Burn Down The Night (32 page)

"I bet the cop
will," says Mick. "He looked like the kind of guy who would get along good with animals. He could
relate to them on their own level."

"Morrison!" yells
Spence. "Are you all right back there?"

Morrison's face
appears at the window in the divider. "Everything's cool. Except I kinda had to deck the lady.
She was hysterical, trying to jump out of the truck while we were moving. What's happening
now?"

Spence shakes his
head. "We are getting away from it and with it. Pull over in a little bit and change the rear
plates. Rest of us will come back with you. Hope you didn't break her jaw?"

"She's all right.
Didn't knock her out, just down. She's quiet now. Getting into some downers, enough to make a
horse laid back."

"That was a close
thing back there," says Morrison. "That frigging dog damn near got me."

"That dog is
Lizzie Borden with teeth trouble," says Mick. "It is Lucretia Borgia with a tail. Damn near got
me too."

"And that cop was
the Marquis de Sade of common sense," adds Spence. "He was the delivery man for the ready-to-wear
electric chair."

I smile at
Morrison, the miles spinning by adding to our safety. "We escaped."

Morrison shakes
his head, staring at us, packed in like human sardines. "Nobody ever escapes," says Morrison.
"Nobody."

I am probably the
only one there who knows he's right.

I shut off the
truck engine. There´s still magic in the world. We made it. This is it. Let's unload."

It's dark in back
of the warehouse that's now a rock and roll palace. The truck doors go open in back and in front
and we all crawl out of the truck, very much the worse for wear. We look like a country that did
not win in World War Two.

Chris is back
among the living with a probable concussion but able to function. He refuses to see a doctor.
Spence, dead drunk, is still sober enough to stand up. That's something anyway.

I am wired,
speeded up and speeded out. We got there and that's all I know, all I can really
understand.

It's a strange
place we are in and no one's there to help us get our gear in. Already too weary, it's up to us,
with Morrison and me doing most of the work, getting our rig inside and getting it set
up.

Five bands
tonight, that's what the posters outside say, and we are first on. Feels like we traveled a
million light-years to get here. In some ways, maybe we have.

Sheila's gone
deep-sea diving on downers, stomach-pump city, mourning the loss of Snowflake. We roll her over
on her stomach so she doesn't choke to death on her own vomit, and just leave her in the truck.
If she dies, she dies.

The place is
packed, full of teeny screamers and rock and roll animals. The rock palace is an enormous empty
cavern like the inside of an abandoned airplane hangar, rapidly filling with the young of our own
kind.

We are them at
their most desperate.

Spence peeks
through the heavy black curtain hiding us as we set up onstage. "Lots of animals out there
to­night," he says, his voice slurred. "It's gonna be a rock and roll weekend!"

Morrison, clumsy,
helps me set up the equipment.

Mick's staring at
a wall. Chris, eating raisins and painkillers, his face of mask of boredom despite pain, talks
disinterestedly to a groupie chick with green eyeshadow and big tits.

She keeps
volunteering to give everybody head but nobody's interested.

Randall comes in,
the bass player. He didn't travel with us. He almost never does. He's never with us until it's
time to play. He's, like now, usually at the gig ahead of us. He's got a couple of band groupies
in tow.

Randall's maybe
the only honest-to-God musician in the group. He can even read music. Remarkable. He is always
crawling off somewhere to jam with other musicians, and always bringing back minichicks too. He
has a talent for scoring underage stick lickers that amazes everyone. He could find a groupie
above the Arctic Circle just hanging round, jamming with polar bears.

He lets loose of
the quickie bangers and goes right for his bass guitar, begins twiddling dials and tuning in,
getting geared for his big moment, everything else forgotten.

Everybody is in
their own oblivion, just barely existing, the waiting-to-go-on mood, a bad taste that is all too
familiar.

The crowd outside
is getting restless. The show's an hour late getting off the ground, partly because of us, partly
because that is the way it always is.

The cat from
management comes in, a fat guy with disk jockey eyes with as much depth as the hole in an album,
and lays his number on us. We suffer his glad-you-could-make-it-here,
now-go-out-there-and-kill-them routine in the silence it deserves.

He bitches a
little 'cause we got here so late he didn't know if were gonna show or not, etc., etc., etc. We
try to get our money up front but no go. After the show, gate paying us off, if we're lucky. Then
it's hustle hustle, 'cause it's time to go on.

"We're set," I
tell him, being the only one who can talk to this kind of guy without puking all over his
shoes.

Spence staggers
over and picks up his guitar. He's so drunk, everybody's a little bit surprised he can even lift
it.

The crowd outside
is stamping their feet, getting ready to riot, demanding some action.

The management guy
goes outside to lay down his fire-marshal-says-clear-the-aisles routine, which is bullshit since
everybody's sitting on the floor and there ain't no aisles anyway. There's the usual joke about
no smoking cigarettes unless they are funny ones. These guys are always lame. Always. The whole
place is already full of the sweetish crowd-pleasing scent of weed. As many joints as there are
fingers, it looks like, out there in the crowd. Looks like a chainsmoker convention.

Morrison and I are
standing together on the side of the stage. The P.A. is all fucked up. I hope it gets us through
to the end because there's nobody in any shape to fix it.

Chris looks up at
the ceiling, waiting for the curtain, looking like a bored rocking horse that died of inertia.
Mick is rolling his head from side to side like a drunken marionette. They are all on the edge of
imminent collapse. I don't know what keeps them from falling over.

