What We Do Is Secret by Thorn Kief Hillsbery

his hand.
    “Just go in with me, okay? Walk me back to the room.”
    “What hey, sure. We gotta move, though. You ready?”
    “Wait. You didn’t tell me. Do I have to get a hard-on?”
    “No!”
    “And what’s your name supposed to be?”
    He hiccup-laughs.
    “Guess.”
    With Sid and Nancy taken, I say Johnny as in Rotten.
    “Nope.”
    Then he sings,
I came into this world, like a puzzled panther,
waiting to be caged—
    So he’s Darby.
    Not Crash, though.
    “O’Toole,” he says, and hiccup-laughs twice, in time with the knocker.
    The house smells like lemon furniture polish and jasmine coming in through open windows. No sign of any dogs. Walking down the straight-shot hallway to the bedroom Bill says something about his lover who died. Blitzer says a friend of ours died a few months ago. Bill says we have his deepest sympathy. In the bedroom he lights a scented candle while I settle down on the end of the mattress.
    “Have fun,” Blitzer says.
    Bill shuts the door and says, “Please make yourself comfortable, Sid.”
    Blitzer’s Hermans fade stomping down the hall, and I get a little panicked.
    “I want you to feel at home.”
    That’s the hint to show some skin, Blitzer said. So I hunch over and unlace my boots. Then peeling off my jeans I feel in my pocket the folded bills from the feet-ure presentation earlier. Which reminds me of the first rule of hustling, the rule you never break.
    Money up front.
    Everybody knows that.
    But I can’t ask him. Not now. I never thought I’d be this spooked. I don’t know what to do with my jeans, so I drop them on the floor. I pull off my socks. I wonder what the fuck is wrong with my feet. Why didn’t that dude like them?
    I sit back up and Bill puts a little pinner joint in my hand. He lights it for me. And it’s some raspy shit, it tastes fuckin awful, but I’m grateful, maybe it’ll calm me down. I try to pass it back, and he says, “It’s all for you.”
    So I burn it down while Bill gets comfortable too. He says his dressing gown is silk from Thailand.
    “Thailand’s a wonderful country, Sid. I think you’d like it there.”
    Before I remember I’m supposed to be part French I tell him I’ve never even been to Tijuana and he makes this tsking sound and says my whole life’s ahead of me and he’s sure I’ll make something of myself.
    Though he doesn’t say what.
    He’s sitting on the end of the mattress too but he swings his legs up and moves closer. He asks if I’d like to take off my shirt.
    “Okay.”
    “Could you use some help with that?”
    “Sure.”
    I raise my arms and he leans in close and pulls my T-shirt up from the bottom. His head follows it and he’s breathing in deep from like a weenus-length away. He’s wearing some kind of hair cream that smells like walnuts. When the shirt’s up past my armpits and covering my face he stops pulling for a moment and my blood runs Slurpee cold thinking Strangler! Strangler! and what harsher way than with my own fuckin shirt. But he’s just sniffing me, and I guess I make the grade, because once my Sid Sings is balled on the carpet he fires me another pinner and lets me know he wants me stretched out on the bed while I smoke it, stretched out just so, my chin propped up on one hand, one knee bent out toward him, my foot tucked under my ankle.
    Those goddamn ugly feet again.
    “And, Sid?”
    “Yeah?”
    “If you’d arrange yourself down there so you’re angling out?”
    I reach inside my boxers.
    “Ah. Perfect.” He takes a deep slow shuddery breath.
    “Christ, you’re lovely. Another young stallion. You French-men.”
    So he really thinks I’m French, then. Fuck, these guys will believe anything. But I suck on the joint and I start liking the thought of being French like Kickboy, liking it a lot, actually, there’s no bigger smartass in the scene, he’s wicked ranking.
    “I can see you enjoy being watched, Sid.”
    He scoots even closer.
    “Don’t you?”
    Blitzer said to