This is supposed to be about Darby Crash, but I don’t think it’s going to be. All my so-called life it seems it’s this boy here and that girl there and once they see my Germs burn and hear it’s real they know what they want as in word on the old-school LA punk scene and they know how to get it as in Tell it, Rockets, but now that I’m at their service sitting down to let my fingers do the talking the first clue card on the table says the only secrets I’m spilling are mine all mine alone, which sounds like here comes trouble if missing in traction from slippage in the spillage are the bleed-all-about-it excess-clusives that all those jacks and all those jills are pitching pretty pennies to read.

I love one thing in all LA, I love the purple sky at night.

Published by Random House/Villard

ISBN: 0-8129-7309-7

It’s been months since the suicide of Darby Crash, L.A. punk rock icon and lead singer of the Germs. But for Rockets Redglare, it feels like yesterday. Darby was the hot-as-sun center of Rockets’s world. Part ringleader, part god, and all charismatic manipulator, Darby was as close to family as a hustler and street kid like Rockets might ever get. Now, as he leaves his crib in a Jell-O factory and amps up for another night of looking for tricks and scrounging a meal, Sex Pistols and X lyrics on repeat in his head, he knows he’s reached a turning point. The scene is changing, and nothing’s as easy as it was when Darby brought him into the fold.

From the underground clubs to the bedroom of the “Dog Groomer to the Stars,” from Oki-Dog to Poseur to Reagan’s star on the Walk of Fame, Rockets wanders beneath L.A.’s purple nighttime sky with Blitzer, who inherited Darby’s leather jacket, and teen Lesbian hooker girlfriends Siouxie and Squid. When Blitzer schemes to finance an escape from L.A. by dosing two glamour-struck Minnesotans with LSD, they all tag along to the back of the giant H in the Hollywood sign, and join in a game of “secrets” that sets the stage for a long night spent burning bridges, building new ones, tripping and talking and searching for answers.

As the dark gives way to early morning, the punks and the cops engage in their ritual standoff, and on the ruined amusement park pier in Santa Monica Rockets faces the ultimate choice: should he stay or should he go. Heavily peopled with real-life charachters—Darby Crash, Alice Bag, Kickboy, Hellin Keller, reggie Mental, and others—What We Do is Secret is about a search for identity at a specific time in a particular place: southern California at the dawn of the Regan era. Like Nathaniel West, John Rechy, and Joan Didion before him, Thorn Kief Hillsbery freeze-frames Los Angeles in the idiom of a defining moment.

So I’m cold, huh?

You got a fire, stoke it up, call me!

How fun, I don’t even fuck no more, there ain’t no livin’ large no more, we don’t barely have a scene at all, and I don’t even bleed the same blood when I’m cut no more. And I heard it through the grapevine that Kickboy’s leaving town.

After all the fears he faced down.

Ain’t no wave, new wave, this bullshit can’t be true, is that what change meant, rearrangement, bought by who?

But i don’t trip on it too hard now, how the Go-Go’s were number one from sea to slimy sea when Darby said they’ve got no lyrics, they’ve got nothing, they’re going nowhere, how it’s maybe morning in America to Reagan but midnight in Hollywood to me, and I can’t get there from here.

Even though he could.

Colossal Youth.

No, wait.

Young Marble Giants.

Colossal Youth is their record. With those statues on the cover Blitzer told me about, somewheres in the Holy Land I guess, Easter Island.

And that’s it exactly, I feel tall enough to play statues on Easter Island. Partly it’s the hill being so steep we’re taking like giant’s steps to get down fast and our boots on the sidewalk sound like the British are coming the British are coming, or maybe it’s Marines making smoke down the halls of Montezuma. And with all the trees and flowers and bird bathhouses up here instead of parking lots and diesel fumes and minimalls it’s like breathing air that no one’s breathed before, like a drug but not the love drug, more the heaven-above drug.

And Blitzer’s beside me every bit as amped as me, saying I’m his rabbit’s foot, I’m his four-leaf clover, singing Sugarlight sugarlight I can’t believe, swallowing one bulb after another in the city of electric light.

“You were always like the mascot. The kid. Way the fuck back at the Masque. I guess I kind of quit looking at you or something. Then tonight—”

He comes to a present-arms halt and huggy bears me down to the grass in the strip next to the sidewalk and puts his lips next to my ear and whispers, “Tonight you opened my eyes.”

He’s holding his weight off me with his elbows so he doesn’t crush me. But I want him to. I wrap my legs around his waist and force him down on me with my wrists crossing at the small of his back and all my bruises hurting hurting and we start this gentle rocking and he says, “Because you know what my problem is? You know what my fuckin problem is? I’m blind! I’m so fuckin blind I should be out there reading waffle irons with my fingers someplace.”

