Burn Down The Night (21 page)

"I'm with you all
the way."

"How about ten
thousand hits of salicylic acid?"

"Far out!
Groovey!" This jerk's ready to flip his wig, already seeing his name in the newspaper.

I hold up my hand.
"Oh, shit! Wait a minute! I just remembered. I can't leave the beach. Got to meet a connection,
one of my bosses. I can't leave the beach and there's a big shipment of salicylic acid coming
into town today."

I tug on my chin,
pretending to think (like I almost always have to). "Hey man! Maybe you can do me a fa­vor and
get yourself a big discount in the process!"

"Anything! I'll do
anything!"

"How would you
like to pick up a batch of acid for me? Direct from my supplier?"

"It sounds great!"
This guy's so thrilled he's practically pissing himself. "Wow! Sure! I'd be glad to!"

"I'll throw in an
extra thousand hits of salicylic acid. Does that sound good, just for doing me this little
favor?"

He nodds
frantically.

"Ordinarily, I'd
be worried about maybe you'd try to rip me off, but you'd be dealing with my bosses and no­body
rips them off! You wanna know why?"

"Uh,
why?"

"'Cause they are
the Syndicate and people who rip them off end up wearing concrete life preservers
under­water."

"Holy fucking
shit!" says the cop, turning pale, his hands shaking. He looks like he is gonna be sick all over
me. Busting hippies on the beach is one thing but shaking down the Syndicate is something
altogether different. He looks like he wishes he'd stayed home and played with
himself.

"You got a
car?"

"Uh?" Now he
panics again. Sure he's got a car. Only it's got cop car plates on it and probably a couple of
cops waiting in it, the rest of the undercover team he's working with.

"Good. I'll give
you the address and you go pick up my stuff for me. They front it to me, so you don't have to
give them any money. Bring it back here. I'll give you eleven thousand hits for the price of ten
and we're in business!"

"That's, uh,
great." He doesn't look too enthusiastic. Then he remembers he's supposed to be playing a role
and falls back into it. "Far out, man!"

"Okay, you go west
on Crenshaw Boulevard. You know where that is?"

He nods,
pretending to be eager. He seems to be thinking this whole thing over. He gets over being scared.
Begins imagining what it'll be like to crack the biggest drug ring in history. I can see it in
his face. His eyes are practically strutting in their sockets. He's Tarzan. From the neck
up.

"There's a
drugstore. Thrifty Drugs. You can't miss it. It's next to Bozo's Burrito King."

"Thrifty
Boulevard. Crenshaw drugs," he says, concentrating.

"You got it
backwards, asshole!"

Embarrassed, he
has to ask for the directions again.

"Go to Thrifty
Drugs on Crenshaw Boulevard. You got it this time?"

"Thrifty Drugs.
Crenshaw Boulevard. Check," he says, so frigging dumb he's answering me with radio cop car
signals.

"Go in and ask the
clerk for fifty thousand hits of salicylic acid. Mention my name. Say Fogface sent you. They'll
give it to you."

"I'm on my way,"
he says and I wonder how the guy manages to be bright enough to keep himself from saying ten-four
as he finishes the sentence.

"Oh, yeah. I
forgot to tell you," I say, stopping him as he starts scooting away, "salicylic acid is the
active ingredient in aspirin."

"What?"

"Aspirin. Yeah.
See I like to take aspirin because talking to cops gives me a real bad headache."

He drops his pose,
forgetting everything, coming after me, mad as hell.

"You son of a
bitch! I'm going to—"

I jump to my feet,
back pedaling quickly, moving away from him. The beach all around is full of drug­gies,
stoned-out bodies getting a little sun. I sidestep and the human bull goes charging past me like
a bad scene from a Mexican bullfight movie.

"Hey,
everybody!"
I yell as loud as I
can. Everybody stops what they're doing, looks in my direction.
"This is a cop! He wants to
buy some dope!"

The cop stops
advancing on me, turns and sees all the hostile faces suddenly staring at him. He looks scared
enough to melt into one big piss.

While his head is
turned, I see my chance and go for him. With one yank his wig pops oft revealing a real short
police academy haircut.

"Let's go play
with the piggie!" shouts a big black dude, and he and about a dozen of his friends start coming
over to us.

"Oink, oink!"
shouts somebody in the crowd gather­mg around us. The crowd swells until it becomes a
full-fledged mob. A lot of outraged druggies have come to give the cop a real
toasting.

The cop is so
scared he looks like he's going to have puppies. He's only outnumbered about two hundred to
one.

The cop starts
backing away, getting ready to run for his miserable life, only there's no place to run to. His
backward progress is halted by the chest of a massive black dealer from San Diego, a really
vicious dude with very little love for cops, or for anybody for that matter.

Somebody is going
to get his rear end sandblasted and the cop is the boy most likely.

Two fat guys in
suits come barreling out of the beach parking lot. Guns out and everything. Hot, sweaty,
overweight guys in Sears and Roebuck suits. They don't look very happy. Their undercover man is
sur­rounded by about a hundred very unhappy druggies who look mean enough to roll him up in a
Time
maga­zine cover and smoke him.

With only two guns
I pity them. Better they should come back with a bazooka and a flamethrower.

I pick up my towel
and dig up my ten hits of acid. Time for me to melt into the background. You can't sell LSD
during a riot. The vibrations get too messed up.

Somebody strikes
me on the shoulder. I turn around. Morrison's there with a blond girl in a bikini that's giving
her a tan almost everywhere. She's also got a very beautiful everywhere.

