“Hell fuckin na!”

  “Can we watch this again?”

  The magic words, Blitzer said, so magic they’re tragic, the Everest of octane for the groomin’ machine. Because once you know how the tape goes you can time your chatter so it sends him summitwards then and there, and you don’t have to sit through the whole goddamn thing twice. But Blitzer told me going into it cold I’d have to live with the rewind, and it’s maybe six minutes max so it isn’t that bad, since I basically just say what I said before, it doesn’t matter if it’s word for word, in fact it’s better if it is.

  The only thing is, about halfway through round two I’m feeling gut-bombed, I guess it’s the mix of the nast pot with the smells of the candle and his hair oil and the lotion he’s using, and I want to ask him to crack the window more, but Blitzer schooled me hard on facing the screen and talking him up all the way through, nonstop, so even when sweat beads break out on my forehead and this sour spit rises up the back of my throat I keep the Hollywood babble on, and with him panting next to me faster faster faster at least I know we’re in the home stretch. Then right after I say he’s funnier than Nerve Stiffen’ll ever be his free hand vise-grips the back of my neck and pulls my head down towards his crotch while he gasps out “Fondle my balls!” in this strangled wheezy voice and Christ on a cream puff, Madonna on a mattress, I can’t help it, I can’t hold it, I puke.

  All over him.

  Right at the magic moment.

  No!

  Punk rock!

  Oki Dog and fries!

  He jumps up. Though he doesn’t hit me or yell or anything. He must be in shock, I know I would be.

  Actually I guess I am. He jams for the bathroom and as soon as I hear water running I start flailing for my clothes to bail as fast as I can before he’s finished washing. But hanging my head down lacing my boots I just fuckin’ break down, why didn’t I up-front him, he’ll never pay now, I haven’t cried since Darby died but it makes me want to end it all, why can’t he live in a condo up high so I can take a dive?

  Into Swan Lake.

  AKA Death Disco.

  I can’t face Blitzer.

  I can’t even face the Dog Groomer to the Stars.

  But here he is, welcoming after a word with his wanker, handing me a warm wet towel. I start sniffling out sorries but no no no.

  “I should be ashamed of myself, giving a drug like that to a boy your age.”

  “Weed?”

  “Heroin.”

  “Heroin?”

  “With the marijuana. You’ve never done it before, have you?”

  “No.”

  “It makes you sick, the first time. I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s me who’s sorry, man. I ruined every—”

  “You didn’t ruin anything, Sid. You were fine.”

  He puts two bills in my hand, and a business card. He pats my shoulder.

  “You said all the right things.”

  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 a while, 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 scratching around in there, scratching around in the dark.

  Tim asks Blitzer about the studs on the shoulders of his leather, the swirly ones.

  “They’re called chocolate chips. They’re from London. This was Darby’s jacket. He put them on last year, when he went to England.”

  It was just a year ago. Right at this time. A year exactly. I remember listening on KROQ to the long-distance interview he did with Rodney. Nobody over there knew who Darby was. He carried the G.I. record around under his arm and played it for people.

  They all thought it was too fast.

  Darby said.

  Anybody that wants to get in touch with me can get in touch with me, like, through Michelle. Like, if Rory wants to get in touch with me, or Blitzer, or Rockets, or Tony, if he could get in touch with me before he goes to jail.

  And how ranking was that, Darby naming us on the radio to all those jacks and all those jills? Especially since it wasn’t that long after Michelle stood in for Tony in that scene for The Decline.

  Though actually she stood in for Rory Dolores, if you want the whole and nothing but. After Darby decided Tony would make him look bad, he asked Rory to do it instead, and I was over there when Tony found out. Tony laughed at Darby and said, “Oh, you don’t want me to be in it, but you want this blond-haired freak to be in it? Not only are you gonna look just as gay as if I was in it, but you’re gonna look like a gay dude with a hideous, acne-scarred freak for a boyfriend!” And Tony he actually listened to sometimes, so then he asked Michelle. But just a few weeks later Darby was namechecking his boys on Rodney on the Roq. So maybe it finally hit him. That you can’t keep a secret that isn’t one anyways.

  David starts station-surfing the radio for punker mood music, and Siouxsie tells him he’s wasting his time, real punk isn’t played on the radio.

  “Really?” Tim says. “But how do you know who the stars are?”

  At first we shop-talk Poseur and Vinyl Fetish and Zed Records, then scene-check back in the day at the Masque and the Starwood and Blackie’s and the Hong Kong Café till finally Siouxsie says the magic words.

  “We know who they are because we know them personally.”

  And you don’t need the Amazing Kreskin to read their minds, if they can’t be stars themselves, why not settle for knowing some?

  Hell.

  Fuckin’.

  Na.

  Goodbye Judy, hello Darby.

  It’s 1980, can’t you afford a fuckin’ haircut?

  Only The Decline was last year, so they don’t just want haircuts, they want this year’s model, they want Atlantic Blue like Siouxsie, On Fire Fuchsia like Squid.

  “And that boy next door,” Tim says. “What were the streaks?”

