Burn Down The Night (20 page)

She puts her arms
around me from behind.

"I'll make you
some Cream of Wheat."

"I'd rather die
first."

"You already
almost did that," she says, putting her head on my shoulder as I stand there, poking around in
the refrigerator. She'd cried when she first saw me, saw how I had got all banged up. She
couldn't stand to see anybody get hurt.

"How about
oatmeal?"

"God
forbid!"

"Tapioca
pudding?"

"Listen! I got
teeth. I can chew. My doctor lets me eat solid food."

"How about
strawberry shortcake?" she says, kissing me on the neck.

"Christ! How about
some meat? You've probably heard of it. You can find it in all the stores!"

I end up with
cornflakes. Stale comflakes.

That's probably
the only thing she can cook. "How could somebody so good in bed be so bad in the kitchen?" I ask
her. She kisses me, making me choke on a mouthful of cornflakes.

"Not when...
ulp... my mouth is full," I gasp, red-faced from choking.

"Let's go back to
bed," she says, just a big soft fuzzy animal that wants to be cuddled.

She was really
falling out of her sheet.

"Didn't we do that
already?" I say.

"Practice makes
perfect," she says.

"You don't need
any practice."

She laughs, very
much in love.

I've been living
with her about nine weeks now. Pretty Tamara with the honey-blond hair and big eyes that trust
the world too much, eyes as pretty as her name. She loves me in a frightening all-surrendered way
and I, in turn, let her pay the rent.

I try to keep her
at arm's length as much as possible, which isn't too possible. I don't think it ever occurs to me
that maybe I ought to love her back instead of just pretending to.

I eat so many
cornflakes that my cheeks are bulging. It looks like I am storing them in my cheeks for the
winter.

"You're falling
out of your sheet."

"The better to
attract you with," she says, laughing.

"It's very
distracting. You better go put some clothes on before I lose control and attack you."

"So attack me."
She gives me her impression of Mae West, thrusting out her hips. More of her falls out of her
sheet.

"My lap is falling
in love with you."

There's a gleam in
her eyes. "You better finish your cornflakes. You'll need all your strength."

I reach out and
grab her.

"Hey! Watch it!
Those are attached!"

"Me too." And I
pull her off her chair. We end up on the floor, rolling around passionately under the kitch­en
table.

She tries to push
me off. "Not in the kitchen! Jesus!"

"Bonzai!" I yell,
not letting her push me off.

She puts her hands
on my chest, heaves hard and pushes me off losing the sheet altogether in the process. "Let's go
into the bedroom," she says, shivering without the sheet.

"You can't get
there from here," I tell her, then I'm all over her. We roll around under the table, having fun,
both trying to get on top and having a terrifically interesting struggle to occupy the same space
simultaneously.

It's just getting
really interesting when there's a knock on the door. Then the doorbell rings.

She looks at me,
eyes opening wide. "Oh, damn! I forgot!"

I look at the
front door, pants at half mast. "Forgot what?"

"My parents! They
said they were coming over today! That must be them now!"

"Terrific!" I'm
struggling to get my pants back on and stand up at the same time.

"They're only
going to stay an hour," she says and I can't remember when I've ever seen anyone who looks
unhappier than she does at that moment. She has reason to be.

"Give me some
money. I'll go to the store. I'll get some meat and stuff. I'll be back in a couple of hours.
Soon as they've left."

She looks so
lonely. "Promise you'll come back?"

"Promise." I give
her a hug. I'd be back. I was too messed up to enjoy knocking around on the street, least not for
a couple of days anyway.

"There's money in
the cookie jar," she says, rushing to the front door, calling out, "Just a minute!" She scoots to
the bedroom to throw on some clothes.

I go out the back
way. I had met her parents once before and once was enough.

Tamara's mother is
a forty-five-year-old alcoholic who dresses like twenty-five and looks like forty-five. She is a
real bed crawler, although how she finds anyone willing to let her crawl in with him is a mystery
to almost everyone. Tamara's father is an ex-professional football player with bad knees who now
does all his scrimmaging at home. By that I mean he works his wife over pretty regularly. Hardly
a month goes by without him giving her a pretty thorough beating. It was that kind of
marriage.

And to make the
chain complete, Tamara's mother used to beat up Tamara when Tamara was still living with them.
Never with any reason to it, the beatings were just sort of on general principle.

They were that
kind of people.

But Tamara wasn't.
Tamara never hurt anyone in her life. You have to wonder how someone that good can come out of an
environment that bad. Maybe it is her way of defending herself. Being good to spite the bad,
being decent and trusting and capable of love in the face of the opposites of all those things.
She was like that so she wouldn't be like them.

She'd left them
when she was sixteen. Got a job and put herself through high school. She was eighteen when I met
her, a golden, wistful eighteen. Working as a waitress during the day and going to junior college
at night, trying to make something out of herself.

A true innocent. A
beautiful girl who'd never really had the time to be beautiful. An eighteen-year-old virgin when
I met her, an eighteen-year-old ache, aching to be loved.

I had no business
even being around a girl like that and I knew it. I was fifteen and too clever. I was just the
face that shows no pain. The lord, the master manipulator who enjoyed tugging the strings to see
the pretty puppet dance.

She danced for me
and for me only, while I, faithless, drifted through L.A. summer days tied together with drugs
and strange girls that went bang in the night.

And even though I
was often gone, often moving through L.A.'s unending party where strangers came together to
remain strangers, she'd always be there, with her heart in her hand, waiting for me whenever I
remembered to come back. She trusted in the least trustworthy of them all.

