Burn Down The Night (3 page)

I catch up to
Morrison, staggering a little as if leaning into a suddenly strong wind. "The dance is not
strange. It is us who are strange."

Morrison hands
back the empty pillbox. I toss it over my shoulder. My eyes see a trail of sparks as it goes
across my shoulder.

Morrison's eyes
are feverish, burning. "We are strange! We are strange because we are lizards, sum­mer lizards in
the flowing heat of young rivers.

His words dance in
the air like chants.

"Our bodies are
ready at any moment to betray us. To give birth to blind lizard children."

"Blind lizard
children," I say, picking up the chant.

"Blind lizard children that swim
rivers of dust... blind lizard children with bridal tongues, caressing scorched
rocks."

Lightning and
thunder crash in the places where words come from, electric rampage in the synapse chains. I
nearly scream. "We have immense blind lizand children and... and dust rivers... pouring out of TV
screens."

Morrison throws
back his head, like a stallion toss­ing his mane. Re raises his arms heavenward.
"Amen Orange
Julius!"

Then mood
changing, or breaking, he turns to me and says, "We got to find a car, find a driver. It's an
L.A. highway night! The beach is no place to sit at the fire!"

"What
fire?"

Morrison shakes
his head, ignoring the question. "I promise you a journey."

"What
fire?"

Impatient shrug.
"We seek it or flee from it. Fire lights the cave. Shadows wait for us, no matter
what."

I give in, lost in
his language. Don't know what he's saying. "I got a car. Belongs to the girl I've been staying
with."

Morrison is
suddenly energetic, whirling around like a dust devil. Walking rapidly, talking back over his
shoulder at me. "Let's get it and go, man."

I stumble along
behind, trying to catch up.

Morrison says,
"All of life is a journey by car. By their wheels you shall know them."

I just nod,
flowing with him, with my acid fever. I've already begun a journey, inside, somewhere deep, on a
river that never ends. I drift out, carried by the current to make the drowning man's
swim.

One edge of
reality, one pain, and I panic. "I got the car but you better drive. Jesus! I'm too
wasted!"

Morrison stops
abruptly, turns and faces me. His eyes glitter. "Think you can drive?"

I shake my head,
scared at the idea of even trying it.

"I doubt it. I
mean I'm really fucked up!" Morrison nods.

"Good! Then you
drive. If you're really fucked up, the fear of death will keep us both awake."

New ending for a
dance of wheels

Interconnected
freeways

Tunnel vision
swimmers in the driver's box

The engine of the
heart

Predestination
between

White lines of the
highway

Neither to the
left

Nor the
right

Straight

The
highway

The dead swimmers
float listlessly

Through the lines
of traffic

Who among them has
driven

Into uncharted
desolation?

No
surprises!

No changes of
lanes

No thoughts in the
intersections

Of erogenous
zones

The driver's swim
deprives senses

Eliminates
pain

Beyond the
tunnel

There is
only

The euphoria of
wreckage

The withering of
dream

We get back to the
party and I go in to get my coat and my car keys while Morrison waits outside.

The party is still
riding high. Looks like a Hieron­ymus Bosch painting based on ideas by the Marquis de Sade.
Party's got louder, more violent, ugly.

Lots of
motorcycles outside. Looks like the bikers have landed.

The bloody-haired
girl who had been throwing up on the door as we went out is being dragged into one of the
bedrooms by four tough-looking guys in biker gear as I walk in. Her shirt's already ripped off.
Skinny little ribs and little-girl breasts. Maybe she's thirteen years old or fourteen. She's
screaming hysterically but no­body pays much attention to her.

Some party she's
having, if she survives it.

My coat is in one
of the bedrooms. I go round the be­ginning of a fight. Rave to push away some drunken chick with
infected pimples who wants to sit on my face while I'm still standing up. Get to the bedroom,
look for my coat and discover a bunch of naked people are lying on it.

Lots of
enthusiastic groping but not much accuracy. Bed is just too crowded.

A pretty little
surfer girl wearing nothing but a tan puts her arms out to me, inviting me in, as she feels me
tug on the coat that's under her ass.

I move back to
avoid her arms and she slips off the bed, hits the floor head first and vomits all over
herself.

My coat comes free
and I back out of the room.

Try to get across
the crowded living room. Some­how, somebody's managed to turn the music up louder and it's
pounding my skull into tiny crazed pieces. Got to get out of there before I turn into a shock
cube of paranoia.

I stumble over
partied-out bodies. Avoid one spot on the floor that is all bloody. Jesus! Somebody must have
taken a human sacrifice. Lots of blood.

A naked
teenybopper, completely spaced out on drugs, mechanically fingers herself on the floor. Looks
pleasureless, her face a pale, skinny mask without ex­pression. Her biker companion is passed out
drunk across her legs.

There's a crash as
somebody throws a chair through a window. I walk around a guy who is standing in the center of
the room, convulsively squeezing his crotch through his clothes with both hands and moaning.
Probably a rising young record executive doing some of his best work.

Seems like the
trip across the room takes a million years. Feel like I am in a corpse factory and the ma­chines
are trying to snatch me up and run me through the assembly line. By the time I get to the door
I'm scared shitless. There's a graveyard inside this party.

As I pass through
the door, a biker rams some girl's head against the wall beside the door. Blood explodes from her
smashed nose and the white corner of a tooth spits out of her mouth. A drop of blood falls on my
arm.