  “Aubergine,” Siouxsie says.

  “And platinum! I loved his look.”

  “Among other things,” Blitzer mutters. He starts massaging my shoulders.

  “Well, it’s best to dye—” Squid says, then laughs and tells Tim and David it must be catching, she hopes it isn’t terminal, their “to-die” disease.

  “Anyway, darlin’s, you want to color before you cut, if you really want to color. Poseur’s fully stocked, and they’re still open.”

  David asks how far it is.

  “Within walking,” Squid says.

  And Tim’s boots, rumor has it, are made for just that.

  “So that’s just what they’ll do!”

  After the briefest little visit to the powder room.

  When he’s finished powdering whatever he powders Blitzer asks if they mind if him and me just kick it here. And Tim and David don’t mind at all. Or so they say. From the way they say it I bet they mind, all right. They mind not being here to watch. Blitzer follows them doorwards, though he doesn’t lock it behind them, just stands there waiting then walks out too. He’s back in three or four. He locks the deadbolt and starts searching the closet. I ask where he went.

  “Next door.”

  “Why?”

  “I left something.”

  “Did you do anything mean to Rory?”

  He says he channel-surfed the TV to a showing of a movie called Shaft. What hey, how fuckin’ appropriate. And how spun is Rory’s whirled tonight, anyways? There’s the open door policy, what the fuck is up with that? Then there’s the deal with his boots. He couldn’t get his clothes off and keep his boots on, so he must have put them back on. Maybe for the trick, and whatever his sick little trip was. Or is.

  I say maybe Rory was wasted and decided to leave when the trick went down for the count and he got his boots laced then remembered he was naked and just thought Fuck it and passed out cold.

  Blitzer laughs and says any which ways we couldn’t have planned it better ourselves, getting T and D all riled over Rotten Rory.

  “How’s that?”

  “Because they’re thinking one thing right now, and one thing only, we can get them in the groove and hook them up with dudes like Rory.”

  “But they can’t be punks, Blitzer. They’re way too big of fags.”

  “We know that, but they don’t. They think the whole scene’s one big homo clusterfuck, based on what they’ve seen.”

  “But sooner or later—”

  “They’ll figure it out. Right now they’re Silly Putty in our hands. We get ’em frying and point ’em at some punk boys and they’ll forget everything, their room, their van, they’ll for-get—”

  What hey.

  He shakes something, muffled inside metal.

  How fuckin’ clever.

  He takes a sudden whistling breath.

  How fuckin’ fuckin’ clever.

  Traveler’s checks in the fake Coke can that’s mixed in with the real ones on the shelf in the closet.

  Three thousand dollars in traveler’s checks.

  Three thousand dollars in UNSIGNED traveler’s checks.

  Not so fuckin’ clever.

  Just fuckin’ fuckin’ ranking cool.

  He dives on the bed and drops his head down over the edge by mine, then huggy-bears me with his arms and pulls me onto the mattress. He kisses the back of my neck.

  “It’s the real thing, Rocketman.”

  I’m still sitting facing away, with Blitzer on his knees behind me. He smells like leather and cloves. He links his fingers in mine and raises my arms over my head.

  And who do I think of?

  The Dog Groomer to the Stars.

  How fuckin’ romantic.

  He pulls his Circle One up over my head.

  But not like you know who.

  Faster.

  I try to smell myself.

  Neutral, I guess. Not bad. A little like Jell-O.

  His hands don’t shake.

  He doesn’t hold the shirt with all his fingers so none touch my skin.

  His fingers touch me.

  Everywhere.

  Too gently.

  He drops the shirt on the bed.

  “Something’s wrong,” he says. “Tell me what it is.”

  He moves out from behind me and presses me down on my back on the mattress with his hand on my chest.

  “Talk to me, Rocketman.”

  His fingers.

  “They can get those checks replaced?”

  Loosen my belt.

  “That’s why they’re traveler’s checks.”

  Work my top button open.

  “What’s up with V-13, anyways?”

  Pop my fly buttons.

  “I snaked them for a little Desoxyn, like a quarter, but somebody else snaked them for a lot, like a roll. They must have mixed us up. It’s like mistaken identity. Pretty soon they’ll figure it out.”

  Tug my jeans and shorts.

  “Is there a scene in Idaho?”

  Pull them down my hips.

  “If there isn’t we’ll make one.”

  His fingers fingers fingers.

  Move to where to there and then to.

  There.

  Too gently.

  Lips follow, circle check, left nipple, circle check, right nipple, lips follow, singing.

  Sex Pistols.

  “Submission.”

  I’m on a submarine mission for you, baby.

  Lips follow, circle check, belly button, lips follow, singing. I can’t get enough of your watery— Drown, drown, down, down, hands follow, his, lifting me, legs follow, mine, lips follow, his, circle check.

  There.

  Not gently.

  Yes.

  Darby said.

  And you can swim, and it’s so great ’cause it’s dark, you know, and you can just swim and it doesn’t matter if you live or die or anything.

