Burn Down The Night (34 page)

I keep hoping
she'll use up all the air in the room and collapse. Nobody knows what she's screaming
about.

Chris slaps her
and she dives for him, fastening on to his leg. The drugs have burned her little brain
away.

"Make love to me!
Please make love to me."

Chris turns and
looks at me, the chick fastened to his leg like a leech. "What's wrong with her? Did somebody
stop her from getting sloppy seconds?"

"She's just
scared. She only feels wanted when somebody makes love to her." I can figure out that much
anyway. She's really freaking out.

Chris tries to
push her away but she's holding on tight so he rams his knee into her head and she thunks to the
floor like a dropped bag of lawn fertilizer.

Now she really
goes berserk. Nobody will touch her, nobody wants her, and her brain is flipping over like an
automatic record changer.

Our
Spanish-speaking friend with the hot Cadillac and the knife scar comes in with a couple of sacks
of greasy hamburgers. He probably stole them.

The little chick
sees the goon from Detroit and loses it completely.

She starts yelling
rape, and I mean really yelling. All the screaming before is nothing compared to this. Sounds
like she grew an extra set of lungs.

"Rape! Rape!
Rape!"

That's funny
'cause she's been sleeping with everything that wears pants or looks like it might wear pants.
How could she ever possibly be raped? The only time she ever said no was when she didn't
understand the question.

Four in the
morning, underage and yelling rape loud enough to bring every cop in the world down on us. Who
needs it?

Mr. Knife Scar
Detroit gets nervous as hell. Me, I'm too wired. I'm professionally nervous, speed pumping
through me like electric eels swimming in my bloodstream. Those screams go through me, make me
feel like I am swallowing a mouthful of razor blades.

I move back,
getting ready for flight.

He goes over to
her. "Shut up! Shut up!" He slaps her. I get a look at his face. Suddenly I am scared. This guy
is crazy. Homicidally crazy.

He starts beating
on her, hard solid blows to the face. But the little chick is past stopping, she's off the deep
end, screaming her guts out. Even more incredibly, she strikes back.

She gets her
fingernails into his face, goes right for the eyes and rips into him, drawing blood. She's in a
drug-crazed state, stronger, berserk, all that adrenaline pumping into her overloaded
bloodstream.

I try to get
between them but he one-hands me out of the conflict, smashing me against the wall, flung
half-way across the room with one blow.

I couldn't stop
him with a machine gun.

I turn my head,
not wanting to watch. She's just my age, still a kid really, and my stomach turns. I don't know
why we do what we do when we do ourselves in.

I want to scream
at them, to tell them to stop, but I know it's no use. All those brainless bodies, like silent
movies that don't know yet they will someday have to talk.

I turn away, maybe
I'm going to run out, just split. When I look back, the man from Detroit has a knife in his hand.
Oh, Jesus! He puts the knife through her back like threading a human needle. It's so fast she
doesn't really know what hits her.

Rock and roll is
gonna save your soul?

She staggers away,
scream cut off in her throat, bumps into the bathroom door and falls on through. There is a hard
slap as she hits the tile floor.

Next thing I know
I'm on my knees beside her and blood is coming out of her mouth and she's flopping on the
bathroom floor like a fish out of water. Fifteen years old and a hole in her back in Memphis,
Tennessee.

In the other room
the man with the knife wipes his blade on the bedspread and says something complicated in Spanish
to no one in particular.

Chris is out there
running around the room like a head with its chicken cut off. He splits.

The man with the
knife comes to the door and looks down at the body in my arms. I've seen a thousand just like
him, crawling out of the caves of the cities, quick hands and no light in their eyes. Demented
hangers-on, grabbing onto the violent raw edge of life, onto rock and roll, moving like sharks at
raw meat.

The son of a bitch
wasted her with the same motion you use to put a penny in a parking meter.

Spence comes in
with some chick who looks like syphilis with legs. They are both dead drunk, falling-down drunk.
Spence pushes past the man from Detroit, forces his way into the John, ready to explode, he's got
to piss so bad. Jesus!

Spence is so
wasted he just does his "Man, is this for real!" number. He keeps repeating that over and
over.

