What We Do Is Secret (22 page)

42

And then I bleed some more, I gash my eyebrow on a ragged edge of metal molding hanging off the shelf above the sideways coffin space on the under-counter floor, I bleed a lot it seems, it mats more than clots, keeps oozing in the brow hair, it was Siouxsie, wasn’t it, who said, “I like blood. The idea of losing blood.”

So she said the idea, not the actual. It’s just a theory then, for Siouxsie.

For me, though, what?

For Darby too, then, what? I don’t think he ever said he liked it. He just did it, and wrote a song about it.

Darby said.

We must bleed.

I’ll never write a song about it, I know I won’t. Or about anything else. Not because there’s drugs in the way, like with Animal Cracker, what’s in the way for me’s confusion. Too much confusion. And I’m no poet besides, not like Blitzer, not like Wanda, who tells me no one’s ever, and she means never, no one’s showed at the taco stand morning noon or night and said, “You’re the poet.”

Not a poet, the poet.

“No one’s ever said either. But to hear it that way, the first time, like I’m the only one there is.”

Like the way it usually feels.

But start thinking poetry, and see where it gets you.

She talks to me bent over, moving lips below counter level, can’t-be-too-carefuling, a towel in one hand, once-over-twiceovering surfaces, surfaces, for her own part she is pleased enough with surfaces, what more could we ask for, what more do we need, the touch for example of a child’s hand, wrapped in your own.

And actually, no, I didn’t answer, did I, the first thing she asked me?

And I mustn’t say anything, not a word, make it taboo now and it’s natural later, if there is later, if later is necessary, but she can guess, aloud. And I can tap my foot, once only, when she’s right.

The first one’s flattery, pure and.

“Eighteen.”

Maybe not so simple.

“Nineteen.”

It’s not like I’ve looked in any mirrors lately.

She counts down, pauses forever it seems, before fourteen.

And at least it’s technically my birthday now, the suspense is filling her.

With?

I don’t know.

“Thirteen.”

She doesn’t know, either.

Whether to believe me.

The whole and nothing but, tap once more?

Once.

More.

Could air brakes be louder than the aftersilence? Could a Marshall stack? Could anything?

She says, “Children.”

She says, “Suffer the little.”

She whispers, dropping the towel, reaching for it, “Customers.”

Straightening up she pushes herself so close to the counter her in-cocked ankle grazes my wrist, ungrazes, grazes, in time almost to the volley, two men talking Spanish, serve, loud, back, her, in Spanish too, just as loud, forth, them, both at once, back, her, just as fast, forth, them, voices darkening, back, her, just as.

Edged.

All I understand are English words.

Punks.

Main Street.

And
drogas
, it must be drugs, it sure the fuck isn’t droogs.

And the men keep saying
hombre
.

Bad man? Is that what it means?

No names, though.

Her ankle, grazes.

Other voices.

Ungrazes.

Raised, outside.

Grazes, tenses.

Somewhere behind.

Freezes, tenses.

One of them bails, rushes out.

Her ankle tenses, tighter.

His lone voice lowers, edges blacker.

Her ankle.

Presses, harder.

She says, in English, “You know all I know. No gun spills secrets when there are no secrets.”

Her ankle.

Slams hard against me as she’s grabbed above.

Neck-grabbed? Hair-grabbed? Twisted side to side, twisted straining, not struggling, straining to?

Hold tight the counter? Hold high her head?

He snorts.

Slaps.

Snorts.

Slaps.

Waits.

Waits.

Waits.

And she.

Hates.

Waiting.

And I feel them in her, rising, powers.

Powers that.

D) Let you say what you wouldn’t.

The bursting stinging whip crack snap of her all on his nothing, ventured.

“Shoot me, motherfucker, or quit wasting my time!”

43

Ventured.

Won.

Before I know, though, before the other Spanish voices voices voices raging raging raging, before the hurried footsteps closing in, scuffling, outward fading fading, before her ankle, not relaxes more collapses, before before before before, I put it all on me.

Her dying, before she doesn’t.

For thinking,
We must bleed.

All this started, words from songs, is the music really, though? My special friend, my only friend, could it be (don’t Lennon let it!) the exact coin toss of it? The exact flip-flopposite?

I’ll take you over.

