What We Do Is Secret by Thorn Kief Hillsbery Read Free Book Online Page B

somewheres else.
    I guess they figure they’ll catch us later.
    Siouxsie grips my arm.
    “They won’t shoot us?”
    “No way. We’re white, they’d just beat us up.”
    “It was like a movie. I thought it was happening.”
    “What?”
    “Death.”
    “Death?”
    “Didn’t you ever dream of dying in the barbed wire escaping from a concentration camp, in those bright lights from the guard towers?”
    “Never.”
    But she says she does, all the time, she likes blood, the idea of losing it, movies like
Torso,
mass murder films, real low budget, murder and rape, plot check, plot check, her all-time faverave gore-fest,
Last House on the Left
, two girls go to the big city to score some drugs and get kidnapped, raped, and killed. Then the killers go to the house of the parents of one of the girls, by chance, and the parents take care of them, one of the killers they drag out in the woods and cut apart piece by piece while he’s still conscious, the first time she saw it she was like seven.
    “It made me want to live to die. It made me live to be killed, I based my whole life on being killed in the woods.”
    “So if someone tried to kill you, you’d just let them?”
    “It depends on who they are. I might just lie there and enjoy it too much to move.”
    And if that isn’t drugs talking, I don’t know what is.
    But everybody says death rock is happening hard as time for violent crime.
    It’s supposed to be the next rockabilly.
    And trends are for terminal morons, I don’t follow them at all, like for example last year’s top-drawer trend, the one before ska, was being bisexual. Which on-fire fags like Tony the Hustler were down for completely, because they were the first ready, able, and more than willing dudes who came to mind to all these clueless vals and surf boys who wanted in on the latest. Though what I heard from those in the two-way know was double your pleasure in theory, double your trouble in practice.
    But Tony and Stickboy are starting a band, and they need a singer, they told me they want a death-rock chick like Dinah Cancer in 45 Grave. So who knows, maybe Siouxsie?
    “Can you sing?”
    “I can dance.”
    “If you’re cool with Tony and Stickboy, you could maybe front their band.”
    “Do I get to bleed?”
    “It’s no joke band. They want to get signed.”
    “Sounds like a joke to me, hustlers fronted by a whore, that’s pretty funny.”
    “You could be a fuckin star. Like Exene.”
    I tell her Blitzer saw Exene at the El Rey Theater last Saturday, she had on rhinestone ankle bracelets. And that closes the circuit finally, I hear blue sparks in her voice almost, saying Exene’s cool, multiple cool, and do I know why?
    I say I do.
    Because she looks like Death. And then I tell her she’s crazed, fully crazed.
    Her head leans sideways next to mine, almost on my shoulder.
    “I want to tell you something, Rockets.”
    “Sure.”
    “I meant what I said. I might let it happen.”
    Tip-tap goes my droogie stick, stepping along, one two three, four five six.
    “Enjoying it. Really.”
    Our hair spikes touch, move apart, rewind-repeat, step again, touch again.
    “Rockets?”
    “Yeah?”
    “When that happened with the cops last week, with you and Rory, did you sort of like it?”
    “Like what?”
    “What they did to you.”
    “They beat us up! Not all to fuck or anything but—”
    “You’re always feeling those bruises.”
    “It’s to see if they still hurt.”
    “Do they?”
    “A little.”
    “You have to touch them to know?”
    “I guess. It’s like a habit.”
    “You get this look on your face.”
    “What kind of look?”
    “Dreamy. Like you’re remembering something. Something you liked.”
    “Well, I’m not.”
    “Maybe you don’t realize.”
    “There’s nothing
to
realize.”
    “But if there was—”
    “Fuck!”
    “Listen! If you did really like it, I don’t think it’s sick or anything. You know, you could tell me. I’d understand.”
    “Is that why