What We Do Is Secret (23 page)

45

Blitzer stops himself to find the water bottle just when I’m about to stop him anyways, or else. He takes a long slow double swallow then tells me to drink up too, it’s important, and afterwards dribbles a stream below my belly and finger-scrubs me there in probing circles, there’s all this dripped dried blood, he says, it’s gross, he doesn’t say, but it must be, pulled by him and pushed by me, close and closer to his face.

“I’m just worsing it,” he says. “I need like a rag.”

Then he says he knows, one of his socks.

Perfect.

And we both laugh.

But first.

Before he gets any more side—

Tracked.

This time we sing the first lines together, yelling out, “Addicts!” twice as loud as the lyrics before it then twice as loud as that when we get to “Came!” And I sort of expect him to go all finish-line-crazed when he’s through with rushing, or want him to, I guess, but after he finally stops twitching hard stretched full length facedown on the Heftys he just unlaces one boot and peels off his sock and starts cleaning me up all businesslike step by step while he talks and only talks, he says he wants to know about Squid, whether she’s talked shit about him tonight, to me or anybody else I maybe overheard.

“She said I’d be better off hooking up with that kid who came up to us at the beer table than, you know, somebody like you.”

“Fuck! Was it really somebody like me? Or did she say me, flat out?”

“Not by name, but, you know, go down to OC instead of anywhere else.”

“What did you say?”

“I gave her shit.”

And he’s all, Good, but doesn’t ask for details, just starts ranting about how it proves she must be up to something, if you think about everything changing tonight from getting better and better to worse and worser till we’re getting chased and shot at by people who don’t even know us you can say exactly when it started, with Squid going heavy mental in the van on Beachwood, nobody knows why, what if it’s all tied in somehow, he doesn’t know how, it’s that limbo world again, nothing is revealed, but how bogus can you get, a kid like that, living at home with his parents in the suburbs, going to school every day, him and me are like on different planets, how could
anyone
say or even think—

“Right, Rocketman? You know, don’t you? You don’t think you could ever—”

I feel like yelling that I told her and everybody else that kid was the last dude I’d ever connect with, I got so upset I fuckin blacked out, where the fuck were you, though?

But I just nod.

Because something’s bothering me.

Actually two things.

One’s the way I feel, amped and almost aggro, hurting stapled still but dealing not dazed, twice awake not half asleep, just like that almost, and why why why, all I’ve had is water, if fluoride felt like this a tube of Crest would cost a bill.

And two’s what Blitzer said about everything changing tonight, and when, because for me and me alone it was way before Beachwood, it was walking with Siouxsie on the boulevard, nothing to do with Squid at all.

Except Squid was the reason we went on that walk in the first place.

With her sore ankle that never came up again walking all over Hollywood, above and beyond even, to Poseur and back from the Nast Western on the hair dye run.

And before that too, Squid was the reason.

“I think he knows it’s sexy. I think that boy’s showing it off.”

And after that Squid was the reason.

For all the Desoxyn, via Siouxsie but Squid the source, and point and rig source too, even though she never slams.

And who first said that Blitzer was in trouble with, how did she put it?

“The wrong people.”

Siouxsie said nothing, just sighed.

I tell Blitzer and he says he can’t figure it out, who would have told them what, with so little to tell. He calls it a smoke-screen, he calls it camo.

“The V-13 thing, I just don’t get it.”

“Did you ever fool around with her?”

“Who? Squid? Not even. Just Siouxsie, once. Drunk. She wanted to. She actually got me going pretty good, for a girl. Not good enough to, you know, do the deed, but—”

“Does Squid know?”

“Not unless Siouxsie told her.”

“Siouxsie said she told her everything, remember? At Candyland.”

“I didn’t think of that.”

“She was worried it gave Squid power over her.”

“Right.”

“I wonder.”

But what I really wonder is what exactly Siouxsie did to get Blitzer going.

I can’t ask, though.

I just can’t.

“I don’t know why I didn’t think of this till now,” Blitzer says. “You wanna bail?”

“You mean—”

“Back to the Nast. For the checks. Then hit the highway. The Golden Escape Freeway.”

He says sure number one they’re expecting us like twenty minutes ago, to collect them for the run to Oki’s, and sure number two they’re bound to start thinking double cross sooner or later, but by the vato dude he shook with, and him not them on the stigmata end, so they’ll be sure number three he’s nose to the limestone in the LA riverbed with a
carnitas
cleaver back and center, no hoard in his future, and the longer the delay in unburdening their suspicious minds the farther the fruit will seem to have fallen from the Max Factor tree.

So why not make a clean break now?

And speaking of clean.

“We got to wash you up. Soap and hot water.”

“What’s the matter, do I smell?”