Morrison says, "I
don't see what you see. I see what I see. My eyes are my body. The ability to see is a viral
infection. Do you have the cure?"

"What?" Oh no. He
isn't gonna start a lot of crazy shit again, is he?

"Druuuuuuuuuuugggggssssss." He drawls the word out theatrically, as if it were a long
sentence.

"Oh." Now I
understand. He's noticing the aspirin bottle in my hand and wants some bottled
electricity.

Why is it I never
meet people who want to buy drugs from me? Just people I want to give drugs to? There is no
justice in the world.

"Sure. I got some
acid. But let's get out of here. It's gonna be a riot or something."

"Oh, yeah," says
Morrison, looking at the crowd, seeming interested. "I could really get into a little
insurrection, you know."

The girl looks
bored. "What's it all about?"

I shrug. "I
started it but I forget what it's all about. Probably a child molester humped a St. Bernard or
something. It's not all that interesting. Let's split."

We move on down
the beach, leaving the riot to riot on its own, without our help.

We find a nice
spot in the sun and tuck ourselves away. I find myself passing out, Santa Claus fashion, three
free tabs of acid. One for him, one for her and one for me. Pray, who is the potter and who the
pot?

I'm not really
sure I'm ready for this. I've only had about ten days to recover from the last journey I made
with Morrison. I'm not much more than one of the walking wounded still.

The pills find our
tongues and go down and discover our bellies, to explode electrically within us.

"Well, there goes
the weekend," I say.

"How heavy is this
stuff?" asks the girl. Her name's Deirdre and it fits her. She hasn't got an inch of ugly on her
anywhere. I can hardly keep my eyes off of her, which Morrison notices with some amusement. Guess
he's bored with her already.

"Well, it's really
kinda weird stuft" I answer. "It's moderately heavy but whoever tabbed it was a little bit too
loose. It could be like a two-way hit or like half of one or like eight shopping days till
Armageddon. All I know is sometimes it takes an hour or more for it to get you, but when you get
off you really know you are off"

"I never approved
of the trial-and-error method. I wish I hadn't taken that pill," says Deirdre, but she doesn't
look overly worried.

Morrison stretches
out on his back, watching the clouds. That seems like a good way to jump off so I get on my back
beside him.

"What are you
guys, queers?" says Deirdre. "Move over." She gets between us, shoving on our shoulders, clearing
a space between us for her to lie down.

We sprawl out in
the sun like three lazy sea lions, waiting for something magical to happen.

The sun feels good
on my body and I feel Deirdre, feel her soft shoulder brushing against mine. Her skin's like
velvet warmed by a fire. I love being touched by beautiful women, love having them near me even
if they aren't mine to touch.

"What do you see
when you see Los Angeles?" asks Jim of no one in particular.

"A city," says
Deirdre.

Morrison shakes
his head. "You see a city and your lips put that name to it. It is a
city.
... I see a
severed insect mound."

"Why is it
everything you say sounds like you are writing it?" I have to ask that.

"'Cause writing
fascinates me. You can do so many things with words. People who put them in the right order or
disorder can conquer the world."

"So let's write
something," I suggest.

We scramble for
paper, using anything we can find, digging up a battered ball-point pen. Deirdre doesn't join
in.

"What a drag," she
says. "Writing. Books. Reading. School, etcetera! What a drag!"

"Ignore her," says
Morrison. "She's only interested in cheap thrills. But as for us, let us suppose a journey, let
us bring forth one of the diseased creatures from a dollar hotel. Let us bring him forth and send
him to the edge of the City where he shall discover muddied dreams and zones of sophisticated
boredom. We will point the eyes of the City through his eyes and we shall hear L.A., the biggest
bitch-goddess City in the world, we shall hear the bitch speak and it will say:
Look where we
worship."

Scribbling
furiously on scraps of paper, paper sacks, I say, "I'll write it all down so we can be sure to
lose it all later on."

And this is the
first of a few shaman's days that we will write madly in the sun, purposely and to no point. An
exercise in futility. The things we wrote created no keys that would unlock doors.

For we ourselves
are the diseased creatures from the dollar hotel. We have only words, and as we use them, we
predict the future. Cancel our subscription to the
Resurrection!
We predict the
future.

We know what the
future is.

John E Kennedy was
young in Dallas, Texas.

Just
once.

And so are
we.

Two fantasies
disguised as human who see the future, in one of those strange alchemical happenings, and blindly
seek some kind of release bigger than ourselves.

"I have seen the
future and I won't go," says Morri­son, hunched over the scrap of paper covered with our false
words.

"Yeah," I agree.
"The future is crazy dancing."

"You touch your
crotch and it's a dance without mu­sic. You touch some stranger and it's music without a
dance."

Morrison stares at
the sky as if he sees the words up there somewhere.

"And we all look
for our assassins and we say one thing but mean, probably at the back of it all,
We want to be
loved.
So bury us in empty swimming pools! Bury us in empty swimming pools because we want to
make love to the world and die in a place that has our name on it where no one can touch us or
take our name away."

And the day
explodes, rocketing into a long shamanistic shared journey. Words tumble out as we write
fu­riously, thrown together accidentally by the summer. Putting it all down on paper. Future
scribbled hastily in the heat of our John F. Kennedy youth. Poems meant never to be heard except
in the dark side of our lives. Stories of the yet-to-happen, fantasies that bleed and offer no
comfort.

The future has
been to the barricades too many times. The future has been up against the wall so many times that
the handwriting on the wall is now on the future. It is on us.

We see our own
deaths and the deaths of those around us. 

I say to you
children

Learn to close the
door

Softly