Burn Down The Night (29 page)

"Also she did
about a million mikes of acid a year ago and she hasn't come down yet. Her mind is kind of like a
disconnected phone number with static and no dial tone."

"I could screw a
buzz saw," says Morrison. "Call those guys and let's find out where she is."

"Okay. I did my
part. I warned you she was strange. I'll find her, that'll be my half of the deal, and you hump
her brains out, that'll be your end."

"Far out," says
Morrison. "I can ask her if she's ever had any dogs better in bed than me. I've never had to
compete with a dog before."

I sigh, reaching
into my pocket for a dime for the phone. Maybe Morrison never had to compete with a dog before,
but I had.

Should I tell him
I lost?

The phone only
rings once before somebody picks it up.

"Mort's Mortuary,"
says a voice on the other end. "You stab them, we slab them."

"Spence. Is that
you, Spence?" If it's Spence, he sounds loaded, as usual.

"I don't know,"
says the voice happily. "Let me look at my navel and call you next week when I find
out."

"Hey, asshole,
it's me." It would have to be him answering the phone. Spence is the biggest brain-damage case in
the whole group. Ever since Russ split for another group, these guys have been self-destructing.
No one sane around to hold them together.

"Hello me!"
There's a pause on the other end. "Oh. Am I talking to me? How am me?"

"Spence, you
asshole."

"Now I know who it
is! It's Mickey Mouse. How's Minnie? Putting it to her regular, are you?"

"Spence! Shut up!
Tell me where I can find Sheila!"

"Look under the
nearest dog."

"Knock it off?"
Just my luck to get Spence. You could say he takes drugs. You could say that. I've seen him so
ripped, he's walked into a bar and tried to light a bottle of beer and drink a pack of
cigarettes. "I'm serious. Let me talk to somebody else!"

"Who?"

"Anybody!" I shout
into the phone. "Anybody! Let me talk to the nearest sane person!"

There's a pause on
the line again. "Uh, sorry, Mickey. There's just a bunch of rock and roll musicians here. I don't
think there's any sane persons here. I think we ran out of them last week."

There's the sound
of a struggle on the other end and then a new voice comes on the line. "Anchovy pizza and no
mushrooms!" says the voice, bellowing into the phone.

"Chris? Is that
you, Chris?" The only semi-sane one in the bunch.

"No mushrooms,"
says the voice, belching loudly.

"Chris, can you
tell me where I can find Sheila?" What's wrong with these guys?

"How soon?" asks
the voice, still yelling into the phone.

"What do you mean
how soon? How soon what?" What the hell is he talking about?

"The pizzuh!"
Chris yells. "How soon do you bring the pizzuh!"

"Forget the
frigging pizza! Where can I find Sheila? 
Sheila?"
I'm screaming into the phone
now.

"Oh, it's you,"
says a third voice, after the sound of another struggle. The voice sounds like a 45 record played
at 33, slow motion, words dragging against each other. "Look, you better get over to our hotel
right away. I mean, yeah, uh huh, 'cause, uh, like we, uh, got this gig, and uh, well, ain't
nobody in any shape to, like, ah, drive." The voice drifts off, as if the person speaking has
passed out, then comes back in again. "I mean, ah, can you dig it, we got this, ah, gig, and, ah,
no driver. So, um, you better come over and... and... hmmmm, drive us... okay?"

"I'm trying to
find Sheila!" I try not to scream in the phone and just barely succeed.

"Who? What? Uh,
oh..." There's a long pause, and just when I begin to think he's passed out, he comes back with,
"Oh, ah, who?"

"Sheila!"

"Oh yeah. She's
here, she's like, you know, loading the truck, man. On account of everybody's so wasted, you
know. And um, I think, um, she's gonna drive, uh, 'cause you're not here, right?" Whoever's at
the other end, and it sounds like Mick, seems to be trying to puzzle something out. "Oh yeah, and
you ain't here, right? Is that right? Right?"

I feel like
tearing the frigging phone right out of the phone booth. In the background I hear Chris yelling
for his "pizzuh."