“You don’t fuckin smell, it’s for germs. We have to get these fuckin staples out.”

“No! Not now!”

“I don’t mean right this second. I said with hot water. You think I want to do it? But the longer you wait, the worse it’ll hurt. Fuck this showing off at Oki Dog shit! Which one of them was talking that up? It was Squid, wasn’t it? It was!”

Goddamn her to hell.

Fuck ’em all.

He helps me button my jeans and swivels me forward again, then settles into the driver’s seat.

“They still might wonder about me,” I say. “Because if you did get jacked by cholos it could have happened before you got over here.”

“What hey, so eventually they’ll check back and the taco lady says we bailed. But who knows what could have happened after that? They won’t be going to the cops or anything. Not even close to soon.”

I start to say I don’t know, but stop when I realize I do. And then I surprise myself as much as Blitzer and say we’re not doing anything to get Wanda involved again period. We make her the last known witness and she’s bound to draw the LAPD. Who knows what might happen. She might lose her job. They might even frame her, say she was in on it somehow. On top of what happened already. First we throw her to the homies, then we serve her up to the heat.

No.

Just no.

It’s wrong.

He doesn’t argue it with me, not at all. Instead he changes the subject.

“When Darby talked about black people, you know, calling them names, what was he saying?”

“That labels always have some kind of truth behind them, that’s how they get started, and the blacks really are lazy, because otherwise they’d, you know, rise up.”

He gives a disgusted snort.

“Yeah, right, takes a white man to get ’em off their sorry black asses,” he says.

He turns the key in the ignition.

“Helter fuckin skelter.”

He gasses the engine and we start rolling streetwards.

“Jesus,” Blitzer says. “Darby, Darby, Darby.”

46

Pull it out!

Of the light my fuckin fire.

Pull it out!

At the bottom of the slide.

Pull it out!

In swords of red disease.

Night of the night of the night of the no.

Trust?

I’m saying it, not nightmaring it?

Right?

“That’s seven, six, and five,” Siouxsie says. “The most sensitive area. You flinched the most when you did these onstage, too.”

I don’t remember flinching at all.

“Could you two hold still just like that?” David says. “Right where you are, so I can shoot a picture?”

I can’t even talk. Siouxsie has one hand on my forehead, her fingers so cool, my head’s in her lap, mostly, I’m propped lying, she’s propped sitting, in the popcorn, Blitzer’s driving, Squid’s shotgun, Tim’s watching too, saying, “If those ugly bolos didn’t
steal
your camera.”

“Cholos,” Blitzer says. “Bolos are—”

“The money in Bolivia,” David says. “Good thing I hid it in the blusher bag.”

“And not in the mascara,” Tim says. “Someone’s set for life. Their sisters, I
hope
. Because those boys—”

Don’t need beauty cream, they need Miracle Whip.

Except that one Blitzer made peace with at the brewery.

The maître d’ or whoever didn’t have to apologize for letting
that
one in, and only as far as the doorway!

Just to talk to Blitzer.

Privately.

Unfortunately.

But under the watchful eyes of
all
those ebony hunks.

Fortunately!

“This is the last stoplight before the freeway,” Blitzer says. “Better point and shoot.”

He’s sorry.

Everyone but Squid got an audible jaw drop going after I schooled them on what went down at the taco stand. All she said was the Confederate army looked for generals in all the wrong places, put a woman like that up against Sherman and not the least lick of flame would have flickered in Atlanta.

Which naturally changed the subject to the treasures of the Coca-Cola Museum.

Squid.

I wonder.

I told them in the brewery parking lot, as soon as they got down to the van. When Blitzer left to round them up he kissed me and said he’d been leaving me all night long it seemed, but one last time. Just in case things inside took a turn while he was gone.

In case Tim and David shredded the creative envelope exploring their new punk identities.

In case Natalie showed.

“Natalie?” I said.

He said he didn’t know her any more than I did, but dropping her name upstairs saved their rhymes-with-molasses when the brewery turned out different than Siouxsie expected, all fixed up inside for artists and movie people, and with the cholo posse in hot-as-our-Mister-Sun pursuit up the fire stairs behind them they dead-ended up jacking a fright elevator to this private club where they didn’t exactly meet the dress code.

“Dude, the doors open on like white carpet and I don’t know, orchid trees I guess in monster pots and a fuckin fountain with purple water jets and six or seven burly black dudes, full brawling bruisers but in top hats and bow ties, on instant blood-red alert already because you have to be in the know to even show at a place like that, there’s no sign, no ads or anything, and we’re like nobody who’s ever known and shown before, then Tim and David start screaming the P-word and what’s the last thing a hush-hush sweet harlots hang like that wants any notice from, cops, they’ve got coke on the fuckin menu, right after caviar, and it’s the real thing all right, flown in fresh from Colombia.”

