What We Do Is Secret (25 page)

49

As soon as Stickboy shoves the door closed Blitzer says maybe he’s right.

Probably is right.

But we have to try at least.

“I don’t think she’d hold the smokes against you, Blitzer, not with—”

“Fuck the cigarettes! They might have got word. They might have seen it coming. Got past where blockading starts before it started. So they’re, you know, hiding in one of the alleys or under cars in driveways. Laying low. So if we just drive around keeping our eyes—”

He stops and says he knows what I’m about to say.

And actually he does.

“You should have went with Stickboy, am I right? Fuck that. You know what I think? I think you were wrong about those fairies. Saying they’re way too big of fags to be punk rockers. That’s exactly what you said, Rocketman. Remember?”

I remember.

“Because back at the brewery, I was thinking, They don’t give a shit! They really don’t. They were all raucous, acting crazy beginning to end. Stirring everybody up. They were hoping Natalie
would
show, in all her glory. I know they were. And me and Siouxsie and Squid were all meek and polite and just grateful those posh people even let us in. Let us! Let us for three hundred bucks! So who’s the punks, then? Isn’t that what we all used to do, laugh and scream and trouble-make, twenty-four/seven, no prisoners, no rules, only the dude who says no is free?”

“So you don’t want to anymore? Jack this van? The checks?”

And he’s all, What?

He didn’t say that.

Didn’t think it.

It’s just that maybe we can help.

While we’re still here.

So we turn on Romaine and start zigging and zagging Oki Dog–wards, never farther than one block at a time on a single street.

No sign of fleeing punks anywheres.

No other traffic, either.

Though there never is much around four-thirty. Like the least of any time, day or night. It starts picking up at five, night shift people getting off, early birds coming on.

That’s the ground traffic. Air traffic’s happening hard. Seven or eight copters, Blitzer thinks. Kind of circling. Floodlighting everything bright as high noon on planet Mercury. That’s the danger zone.

Inside the circle.

So the edge is the closest we go.

To what’s happening.

To the siren magnet.

Cops and ambulances.

Fire engines too, though.

Blitzer says they’re good for blocking streets.

Blocking the view.

That’s what it’s all about. The cops aren’t sealing off these neighborhoods to protect good citizens from maybe a hundred scared teenage punk rockers with no weapons besides broken bottles and a few studded belts that actually are quality enough for whaling purposes.

(The ones from the gay bondage section at the Pleasure Chest, the expensive ones, not the Made in Spanish Sahara jobs from Poseur.)

It’s to keep people from seeing what they’re doing to the teenage punk rockers.

Nonlethal force.

We’re white, they’d just beat us up.

Usually.

Mistakes are made.

And we’ve just made one.

We make a left and Blitzer says, “Fuck no, oh no,” and stops.

Behind us, close, flashing reds. Ahead, farther, a block away, marching, but not away. Marching our way. In formation. Shields out. Helmets on.

Special Weapons and Tactics.

SWAT.

Sealed with a tomb, LA riv vu.

Blitzer says to lock my door and hide in back.

A bullhorn.

Snap crackle cops.

Attention driver and all passengers of yellow Dodge van blocking
intersection.

Blitzer fists the steering wheel.

“Blocking the intersection! What am I fuckin supposed to do? Charge on and get shot?”

What we’re supposed to do is exit the vehicle from the right side with hands in the air.

Immediately.

Further instructions to follow.

“I’m sorry,” Blitzer says. “You should have went with Stickboy.”

I say no.

Because only the dude who says no is free.

Outside we’re told to walk towards the sheriff ’s vehicle.

Slowly.

Side by side.

The nearing bass of lockstep boots behind us.

We’re not quite slammed onto the hood of the cruiser, more manhandled, though it’s women, both of them. The one on me gets me spreadeagled then cuffed behind my back and lying there face mashed on hot steel with the vibration of the idling engine and the formation passing like two feet away it all comes back.

The beatdown with Rory.

That sort of out-of-bodyness while it happened.

