the letter H
21
But that was just a follow me don’t follow me, I followed him, I couldn’t watch no parking meters, I lit a cigarette on one though, and walked on down the—
“Beach?” Squid says. “Would—”
She swivels the shotgun captain’s chair back towards Siouxsie, full-length lounging in the popcorn gallery watching T and D and all of me, Rockets Redglare, Hair Distresser to the Stars, hand number one, battery-powered clippers, hand number two, blunt-tipped kiddie scissors, A-side Tim, flipside David, trim on down.
“Would what?” I say.
“Would not!”
Be named for beech trees. Not the beach but the street. Because the sign says Beachwood.
“There aren’t any beech trees out here,” Siouxsie says. “Or haven’t you noticed?”
“Darlin’, there aren’t any holly trees out here either. But that’s not the Hollybeach sign up there—or haven’t you noticed?”
“Holly doesn’t grow on trees! It grows on bushes. Bushes don’t even have wood.”
“What do they have, then?”
Up front Blitzer’s laugh breaks the astound barrier just when the light changes and he feeds the gas too hard too fast for the left he’s making so it feels like we’re already frying the friendly fluorescent skies, catching two wheels’ worth of air and hair, there and everywhere.
“What hey, if you two lezzie-byrds aren’t the authorities on bushes without wood—”
Which rows Squid’s boat even more merrily than mine and Tim and David’s. Not Siouxsie’s, though, she hucks a compact or something, good thing the Coca-Cola Kids did Atlanta to the max like Factor, not all generally, Sherman style, you know, popcorn and cannonballs.
“Fuck you, Blitzer!”
“I’m all yours, Siouxsie Sioux! But only if you’re packing!”
“Packing?” David says.
Tim seconds the emotion and I’m all Joseph in a G-string.
Mary in a mullet.
Here they are two full-blooded fags who even tune in to the stations of the cross-dressing on oh-so-special occasions and they don’t know? I mean there’s no excuse. Signed by parent, regal guardian, or otherwise. Ten to one marvelous Minnesota’s jammed gills to glory hole with lesbians, it’s the North Woods, after all.
As in limber-tongued lumberjills at play in.
The fields of the bored.
Squid and Siouxsie girls talk about dykes like that constantly. Or skank like that is how they put it. Of the overalls, braids, and hairy legs persuasion. Not favorably, in other words. Probably about the same way normal-acting gay dudes talk about Tim and David types.
If there are any normal-acting gay dudes.
Who aren’t really acting, I mean.
Who just are that way.
Everybody I know, they seem the least bit normal for thirty seconds over Little Tokyo, bring on free admission for Academy members and their guests, you know what I mean?
Though I got dibs on the envelope please right here and now in the flutter and wow. Because the ladies won’t reveal what they’d rather conceal, and Blitzer isn’t steppin’ in the range of their weapon. Leaving me best juvenile actor in a reporting role, snip snip snipping away while I school the two without a clue on strap-ons all ho-hum like it’s Play-Doh not dildo on the cue card table, girls will be boys and boys will be girls and all deserve favor but some deserve a porpoise.
But next thing you know they’re back-to-schooling us on how the year one day one sign said Hollywoodland, and how one of their checkout glamour girls did the deed from the crossbar of the letter
H,
though David claims she sky-dived into the mild blue condor style—it’s a byrd! it’s a Jane!—while Tim says she got jumpy with one end of a rope tied around the crossbar and the other noosed round her neck. Either mix though they’ve got it all down, dates and names and reasons, identifying marks and tattoos. Which is food for thought at Mr. Smorgie, take all you want but eat all you take, because if they know this much about the damn Hollywood sign they probably know twice as many details about Marilyn’s last exit from strife in the fast lane, right down to aisle, row, and beat number of burial location. And unless that just happens to be Holy Cross Cemetery it complicates everything.
Staying out of trouble, especially.
I mean we’re trusting Tim and David totally, Blitzer and me. To be clueless, and to be trusting us. But what if they’re not and what if they don’t?
Though if they’re trusting
me
with the finishing touches on their makeovers.
It was even their idea, back at the Nast Western after Squid and Siouxsie got the wonderful swirled of colors in and with smiles to grow and promises too deep Blitzer said Let’s motivate to meet our date with Lady Fate, what could be more punk rock anyways than haircuts on the road as in you-know-what runner once, you-know-what runner twice?
