What We Do Is Secret (5 page)

10

Squid’s got the craves for a pack of Djarums, thanks to the malingering aroma on yours coolly, but the closest store with cloves is the 7-Eleven on Santa Monica east of Highland, across from that
transvestistas
place where the Mexicans just can’t get enough of pulling off each other’s wigs and catfighting on the sidewalk, and she’s tired of walking, she bruised her ankle earlier, banged it hard on the coffee table during “Strip to My Lou.” So with me as Siouxsie’s bodyguard in case she stirs up pussy envy among the
queñas
, we head out, after Squid swears she’ll do whatever dirty deeds it takes to keep Blitzer on the scene if he shows while we’re gone.

“Don’t you worry, darlin’, I’ll laugh at his jokes, admire his belly button, anything.”

And next thing you know we’re walking up the boulevard, north side, arm in arm against the traffic, the full punk couple on their Sunday night stroll, too bad we don’t have a little punk baby.

Then, just east of Orange, south side, snap-crackle-cops a bullhorn.

We freeze and put up our hands. There’s more static, then nothing. The engine revs. The tires roll. But not our way. And no siren action like they’re in a hurry somewheres else.

I guess they figure they’ll catch us later.

Siouxsie grips my arm.

“They won’t shoot us?”

“No way. We’re white, they’d just beat us up.”

“It was like a movie. I thought it was happening.”

“What?”

“Death.”

“Death?”

“Didn’t you ever dream of dying in the barbed wire escaping from a concentration camp, in those bright lights from the guard towers?”

“Never.”

But she says she does, all the time, she likes blood, the idea of losing it, movies like
Torso,
mass murder films, real low budget, murder and rape, plot check, plot check, her all-time faverave gore-fest,
Last House on the Left
, two girls go to the big city to score some drugs and get kidnapped, raped, and killed. Then the killers go to the house of the parents of one of the girls, by chance, and the parents take care of them, one of the killers they drag out in the woods and cut apart piece by piece while he’s still conscious, the first time she saw it she was like seven.

“It made me want to live to die. It made me live to be killed, I based my whole life on being killed in the woods.”

“So if someone tried to kill you, you’d just let them?”

“It depends on who they are. I might just lie there and enjoy it too much to move.”

And if that isn’t drugs talking, I don’t know what is.

But everybody says death rock is happening hard as time for violent crime.

It’s supposed to be the next rockabilly.

And trends are for terminal morons, I don’t follow them at all, like for example last year’s top-drawer trend, the one before ska, was being bisexual. Which on-fire fags like Tony the Hustler were down for completely, because they were the first ready, able, and more than willing dudes who came to mind to all these clueless vals and surf boys who wanted in on the latest. Though what I heard from those in the two-way know was double your pleasure in theory, double your trouble in practice.

But Tony and Stickboy are starting a band, and they need a singer, they told me they want a death-rock chick like Dinah Cancer in 45 Grave. So who knows, maybe Siouxsie?

“Can you sing?”

“I can dance.”

“If you’re cool with Tony and Stickboy, you could maybe front their band.”

“Do I get to bleed?”

“It’s no joke band. They want to get signed.”

“Sounds like a joke to me, hustlers fronted by a whore, that’s pretty funny.”

“You could be a fuckin star. Like Exene.”

I tell her Blitzer saw Exene at the El Rey Theater last Saturday, she had on rhinestone ankle bracelets. And that closes the circuit finally, I hear blue sparks in her voice almost, saying Exene’s cool, multiple cool, and do I know why?

I say I do.

Because she looks like Death. And then I tell her she’s crazed, fully crazed.

Her head leans sideways next to mine, almost on my shoulder.

“I want to tell you something, Rockets.”

“Sure.”

“I meant what I said. I might let it happen.”

Tip-tap goes my droogie stick, stepping along, one two three, four five six.

“Enjoying it. Really.”

Our hair spikes touch, move apart, rewind-repeat, step again, touch again.

