Secret
There’s this town called Secret, somewhere near southern California. Been there before once, back when my head was gone. Big party city, bit of a mess. Used to have a different name back in the twenties and thirties, I think, but after the wars and the bombs and the radiation, the place got a new name. Secret because if you wanted a good time, you had to be in on it. You had to know what you were looking for. Finding Secret meant driving through the deserts where you can just breathe in the radiation like you breathe in the heat. Feeling it dry up your lungs and fill your belly, feeling it go through your hair like the wind when you’re on your bike with no helmet. That’s how I got there.
A girl in Miami had told me about it. She handed me a napkin with the name and the coordinates- 36 degrees north and 115 degrees west, out in the middle of nowhere. Had to drive through the forests to get there, had to cross all the flatlands, and then get through that desert. You manage to do all that, you’re going to have the time of your life.
I got there during the day, when the sun was out, when it was hot, when the town isn’t all that exciting. I had found the nearest hotel to check in and found the staff standing around, bored, half asleep. I asked where everyone was and a man told me most people were in their rooms. He asked me if I wanted a room with blacked out windows. You slept during the day out there, like the lizards in the desert. You slept like a desert dweller and at night you came out and partied like one. When the sun was up the men and women in suits strolled between the strip clubs and bars, none of which were open until well after sundown. As soon as the sun went down, people started to fill the lobby. Women with long legs and long hair and short skirts. Men in suits and expensive tennis shoes, sunglasses despite the fact that the moon was out. You’d need ‘em though. The whole place lit up like I was living inside a Christmas tree. Red and blue and purple lights stained the buildings and the dark windows. The heat had broke like a fever and finally the air was cool and slick with smoke.
The crowds down in Secret, all real nice folks if you can get in with the right gang. Don’t go for the guys wearing the sport jackets and the baggy jeans, they’re cheap and the clubs they all hit up are cheaper. You find the women in the heels and their hair all done, with clothes showing just enough skin to make you wonder. You find the men in the suits and neatly trimmed hair and that grin. You’ll know it when you see it. You hang with them for the night because they’re not going to deny another guest to their party, especially when that guest dresses like they do, so do your best to blend in. You follow them around for the night, you go to the clubs they do, and you let them buy you everything you want because these guys are regulars and you’re new to the game, so play along and they’ll give you everything.
First club I went to didn’t have a name. None of them did, but you remembered them by the colors of the bracelets all the girls wore. Red Club, Blue Club, so on and so forth. Just another thing to keep a secret. Inside, girls danced on stages and in cages and on tables and on the bar, but no one was paying any attention to them. You found someone in that club and you danced with them for hours on end until someone wanted to go to the next place. The lights in there flashed and flickered and made you look like something out of a horror movie. The music blared and within ten minutes you couldn’t tell the notes apart, but you heard that bass and by god, you moved to it. The girl I found, she was impatient, and after an hour she grabbed my arm and giggled her way to the next club.
This one, with yellow bracelets, had colorful lights that swung around the room, and bodies pressed up against each other and here you didn’t dance with one person. You threw yourself in the mix, and with bodies pressed upon bodies, everyone danced as one person. Here, the music was clanging and synths and sounds no human could ever make. We hit the bar first, scoped out the crowd, and after a few shots, the girl grabbed my arm and threw me into the crowd like I was trash, and I couldn’t have cared less. In there with all the people and all the sounds and all the lights, nothing was real anymore until finally, after another two hours of moving as one great big, breathing being, you stumble out of the mass of flesh and realize where you’ve been and who you are and that you’ve got another club to hit.
The girl was long gone by the time I’d crawled out, so I found the next club on my own, this one green, and went to the bar first like last time, and watched. You’d paid attention to someone here. You didn’t just grab the nearest person and dance, you searched them out, you hunted them down, and you talked for a half hour before going to the next club and dancing with them there, a black bracelet club. This one is typically the last one everyone hits because you’re with one girl, and she’s with you and the two of you aren’t going to be alone for the night in Secret. No one sleeps alone in Secret.
Doesn’t matter if you don’t even know their name, by the time you wake up the next night, you’ll have learned more about them through whispers and drugs than their own god knows. You’ll know how they taste and what they like and you’ll learn who they love because they don’t know your name but someone else’s. You’ll figure out where they live when their wallet falls open and you might even know what job they have if you’re careful. You’ll know everything about these people and the next night you’ll go and do it all over again until eventually- who knows, days later, weeks later- you’ll wake up and realize you need to get the hell out because there aren’t any secrets in Secret.