Watching ourselves audiencelike, wondering how far they’d go with it.

And wondering too who’d ever find out if they went too far and just dumped us somewhere special that cops have keys to, the incinerator at County General, the sludge pools at the Hyperion plant out past the Venice ’hood, one of those huge roofed reservoirs in the hills where.

Nothing is revealed.

They keep barking at us not to move a muscle, but the only moving I’m doing is breathing, barely.

A helicopter makes three passes, not low but focused, on us. One of the sheriffs talks into her radio. The chopper moves on. Suddenly it’s almost quiet.

Without the radio static, it would be.

Even their voices, now.

Are quiet.

Saying everything’s all right now, helping us stand back up, snipping the cuffs.

Telling us they know exactly who we are, without ID, and proving it.

“You guys interested in working off your debt to society in welding school?”

“A women’s welding school?”

Then telling us this, they’ve got Tim and David and Squid and Siouxsie in phony protective custody in a paddy wagon over behind Astro’s, waiting on their return and only their return, off limits to any other officers and especially LAPD, no one’s hurt or will get hurt, no one’s going downtown, there’s just some waiting, that’s all, for everything to stabilize.

Though Siouxsie’s waiting on her cigarettes too.

The deputy named Rita walks Blitzer back to the van, in case any homies are peeping between their curtains. The one with me, Virginia, says they rescued all four of them like seconds from beatdown by hand-signaling they were sheriff’s informers, under protection. And the lickety-split-second custody was transferred Siouxsie started begging them to let her go so she could look for us, she’d risk it, she was sure we’d show and sure we’d end up wishing we hadn’t.

I say word on that, Siouxsie was right, and she asks me why, then, what passed through our minds that pushed us on, most grown-ups would have stuck their heads in the sand as fast as most kids. And I tell her I don’t know, honestly I don’t, I was scared, ask Blitzer, he decided.

She doesn’t, though. What she asks is why he thinks he can crack the Vantage pack and stash fifty bucks inside right in front of them and be so sure they won’t decide they’ve earned it for themselves. And he just says he isn’t, and if they decide that, fine, because they’re right. They have and more. The thing with not knowing something is you hope it keeps you from doing wrong, not being certain. But you can’t let it keep you from doing right.

“Or trying to, anyways.”

They tell him what streets to take on the way out, and say we’re free to go. We’re both in slo-mo on the uptake, though. Flabbergasted.

I ask myself what if it’s all a dream? The whole night? And how will I know?

This is how: I’ll wake up for real and it won’t be black cherry.

Maybe lime. Lime sounds really good to me right now.

Blitzer says, “Maybe you can tell me, Officers, I hope you will, I was so scared, I almost peed my pants, now I’ve really got to go before I drive, and I don’t want to break the law right under your noses, it would be like an insult, what should I do?”

And just like that the soundtrack spins “Suspicious Minds”– ward, no surprise if you think of him saying the exact same words in a smartass way, they may be dykes, but they’re on-duty cops, and they wouldn’t like it, oh most defiantly. But Blitzer sounds like he’s being considerate, he really does. Like a demo of what he said about not knowing for sure, but doing anyways. And they decide the answer is to wait for them to leave first.

And they do. Right away.

And it’s hard to explain, because he’s so much older and bigger than me. But after their cruiser rolls he hand-plants on my shoulders and his whole body’s shaking and he just collapses into me and I’m holding him up somehow, all of him with all of me.

50

More cops.

At the Nast.

As in Western.

Not avenue, though. That’s west of the motel.

West of the Western.

Street of my, well, not birth exactly.

Abandonment.

Unless I was
born
in that fuckin laundromat too. Maybe there’s a bathroom? That might explain the SOUVENIR OF PARIS dish towel they wrapped me in, Dad could have jacked it from an unattended dryer while Mom was in the ladies’ dropping her load. Leaving plenty of time to come up with the note— according to the file, it looked like a dude’s handwriting, saying junkies could make good babies but not good parents.

