Free What We Do Is Secret by Thorn Kief Hillsbery Page A

front me.”
    Radar laughs.
    “In your wet dreams. Work the Spotlite. Go get your
huevos
poached. I’ll be around.”
    I know the Spotlite, but I’ve never been inside. It’s an old hustler bar on the corner of Selma and Cahuenga, with a back bar where older punks would kick it sometimes after LAPD shut down the Masque, and the jukebox supposedly has an X song.
    Not “Los Angeles,” though.
    Maybe “The World’s a Mess, It’s in My Kiss.”
    Maybe “Sex and Dying in High Society.”
    I ask Blitzer what it’s like.
    He says it’s so dark that when you first walk in you can’t see anything at all. It’s long and narrow and there’s booths on one side and the bar on the other and you open the door and everyone can see you but you can’t see them. Kind of like walking out on stage, into the.
    Got it.
    Only the bartender’s front and center in the audience too, so he proofs you on autopilot.
    “The only way to last inside is to work it with an older dude going in to raise the roll-up door from the back bar just enough for you to crawl under. There’s never anyone back there. Just a pool table. And then you just drift out front all casual and sit in a booth with your back to the bartender.”
    “So where do you hook up, the bathroom?”
    “No way. That’s how you get the lifetime ban. These are guys who take you to their houses. It’s not like Arthur J’s, jacking you off in the alley. You can click with regulars. They like you and they see you again and they’re all hot to trot.”
    “And you still don’t have to do anything?”
    “Not if you don’t want to. Some guys just want to talk.”
    “Talk dirty?”
    “Just talk. What hey, maybe with your jeans off or whatever.”
    We’re almost to Cahuenga. He decides to cruise inside anyways and get the boot.
    “Sometimes guys see you and follow you out. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”
    He says “we” so I’m right beside him crossing Selma and pushing through these heavy smelly greasy leather curtains that hang in front of the real door. But then he stops and says, “I don’t know, man. Maybe you’d better—”
    The door opens innie and low voices carry outie with the beer smell and smoke. The music on the box isn’t X. Oh most defiantly. Some burly dude elbows sideways past us and then the voices stop inside. Which stops me too, dread in my tracks in the doorway, while Blitzer keeps on walking. So just like that it’s me in the Spotlite, me and me alone, blinder than you’ll never be, feeling all these eyes do their creepy-Crowley crawl, through the air their hands on me. And it’s still dead quiet, like everybody got the call to step up for the organ donor program, voicebox division, all at once. Which after thirty seconds in the penis brittle gallery seems like my clue card to back out and take a stance, one knee bent, Monkey Boot planted on the stucco wall, facing Cahuenga.
    Blitzer lasts like a minute longer. He says he spoofed looking for ID so his eyes could adjust, and he saw this dude he knows, who saw him too, and he thinks he might be coming outside, so I’d better chill around the corner, two of us tandem might scare him off.
    “He’s a good trick. One-fifty. Fully nonsexual.”
    So I switch to the Selma wall, but next thing you know Blitzer’s grabbing my arm and steering me double time down the sidewalk. He says the dude saw me in the doorway and what hey, stranger things, he likes me. A lot.
    “We’ll go up to his house. It’s just on Camrose, towards Hollywood Bowl. I’ll wait right outside. You don’t have to do anything. Just watch TV.”
    “But—”
    “It doesn’t matter. Cool is the rule as long as you follow like the script. And I told him you’re part French and really shy and you’ve never done this shit before so you and me need to talk the talk before you go inside. So everything’s cool.”
    He turns me around before I get out a word, and the dude’s waiting on the corner.
    “Bill, this is my friend