“Rockets?”

“Yeah?”

“When that happened with the cops last week, with you and Rory, did you sort of like it?”

“Like what?”

“What they did to you.”

“They beat us up! Not all to fuck or anything but—”

“You’re always feeling those bruises.”

“It’s to see if they still hurt.”

“Do they?”

“A little.”

“You have to touch them to know?”

“I guess. It’s like a habit.”

“You get this look on your face.”

“What kind of look?”

“Dreamy. Like you’re remembering something. Something you liked.”

“Well, I’m not.”

“Maybe you don’t realize.”

“There’s nothing
to
realize.”

“But if there was—”

“Fuck!”

“Listen! If you did really like it, I don’t think it’s sick or anything. You know, you could tell me. I’d understand.”

“Is that why you said that, back on the steps? I hit you, and it felt like a kiss?”

But it’s words from a song. She thought I got it. She can’t believe I didn’t. Me. And it does sound way punk. Though it’s not, she says, more like power pop, old-school power pop, back in the beach party day, it’s hard to believe, but do I know what?

She doesn’t care if I do.

What?

Believe her.

About anything but this: I can tell her, when I’m ready.

What I can’t tell myself.

She squeezes my hand and I just say, “Cool.”

And we walk on up the boulevard like that, holding hands, the only people out, just us and all those cars all stuffed with eyes, mostly guys alone, looking down the side streets, looking in their rearview mirrors, looking at us, but they don’t look long, Siouxsie laughs about it, she says it’s more of a glance, it’s so different walking with a chick. I mean, sometimes I walk down Santa Monica from Oki Dog on weekend nights with Tony or Stickboy and the air’s just electric, like at a really good gig, there’s the audience and there’s the performers and you can feel the excitement, you get seen by thousands of people, tens of thousands, and some of them never forget you, I’ve met dudes who remembered me from back in the day. But tonight I might as well be walking some nowhere street in the Valley, nobody even slows down, I could care, I don’t, we just talk about bands, we talk about songs we could write, songs about death and dying, and makeup we could wear so we look like corpses, Siouxsie knows all about makeup, one time at Oki Dog she held my hand and showed me how to put on eyeliner, right as rain on the plane to Spain, so it won’t run when you sweat.

11

Back to black, as in cherry, and maybe even popping, depends on who did the dropping, there’s a pleasure trail of opened Trojan packets leading from the sidewalk up the factory steps and Siouxsie’s all, Vice check, vice check, but where’s the versa?

“Nobody here but us Squidleys, boss.”

And half a dozen blown-up condoms, knotted like balloons.

“What the fuck?” Siouxsie says.

Squid says some social worker laid them on Blitzer, and since he’s not exactly the baby-making—

“Where is he?” I say.

“He said he’ll be back in twenty or thirty. I know, I promised. But he’s closing some deal where we’ll all be like tour guides tonight. For a couple of out-of-towners he met.”

“What kind of tour?” Siouxsie says. “What kind of out-of-towners?”

“Blitzer said, and I quote, ‘totally nonsexual.’”

“I’ve heard that one before.”

“Well, it would be for us at least, sweetie. It’s not just a couple of dudes, it’s a couple, period. No, make that comma. A flamer couple. How did Blitzer put it? ‘Flamers with cash in the capital of trash.’ So I said yes. I’ve never done any of the tourist things. Like the wax museum. And they’re paying.”

So Siouxsie’s all, Then we might as well start playing, do some MDA, trip up in the crib for a while. And she says
we
means me too. But after all it is the love drug. And I bet what they really crave is a private round of les-be-friends, so I just say I’ll kick it where I am, waiting for Blitzer.

But I hate waiting.

And while they’re climbing the planter behind me I back-plant on the tiles and realize the food’s making me sleepy and the egg-crate foam would be way more relaxing and I almost jam after them.

