What We Do Is Secret by Thorn Kief Hillsbery Page B

Hollywood scene, even though he didn’t look like one, and when I met him back in the day I thought he was a rich kid from the beach like they all are now, but then Hellin drove down there to help him get his stuff from his dad’s garage and I went too and found out the whole and nothing but. He did surf, and he came from that area, but more the low-rent inland part. The house was all drafty from busted windows and you tripped on beer bottles everywhere inside and the backyard was just bare dirt and head-high sticker weeds. And Rory’s dad was this lowlife on some kind of disability who came out and grabbed him from behind and held an ice pick to his chest until he gave him all the cash he had, ten or twelve bucks, a real father-and-son jamboree in other words.
    And too he blames himself for Darby checking out, they had a huge fight that night outside the Hong Kong Cafe, and Rory stormed off. Then at the funeral he cried and wailed more than anyone but Darby’s mom, and afterwards John Doe had to talk him out of jumping from the roof of Sunset 9000.
    I stand back up and tell Blitzer maybe we should bail.
    “What hey?” he says, all startled till finally he reaches for my arm.
    “You mean all of us, Rockets? Or—”
    “I mean we were going to do the haircuts, I thought, and—”
    “And as every daughter of the Confederacy learns at her Aunt Jemima’s knee, if it ain’t stiff it ain’t worth a fuck,” Squid says, then she and Siouxsie bookend Rory on either side of the bed and raise his arms over his head and start popping Bazooka bubbles in his armpit hair, one after another.
    Then Blitzer picks up the bottle of poppers and he’s all, Hmm, till Siouxsie points out the Calistoga stubbie with a one-piece twist-off cap in the ice bucket on the dresser, the kind of cap without a metal ring that separates off, the kind you can open and close without anyone knowing.
    Blitzer unscrews the top, takes a swallow, pours in the poppers, and seals it back up.
    That leaves the empty bottle, and I volunteer to fill it, in the bathroom. Blitzer follows me in and says he wants to hold it for me, and no not the bottle.
    “I’m afraid I’ll pee on you.”
    “Don’t be afraid of anything.”
    And I get this feeling, I know it’s the Desoxyn kicking in hard but that doesn’t change the feeling itself, it’s like we’re surfers, Blitzer and me, we’re surfers on this huge hollow wave, or no, not on the wave but in it, we’re surfing this wave and the wave is our luck and our luck is a tunnel, and the tunnel hurls us forward, and the tunnel never ends, but whose tunnel?
    Darby said.
    I fall into my tunnel.
    Darby said.
    I crawl into my tunnel.
    Darby said.
    What are you doing in
my
tunnel?

19
    Tim and David’s room is one door down and isn’t that amazing smells like popcorn popcorn popcorn and what kind of perfume, Squid wants to know.
    “‘Promise her anything,’” Tim sings out. “ ‘But give her Arpège.’ ”
    “My mama wore that,” Squid says. “I’d recognize it anywhere.”
    She actually has a family that she remembers, and they even sent her a present through Greyhound will-call for her birthday. A dress. Or “sundress” according to Squid. She ended up giving it to Su Tissue of Suburban Lawns, who wore it onstage. Later I heard Kickboy wrote up the gig for
Slash
and said more about the dress than the band.
    While we’re settling onto the bed and around it on the matted shag carpet David offers us Cokes and I ask if there’s Pepsi, not thinking. Everybody laughs but me, and it takes awhile, but finally I get the joke. I know one thing though, if I was them I’d have made the switch by now. I’d have switched right there in Atlanta. That fuckin museum wouldn’t even let them in for free.
    I don’t say anything though. I’m sitting at the foot of the bed, legs stretched out on the carpet, leaning back against the mattress with the cardboard carrier box for the mice in my lap. I feel them