Burn Down The Night (33 page)

Tell me what are
you winning

We made you
alone

Back there at the
beginning

I have all I am
and you

You are all I
know

Little strange
eyes

We made you
alone

We made you a
stranger

Trapped inside
your home

Why are you
grinning

Little strange
eyes

Have you been
sinning?

Please take it
easy

Please take it
slow

I have all I am
and you

You are all I
know

You looked so
nice

I wanted your
fire

And touched all of
your ice

Little strange
eyes

We knew who put
out the light

We loved you all
the time

Before the death,
at the birth

We were together
when

We buried it in
the earth

Little strange
eyes

Little strange
eyes

(The police saw
what we did)

We are five weeks
into the tour burning out with too many one night stands too far apart. All the signs are wrong
and the tastes are wrong and all the women we see make us feel unclean and wicked.

None of us sleeps.
It just doesn't seem to happen. Spence, our lead guitarist, is drunk, has been drunk three weeks
straight. Mick, our drummer, is stroking the skins with a toothache. For four days he has been
doing up downers, heavy doses. Traveling like we are, it'll be a couple of weeks before we're in
one place long enough to see a dentist. Long as Mick's got downers, he's sure he can hold out,
even though one side of his face is swelling up pretty bad and the downers have already dropped
him down two flights of stairs. Somehow he manages to play the skins but his timing is off and
the band is constantly slow.

Randall's
traveling with us for once and is driving us all crazy, yelling and screaming about how fucked up
everybody is, how we're ruining his chance to be a star, the whole tired routine.

"I could be a star
but I am surrounded by assholes!" Randall screams, slamming out of the Memphis hotel room we all
share. We're sleeping six in a bed. Have been doing it seven nights in a row 'cause money is
tight, like always, like always. Seven different beds in seven different cities. Sometimes one of
us scores on a chick who has a bed and there's only five of us in the same bed. I think we look
for chicks just so we can find someplace to sleep. But most of the chicks we meet are band
groupies, underage and usually still living with their parents. What a drag!

The tour! The
trip! And the V.D. clinic at regular intervals. I should have jumped ship when Morrison did,
crawled back to bitch goddess L.A. to burn in the California summer.

Anything but this,
this drug-crazed, sleepless slide down the sleazy side of the night. This meaningless shuffle,
the endless check-in-and-check-out routine in a thousand heartbreak hotels.

The hotel room
comes equipped with livestock, shiny-backed roaches who've escaped from some cattle drive
somewhere. And you can't get tired of the kind of places where you eat because the thrill is
always there: Will this greasy dogshit hamburger kill me? Is it ptomaine? The fear of poisoning
is the only legitimate thrill.

And there's girls
to jump. Lots of that. Like the one I'm looking at now. I don't have far to look. I seem to be
lying down on the bed and she seems to be lying down under me. I swear she wasn't there when I
started to get on the bed. Well, they must breed like rabbits. They are everywhere.

She is my age,
maybe a little younger, but with all that speed in me, too many days' worth, she is the closest
thing to rest I can get. Usually, though, it's not tender, it's not clinging softly afterwards.
It's usually more like an efficient billiard ball game between experienced players. But this one
is into having and holding.

Rock and roll
chicks are usually made out of leather—as soon as they get wet, they get stiff and hard. But not
this one. She's really almost nice. She even sounds a little less dumb than these kinds of girls
usually are.

"You know why I
sleep with the bands?" she tells me, lying next to me in the bed, her pitiful little-girl breasts
brushing against my bare back.

I don't say
anything, just enjoy the feel of her next to me. "It's 'cause I want to sleep with someone who's
famous, or might become famous. I know that sounds crazy to you."

"Un-huh." So what
if it is crazy? I've heard it all before, anyway. Does she think she's the only one? There's a
hundred thousand faceless ones of her.

"I know it sounds
crazy, but you see, you don't know what it means to me. 'Cause, see, you guys have got some kind
of power, some kind of bigger-than-life something or other, maybe it's like glory or something,
you know, like it's I don't really understand, you know, but I want to sleep with you because...
because somehow I think whatever it is, that magic, maybe some of that power, maybe... just
maybe... maybe some of it will rub off on me. Then I'll really be somebody. I want to get close
to you, close to your power."

She puts her arms
around me, hugging me tight, reminding me of an affectionate puppy. "It's important to
me."

"You're already
somebody now. You just don't realize it,"I tell her, playing with her hair.

She frowns, very
serious about it all. "No! I'm not. I'm nobody. All I have is my body. It's the only thing I've
got to offer."

She makes me sad,
maybe even a little angry, although I don't know why. "Why don't you go home to Mommy and Daddy
and straighten yourself up?"

She jumps like I
stabbed her in the back. Jesus! She's almost crying.

"Home? You think
I'd be here if I had a home to go to? My father! I never seen him. He's in prison for something.
And my mother, she's just a whore. I've been gone two months already and she probably don't even
know I'm gone yet. She only knows I'm around when she's sober, and she almost never
is."

It could be all
lies. Almost everybody you meet is selling you some kind of wolf ticket, some parade that never
happened where they claim they were the best float. But she sounds like the truth.

She rolls away
from me, now just a lonely little girl that somebody didn't love enough. "This is my
home,"
she says. "These are my friends and they take care of me. I belong
here."

I get up from the
bed abruptly. I must be losing control of my personal steering wheel 'cause I feel sorry for her.
She's like a little sister or something. Maybe she's got an echo of Tamara. I can't deal with
it.

