What We Do Is Secret by Thorn Kief Hillsbery Page A

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