So when T and D made their to-flee-or-not-to-beeline for the inner door they got stopped in their tracks, a couple of world heavyweight contenders basically picked them up off the floor one-handed and held them treading air like cartoon roadrunner roadrunners who didn’t notice the edge of Grand Canyon, not fucking with them otherwise, super polite, even, shooting question mark looks to the one and only big big brother with a lightning-bolt slash of red silk ribbon firing down his top hat, making his own killer beeline as in B for Blitzer, asking please and asking sir, but asking still, who invited them, and talk about swear and swear alike, it hit him all at once, lashed him like a Miracle Whip, he only thought it through after, how all the pieces must have clued him in just below his radar screen, like he could hear the music inside was that piston-pumping rhymes-with-Crisco, and if the Welcome Wagon boys were black and swell endowed you could bet the gloating rights act multiple customers were too, and being in Los Angeles the city not the record they had to be entertainment-type people, so all he really had to do was baby be friends with who, think up a rhymes-with-fame in either music or movies or maybe television and hope they wouldn’t show themselves in person that very moment and overhear it taken in vain.

Or vein, ha!

Then he asked me if I remembered Roscoe’s House of Chicken and Waffles, in Hollywood on Ivar, down outside steps to a basement.

“Dude, you got to, once we ate afternoon breakfast there together, that record company hang trying to be funky, remember I said I used to go there steady-like after tricking with my regular Pepe, you met him, the flamer with all the scrap-books from his
transvestista
days?”

Back in the faaabulous fifties, check, I remembered Pepe all right, one more bruised brown fruit on Carmen’s veranda, then I remembered the restaurant, double check, I went there with Animal Cracker too, it had prices low enough that jagged jacks and jittery jills would actually show sometimes and give the industry crowd a little slumming thrill, and food to sink your treat tooth into, waffles topped with the business end of a busty bird doing the breaststroke through a Mrs. Butterworth’s pool to drool for. And there was old-school soul on the box, though I never let on how much I liked where it took me, over, I guess, music real music, like Phranc.

Anyways, Blitzer said, once upon a crime against true sanity, macking hard in there after a Pepe session, he overheard some regulars talking up who owned the place, saying the main partner was the ultra-fox young daughter of some big-time crooner, black Sinatra style, so she served up a side of rich to go with beautiful, and talk about hip, connected-at-the with everybody who was anybody in the music scene, the night-club-type scene, that was what they kept coming back to, the dudes were like her groupies or something, she’d just made a record herself, and the other thing was, she was supposed to be onto all the latest offbeat stuff, it stuck in his mind like glue for sniffing later, skater, because he wondered if she even knew that punk rock existed, barely two blocks away from her little with-it Hollywood hang.

“So what stuck was yin and put us in like flynn but what didn’t was yang and could have blown it go bang, her full name, if asked, but it wasn’t, I passed, the dude just
sir
’d me all-knowing with ivories showing and said, ‘Oh, Natalie,’ with name attached so all it took was a nod, of course they matched.”

Suave as he could make it though, all Who else, the one and only, they broke the mold, and without so much as the pause that depresses Tim and David’s keepers got the word, they’re
Natalie’s
friends, and then Blitzer got it too, on how there was always room in the dress code for “pushing the creative envelope,” whatever the fuck that meant, some Oscar deal maybe?

David says we look just like some famous sculpture, Siouxsie and me, the
Piñata,
something like that, the punk
Piñata
.

“What the fuck, David!” Siouxsie yells. “These flashes! I’m frying!”

David says he almost forgot until he tried to focus. And nothing stayed still. But it’s not as
intense
now. As before. From about the time they got to the Chinese place downtown with Blitzer till they got inside the brewery. That was—

“One long Diane Linkletter moment,” Tim says.

They start play by replaying some underground movie with Divine as a hippie chick in San Francisco who mixed up frying with flying and checked out Superman style from a fifth-floor window. Siouxsie strokes my forehead and goes back to humming “The World’s a Mess, It’s in My Kiss,” she’s had it on mind rewind ever since Tim asked Animal Cracker if he got what it meant.

“Do three more now,” I say. “That’ll be half.”

She takes a long deep one and hands Tim the eyebrow tweezers. They’re like industrial strength with twin scissors grips for pliers action so they’re.

Perfect.

The Joan Crawford model, according to David.

“This exfoliator
must
be antispetic, with all the alcohol, but the Red number eight?” Tim says. “Yellow number fourteen? Aren’t those cancer-causing?”

“Maybe if you live long enough,” Siouxsie says. “Which Rockets won’t, if this gets more infected.”