Spence,
undressing, jumps on the bed. "Sloppy seconds time!" he says, struggling with his
boots.

I put on my shirt,
not looking at her.

"I liked you," she
says, looking up at me. "Didn't you like me? Why did you just jump up and leave?" There is an
ache in her voice, a lasting sorrow.

I look down at
her, trying to think of some answer. Spence is on top of her, acting like the animal he is. I see
tears in her eyes and suddenly I can't answer, can't even stand to look at her
anymore.

Rock and roll will
save your mortal soul?

I have to go, have
to get the hell out of there. I go outside and smoke a dozen cigarettes, standing down there in
the hotel lobby, watching the rain falling on the water-slick streets of Memphis, waiting for the
look on her face to fade out of my mind. I let a few hours go by, aimlessly.

I had seen that
look before, on Tamara's face, the night I left.

And I know
something then, for the first time, between cigarettes. I am going to go back to Tamara. I am
tired of trying to live like a dream whose meaning has been lost. I am going to be in love just
like everybody else.

No more holding
back, no more lies, no more promises I can't keep. I know that's what I'm going to do.

Fall in love just
like everybody else.

But I am not like
everybody else. I am not.

The only thing I
know is games and all my games contain the idea of death.

I am a vulture
descending on life.

I am a camera in
the coffin, interviewing worms.

Knowing and
believing are two different things.

I am going back to
Tamara anyway.

I stub out a last
cigarette and head back to the room. It's getting as dark outside as it is inside and there's no
place to go.

Back in the room,
somebody gave the little girl some drugs, some unfriendly chemicals to keep her warm, and we get
something we've all seen before, too many times before.

A
screamer.

They run through
your hotel room at four in the morning with a bad trip exploding inside their heads and the
inevitable hysterical confession that they lied about being eighteen. That's what we got on our
hands now, live and in person, a screamer making a hysteri­cal appearance in our crummy hotel
room in Memphis.

Down here in good
old Memphis to play a gig that didn't even exist, drug all the way down here by a bullshit
promoter who couldn't promote a bowel move­ment let alone a rock and roll concert.

So we are
overnighting it in Memphis, six to a crummy hotel room, seven if you count the groupie scream­ing
at us, all of fifteen years old with bad chemicals in her bloodstream, and haven't we danced this
dance before?

It's four in the
morning and the little lady suddenly doesn't know who she is anymore or who we are, and like a
hundred times before, it's those screams of outrage, those screams of rape from the once willing,
and we all get that uneasy vision of some cold prison cell, doing twenty trips around the sun for
statutory rape.

We sit in a kind
of shock, listen to her screaming at us. Nobody does much about her, we just let her scream.
Nobody even knows her name or remembers where she came from. Maybe we won her playing cards. Who
cares? No one. They all look the same after a while, all the little ones with the same tired
faces and the tight little bodies that drugs and drinking and living loose are slowly
killing.

There's this guy
traveling with the band. I think maybe he joined us in Detroit. Not invited, just some
brain-damage case who has lots of money and some big talk about being a hot-shot record promoter.
He's gonna make us stars, he says, and it's a lie we never get tired of hearing no matter how
badly it is told.

None of us believe
a word he says but he is useful when it comes time to pay for gas and for the usual gar­bage you
get to eat in crummy restaurants along the way. So nobody tosses him out. Besides we'd be afraid
to.

This guy's Mexican
or Puerto Rican. His English isn't too good but his money is fine. He's got an ugly knife scar on
his left cheek that goes from one eye to the corner of his mouth. Just some crazy bastard from
Detroit, which is where hell moved to get to a bad neighborhood.

He follows our
truck in a new Cadillac with a big dent in the hood. Nobody says it to his face, but we all know
the car is hot. Christ! He switches license plates more often than we do.

It's Saturday
night in Memphis.

The little groupie
is screaming. If this is a movie, the projectionist is on drugs.

Spence is out
getting drunk or staying that way.

Me, I am wrecked
with speed.

Mick, down on his
knees in one corner, is passed out from downers, head flopped over on a chair, neck bent at a
painful angle. Dumb bastard's been falling down all day. I am tired of picking him up. His neck's
gonna kill him tomorrow when he wakes up, but I'll be damned if I'm going to move the son of a
bitch. Let him suffer.

I keep hoping
somebody will get up, that somebody will go over to her and make her shut the hell up. No­body
does anything. I am on the bed, with my head buried in a pillow, trying to shut out the noise,
expect­ing cops to come.

My ears hurt.
Chris is long gone, must be hours since he left, gone out to cop some penicillin 'cause a
red-headed groupie from Alabama gaye him a special gift that burns like crazy. He's also maybe
looking to lay his hands on the four-eyed pimp that got us down here for a gig that disappeared
before we got into town. Randall's out head hunting for the promoter too, threatening to kill
him, and maybe he will if he finds him. We had been told we were gonna do a warm-up for a
big-name band. Turns out the band isn't even in America. Just another scam artist wet
dream.

I look at the
screamer, trying to remember what she was like when she was soft, when she was sad and
lonely.
"This hotel's got cockroaches. Rude, nasty, screaming
cockroaches."

Chris pops back
into the room "Hey!" he says, holding his ears as he comes all the way into the room. "Enough is
enough! Turn down that music or I'll put your head through a goddamn door!"