She screams and I
lose it. Freaked out, insane with fear. I run with demons at my back. Blindly,
hysterically.

At the end of the
sidewalk Morrison grabs me, knocks me down. Contact with hard pavement jolts me back out of it.
Good thing he caught me. Would have run until my heart gave out. Party violence really fried me,
really wrecked me.

Morrison helps me
up.

"The car?" he
asks.

"What?"
Disoriented.

"Where's the
car?"

"What
car?"

Morrison sighs.
"You said you had a car."

"I said that?" I
shrug. "Did I say that?"

"Far out," says
Morrison.

"Far out what?"
Universe is spinning, can't get a grip on this conversation. What is he talking about?

"You wouldn't
understand," says Morrison. "It's the kind of thing which to be properly understood, you gotta
hear it through a mirror."

I nod. I've
encountered lots of things like that before, but never in other people.

Morrison puts his
hands in his coat pockets, scuffs his foot against the sidewalk. "Looks like we're gonna have to
walk."

"Why don't we take
my car?" I say. "It's better than walking."

"You got a car?"
asks Morrison, suspicious.

My face feels that
the smile on it is only pretending to be innocent. "Why? Did somebody say I didn't have
one?"

It was a '61 or
'62 Chevy. Or it was a black '62 Ford with moon hubcaps? If it was a Chevy, it was either blue or
green. People you remember, your favorite rapes you remember, dirty words you remember, but cars
you forget unless something special happens like her father catches both of you in the back seat
wearing only each other's suntans.

There were a
couple of bottles of wine in the car, two six-packs of beer, party supplies that never made it to
the party.

Also some
Schoenling Little Kings Cream Ale, boot-legged from the Midwest by some friends of mine in a rock
and roll band. My favorite drink but hard to get anywhere but in the Midwest.

Morrison and I get
into the Ford or Chevy. I open a Little Kings Ale for myself right away. Knock the cap off on the
ashtray, which is all bent out of shape and makes a perfect bottle opener.

I need something
to calm my nerves. Gonna be lucky to get the car started, let alone drive.

Morrison declines
a beer.

He opens the glove
compartment, exploring. Inside he finds a nasty-looking bag of dark brown weed. Michomocaan. A
friend laid some on me in exchange for a band groupie I had lent him, a funny little sleep-around
girl who gave such good head she left scorch marks.

He doesn't seem to
be in any hurry to get going. Me either. My hands are shaking so bad I spill cream ale on myself
trying to drink. I settle back against the seat, willing to wait forever.

If I sit here long
enough, I tell myself, maybe my vision will clear enough for me to be able to find the place on
the steering column where the key is supposed to go. Rate to bet on it, though.

Morrison's got the
bag in his hands, a weight ounce of Mexican mind boggle.

"Is that some of
that there Mary Weyno, boy?" He's doing an imitation of a dumb Southern cop, the kind with raised
eyebrow ridges and hairy knuckles.

I reply in kind.
"Catnip, boss. Just a little catnip hyar, boss."

He opens the bag
and takes out a couple of already rolled joints. I'd already rolled a half dozen or
more.

"Gonna have to
confiscate these here funny ciga­rettes."

I shrug. "Help
yourself. With six you get eggroll." While Morrison is helping himself to my dope, I am watching
the windshield flow in and out. Sometimes it looks like it's coming in, sometimes it looks like
it's going out. There is a tide in the affairs of men.

Morrison puts the
joint under his nose, sniffing it like a rich man sniffs an expensive Havana.

The interior of
the car comes into focus momentarily. I frown as the windshield stabilizes. I take advan­tage of
this little burst of sustained reality and insert the key in the car ignition.

Getting even
bolder, the lucid period stretching out, I even manage to get the car started too. Miracles will
never cease.

The car is loud. I
lost part of the muffler on a high curb on the way to the party. Zigging when I should have been
zagging. Now the engine noise is scary. I am half afraid the car will eat me.

Morrison looks up,
notices the car engine is turning over, says, "Let's hit the road." He puts a joint in the corner
of his mouth.

I sigh. I almost
wish I am Catholic. I don't have any comfortable little gestures to ward off death like the sign
of the cross. Not that I believe in any of that crap. My religious beliefs stop at wall-to-wall
carpeting.

Still, be nice to
have some protective razzmatazz, no matter how fake it is.

"I don't think
this is a good idea," I say. With a clash of gears I mis-shift us and we pull away from the curb.
We flee somewhat erratically into L.A. night.

Car keeps weaving,
jumping wildly as I mis-shift in every gear. Car's got a full tank of gas and I just aim it at
the million miles of bitch goddess L.A. and let it run where it wants to go.

Up there in that
part of my head that is trying to drive nothing is working except reflexes. I'm so wrecked. Too
wrecked. I finish the first bottle of cream ale as we cruise down a small side street. Roll down
a window one handed and toss the bottle out. Hit a parked car, cracking the
windshield.

Morrison's still
rummaging in the glove compart­ment, not paying attention.

"This is a
terrible idea," I say, sweating. Road keeps melting in front of me, becoming a black thick liquid
as I pass over it. Car seems to be swooping and diving, sinking down into the soft black tar of
the road.

I make an illegal
U turn at an intersection for no spe­cial reason and then a right turn up what I think is
somebody's driveway. Shit! Now I'm going to have to back out.

Driveway seems
endless so I speed up, making a curve, wanting to get to the end of the driveway so I can turn
this pile of Detroit iron around if I can. Be eas­ier than backing out.