What We Do Is Secret by Thorn Kief Hillsbery Page B

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