And he kisses me, hard on the lips and deep deep past them, hard and long and let me, let me.

Darby said.
Let me teach you how to hold me and don’t ever stop.

So here I go, wishing again, in Candyland now like on the Boulevard then. But look up this time, what do you see, both of them and lagging me, up the road and down a driveway, curved and cobbled, signed in jest or is it joust, Blitzer wants to know, but this fame thing, I don’t get it.

Vernon and Irene’s Castle.

Tiptoeing toward the must-be reason it’s not gated.

The drawbridge.

Because no shit, Sherlock, it’s elementary as jetsam to my dear Flotsam, if you draw me a bridge don’t deny me a river, just picture a moat, and what’s a moat without floatage for the knightly boat?

A) Dry

B) Concrete

C) Painted blue

D) All of the above

Circle D for Circle One, Beachwood Brigade, company halt.

“They must only fill it for special occasions,” Blitzer says.

“Like what?” Siouxsie says. “Crusades?”

“What hey, there’s drains, it must be meant for water, there’s a tap down there somewheres, sure there is.”

He leads us single file down a narrow ramp next to the drawbridge that ends in a dropoff where there’s a pool-style ladder to the bottom of the moat. He says it’s bound to be a walk in Echo Park with more than one of us down there, so Siouxsie waits with me sitting under the drawbridge while he checks it out.

Though she says we’re lurking.

“Like trolls. That’s what trolls do. They lurk. Under drawbridges. I wonder if this is authentic. If it actually raises up. I don’t see a motor anywhere. I guess it’s not.”

“A motor wouldn’t make it authentic. More like the opposite.”

“True.”

She sparks a smoke.

“To be really authentic they’d need slaves, wouldn’t they? That must be why drawbridges went out of—hey, you better take some Desoxyn, Rockets. Like three, at least. Right now.”

“Why?”

“To keep up with Blitzer.”

I know at least two things Animal Cracker needs, a shirt and some points. But what do I need?

I could always ask him for a kiss.

We never have.

Done anything.

Just like Blitzer and me before tonight.

Bad idea.

“I need somebody raised from the dead.”

He lets out a long breath. Draws in a longer one.

“Fuckin Darby.”

I just say Yeah. But it’s like this long conversation between us in three words or less. He had something going with Darby for a while too, fully maybe-maybe-not like lots with Animal Cracker, he’d vanish from the PCP for days sometimes then show with serious wealth he’d share in drugs and pizza and ice cream till it was gone, and after Reggie Mental got a look-see jungle go ape crazy over mass bloodstained bills in one of his cash-hauls we all figured he was roughing up gay dudes and robbing them, he’s big for his age, not so tall but musclewise and where it counts I guess too, since Darby went for him. But Animal Cracker just said he couldn’t tell a bloodstain from a wine stain and didn’t think we could either so end of discussion.

Not exactly a no to robbing someone if you think about it. But how likely is it you ever will when what follows the discussion and I mean immediately is Animal Cracker taking like seventeen punks to the Cinerama Dome on Sunset for that Space Odyssey flick where they all dosed hard on fry and sat onstage right below the screen and I know dudes who talk to this day in the wary month of May about the after-images from the spaceships.

“You know what’s wrong with The Decline?” he says. “Too much X. Not enough Germs. The parts with Darby are the best. Even in the kitchen with Tony’s suck-ass tarantula.”

“I was there when Stickboy herded it into the freezer while Tony was taking a leak. And when he finally found it after this search we kept delaying by flowing him drugs and fucking with the stereo so he had to keep tabs on us. Stickboy said it must have crept in while he was refilling ice trays but no worries, it’s like Walt Disney, in the future they’ll figure out how to revive it.”

“I thought it drowned or something.”

“Only if it wasn’t dead already. Tony wanted to revive it right then and there and filled the sink with hot water. But it sank like a stone so Stickboy swore it was already frozen through. He was all, I told you so, it’s gone for good now, and it’s all your fault.”

“Burn, baby, burn!” he says.

And genielike it billows up, almost instantly, the gut-churning smoke from the melting vinyl.

“To purloin a phrase.”

We both step back.

“Sixteen, you say? Born in ‘sixty-five? Hard to believe.”

“I’m small for my age. But I shave and—stuff.”

He laughs.

“Oh, I’m sure you do. Stuff, especially. I don’t doubt it. What’s hard to believe is sixteen years, since the long hot summer.”

Sizzling sounds funnel up out of the barrel and turn to static on the airwaves, distorted, echoing.

“Since the Rebellion.”

Like out of a frying pan.

“Since the Gulf of Tonkin.”