"Oh, Christ!
Listen! I'm coming right over, me and a friend! Don't let that dog-loving maniac near that
goddamn truck! Sheila couldn't drive a merry-go-round horse without crashing! You hear me! Keep
her away from that frigging truck until I get there!"

"Uh, yeah. Don't
let her drive the, uh... keep her away from, ah... what was that you said?"

"Don't let
Sheila drive the fucking truck!"
Christ! She couldn't find the right side of the road if it came with her
period.

"What about my
pizzuh?" a voice screams in my ear.

I hang up,
thoroughly cranked off.

"Did you find
her?" says Morrison, finishing the last of the wine.

"Yeah. I know
where she is." I frown. "Looks like we are gonna have to do some frantic hitchhiking to get
there, though. I hope we get there in time. You can't join people in a graveyard."

"Wanna bet?" says
Morrison. "That's the only place where they start to get real."

Morrison's
energetic, beating me out to the highway. "Let's go! Let's get it on!" he says, talking to the
cars as they whizz by.

Maybe if I told
him how much competition a St. Bernard is, he wouldn't be so eager.

We get lucky.
Practically the first van that goes by stops for us and on the inside is a stoned guy with ten
pounds of beard on his face and a girl with a chest so flat it could be a landing strip. She's
like maybe on a good day twelve years old but friendly. We know she's friendly 'cause she pops a
joint in our mouths as soon as we get seated in the back and practically ignites us in her
eagerness to get us lit up.

Good smoke. So
smooth you don't know you're get­ting too much until you damn near choke. Nice folks. They go out
of their way about six miles to drop us off exactly where we want to go. So lucky for us it's
like magic.

"Outta sight,"
says Morrison, standing in the hotel parking lot, waving at the van as it pulls away from
us.

I lead us into the
hotel, hoping those idiots in the band haven't split with Sheila driving. Sheila couldn't back
out of the hotel parking lot without driving into the hotel swimming pool.

Spence is standing
outside their hotel room, leaning against the wall in the hallway, looking absolutely wasted. He
looks wasted because he is wasted. It's no big surprise.

"It's good old
me," he says, pointing at me.

I see Morrison
staring at Spence, sizing him up. Spence is something to see. About six foot five, coal black
hair like a lion mane flowing over his shoulders. He's got a face carved out of granite and a
chest a thor­oughbred racehorse would be proud of. He used to be a weight lifter and his body
still looks like it.

He's dressed like
Bela Lugosi, sort of a cross between Elvis Presley's gold lamé country hick suits and what the
well-dressed Transylvanian count wears to a necking festival. Lace ruffles no less.

"I'm glad you guys
haven't left yet."

Spence looks
confused, scratches his head. "You mean we're still here? Jesus! I thought we left!"

"Far out," says
Morrison, not sure whether Spence is kidding or not. He's probably not.

"Asshole," I say,
passing Spence. I go into the room, Morrison at my heels. Chris is on the bed, stretched out,
trying to blow smoke rings with an unlit cigarette.

Chris is wearing a
ripped-up vest, tight white corduroy pants and a glitter-covered top hat made out of black
velvet. Chris is about twenty-five pounds under-weight, sort of a walking skeleton type with a
face that concentration camps usually get the credit for.

"Are you guys out
of your frigging minds? You know you're getting the look-over for an album shot and you're
sitting around here getting polluted right out of your fish bowls!" I start in on him. "You guys
can't keep going into gigs totaled out and still expect to get a record contract!"

I've told them all
this stuff maybe a million times but they have the attention spans of guppies.

"Welcome back,
mother hen," says Chris, choking on an imaginary lungful of smoke. "Glad you came back to the
fold. Man! Whecew! I'm hungry as hell. I sent out for a pizzuh. A frigging anchovy
pizzuh!"

It's like talking
to a blank space on a death certifi­cate.

"Where's the gig?
How much is it? Is it a warm-up for Mitch Ryder? That was what Masters promised us. That was
supposed to be next. Is that it? How long be­fore you have to set up and go on?"