On the way to the
store I've got time to think about Tamara. Sometime I wish I could explain everything to her,
that I could simply let her go.

When I walk in the
door, having been gone too long, and she's there and it's "I love you" and she puts her face
against my neck and cries and her arms tighten around my back as if she were embracing all of
creation, as if she loved the whole world, it's then I most want to tell her, to set her free.
Somehow I never do it.

And she never sees
me for what I am, for what I'm trying to became—a machine that tries not to think too much, tries
not to feel too much. A machine that is a face with nothing behind it.

I'm paying for a
steak at the supermarket. I hand over the money from Tamara's cookie jar and say to the blond
girl behind the register, "Why does everybody got to be in love?"

She looks at me,
steak blood dripping from the corner of the package in her hand.

"That's three
ninety-eight," she says, putting the steak in a bag. "Did you know your pants are
unzipped?"

I look down at my
crotch. She's right.

And it's the best
answer to that question I've ever heard.

It's a new morning
and some of the summer has gone by since the day I woke up under a bush to find Morrison had
disappeared while I slept. Vanished in the heat of an L.A. summer day.

Not that I had
been surprised to find him gone. Exits and entrances are a way of life.

But I didn't
figure I'd ever run into him again. I was wrong. We kept colliding.

As if for a while
we both rode the same snake to the ancient sacrificial lake. And there were days set aside by our
own personal shaman for us to meet and run together for a little while.

This is one of the
shaman's days, even though it doesn't begin like one.

I find myself back
on the beach, having fled Tamara's snug harbor again, broke again, tired of living off the little
girl that loved me too much. I'm out on the hot sand, trying to sell some righteous
acid.

I know it's going
to be one of those days because practically the first thing I flash on is an undercover cop
trying for a drug bust. A real play-pretend fool in cutoff shorts, bared white chest and wire-rim
glasses that don't fit his face very well. He's got an immaculate pimp hat, fresh off the rack,
holding down his blond wig, which doesn't match his dark black unshaven chin whiskers. He hasn't
shaved in about three days and thinks he fits right in.

"Like wow, man,"
he says, coming up to me.

"What's
happening?" You can see the marks on his body where his cop suit keeps him from getting a tan.
Well-tanned neck, face and hands, but white everywhere else.

"The beach is
happening, babycakes! Like everyone is here, you dig?" I find myself saying, wondering if anybody
really talks like that. Probably only in a Frankie Avalon movie.

"Like I can dig
it," he says. "Sure is a grooooooovey day! I'm really digging up the vibrations!" He smiles like
he's afraid his face is gonna break.

The idiot. He
means "digging on" not "digging up." This guy stands out like a pregnant whore in an all-male
police lineup.

"Hey, man! I want
to cop some acid, man," he says, nodding his head as if he just said something so cool his face
is gonna freeze.

"No shit! You want
acid?"

His eyes flash and
he pretends to be furtive, faking a dose of paranoia. The only emotion he's really managing to
get across is probably constipation.

"What you want? A
hundred thousand hits? Ten thousand?" I ask, enjoying the game.

Actually I got
maybe ten hits of acid. Real big-time dealing! Got it buried beneath my towel in the sand in an
old aspirin bottle.

"I can handle all
you got, man. I want to cop heavy, man!" This guy is jumping like a fish, thinking he's just run
into the big bust of the century.

Time to put a
permanent crease in his ambitions. "What kind of acid do you want? You want it untabbed? Blotter?
Cube? Windowpanes? Strawberry tabs? Owsley? Grosse Point sugar lab? I mean specifically, what
kind of acid are you looking for?"

He looks confused,
like I suddenly started talking Martian.

"Uh, whatever you
got."

"Shit! Don't you
know what kind you want?"

"Sure, man." He
looks defensive, licks his lips nervously, afraid he's going to blow it. "But you know, um, it
don't, um, matter to me. Um, I'll take whatever I can get."

I look this guy
over from head to toe. What a frigging motorhead!

This human zero
has got the whitest-looking feet I've ever seen. Probably the dye from his white socks has soaked
into his skin.

"Well, shit! I
don't sell to just 
anybody,
you know!"

"Hey, man! I'm
cool!" He looks frightened. Afraid he's blown it.

"I never seen you
before. Where you from?"

"Uh, San Fern...
Francisco. San Francisco," he says. "No shit! That's a heavy place up there. You prob­ably know
White Rabbit and Frenzy. You ever cop from them up there?"

Now he's sweating.
Doesn't know if I'm testing him or not. Thinks maybe it' a trick question.

"Sure. I think I
got stuff from them once. I don't really remember. I buy a lot of shit, you know,
man."

"Far out! Well,
you look okay to me. If you got the coin, maybe you and I can do some heavy dealing."

He lights up like
a two-hundred-dollar drinking spree. "Hey, man! No sweat! I'm loaded!" He pats the pocket of his
cutoff blue jeans. "Cash on the barrel head."

"Course"—I have to
tease him a little, keep him off balance—"you know you asked me for the acid, so that's
entrapment, so it's cool if you're a cop."

"Me a cop!" He
tries to pretend he's shocked at the idea. Actually I think he's scared shitless.

"Course lots of
cops pretend like they never asked, then it's just my word against theirs. When I deliver the
acid, my ass is gone!"

"Hey, man! I'm
cool. I can't stand pigs!"

I smile at him,
reassure him. "So okay. You got vibrations that tell me you are an okay dude, so we'll do some
dealing. We'll start small to get the feel of it and then take it from there. That okay with
you?"