Burn Down The Night (13 page)

Besides, I never
hit a girl before. Till now. Don't like the feeling at all. I must be a little flipped
out.

I push her away
from me, understanding for the first time. She's really just a little girl who's dead inside.
Accidentally, my hand tangles in her poncho, brushes against her cold little-girl breasts. A
cascade of wallets and watches comes tumbling out. This little zombie's been busy
tonight.

She falls on the
pile on the floor, eyes glazed, blood dripping from a tiny cut on her chin. "That's mine," she
mutters. "Mine! Mine! All mine! Mine!"

She slumps over
her pile of stolen goodies, clumsily trying to protect them with her knees and with her
arms.

I shake my head,
step back, a little dazed. What the hell was I doing anyway, this insane cop routine. I came into
the kitchen to steal stuff myself. I must be flipped out.

"Okay. It's yours.
Keep it."

I let her grab up
her stolen goodies and stuff them back inside her shirt. When she gets them safely stowed and
gets up on her feet, I'll be damned if she doesn't try to deck me again. She's really insane. I
duck her swing, spin her around by one arm, aim her for the kitchen door and give her a friendly
kick in the ass to get her going. She crashes into the swinging door and goes on
through.

"You should have
wasted her, man."

I turn around,
surprised. Morrison is sitting up under the table, staring at me with a glazed look on his
face.

"I seem to have
been trying to. Guess I'm a little flippy. Taken too many licks tonight, too much drugs. Almost
off the deep end." I shrug. "Never hit a girl before. Don't like the feeling. Guess it's the
drugs. You take them and things happen."

"You let her mess
you over. She couldn't have been more than fifteen or sixteen," says Morrison, crawling slowly
out from under the table.

Morrison gets to
his feet, staggering, having to lean back against the table for support. I throw his jacket at
him.

He flips up a
hand, catching it.

"What was it all
about?"

"Your coat. She
was stealing it."

Morrison's still
staring at me, as if he's never seen me before. He shrugs. "Coat wasn't worth much."

I felt the need to
explain.

"You're with me,
or at least we came here together. It was yours. Somehow, at the time, it seemed
important."

I wave my hands in
a forget-it gesture. "Besides, what's it matter? We're all just killing time until they get our
graves dug."

"You should have
wasted her, man."

"What?
Why?"

"For the
experience, man."

Morrison rubs his
face with one hand, trying to wake his face up, looks thoughtful a second. "You got to be a lord,
man. A fucking lord. You don't suffer. But other people do. The creatures are to be beaten, they
exist to suffer for us."

"What the fuck are
you talking about.?"

"The lords and the
creatures, man."

I just look at
him. Is this a put-on?

Morrison gestures
with his hands, suddenly feverish about explaining it all. "Look, man, life is like some giant
game. It's a connect-the-dots game for a race of giants. We only see the dots, one by one. We
gotta rely on the world out there to see the connections between the dots. We don't even own our
own fucking lives. It's being lived for us. Don't you see it, man?"

This is some kind
of rap he's laying on me. I understand about half of it but that half sounds
interesting.

He goes on, still using the table to
prop himself up, swaying drunkenly in front of me. "Look, it's like some kind of huge
perceptional journey and we only perceive a little bit of it. I mean, that's what the creatures
get. Just tiny pieces of the whole bit. The lords see it all. They don't suffer. They stand above
life, but trapping themselves with all these secret exits, entrances and disguises, man. Like you
and me, man, we're both in disguise."

"Disguised as
what?"

"As human
beings."

"What does that
mean? And why are we disguised?"

"We hide ourselves
'cause the creatures don't like the lords. It's like historical. We are the real strangers, the
lords. In the old times, see it was the primitive societies in which the stranger was always the
greatest menace."

"Why?" I have to
ask, not disagreeing, just curious.

"Because the only
fucking power in the world is... the
only power
is... enslaving others in your own
designs."

I think I
understand. He's talking manipulation, at which I am past master. "You mean trap people, taking
them into the fantasies we project on them? You mean like putting lies over on
people?"

"Exactly,
man."

I scratch my neck,
touch my nose to see how bad it's bleeding, thinking about what he's saying. Hard to think when
you're bleeding, but I'm listening, interested.

I shrug. "So okay,
Adolf Hitler was a lord."

Morrison comes
away from the table, raising his voice.
"Atilla the Hun was a lord!
All men who en­slave
others are lords!"

"Shakespeare,
adept plagiarist, liar and lord," I say.

"Assassins are
lords, public lovers are lords, politicians, pimps, madams and all artists are lords! Art is the
greatest enslavement of all. Art obscures and blinds the imprisoned, they never see the walls of
their frigging cages because art keeps them silent, awed, dis­tracted, and finally, indifferent."
Morrison's delivering a speech he's given someplace before. "Art is the exer­cise wheel in the
cage that keeps the rat from going crazy and dying too soon, thereby depriving the ruling lord of
his fair share of amusement."

"So we, us, you
think we are both lords? Right?" I ask.

Morrison gathers
himself up, standing taller. Begins quoting from something, a solemn voice that would chill a
grave:

"I want to stifle
my longings in the increased mech­anization of apes.

I pose impossible
selection.

Sex without
limits.

Death without
touching... cold girls I want you.

I want your kind.
I want you all to become crea­tures who stumble into darkened rooms without windows.

To celebrate the
hideous!

Penetration!

Sometimes by
force, the mind takes place in an un­closed world.

Penetration!"