So it runs in the family, then.

The wishful thinking.

No sidewalk stars to wish on here, though, not this far east on Hollywood Boulevard, east of Western, east of the freeway. Just plenty to wish for, here and now in the flutter and wow, no black-and-whites in the head-in parking only, no coroner’s van, no night owl looky-loos knotted on the south-side pavement talking. After he parks us across the street Blitzer takes a sixer’s worth of Big Gulps just to stay the vocal Richter dry, but cops or no cops we can’t say no to three thousand bucks, he’s got a room key after all, and besides who’d try anything sketchy anyways crossing a police line, the cops know that, he wouldn’t be there if he didn’t belong there.

Though both of us.

Together.

Might attract attention.

“Dude, I know I said this leaving you behind shit is over, back at the Mayfair. But—”

What hey, it’s the story of my so-called life anyways, right?

I say to myself.

“It’s cool.”

I say out loud.

He tells me to lay low in back while he walks the walk. I don’t, though, I kick it slumped down shotgun with the window cracked, so I can hear the gawkers chit-chattering outside, but the frequency’s strictly
español
and
drogas
and
muerto
are all I
comprende,
it must be an overdose. Then they all make like Speedy G anyways, skip to my looky-loo after a downtown-bound diesel bus that misses the stop because the driver’s checking the Nast I guess instead of the sidewalk, the sweat-shop express brakes hard up the block and honks and next thing you know everybody’s gone.

Just like Blitzer.

Gone like a song.

All this started.

And all this ends.

He can’t even talk at first.

There’s just this rhythm track, there’s drums, his fingers, on the steering wheel, those fingers, there’s bass, deep deep breaths, in out in out, not steady really but half-controlled at least, rock steady compared to the key castanet on the ignition faceplate, rattle-shaking forever it seems, till finally he steadies his hand enough to guide it in and the engine turns over and we start to pull away.

“It’s Rory,” he chokes out.

Dead.

In the room next door.

Worse than dead.

Killed.

Stabbed.

At first I’m electroshocked and sad and too I’m scared, our fingerprints are all over that room, the cops could say.

We did it.

Lights.

Headlights.

He can’t find the fucking lights.

And I can’t help him. And he’s crying. And somehow I know.

I just know.

It’s not just the cops could say.

Even with the falling just beginning.

It’s not just the cops could say.

The pieces of the night, falling into place.

It’s not just the cops could say.

He did it.

He made it happen.

“When you went back over there, after they all left on the Poseur run, you said you left something,” I say. “You never said what.”

“My leather. Darby’s leather.”

He knows I know. I hear it in his voice like panic.

“Because we’re leaving and I wanted him to have it.”

He says because he’s over Darby, and Rory isn’t.

“Wasn’t,” he whispers.

But Blitzer hated Rory. He’d never do that. He’d do just what he did. He left all that Desoxyn that he must have jacked from V-13. That Squid dipped into later on their way back in, while we were in the bathroom. And that’s why the mysterious private conversation with the mysterious Mexican dude at the brewery went so mysteriously well so mysteriously fast. Because all Blitzer had to say was mistaken identity, it’s Rory Dolores, and this is where he is, here and now, sleeping like a baby, door wide open, tell your homies.

And I could have stopped it. There was that chance of taking Rory with us tonight, Tim and David would have jumped at it, on the way to the Hollywood sign we even talked about going back for him, I could have forced it, I could have went in myself and woke him up. I think Blitzer tricked me. He got me worrying about Tim and David on purpose. Like a diversion.

Same with getting me suspecting Squid.

Same with reading me so hard for saying I thought he was mad enough to murder Squid and Siouxsie, how could I think such a thing?

Mind control.

Even on my back in the grass by the sidewalk up on Camrose, pressed hard together pulses racing, saying didn’t I hate Darby, for the mind control stuff, that was part of it.

The fucking pot, the fucking kettle.

Black as night, black as coal.

Paint it, black.

Darby said.

You’d have to be a painter, to try and get it right, but even then
you couldn’t.