Asked and answered, in homo-phonic here, queer, and got-you-surrounded sound.
“Let Rockets drive!”
Not behind the wheel.
“Let Rockets drive!”
But behind the steel.
And what about the surfer feeling too, the wave feeling, the luck feeling, the tunnel feeling, back in Rory’s room? Before the traveler’s checks even came up. Why not still feel that way? Nothing happened. No room check at all when they came back to the Nast. We could have jacked the checks already. We could have been stupid about it and gotten away with being stupid about it. So we’re bound to get away with being smart about it. It’s Einstein’s Theory of Inevitability.
They must trust us. Maybe she is buried at Holy Cross. There can’t be that many cemeteries in LA. Most of the people who ever lived here are still alive.
Though there’s plenty of tombs with a view once the street starts climbing. And that’s why this neighborhood’s famous, supposedly. Beachwood, I mean. Not all Hollywood obviously, every barefoot banana boat bwana-be in starkest Africa knows the scariest letter in the alphabet on that one. And not for the sign up top either, that’s not localized, this is just the street to get to the fire roads that go there. For the houses, that’s what David says to explain why Tim goes into multiple big-O overdrive, squealing like he’s playing that license plate game normal parents make their normal kids play on those family vacations you get every boring detail on in group homes so you’re schooled to Dudley Do-right by your own little monsters someday.
“Swiss chalet!”
“English Tudor!”
“French château!”
“Arabian nights!”
“Turkish delight!”
Because the mass of different styles up here all beak by foul are major memory lane material from this required reading book called
Day of the Old West
, or something like that, West is definitely in there somewheres and hell fuckin na it fits like Jayne’s unmentionables, what is this after all but the merry merry month of Mae? And actually that reminds me of something I know that most good citizens don’t, I learned it from the 3-D globe in the Institute library on Vermont.
So I tell David I’ve got twenty bucks with his name on it right here in my jeans pocket if he plays and wins one round only of geography
Jeopardy
.
“Just hand it over no questions asked,” Tim says. “He’s got a thing for peekaboo loincloths. Lifetime subscription to
National Geographic
.”
“Geography where?” David asks.
“Right here. The West Coast. And back inland a ways, you know, Arizona, Nevada. I’ll name off four cities, and you tell me which one’s west of the rest before Tim counts five. If you’re right, IOU. If you’re wrong, UOYC.”
“YC?”
“Yours coolly.”
“What proves the answer?”
“Any old map with those marker lines running north south, the long ones, like on globes.”
“All right.”
“Las Vegas, Phoenix, LA, Reno.”
“One.”
“Westernmost?”
“Two.”
“Yes!”
“Three, dummy!”
“LA, of course.”
“Wrong. It’s Reno.”
“It is
not,
” Siouxsie says. “I’ve been to Reno. It’s in the desert.”
“There’s no rule saying every desert’s east of LA.”
Tim says, “What about that big fat rule saying the Pacific Ocean’s west of everything? Always. West of the West.”
“Dude, down by that Panama Canal? That’s way east of here. It’s almost to the Atlantic.”
“It’s still west of it. So the rule stands.”
“You didn’t say the Pacific’s west of the Atlantic, you said it’s west of everything!”
“I did?”
David tells Squid there’s a highway atlas under the passenger seat, but she’s already got it out. And next thing you know she’s passing it around so everyone can check how up past Santa Barbara the coast jogs east instead of south. Seriously east. As far east as that big lake up there on the Nevada border.
“Tahoe,” David says. “We saw signs for Ponderosa Ranch. Where they filmed Bonanza! I wanted to stop, it looked so butch, but Tim—”
All at once, no sounds.
(Where there were sounds.)
Not backwards behind me through speakers.
(A long time ago a Dairy Queen came to me, that’s Dylan, David said, Minnesota corn and fed.)
Not frontwards before me in sneakers.
(Fidgety faggoty Tim, squealing to the rat-bite beat of Beachwood’s every bump and wind, scored by the clippers on the back of his head, in two-part disharmony, laddylike first, ladylike second.)
Not sideways righthand.
(Through Blitzer’s open window, hush-hour traffic, an accelerated murmur like the dry sound of bees.)
Not sideways lefthand.
(From pages Old Western as western can be, rustling.)
All at once, no sounds but one sound.
One slim soft girl.