That’s not Darby’s voice though, just.

This voice I hear again in the awful doom with no view silence after Wanda.

Says it.

And I wait for the blast and the blood and the brains and ask, ask, ask, Who the fuck is the we of me anyways, why should she be, why should she bleed, for me?

She doesn’t even know me.

I’ll take you over, there.

Sound, sudden, it must be her elbows, dropping to the counter.

I imagine her hands, covering her face, imagine her crying, imagine her hating us, imagine all the reasons, the kids she maybe has, the husband, though what kind of husband, a black woman on a drive-by street in the brown part of town, three in the morning, alone, imagine her hating us because we’re white, they’d just beat us up.

It’s the last thing I imagine, what she says, what she does.

“I’m closing for a while, I need to write this down.”

She says she’s just locking the doors. Not leaving me. I’m not to worry.

Though not to make a move, either. A move or a sound.

“They’re over at the brewery now, after your friends, we hear shots, maybe then we worry.”

She talks to herself, writing, not full-time, just trying out the fresh-joined sounds of all-together-now words, I guess. So I get like these hints, of why she’s working here in the first place, it’s minimum wage but she can write, it’s quiet,
usually
quiet, there’s no boss around to give attitude, she’s got glazed eyes and she’s black and what can that possibly equal but dope fiend, working three jobs and sleeping only in her car between times just doesn’t compute, not in the city of the angels in the land of liberty and justice for all.

And fuck, minimum wage, that’s like $3.25 an hour, I mean she could do what Squid and Siouxsie do.

But maybe she can’t. Or maybe she won’t. Because it’s like the dope fiend thing? Just what Jack and Jill Moron expect?

I wonder.

After a while she reads it through, her poem, not to me really, her voice is so low I miss a lot. I hear enough though to get she’s not telling why it happens but just running down the scene, the taco stand, her working here, this crazed dude with a gun to her head, what she tells him. Kind of like, you know, just another night in the life. And like, big deal, what else would she say? She doesn’t heroize herself. She doesn’t blame anybody.

It’s just the way it is.

And life goes on.

She says nothing for a long time afterwards, there’s just her pen scratching and the hum of the cold case motor and that low clean bright buzz neon signs make. And a few sirens, medium-close.

No gunshots.

“ ‘Three A.M. at the Taco Stand’ just won’t work,” she says suddenly. “I
do
not do real-dark-night-of-the-soul.”

She laughs, people talk about musical laughs but she really has one, there’s almost a melody in there, starting low and warm and darting upwards to little peaking highs all sly and self-skeptical, with depths between, not bass-deep canyons though, more midlevel valleys where sunned things grow, sunned like grapes, figs, pomegranates.

“So ‘Midnight at the Taco Stand’ it is.”

She walks around the counter and unlocks the front door. Standing there, she says, “Well, well, the gun boys trying to be men have departed. Or at least their car has.”

Though she thinks I’d better stay low just in case.

And then back close to me she says she’ll tell me a little story, about another gun, it’s from the journal of this woman artist she’s been reading.

“She was twenty-two or twenty-three, living out in Texas, just getting her start at painting. And she’d take walks with her sister out past the edge of town late in the afternoon, to watch the evening star come out. Her sister had a gun, and as they walked along she’d throw bottles into the air and shoot as many as she could before they hit the ground. So that’s what her sister did. She had nothing to do herself, she wrote, but walk into nowhere and stare into the sunset space with the star. Then she wrote, ‘Ten watercolors were made from that star.’ ”

And that’s the end of the story.

She doesn’t say a poem’s been made already from what happened tonight or anything like that.

But the star thing, I think I get it.

Then she laughs again, at what she’s seeing out the window, but short and sharp, hold the music, any music.

“I might have known. I didn’t get a look before. Here’s the brother.
Your
brother.”

And Exene could be singing about me in “Los Angeles,” I get confused, it must flow straight through my fingertips from the record itself, I mean how could Wanda possibly know about Animal Cracker when she doesn’t know me, but that’s who I’m sure she’s talking about till she opens the door and I hear Blitzer. Though for only like two seconds twenty blocks and counting east of Little Tokyo, because she tells him to hold it right there, she’d like a word, and she’ll do him the courtesy of making it a private one. So they both step out and I can’t hear anything she says, just the tone of her reading him, chapter and vice squad verse, hard as times tables in Roman numerals, but Blitzer saying nothing back.