Not quite, though. And then I guess I do drop off, it’s like I was sleeping and now I’m awake, but if this is a dream, no no no it can’t be a dream, in the dreams he never talks, it’s Darby’s voice, but he’s a ghost, and ghosts don’t talk, Rory Dolores told me he was walking up Vista the day after Darby died and he saw his ghost, his leather zipped up past his neck to his chin, standing up on a wall in a cactus garden. He said Darby stared at him with this completely pale ghost face and tried to talk, but couldn’t.

“You’ll only know them when you need them.”

It’s Darby’s voice, I’m sure it is.

Know who, I wonder.

Or what.

I bet the words is what he means.

For Blitzer. For me to sing to Blitzer. Because he sang to me. He sang “Sex Boy.” And now I owe him.

Yeah.

Big-time.

Oh, yeah.

And thinking of Blitzer I more than think, Siouxsie’s right, my hands are cold, but all of me isn’t, and I warm them up, one at a time, slow and easy, waiting but good waiting, the best kind of waiting really, I’m so waiting is there anyone so waiting, the more I wait like this the more I want to wait some more, the more I wait the more I want the more the more the sound his yes, now, Blitzer’s, the sound his boots, the touch his knees, Squid’s right, his shirt pulled up the silky soft the spiraled ridge I think he knows, Darby’s right, you’ll know them when.

Tell
them
that
I’m
your gun
Pull
my
trigger
I’m
bigger
than.

He lets out a low slow moan.

“How did you know?” he whispers.

“The words? From ‘Forming’?”

“To touch me there.”

My tongue follows my finger and this electroshock shiver powers through him crop up top to steel toe below and he pulls me up by my armpits so we’re face-to-face.

“The crib,” he says.

“Squid and Siouxsie went there.”

“Then the doorway. Where the planter juts out.”

He leads me with his fingers wrapped around my wrist and pulls me hard against him with his back to the alcove wall. We stand statued with our legs twined together but our faces apart and the heat between us rising and then his fingers then his shirt then my lips and then our hands, panicking together unbuttoning his jeans as he arches his back and then comets no comets are ice, meteors burning, showering burning, meteors, fingers, his fingers, my fingers, holding me holding him circling me circling him, his fingers, hot slick, uncircling, blunt thick, his fingers, my lips, my tongue, his taste, his lips his tongue, my back too, now me too, his throat, swallowing.

Before he pulls up his jeans he lets me lay my head in his lap and he rakes his fingers through my hair like he did in Citrus Alley.

“You didn’t find that spot,” he says. “You knew already. How did you know?”

I raise up a little and trace the flat skin surrounding with my fingertip. Then the raised round rim. Then the snail curve of the ridge inside.

“It’s a circle, Blitzer. That’s how.”

the walk of fame

12

“Girls! Try it all! Lights! Glamour! Action!”

It’s Froot Loops ripe from the Variety Pack all right. They’re parked waiting for us at the Mayfair on La Brea, and as soon as we all-aboard Squid and Siouxsie are on the goods in back like Here Comes Santa Claus on Christmas morning, jumbo Hefties of stale popcorn, mesh bags bulging with makeup jars and lipstick and eyeliner, stem to stern, floor to fuckin ceiling, Blitzer’s words exactly. It’s the van he saw on Fountain, but Tim and David aren’t anything like hippies.

They’re not like anything else period.

“That van outie looks like it couldn’t be filled with anything but nast cushions and Mexican blankets, you know, soaked in spilled bong water,” Blitzer told us walking over. “But innie it’s a whole ’nother story.”

And why, because they wanted to be famous. And what for, for being the first people to drive from Bumfuck, Minnesota, to the Coca-Cola Museum in Atlanta, Georgia, in a van filled with popcorn and cosmetics.

“They thought if they drove all that shit down South, took back roads all the way, stopped in every little white trash town to tell the rednecks what they were doing, and filmed it, the Coke people would make them into an ad campaign.”

The
ad campaign.

It’s the Real Thing, take two.