One Berlin Wall of max vol sound of riot rage and rant.
Shout down the Red Army Chorus!
QT the Tabernacle Choir!
Why craze your chords, why tear your tonsils? Commie or Christian, shut it on down!
I am Squidley! Hear me roar!
It’s the scream you hear talked about, but never actually hear.
Unless you’re at that college in Ohio with the girl kneeling on the ground in front of you and somewhere behind the National Guard kneeling too, with rifles.
Unless you’re in Vietnam and she’s running towards you, a different girl, the naked little girl, on fire from napalm.
You know the ones.
Screaming, both of them.
Screaming, Squid.
Screaming, brakes, or is it breaks, all at twice or after brakes, our brakes, other brakes, something breaks, glass breaks?
Outside.
Brake slam velocity.
Inside.
Whale-tail careen.
Look up, what don’t you.
Siouxsie.
Guided by voices, some of them they surprise, missile-aimed for the console space between Blitzer and Squid, sure she’s Stitches, but taking out a windshield? With her head for a battering ram?
My windmilling arm, my drowning-man fingers.
Her fishnetted calves, tendons past wire-taut, more like hotwire-taut when the ride you’re jacking’s a black-and-white, and the scene of the crime’s Parker Center.
I slow her, don’t stop her, she self-deflects Squid-wards and they’re clutched together screaming swearing spastic fist roof-pounding from there through Blitzer’s eternity of C-O-N control, lost then fought for, finally found. He stops, jumps out, sprints frontwards round to shotgun side and wrenches open the door.
“Get out!”
And I’ve never heard it before but I know it, the just-snapped sound of someone strong as strong, ready as ready, to do only one thing.
“Get out now!”
They know it too, and they do.
In total silence loud itself as Squid herself just moments past, to me and we three crouched together, listening inside, paralyzed in popcorn spilling from who can count how many Heftys, whiplashed, panic-slashed, body smashed, David listening, Tim listening, who knows what for, but me listening, for.
His fingers.
Those fingers.
Long and thick and blunt and strong, square-tipped fingers, one by one, by me tongued and by me tasted, tip to palm root, one by one, by me twined and by me wanted, hot inside me, more than one.
Those fingers.
When I heard his voice, I knew first he’ll do it, second, how. But third I don’t know, what’s the sound, snap of a neck, crush of a windpipe? All I know is, too late now, too late to stop it, too late too late, too late now. And we’re not even trying. Something took hold as soon as Squid screamed, took hold our feelings, took over sounds, fallen palm fronds’ raspy clatter, hollow scrapes, cry yelp yipping yelp cry coyote cry, sirens don’t, copters don’t, thorns won’t, scratch scratch stucco branch, brittle blossoms, bougainvillea, nature sounds no human sounds till bootsteps bootsteps, finally finally.
Circle doorward, driver’s side. Hinges creak him up and in, moving air and me too moving, my hands where?
Ear muffling.
For the slam that isn’t and once it wasn’t casts its own spell changing things as much it seems as the scream that was, just this soft controlled closing of the driver’s door and the different kind of quiet after, knowing now not what he’ll do but knowing knowing what he won’t.
If he would have anyways. Maybe it all came out when he yelled, It’s gone gone somewhere, and more’s gone too when Blitzer talks, his low voice slow like the speed’s scared out of it. He asks if we’re okay, no bleeding, broken bones, gnarly head thumps. And we all take personal inventory then answer, Yeah, we guess.
“Cool,” he says, and turns the key in the ignition.
“What did you do to them?” I say.
“Nothing. They’re right there. In somebody’s driveway. Off the street.”
Tim says, “We can’t just leave them here.”
“Dude, this is a nice fuckin neighborhood. A lot nicer than their usual this time of night.”
“But what about Squid? Is she all right? What happened?”
“You mean what about her
besides
she just missed sending two carloads of people out to that fuckin cemetery we saw? You know how close we came? That was the side mirror breaking off. Is she all right? NO! After pulling that shit? Not to me, she’s not. She’s fuckin poison, is what she is. What happened? Do you want to know what happened? I’ll tell you exactly what happened. I thought I ran some dude down! When she started wailing like that, out of the blue. Without a word said first. Not one. One minute she was fine and the next minute—she wasn’t. And I just cranked the wheel hard opposite, hard as I could. For, you know, clearance. If someone was down. So I wouldn’t hit ’em again.”