Randall seems
mechanical, as if his life was fine tuned and carefully engineered. He looks like a giant clock
about to strike the hour with the precision of the weight of the ages.

Spence's head is
down on his chest, as if it were too heavy to lift.

"These guys are
going to play rock and roll?" says Morrison, having been with them long enough to doubt it
severely.

The management
dude finishes his speech, announces the band, to thunderous cheers.

Morrison looks at
me. "Why do they even bother getting up there, man? I've never seen a more destroyed-looking
bunch of defectives."

The guys on the
ropes begin dragging the curtain open.

"Just watch," I
tell Morrison, having been with these guys long enough to know what it's all about. "This is
their only moment to be alive. Just watch."

The crowd gives
off an immense primal roar, thousands seething in the dark. The lights flash, spotlights
exploding like a nova, sending unreal shadows curling up the walls of the stage.

Spence steps
forward and his hands slam the strings and suddenly he's not drunk anymore. He's an electric
Samurai warrior and his guitar is a deadly weapon.

The group moves as
if it had the same wild heart, as if it were a wild horse that no one could tame.

Chris is a fever,
a human dynamo flinging electric thunderbolts into the night, into hungry ears and minds. The
crowd roars again, letting the first big burst of electrified sound roll over them like some
tidal wave that nothing can stop.

Suddenly they are
larger than life, towering above the crowd, all the guitars, the drums, the amps, transformed
into high-voltage energy weapons. And the darkness flashes with the sound of aural death rays,
kiss and kill rushes roaring through amps turned up to full gain.

Sex and death, the
crash of skin against skin, all exploding outward to infect the vast ocean of the crowd mind,
huddled religiously in front of the altars of massive speakers.

High-charged
guitars slash and scream, big Sun amps pushing megavolts through the waves of stoned bodies on
the floor.

Inside the
ballroom there's a sensation of all-consuming force, of rivers wearing down mountains, of day
destroying night, of the ever-powerful, unstoppable rush that is youth streaming through one vast
shared bloodstream.

Long-haired
stonies, trippies drugged into one massive sensation, sit directly in front of the speakers,
tossing their hair around their heads in frenzied abandon, like electric horses tossing their
manes.

Morrison stands
beside me, absolutely transfixed. He has a look of total fascination on his face.

He says something
under his breath, spoken not to me but to himself.

I can just barely
hear it.

He says, "I am the
Resurrection and the life."

And there is in
his voice a sensation of wonder, as big as any that travels with childhood.

The music drives
on into the night, building and building, to die without cause or ceremony forty-five minutes
later. To die on schedule, to die right on time, so the next group can come on and do it all over
again.

The equipment gets
dragged off. Spence is drunk again. Chris is bored and Mick stares at nothing, think­ing of
nothing, the moment gone for all of them.

Randall, the only
one who never lets go, holds his guitar as if it were a camera and he's trying to take a picture
of himself.

Randall walks off
the stage, not speaking to anyone, holding his bass guitar under one arm, preoccupied.

"I don't believe
it," says Morrison, helping me move the stacks of amps. "I cannot believe the fucking incredible
animal energy!"

Morrison calls out
to Spence, "You were fucking-A great, man!"

Spence looks at
him, indifferent. "Oh, yeah. It's over, man. It's already gone by."

"But while it
lasted it was incredible! The—"

"But it doesn't
last. It never does. Fuck it!" says Spence, walking off, a little unsteady on his
feet.

"What's wrong with
him?" asks Morrison.

"You got to
realize they only live for that moment onstage, that spark that sets them up above the world.
While they are up there on that stage, they're living, really living, but everything else, the
traveling, the waiting to go on, tearing down, chicks, all that is just so much broken glass," I
tell him, having seen it all before.

"I want to do
that!" says Morrison, with a fierce light in his eyes. "I want to feel that energy driving
through my body!"

"I wanted to be a
Negro," I say, picking up a guitar case and putting the guitar back inside. "Even when you get
it, you don't get it. You can't always get what you want."

"We'll see," says
Morrison, coming over to help me with the gear. "Someday I'm going to ride right through the
heart of the night and everybody's going to believe that rock and roll will save their mortal
soul!"

Rock and roll will
save your mortal soul?

Hours go by and we
struggle to get through each slow century the truck long since loaded. Just waiting for the night
to end and the money to come so we can go someplace else.

Sheila doesn't die
because I call an ambulance after dragging her out behind the back door so the cops can't connect
her with us. They pump her stomach and take her away.

Nobody is sorry.
Nobody cares. This is rock and roll. You do only what you have to do and you don't have to care,
so mostly you don't.

Everybody splits
but me. Morrison goes off somewhere with some new girl who's promised him something sweet and a
free ride back to L.A.

Me, my time, hour
by hour, gets spent waiting for the money. And the longer I wait, the harder it gets to get it.
Finally, while the last band is going off, I march in past the guy hired to keep us out of the
office and stick a shiv in the fat face of the suck ghoul from management and ask politely for my
money. I practically have to knife the bastard to get him to cough up the money, and he tries to
short-change me six ways to breakfast and back. I get every penny of it.

I gather everybody
up, get them back in the truck. We are ready to strike out for the nothing we have set off from.
Make haste.

I really want to
leave, get away from these guys, but anything I do is like anything else so it doesn't matter.
I'm in for the whole tour.

It's as good a way
to get lost as any other.

And we get very
lost.

Little strange
eyes

Well, you know
what you've been