And into a fire.

He starts humming a tune, not one I recognize, though. And the breeze turns into wind, just like that, force-feeding us oily nasty greasy gagging rhymes-with-choke till we both take another step back, and then another.

“Father, father,” he sings. “We don’t need to escalate.”

And he keeps singing, with melting vinyl snap crackle popping for the rhythm track and double tripled heat from the barrel spoofing spotlight glare, at least how it feels, the furnace thing surprises me at first but what are records anyways but hardened petroleum, in circular form. What keeps on surprising me is his singing voice, how it doesn’t match the way he talks or the way he smells or the place I’m hearing it, not at all, more belongs in church almost, and not just any church but one of those ancient Holy Roman ones that took longer to build than this country’s been a country, and partly it’s the words I guess, war is not the answer, for only love can conquer hate, but only only partly partly, the words are just whispers but the voice, clear and unclear, sure and unsure all at once, so many edges to it soft and sweet and bitter, torn, the hurt of a promise, broken, father father, the stir of a kiss, beginning, sister sister, the touch of need, endless, mother mother, oh like the river of time or something, with currents and eddies and riffles and rapids, sun-warm shallows, green deeps, cold deeps, dark, and sinkholes, sinkholes you lose yourself in, touch your toes on smooth white stones it seems that voice is here for one reason only one alone, to show you something nobody else has ever seen.

And she starts talking about what she calls playing the tapes, and no not songs, though doors come up again, it’s how door number one, bad shit happens, and you deal, you know, for better or for worse. Then door number two, bad shit happens again, and if it’s close overall to what happened before, not in the details maybe but big picture-wise, what you end up doing is dealing the same way. And not just dealing either but seeing it the same way to begin with, even bending the pieces of the puzzle in your mind to make them snap together into the old greatest hits big picture better than their natural fit with the top-twenty new one. And we do this all our lives from here to fuckin infirmity and it’s basically one of the Jolly Green Giant-sized reasons so many married people don’t stay that way unless they’re.

Fuck.

Well, masochists is what she says.

Hell fuckin na.

Why not start right there. Shine the tapes and play your sicko cards instead. On the fuckin table boy. Show ‘em to the seagulls before you throw ‘em to the fishes.

And I can’t believe it but I do, I just start talking, I tell her about that first time with Darby, he said to fuck him and I did, hard really hard, and he said scratch him and he said punch him and he said rip handfuls of his hair out by the roots and I did I did I did. And I bit him till he bled, everywhere he told me to, till he was like the Braille edition of The Illustrated Man, with teeth marks not tattoos. Though what was he to me but gentle gentle gentle, that night and always after, too gentle. Too fucking gentle.

We’re at the end now, the broken-down railing at the abandoned dead-end of the wave-slammed pier, where you can jump off and just swim, and it doesn’t matter if you live or die. Phranc holds out her wrist and guides my fingers with her other hand to the scar from her Germs burn.

Maybe there’s lots of tapes I play.

The waves pound the pilings below and water rockets geyser up past our faces and explode in the air with spray so dense we’re drinking more than breathing, swallowing salt water like those Foreign Legionnaires in the book Blitzer read, emerging from the desert lost and crazed with thirst but finding only ocean and forgetting how fish are full of fresh water.

I tell Phranc there’s something I’ve been wanting to say to her, she’s light-years better than Darby at mind control, she got all those goons from the beaches to do the right thing, when they took off their swazis.

She says it wasn’t all, it was some. And it wasn’t mind control, just telling the truth.

“Well, to tell the truth you have to know what it is,” I say.

“This is supposed to be about Darby Crash,” Rockets tells us at the outset, but most of the secrets the homeless, 13-year-old street kid shares are not about the leader of the formative L.A. punk band the Germs but about himself, instead. In his jittery, oddly addictive, street-smart, pun-spurting, stream-of-consciousness style, he tells us about a single night in the life two months after his sometime lover, Darby, has committed suicide. The beautifully realized setting of this semiautobiographical novel is Hollywood in 1981, when punk has captured the attention and imagination of a crazy coterie of Southern California kids. But punk, Rockets explains, isn’t a style; it’s a way of life that, in his case, is lived on “home street home.” And, for an abandoned-at-birth child of drug addicts, it’s an identity. After all, Rockets was one of Darby’s boys. But who is he now, and, if he survives this drug-riddled night of hustling, narrow escapes, frenetic music, and death, who might he become? And where will he find love? Like his first novel, War Boy (2000), Hillsbery’s second is a hauntingly up-close-and-personal look at the hellish life of a troubled, baffled, different kind of kid for whom many readers will come to care enormously.

Booklist
[Starred review]