She says I’m so warm it must have started already. She noticed without even touching me, outside the brewery, right off, I was sitting shotgun with the window down outside the loading dock and she walked up asking first things first if I’d done more Desoxyn, and after I said no and she felt my forehead she said to Blitzer, “I’m worried about him.”

Pull it out!

They’ve been telling whys who’s been telling wise?

Pull it out!

There are no strangers there are rebels in many ways.

Pull it out!

Fake it like a man.

“Four,” Siouxsie says, and dabs on exfoliator.

Stars.

“Eight.”

More stars than.

“Nine.”

There are.

We exit down the ramp to Santa Monica Boulevard and make the light for the left so Siouxsie braces me from lurching off the Heftys. With her tensing leg against my side the taco stand comes back and with it no matter how warm my skin this black hole chill inside, black as cold, black as ice, and just to feel something else, anything, I say, “Three more.”

“I can’t watch anymore,” Tim says.

“Then don’t,” Siouxsie growls.

Pull it out!

Drag on my Christian.

Pull it out!

Drag on my deadened body.

Pull it out!

There are some tracts here I confuse with escape.

“What hey, there’s the Stud.”

“The?”
Tim says. “Really?”

And I think of
the
poet.

“Dude, it’s a bar. But that bus stop, right over there, it always reminds me, one time Don Bolles of the Germs was driving the rest of the band and me down Santa Monica and he had real fireworks in his car, illegal ones, those kind that spin around really hard on the ground and make a huge dome of flame and sparks, they’re called Ground Bloom Flowers. And this big fat hairy-chested guy with no shirt who Pat Smear thought looked like Black Randy was sitting on the bench, and it was rush hour with traffic backed up, so Pat lit one of the fuses and threw it at the dude and it fuckin stuck to his chest. One moment he’s just chilling, waiting for the bus, then next thing he knows there’s all these flames and sparks shooting out of his chest hair. And Darby beside me in back was trying not to let anybody know he was laughing about it that much, but I was like hysterical. So was Pat.”

“What about Lorna?” Squid says.

“She just sort of giggled.”

“There was a
girl
in the Germs?” Tim says.

“Darlin’, why not? Wasn’t there one in
The Wizard of Oz
?”

Three.

It just burns like fuck this time, no twinkle twinkles.

Ten.

No planet aquarium.

Eleven.

No smog zoomer to the stars.

At the Highland light it’s only punker poontang in the lot at Arthur J’s, but T and D crowd up front like Blitzer’s pointing out Judy and Marilyn, resurrected and les-be-connected on the sidewalk. Or I know, that taxi dancer chick who got stuffed, out with Trigger on a late-night road-apple drop. So I guess this drive-by’s just part of the setup for the Coca-Cola Kids, promising satisfaction from still-to-come attractions down the boulevard at Oki’s.

Though actually they’re both kind of shocked.

“They’re just boys!” Tim says. “
Little
boys.”

“Some of them aren’t that little,” Blitzer says. “Not where it—”

“But how old—” David starts out, then sputters while everyone else decides I’ll be the one to say whatever might get said, but I just hold hands with Siouxsie and do the full Helen, as in Keller not Killer.

“It’s illegal, isn’t it?” he says finally. “Isn’t there a curfew?”

“What hey, it’s
all
illegal. Male, female. Black, white. Bent, straight. Old, young. It’s LA, not Reno. West of the west, remember?”

“But it’s so
blatant,
” Tim says. “The police don’t notice?”

“What they really notice is a black dude north of the Santa Monica Freeway, period,” Blitzer says. “A lot more than a white daddy, comma, looking for a pink boy.”

“Pink?” David says.

Tim echoes it, and there’s that fuckin silence again, like after “How old,” it’s stale as hail on the Yukon trail.

“Fuck all of you! I’ve got pubic hair! Here! Look!”

And with Siouxsie giggling I follow right through, and get out my goodies.

Blitzer says he needs no convincing, it’s not all I’ve got either.

Tim and David don’t know what to say. But what to do’s a different story, and they waste less than zero time returning backwards ho, I notice. But ask me if I care at all. Let ’em fuckin look. I guess I owe ’em. It was me who spoiled their last peep show, vulturing around Rory back at the Nast.

Siouxsie says, “Did anybody ever tell you how beautiful your skin is?”

Dead serious, too.

Nothing X-rated about it.

Or X record, either.

“One person,” I say.

I don’t say Blitzer. I don’t want to embarrass him.

“Well, now it’s two.”

“Three,” says Tim.

“Four,” says David.

But nothing from Squid.

Blitzer says he wants to drop them at Oki’s and come back to the Mayfair with me and play doctor, get some real antiseptic like peroxide, and ointment, and bandages maybe. But right off Siouxsie says he shouldn’t, if people see us with a vehicle there we’ll be taxiing the whole scene around till noon at least.