Chris shakes his
head, staring at me with a blank look on his face. "Oh, wow. It's like twenty ques­tions." He
fumbles in his vest pocket, then takes a crumpled wad of paper out of his shirt pocket, tosses it
in my general direction. "Uh, it's all written down. All you gotta do is get us there. Don't
worry about us. We could play with rigor mortis. You get us there, we'll do our
stuff."

I unfold the
crumpled ball of paper, stare cross-eyed at the chicken tracks on the page. "Jesus! Did some­body
write this under water?"

I can make it out,
but just barely. And it doesn't look good. To make the gig on time, it's going to be a
leave-right-now-and-drive-like-a-mad-bandit-straight-through-and-we'll-just-barely-make-it kind
of thing.

Morrison's
restless. "Like what's happening? Are you going off with these guys or what? And where's this
Sheila you were talking about?"

I almost forgot
Morrison. I turn and look at him, shrugging as if to say I'm trapped, I got no choice. "Look,
these maniacs will kill themselves if I don't go with them. You wanna come along? We'll drag
Sheila along. You can hump her until she breaks out in overlapping poodles. When we get to the
other end, she'll get us a hotel room and we can live like kings for a cou­ple of days. How's
that sound?"

Morrison. shrugs,
ready for anything. "Why not? Can't be any worse than going back and sleeping on the beach. Might
be an interesting diversion. Do they have any dope?"

"Are you kidding?
You think these guys got like this licking postage stamps? Food they can do without, sleep they
can do without, sex they can do without, not that they've ever tried, but do without drugs?
Nev­er!"

"The music bone is
connected to the dope bone," says Chris.

"Let's do it,"
says Morrison. "Might as well get our kicks while we can."

Chris gets off the
bed, stepping into the wastebasket beside the bed. He stands there like an idiot, up to his knee
in it.

Mick walks into
the room, looking almost straight, except he walks a little too fast and runs face first right
into a wall.

"Truck's loaded.
Almost loaded anyway. We got everything out by the truck that should be out there. Ex­cept we're
missing a couple people, I think," he says, sounding more or less coherent. He stares cross-eyed
at the wall his face just hit. Walls are always surprising his face. Floors do it to him
too.

Time for me to
take charge. "Okay, we got to get rolling. Round everyone up, get them in the truck. If Sheila's
out by the truck, load her up too. She's gonna go with us. I'll drive and I'll make sure you guys
got everything loaded."

I stuff the paper
with the info about the gig in my pants pocket. I don't know how we're going to make it there in
time but I'll give it a shot anyway.

Chris, still in
the wastebasket, looks like he's gonna cry. "Aren't we gonna wait for the pizzuh?"

It takes Morrison
and me both to get him untangled from the wastebasket. We get everybody out of the room. We find
a chick passed out in the bathroom, a groupie who's had too much fun all at once, and we leave
her there as a kind of tip for the chambermaid. We don't really have any use for her.

We get out to the
truck, carrying a guitar case and some clothes that didn't already get picked up. "Did anybody
pay the hotel bill?" I remember to ask.

"I remembered not
to," says Chris. "You better write it down. I mean, the name of the hotel, so we re­member not to
stay here again."

"One of these days
they're going to get wise to you guys and you'll do your next gig behind bars. You guys really
ought to pay every once in a while." What a bunch of fuckups!

"We paid a month
ago," says Chris, trying to remember where and when. "Yeah. It was in Atlanta."

"We never were in
Atlanta."

"Well," says Chris
with brilliant logic, "if we had been in Atlanta, we would have paid."

Morrison and I get
Spence, Mick and Chris out to the truck. There's a pile of equipment sitting beside the truck,
still not stowed away. Sheila's dog is sitting on a guitar case, looking like a furry Buddha.
Under the gui­tar case, which is under the St. Bernard, is another passed-out groupie. Where are
they all coming from? This one must be a keeper because somebody went to the bother of dragging
her outside. I'll probably get in the truck and find one packed in the glove compart­ment and one
stored inside the snare drums.