But the boys in suits wouldn’t see them. Even with Tim dressed specially for the occasion. (And I’m clueless on both counts, hot pants and Nancy Sinatra boots, but Squid said trust her, ignorance is bliss.) So they decided on Hollywood instead.

And why?

“Because there’s always Max Factor!” Tim shrieks. “That’s why!”

He’s perched shotgun, facing back in the captain’s chair, clapping his hands and squealing exactly like that homo on
Hollywood Squares
every time he gets the answer right. Up front on the driver’s side David’s got a deeper voice but only thanks to Einstein, it’s all relativity, the valve’s wide open on the high-test helium line to his loafers too.

“I adore your look,” Tim says to me, third time in one young night and it’s either the harshmallow in the Sucky Charms or the surly fries in the box of Hacker Jax, you tell me. No new wave follow-up from this dude, though.

I bet he thinks it’s a hair product.

Then he tells us how right before we showed he strolled into Mayfair to buy a pack of Kents and saw the most adorable to-die-for punker with a sleeveless shirt in the checkout line and he just couldn’t help himself, he
had
to ask, “Where did you get those muscles?”

And what did Mr. Adorable answer right back?

“From beating up queers.”

And Tim and David bust up even harder than we do.

I’ve never been around homos like this, not up close and personal. They’re not the Arthur J’s crowd, not even. Though I guess those dudes are mostly switch hitters, they really are daddies, a lot of them, with families, they’re divorced or separated because their wives found out, and here they are doctors and lawyers but with ratty little apartments in Palms or East Hollywood because all their money goes for child support, in two different versions. And they’ll be getting down with you,

and right at the magic moment they’re all, “Oh, Justin,” “Oh, Shawn,” the name of their kid, it isn’t pretty, it’s as vacant as it gets, you feel like a fuckin social worker, out there making coin preventing incest.

But Tim and David are the real thing, Coke or no Coke.

I mean, this is gay.

Really gay.

But I’m not like this at all.

Darby wasn’t either.

Well, maybe a little, sometimes.

And.

More than a little, other times.

They start name-checking sights they want to see, the Cocoanut Grove, the Brown Derby, some drugstore called Schwab’s, I haven’t heard of zip except the Chinese Theatre and the Hollywood sign. And neither has Blitzer, I can tell, but he’s like Tony the Tiger at faking it, he’s grrreat. So when the final breasting place of Marilyn Monroe comes up he’s all over it as the pick to click for starters, even though he says it’s not actually in Hollywood, and we’re down La Brea to the Santa Monica Freeway before I con the dots that the only cemetery Blitzer knows is the one in West LA where Darby’s buried, and that’s where we’re pointed like Marilyn’s perkies, with Tim going into on-ramp hysterics, “Mae West, young men!”

I don’t even know if cemeteries are open at night.

I kind of doubt it.

It’s not like Ralph’s.

And isn’t that amazing, what are the gates but rhymes-with-shocked when we get to Holy Cross Cemetery.

David says he didn’t know Marilyn was Catholic.

“Of course she was,” Tim says. “The Kennedys were really strict about it, they only went for Catholic girls.”

“You don’t have to be Catholic,” Siouxsie says. “Darby Crash wasn’t.”

“He’s buried here,” Blitzer says, and there’s something in his voice, something lost, maybe he’s remembering the funeral, dirt clods drumming down on the coffin and the screaming screaming screaming, Darby’s mom, she’s this big scary lady who cleans planes at night at LAX and sleeps all day and everyone says she looks like Divine.

“Too, I mean.”

Nobody says anything. It’s really quiet here. Really really really quiet. It hardly seems like LA with all the car alarms missing in action. And the air’s so damp from the sprinklers and the goddamn grass I’m shivering in my ripped Sid Sings. Finally Tim asks about Darby. They’ve never heard of the Germs. But they both get excited when Blitzer says he overdosed.

Just like Marilyn.