I'm hooked,
somewhat mystified, but hooked. Trying so hard to understand I get it committed to memory so I
can stack it up later for myself, sort it all out.

"You and me," says
Morrison, no longer reciting. "The wind on the beaches of drug Venice brings us
together."

"Lords come to
collaborate in darkness," I say, liking the sound of it.

Morrison goes on.
"Drugs are the weapons, the appointments of power. They fester in our burning bodies. In the
summer, man. Terrible summer."

"Drugs are..." I
stumble in my thinking, hesitating. "Drugs are the new eyes of the world."

Morrison nods,
approving. "Man, it's a French Revolution of the flesh, if you can dig it. All the books of the
world are closed. Our bodies in disguise record eye movements." Morrison seems excited,
evangelical.

"Who the hell are
you anyway?" I have to ask h0im, curious as hell. For the first time he makes me feel as young as
I am and that he is as old as he is. That's unusual. I was born a cynical thirty-year-old with
death in my eyes. "I mean who the fuck are you really?"

Morrison starts
laughing. "If I told you anything, you know I'd lie. Same way you'd lie to me if I tried to find
out who the fuck you really are. We are lords in disguise."

"Maybe I'm Jason
and you're the Golden Fleece."

"Bullshit! Neither
of us are heroes, 'cause heroes are too simpleminded to be creatures of deception. We're spies!
Two spies in the house of love! We're horses in a hotel of sheep."

I got to disagree
somewhere. "I always wanted to be a hero."

"Bullshit!"

"Then what am
I?"

"You're a
genuinely fucking
evil
villain, just like me, and you know it."

"Ah, you're just
higher than a kite."

"So are you and
you know I'm right. You want to be a villain and you know it. We both do 'cause we're making the
same leap into lies!"

I want to disagree
but can't. I know myself too well, and sense he knows me for what I am too. What was I, all of
fifteen or sixteen, passing always for someone much older? The years all blur together and I walk
through them in my constant play-pretend. Just faking it, all burnt out inside, taking drugs and
chances. This son of a bitch knows me. A fake.

A bullshit rapper,
hanging out with the rock and roll bands, with the druggies, balling the ladies, world weary and
jaded at fifteen. Arrogant sex, flagrant display.

Fantasy this,
fantasy that, one pose building on another, all kinds of supposed torture,
self-inflicted.

And this bastard
was right up there with me, running along ahead of me, already wise in certain ways, having seen
too much and felt too little.

"You want to know
who I am?" he tells me. This whole incredible rap, all about Jim the Admiral's son, parents dead,
alone in the world. Lies. Almost all lies. Just like my life story if I'd have told it. All
lies.

I forget
everything he says as soon as he's said it. It's my kind of lies and not worth committing to
memory. He and I are in the same performance on the drug beach.

He's good at it,
though, you gotta give him that. You listen a little and you get the feeling this is the master,
this is the cat who went around originally making it all up.

"You're right," I
tell him. "Every word a lie and every lie a word."

Morrison moves
toward me. "Let's split this funeral. Did you come back for me?"

"Uh,
yeah."

"Liar. You
probably came to get some pussy or to steal something. But who gives a shit. Let's
blow."

We stagger out of
the party, head for the car. Day­light is kicking the shit out of the stuff they call air in Los
Angeles. Getting hot, to stay hot, a real L.A. summer hangover day.

Both of us are
wrecked. Brain-whipped.

"Let's drive out
to the beach, crawl into the shade somewhere and crash," suggests Morrison. He slings his coat
over one shoulder, blinking and staggering under the merciless California sun.

He leads the way,
I follow.

I stop for a
second, look back at the party. It's all over, like it never happened. Maybe it
didn't.

What is it that
race car drivers say?

If you can walk
away from it, you haven't had an accident.

We argue. I´m for
Malibu. He wants to go to Venice. Think maybe he´s got some lady he wants to see there. Mainly,
though I think I want to check into my living situation. Supposed to be living with this girl,
old whatever-her-name-is.

I open the car
door, regretfully remembering the junkie chick episode which got me so wrapped up I for­got to
snatch some more booze.

A fat head flops
out of the open door, connected to a neck (fat), connected to a body (fat). Familiar fat. I've
seen this fat somewhere before. Herman Melville's inspiration.

"Oh, shit," says
Morrison, opening his door and discovering the other end of the monstrosity.

The head opens its
eyes, the mouth comes open in an imitation of the back end of a garbage truck and slowly begins
slobbering. Another head appears over the top of the back seat. It's Sandy, the good-looking
blonde, now not so good-looking waking up in the back seat. Semi-waking up anyway. She looks like
the loser on the last day of a six-day bicycle race.

"I thought whales
migrated," says Morrison.

The whale in
question turns slowly in the seat, no mean feat in itself, and crawls up to a sitting position on
the front seat.

"Hey, where you
guys been?" asks the blonde in back, rubbing her eyes. "We was looking for you, wait­ing for
you."

"We were directing
films in hell," says Morrison. He looks at me, shrugs. Gives me a what-do-we-do-now
look.

I signal him back.
What should we do, you decide?

He waves his
hands, shrugs again.

"We need a ride
home," says Gail, fuzzy eyed. "Jeeesuuus! What a great party! It was... the
greeeeeeattteessttt!!"

Morrison stumbles
into the side of the car, bends over double, cracking up. Laughing like a horse under nitrous
oxide.

I start laughing
too, can't control it. Both girls look at us like we are both insane. We can't stop, just rolling
on the ground.