Finally they’re inside and after he helps me up and starts brushing me off Wanda asks to see my record. And this time it’s Blitzer tensing next to me, just like that, though I don’t con the dot dot dots to make the scariest letter in the alphabet till she’s pulling out the sleeve for a lyric check. And I don’t need one of those Mormon devices to preview the coming reaction, hmmm, title track, well well well.

She started to hate every nigger and Jew
.

And what’s next on the hate list?

Every Mexican.

Every homosexual.

And the idle rich, all together now.

But Wanda says nothing.

She just laughs, with full music too, and hands it back. On our way out I tell her thanks, and sorry, then say that Siouxsie called her the whip lady, and—

“Rockets, Jesus!” Blitzer says.

“And quite naturally you wonder why,” she says. “Well, it’s nothing kinky. Sometimes I whip an audience, that’s why. With words. When they need it.”

She laughs again.

“Or when I need it.”

Then she tells us not to worry about all the popcorn strewn around from the van getting ransacked.

“Leave it for the birds. They nest down there under the LA riverbed bridge. You wouldn’t think it’s the most hospitable place, but—”

The most unexpected things.

The most unexpected places.

Good night, children.

Sleep.

Not well.

Not tight.

Just.

Sometime.

44

Not anytime soon, though. Once Wanda’s back inside Blitzer bails from the driver’s seat and swivels me around in the captain’s chair so I’m facing him butt-planted on slashed-open Heftys leaking popcorn, grinding Desoxyn tablets under a nail polish remover bottle on top of a makeup mirror. He hiccup-laughs.

“Rocketman, for a dude who instantly memorizes the words to every song he hears, first time every time—”

“I remembered, but not till I handed it over, I couldn’t really snatch it back.”

“She had it coming anyways, after calling me out like that.”

“She was just itching to read somebody.”

“Why?”

“Over what went down!”

“What’s that?”

“She didn’t tell you? She wasn’t schooling you out there?”

“She was, but over all this, you know, racial shit.”

“She didn’t care about the X lyrics, though. She’s really smart, I’m sure she could tell.”

“Tell what?”

“That they’re not, you know, racist, they’re just showing people who are, like, characters.”

“Maybe, I don’t know. Exene always belts that one out like—dude, let me give you some advice, black people don’t like white people saying
nigger,
whatever for. You be careful using that word.”

“I am careful. I never liked it when Darby said it.”

“He did?”

“He talked about niggers sometimes.”

“Not around me.”

Then he changes the subject back to what happened, anyways, so I’m all, Once upon a time, by popular demand, and he listens saying nothing, just gives out a long low whistle when I tell him what she told the dude. And even after I get to happily ever after he stays quiet forever it seems, so long I start counting the semis exiting onto Main from the freeway above us by the banshee wails of their air brakes, just to be doing something.

Which ends up scaring me he’ll restart the audio right after I get to thirteen, and jinx us even worse for the rest of the night. So from the last screech of twelve to the first rumble of fourteen I’m this raging Mr. Jitters, sweaty-palmed and nervous tic-ing like a crime bomb but trying to keep it all Clark Kent incognito, breathing all stealth style so he doesn’t hear me and think it’s the call of the riled, earth to Blitzer, do you heed me? Then once we’re out of bad omen danger danger I decide to think positive for a change like Wanda I guess and try to figure out which of the next few numbers coming up might be the best omen, so I can root for it.

And it’s seventeen, easy, both the day of the month and my birthday. So when the chosen semi goes into reverse-engines mode at the top of the ramp above us I play the exact opposite of the incognito card, whatever the word for it is, clearing my throat and tapping my fingers to the roadrunner beat on the armrests and finally perfecting this side-to-side motion in the captain’s chair that discreetly gets a fingernails-on-chalkboard type squeal going that’s low vol enough to seem accidental but still noticeable enough to get more irritating with every repeat. Even so it’s a photo finish with number eighteen halfway down the ramp to Main when Blitzer finally says, “I wonder if there’s anything in one of these little tubes or jars that would work like WD-40, so we could stop that fuckin noise.”

“What noise?”

