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thing to total silence in a roomful of punks in the history of Western civilization, before
The Decline
or after it. But not for long. After she announced her first song, “Punks, Take Off Your Swastikas,” it seemed noisy.
    She played a few chords and said, “I see we’ve got some storm troopers here tonight.”
    And a few jerks finally yelled out “Sieg Heil” but it was still mostly silent night unholy night, and then she started singing in this voice that wasn’t growling like Darby or screeching like Alice Bag but more like real music, the kind that takes you places where you’ve never been. And it got quiet quiet quiet again and stayed quiet quiet quiet all the way through the song, so you could hear every word, and before she even finished I took off mine, it only meant something to me anyways because it was one of two things Darby ever gave me, that little silver swazi and my droogie walking stick that never leaves my side, he brought it back for me from London.
    So it proved what Darby said about the power of words, that language could physically affect you, I think it partly came from Scientology. He said a leader made language a cause, and followers were the effect, like with Hitler and Manson and Bowie. But it was proof with more vengeance than 151 rum, because when people A’d their Q’s about the circle on the armbands and the record covers Darby always talked about how Hitler had the swastika.
    And even though he mostly only wore an iron cross he was totally down with all that triumph of the swill, not the killing-Jews part but the symbols and the government, one night he downed a couple of Black Beauties and explained it all to me, how he thought a complete fascist state was the best possible solution. And he thought Hitler was the first rock star too, though he said it was Bowie’s idea in the first place.
    Darby said.
    If you get everybody to believe in one person, then it’ll work. Communism can never work.
    And that’s who he wanted to be, the person. Or had to be, actually, I mean he ruled himself out of the everybody. Because he didn’t really believe in himself. Like door number one, here’s Phranc, who’s so small she brags she can get into movies for the under-twelve admission, walking onstage and telling all these burly beach jocks who hate homos that she’s a dyke, before she even sings a note. And door number two, there’s Darby, before Penelope filmed that interview for
The
Decline
, the one with Tony the Hustler’s tarantula crawling up his arm, asking Michelle to fake it as his roommate, or his girlfriend, that was the idea, cooking breakfast together in Tony’s place on Orchid Avenue behind the Chinese Theater. Darby was living there then, and Tony was supposed to do it originally, but Darby didn’t want the mass of good citizens conning the dots between him and an in-your-face male whore like Tony, in spikes and leather, with celebrity clients and a laugh like the Queen of Tarts. And that’s why Michelle ended up in the movie.
    But now I remember why Blitzer isn’t on Siouxsie’s Johnny B. Goode side anymore. She’s a big bull dagger on the out-of-the-closets-and-into-the-streets stuff. And after Darby checked out, Blitzer supposedly talked trash to this jerk outside the scene, a writer for some bum-blanket paper like the
LA Weekly
. That Darby was after him but it wasn’t, you know, mutual. That he wasn’t like that. That he helped Darby and Stickboy escape from the Elks Lodge riot and next thing he knew Darby had this crush on him.
    Maybe Blitzer was just scared of the beach punks like Darby. Scared he’d get beat up. Scared he’d get killed.
    Scared the way Phranc isn’t.
    But if Darby was scared he’d get killed, why would he kill himself?
    It makes no sense.
    There’s one more Darby checkout theory, Gerber’s theory, it has to do with Tar. He was like the sugar daddy at Hollywood Towers, a boys’ youth counselor somewheres, he craved all these little