What We Do Is Secret Read Free

the wall at Licorice Pizza on Sunset, where Chief Gates called punk the biggest threat to our sons and daughters since Darwin I think it was, or maybe it was Communism.
    “Hello there. Killing time before something more exciting comes your way?”
    These guys. And you know they actually sweat brain cells over lines like that, practice ’em in front of a mirror I bet too.
    “It usually does.”
    “I like your look. Kind of new wave.”
    I can tell him they’re fighting words, or I can ask for a cigarette.
    What a mellow boy I am.
    “Nick.”
    “Rockets.”
    And at first it’s a holiday at the inn, no surprises, weather, smog, I’m not a cop from him, I don’t do anything from me, no, not with white dudes either, he’s black. Then he says, “I’m into feet. Young men’s feet.”
    I shrug like I’ve been hearing it since I was in Pampers, though if you want the whole and nothing but I can’t think of a lower priority with any dude I ever met, my nipples are social flutterbuys when you make the Campari, son.
    “I’d like you to show me, so I can see if I can use them.”
    “For what?”
    “Photography. I’m a photographer.”
    And what did I know, second, it’s Hollyweird, they’re always on the prowl, armpit sniffers, jockstrap glimpsers, dudes who cross the finish line for free from debris on the rutting room floor, just touching the bare skin between the top of your sock and the cuff of your jeans when you sit with your knee bent. So you can see the feature presentation with your eyes closed: I show him my feet, Nah, sorry, not what I’m looking for, later days, and faster than it takes a third grader to find the titties in the latest
National Geographic
he’s parked in Citrus Alley, drooling over sweet memories and flogging his ferret twice as hard because he put one over on a white boy.
    I push my shades up tight on the bridge of my nose and fold my arms across my chest, and without even pressing pause he starts talking twenty, for a quick look-see. And I won’t go less than twenty-five for anything, talking dirty, arm-wrestling, instapic action with an SeX-70, shirtless only, you name it, I’ll claim it. But it’s more like a deposit, it could lead to real cash, and too he says he’s got it all in ones, just the way I like it. So I’m all Hell fuckin na, George full frontal, slim down your wallet while I start unlacing.
    And I bend down, but next thing you know the dude’s checking into Seizure World, choking out, “Not here! Not here!” like I reached for my weenus instead of my Monkey Boot.
    Then he tells me to get in his car, we’ll drive over to Citrus, and though I know I’ll never go mobile still I pause to A the Q whether I would if he was white, and decide I wouldn’t, it’s the weird part flashing caution orange and not the black part.
    And then it hits me.
    He might even be the Strangler.
    But on split-release thought how could he be, unless the Strangler’s switched from girls to boys to throw off Homicide. And even if he has, he wouldn’t be nickel-and-diming over a toe check in Citrus Alley, he’d be waving a bill in the air and promising to suck me harder than a J. Edgar Hoover vacuum.
    And B-side, everyone knows the Strangler picks up his victims on Hollywood Boulevard, and Arthur J’s is on Santa Monica.
    I guess for me it’s just always lurking out there, on the far side of the pair of dice, I knew this chick the Strangler got, not up close and personal but I knew who she was, we all remembered her being at the Masque on Halloween the night before it happened. Her name was Jane, not Jane Drano obviously who ended up in the Go-Go’s, Jane something who wanted to be an actress, and she was taking singing lessons too. And after they found her body two undercover cops made the scene at the Masque, posing as art dealers I think it was, saying they wanted to invest in a punk band, but we all knew they were cops right off, who the fuckety-fuck would invest in a punk band