“You don’t hear it?”

Of course I stop shifting my weight, so neither one of us hears it now.

“No.”

“Well, I—forget it. I know one thing, this hit better help clear things up. In my head. Something’s not right, Rocketman, this is some heavy shit, people shooting guns our way on the street, even aiming low, there’s ricochets and, what do they call it, shrapnel, someone could get hurt, or killed, it’s not something the person
doing it
does without a major reason, see what I mean? Then what happened inside there, to her, fuck, it’s scary.”

Because there’s the good news and there’s the bad news, with the ugly news maybe yet to come. On the good side, across the street they ended up taking refuge in this poshboy cokehead after-hours club, it’s one of those death-or-glory stories Liz Taylor–made for legends in their own minds like Tim and David but he’ll stay the telling dry for me till later, the main thing is once they were safe and renowned as only T and D could make them he went out under protection from the bouncers and talked face-to-face with the in-charge vato dude and they shook on it and everything, the cholos chasing us is over, completely over, mistaken ID, just like he thought. On the bad side, what came down was planned by somebody we know, it had to be. But you start asking who, you start asking why, and instantly you’re like teleported to another dimension where only three things have happened in all recorded history.

Lost Atlantis.

The Bermuda Triangle.

The Kennedy assassination.

“Here’s an example of what it’s like,” Blitzer says. “Not just any example, either. The perfect example.”

“I hate that word,
perfect
. ”

“Since when?”

“Since tonight when Slade said it like fifty times. Everything was perfect. Perfect, perfect, perfect.”

“Slade. Well. Until you told me about the dude in the taco stand I was pretty sure he was behind those losers.”

“How could he be? Why?”

“How? Paying them, or promising something, who knows, maybe jobs or something through his rich old man. Why? That’s easy. Ask a three-letter question, get a three-letter answer. You.”

“Fuck, just stop.”

“I told you, I don’t think it’s him anymore. He couldn’t have set it up so fast. Couldn’t have got someone so worked up he’d be holding a gun to someone else’s head for no reason, not robbing, not vengeance, nothing. A total stranger. And it sounded like the dude was foaming at the mouth, right?”

“Pretty much. He slapped her too.”

“And you’re totally sure you didn’t tell Slade you were getting ready to bail, with me? Leave town? Because that’s one thing that would get him working overtime to keep it from happening.”

“Not even. He has more the opposite idea, from what I said.”

“What was that?”

“He wanted me to kick it with him tonight instead of you. And I said I couldn’t, but, you know, maybe some other time.”

“You could have just said no.”

“Yeah, well, you were honking the horn and I was trying to get away from him and I knew we were leaving anyways so it seemed like the best thing to say.”

“Okay, you’re right. Fuck Slade. He’s not important. How’d we get on him again anyways?”

“By me saying how
lame
I thought he was. For all the
per
fects.”

Perfect.

Right.

The perfect example of what it’s like.

While he.

“What’s a rhyme for fixative?” he says, unbuckling his belt.

While he sees to the priming.

“I know the perfect example,” I say. “Of what this is like.”

Of his pump for rhyming.

“What hey, we’ll trade off, then.”

So I sing out the first line from “Sugarlight,” how we’re addicts, that’s why we came.

“This is what it’s like,” Blitzer says.

Then the second, those gold leeches, how he pastes them on my arm.

“On all our money there’s like the national motto, right?”

And how he’s speaking French while we sharpen up our teeth, White Sugar.

“In God we trust.”

Who’s memorizing torsos, all open-throated.

“Well, in the alternate limbo world the money looks exactly the same.”

And meanwhile in the corner hands collide with hands.

“Until you hold it up close to check the fine print.”

With my arm all tired from waiting, to burn it down.

“And read the new motto.”

Sugarlight, sugarlight I can’t believe.

“Nothing is revealed.”

Swallowing one bulb after another in the city of electric light.

Then he’s all, Fuck, I missed, and next thing I know his fingers shoot between my fly buttons, long and strong and searching searching, finding while his other hand unbuttons me, then both together tug me bare down there and after his cheek touch chin touch nose touch eyelash earlobe forehead touch first, before his lips tongue mouth-roof throat-back touch second, he says, “Doesn’t it sound like swallowing one boy, though? It always does to me.”