  And it’s dark, and it hurts, and I’m yes. The poison in the, yes. The future, yes. What I can’t tell, yes. The look on my face, if I could only, yes. I know and I can and I wonder, sex boy, was I ever, the slave, am I still, uncontaminated?

  All this started with words from songs.

  LIZARD KILLING

  July Shark

  I have to lie on top of him in the hideout up under the kudzu. I caught the lizard on a fencepost coming over here. Now it is pinned in between us and the drying blood sticky around it. Hard to keep it pressed there to where it can’t squirm loose but to where it won’t get crushed dead either. I have to grab onto his hands the way we decided it would work and shove our palms together around the rocks. Can smell the dark, viney dirt that ices and thaws but has never got sun to dry it out all the way, that scuffs into little clotted balls but dissolves with spit rubbed into it to be black mud slicker than you get from other dirt.

  We don’t have any names when we go up in the kudzu. What we do there is changing and names don’t account for that. Where any pieces of sun fall in there they are hot and yellow. They are like candy pulled out of sweat. The shadows don’t have any color but everything is the barked and throbbing underside of green. If you move you change in the shadows and have different hollows and different dark parts. So I know. Shadows are what let you see what moves. And just because you are in a body you are like a clock or a stick or closed eyes. You are made of bones and skin and you show something pass.

  The trick we are playing has to happen so the ghost will be trapped forever. We did have our ghost, Kovi, caught in a jar. Yelling one way, yelling right, I took off the lid and my friend hollered the other way just right and snapped the padlock shut at the jar’s mouth. That was the first trick. Ghost in the padlock. Key we busted, padlock shuttered with blood milked from our fingerprints. Padlock we buried in the river bank and marked it. But it wasn’t there when we opened the hole to check. I thought most likely he had dug it up to see what would happen. I didn’t act like I thought that. All the things supposed to get fixed when we trapped Kovi got bad again anyway.

  Now glass pieces we polished on our shirts will call the ghost. I laid the glass trail out lining right over to where we would lie. We took our shirts off then and draped them over the old thick twists of the kudzu.

  Our breath will call the ghost but he can’t get between our faces. The lizard is alone, an unpaired, unprotected mouth, and the ghost will go to it. Kovi won’t know until the lizard swallows him that blood already protects the lizard. Kovi will die. But the lizard has to die too. This magic scared me to figure out but it is surer than the lock ever was. You can’t unlock a lizard. You can’t open it, not that way.

  A spirit will get stuck in shining glass, colored glass. Hypnotized. Glass like you see dangle off the skinny twigs of the dogwood trees or the sarvice trees or the redbuds out front of some houses. Far side of creeks hung with skewed, swinging bridges. That you see if you ride your bike too far up the crumbled tar roads that pierce the hollers and stall out into dirt. Only, for that trap, the spirit has to possess some glimmer of its own. It has to love the color and the light to get snagged on the glinting edges, to sense in that glass a satisfaction of its aimless hunger. Then it will risk the eternity of fascination and bewilderment in the shards.

  The kudzu can grow a foot a day. Stray blind ends grow too far and one or the other of us winds them back so that the place we don’t have names in is less of an accident all the time. First day after the hideout was cleared we looked to grin at each other but a fear what next what to do with it now we made it snarled our lips over our teeth. I don’t know who jumped first into fist throwing. I kept swinging at him mean and wild, thinking how animals use teeth, while his dirty knuckles blurred right back at me. The air under the vines slipped around us like a river of shadows. Fists skidded off ribs from the sweat but it felt like firecrackers I stole from the convenience store.

  Me on my knees and him curled on the dirt and us not hitting now but choking out the last frenzy in dry hitches. I told him, you go to sleep. When he closed his eyes and quieted pretending to do it the shadows stood finally still on him and maybe we were on ground that we had opened now. I drew my fingers over the freckles over the bones on him my hands like shadows or cold like fish in the summer air till he whimpered, shook some. Till I didn’t know how to go on. Then I lay down and closed my own eyes not knowing if something would come to me.

  I keep hold of the lizard in one hand until it is time, no place else to put it. It can be dusty green or brown but in my hand it doesn’t know what color to change to. I rub my finger on the side of its jaw to soothe it.

  Kovi is old and ugly and too hateful for glass to do more than lure him. That ghost hates us ever since we figured him out. We fished him out of the tangles of what went on at night in our houses. Fears such as water in the tub, or stove burners, or painted nails. Ghost movies show that haunted can be something you get to the bottom of, and cast out. Power to climb out of your dug grave you rip from the very ground, invent out of chickenscratches, words, and your own flesh and bones. If you make it yourself you will always have your secrets by a choice.

  First we pull the blackberry thorns across our bellies and it is easier if I let the whole piece of bramble prick and skip all the thorns across instead of just one. Only a couple times and it gets some scratches to dot up red along their high pink lines. So scared my breath comes light and cold and feels like I draw it by choice and the choice is hooking me and leading me by all the hidden parts, all the skin parts. By the elastic that I know is my skeleton and my will. He breathes shallow too, wild eyes and shadows kneeling right across from me. Quick jerking shudders of his ribs.

 

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