Black.

His voice, denying everything.

I ask what was up with the other Mexican dude at the Vex, the one he took off with, that’s part of the puzzle, I’m sure it is, but he says it was a trick, just a local respectable, craving gringo dick, Yes way to my No way, It was to my It wasn’t, What do you think I am to my Expert witness, my expert witness, my fuckin Elliot, my fuckin Mess.

Black.

Me, inside, remembering.

Everything we did tonight, everything I did tonight, everything I really liked.

I guess it started with Darby but now.

Darby’s dead.

Gone like a song.

“Rory’s fuckin dead!” I scream back at him.

He starts to yell back but stops. He says It’s his fault, it’s all the speed in me, mixed with one thing after another, all night long, we’ll get through this, we’ve got money now at least, we’ll just chill, shine the freeway, go surface, out to the pier like we planned, celebrate my birthday, we’ll watch—

“Fuck you!” I yell.

“I wasn’t—I don’t even think about it, Rockets, I just say it, I’m from back east! I always think of the ocean that way, watching the sun rise out of it.”

Not setting into it.

Fading to.

Black.

Her voice, screaming.

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

Red.

The light, Fairfax and Santa Monica.

I’ll celebrate my birthday all right, lucky fuckin thirteen.

Hell fuckin na.

But I won’t even ride there with Blitzer. I could fool him but no, I stealth-hand my stick and pop the door and I’m out out and away, on my own and completely alone, hiding on the high school grounds till I’m sure he’s gone gone gone. Then I count block after block to Olympic and start walking west.

And the farther I walk the more it’s in the air, the change. This cooling. This dampening. At first it’s like the cemetery earlier, but that was localized, from sprinklers on grass, acres of grass, you know, just add water, lots of water and it changes everything, you get there and you feel it and you leave and you don’t, you pass through it, and this is more going into something big and forever stretching, it’s the marine layer I guess they call it, who knows how far it goes sometimes, upwards to the redwoods and Oregon, farther, outwards to those islands past Santa Barbara and farther farther, over all the dolphins and seals who feel this too on rocks in sea caves, wake up to this, if they ever sleep, they must though, not well not tight just sometimes, like Spanish sailors in the Aztec day, crewing those street-name explorers like Cabrillo and Balboa and Sepulveda sounds like too, La Cienega, most good citizens have no clue on that crew but there’s an exhibit with audio out in Exposition Park that runs it down, those conquistador dudes didn’t conquer anything, they made their camps out on the islands so they
could
sleep, or wake up actually, shut-eye wasn’t the problem, Indians slashing their throats so they never rose and shone again was the problem, the Indians around here didn’t crave beads and mirrors like the ones back east, and it wasn’t that the trinket shit staled either, they didn’t want it from day one, or flowed pumpkin pie and mincemeat, or giblet fuckin gravy, they just wanted white men dead or gone and preferably both, and what that made California for the Spaniards was a day job only, they sailed back to safety every night, to the islands where nobody lived because there wasn’t any water.

Now it’s heavy in the air, though, it turns out what I thought were sweat trickles down my sides aren’t running from my armpits but angling off my chest, not sweat at all but dewdrops collected on my skin and warmed enough I guess to make like magnets into flowage for rills that gravity spills. And talk about magnets, my buzzed head’s tweakin’ like a beacon for every dew drop in from Malibu to Redondo, and with no hair to hold them any higher I’ve got leaky faucet drips off my eyebrows and bridge to tip-drop off my nose, watering wannabe whiskers on my chinny chin chin.

I wish I had a hat.

But here I am, wishing.

And here it is, waiting, I finally notice I’m not on my own after all, not completely, my left hand’s still gripping the X record like we’re Thailand twins, or triplets, the ex of me one and the why of me two and the we of me three, so I might as well get some umbrella action. It’s not like I’ll ever play it, not where I’m going. And I just keep west west walking, and the soggier the jacket gets the more I hear nothing but the Doors’ greatest hit.