All I know about her is the name. But Siouxsie’s all, Wasn’t she in a movie with Montgomery Clift? And I know him, he’s the dude in that Clash song “The Right Profile,” begging for another roll of pills. When
London Calling
came out and we first heard it I asked Darby what a roll of pills was, and he wasn’t sure, so he drug-checked with a pharmacist at the Walgreen’s on Vine, who said it’s a thousand. That means Montgomery Clift gulped a thousand pills at a time, according to the Clash. So make it the fright profile, and call it a trap.

“The Misfits !”

Tim and David belt it out together and we all think they’re talking about the band and mixing up Danzig with Darby. But it’s some fuckin movie, not only are they clueless on the Germs, they know less than zero about punk rock period, except they love the sound of the Sex Pistols.

The sound of the name, I mean.

Blitzer asks what kind of boonie tunes they thrive on keep alive on out in Mickey and Minniesota, and Tim screams it loud enough to wake the you know who.

“Judy!”

And that’s all it takes, the creepy-Crowley quiet since we got here is gone, the days change at night, change in an instant, just like the X song, though “Los Angeles” itself isn’t gone at all, more like the exact flip-flopposite, it’s been like number one on my brainframe grit parade ever since I said yeah yeah yeah to Idaho, back at the Jell-O factory. Though right this moment at the tomb the tune will be gabba gabba hey hey we’re the homos, with Squid and Siouxsie joining in left channel right channel on the goodbye yellow brick road action.

Some of the Oz that refreshes stuff I get, like lions and tigers and Tim’s to-die-for favorite, bears, but the rest I don’t follow at all, except that Judy overdosed too. And it just goes on and on from here to fuckin infirmity till finally Blitzer steers me over to the fence and we stand hugging the cold iron bars with the night wind blowing in our faces off the graves.

“What hey, girls talk.”

“Squid and Siouxsie really like these guys.”

“Repeat after me, girls talk.”

And I guess the girlie thing is part of it, but even though I just met Tim and David I can tell they’re like Siouxsie and Squid, foreground one, background one, I bet the whole popcorn pilgrimage was Tim’s idea but it took David to get the freak show on the road, he did the driving for example, I’m not the only one who can’t see Tim out there in Mudville, Mississippi, pumping gas in his hot pants, now am I. So it’s like team-work, really, and they’re the same kinds of teams, maybe that’s why they’re hitting it off, because the list of what they’ve got in common otherwise is shorter than a name check of the honest cops in Hollywood Division.

I ask if he thinks they’ve got much money.

“I don’t know how much cash. But making movies isn’t cheap. They’ve for sure got plastic.”

He reaches over and rubs the back of my neck.

“And they’ve got a room.”

With those fingers, with the ones I.

Yeah.

Blitzer says, “I want to finish what we started.”

I just nod.

“Tonight.”

“Cool.”

“In a bed.”

I tell him I’ll do whatever he wants. And then I wonder if he thinks I mean whatever to help get us into that bed, or whatever he wants once we’re in it.

Both, I hope.

He asks if Squid and Siouxsie have any drugs.

“MDA. They turned a two-bill trick. Siouxsie gave me some.”

“We need some fry. Feed those fairies acid and leave ’em somewhere. Buy ourselves some alone time.”

“Leave them on their own?”

There’s the hissing and
click click click
ing of the sprinklers and the laugh track of the four of them over by the van, busting up over not being in Kansas anymore. Finally Blitzer says, “With the lezzie-byrds, I guess.”

He reaches between us and hooks two fingers down the front of my jeans inside my shorts and pulls the waistband away from my skin.

And fuck, do I shiver, and fuck, does he sing to me, and fuck, do his fingers, and fuck, which song, “The Slave.”

It
starts
in
your
head
and
moves
to
your
hands
Your
body
starts
shakin’
cuz
you’re
in
demand.

“We could take that van to Idaho,” Blitzer says. “We could live in that fuckin van in Idaho.”