Then the bastard
starts kicking her. I still got my arms around her, trying to hold her head up, so loaded with
speed I feel like only three seconds have gone by. I am out of my mind. She's dying in my arms. I
don't know what I'm doing.

"You stupid
bastard!" He just kicked my arm.

"This ain't real,
man!" He's kicking her like you kick a car tire to see if it's flat. He is out of his mind. "This
ain't real. I ain't gonna piss on no dead bodies, man!"

Spence grabs her
and tries to heave her out of the bathroom.

She looks like a
broken doll that's fallen in red paint. She's dead. Spence drags her out of my arms, throws her
into the next room. This is all her life came to.

This is a bad
movie. None of this really registers in my brain yet. I've got blood all over me and my stomach
is turning over. I start for the door and this other chick, the one that came in with Spence,
explodes like a lightning bolt. She screams and goes for Spence, swinging a whiskey bottle at his
head and screaming bloody murder.

Spence is standing
over the dead girl, his cock hanging out of his pants for the piss he's yet to take. The girl
hits him solidly in the face. He doesn't know what's going on.

The man with the
knife is over in the corner, not moving, and the other chick is trying to tear up Spence's face
'cause she's screaming it's her sister, and Spence goes down under her attack. He doesn't
under­stand her because he only understands taking a piss. Everything else, he can't
handle.

The chick is
beating Spence into a pulp, and he's too wrecked to defend himself. She goes for his eyes like a
kamikaze pilot jumping to a screaming death.

It's all part of
the tour. The trip. Rock and roll will save your mortal soul.

The man with the
knife. I don't want to look at him. Don't want to know if he's going to use that knife again. I
think he is and I don't want to know it. I don't want to see it.

I yank my duffel
bag out from under the bed and run into the bathroom, slamming the door behind me. There's blood
all over everything, all over me, and I lose it. I puke all over myself like a fucking
four-year-old.

I take a huge step
over the pool of blood, eyes averted from the hideous. I strip down, scald myself clean under the
hot water of the shower. All the water in the world cannot wash the blood off.

Change clothes,
wrap up my other ones to throw away. Still wet, I run out of there, run through the room and the
screams with my eyes closed, but they never really close. I see it all more terribly in my mind.
It bums up there inside me, inside my head.

The rooms of hell,
you can't get out of them, they follow you everywhere, every door leads you back
inside.

Outside the hotel
I am a diseased creature, fleeing from a dollar hotel, running scared, never looking
back.

I can't live like
this. I can't make it anymore.

I think maybe the
little one with the big hole in her back, I think maybe she is my little sister. I think she dies
with Tamara's eyes looking at me, with hope and love denied in her eyes. Her only crime was that
somebody didn't love her enough.

That was Tamara in
my arms, all alone in the world and looking for a love she couldn't find.

I have all the
band's money in my pocket, accidentally. I never go back. I just hitchhike out of
there.

Three days to get
back to Tamara and the look in her eyes. Three days and a dead girl in my arms as soon as my eyes
close in sleep.

It is a dream from
which I do not wake. Forever. It lasts forever Hotel room blood and the endless highway and the
door the door that opens and finds Tamara waiting, waiting for me inside.

It is as if there
is nothing in the world until I get back to Tamara. Please be there when I get back. I can't make
it anymore. Inside your rooms, in your soul kitchen, are all the things that wait, that walk and
talk and breathe. All the things that matter that for so long I pretended did not and could not
exist for me. Please be there.

I can't make it
anymore.

I call in Memphis.
In Little Rock. In Oklahoma City. In Amarillo, in a hundred towns whose names I don't know. The
phone rings and rings. Nobody home.

This frantic
journey to the end of the night. What was it for? Looking for a home in every face I
see.

In Phoenix the
same dime clicks in the slot, the same despair, the same urgency and frantic hope, all clinging
desperately to that need to know she's still there.

My whole body is
an instrument of hearing, tuned to some sign that she still is there. Is it the thousandth ring
already?

There's a buzz on
the line and the phone stops ringing. It's one in the morning and summer's gone. A sleepy voice
says "Hello."

And there's a
million words I want to say and they catch in my throat and I can't say any of them.

"Hello! Who is
this?" The voice sounds like a warm little cat, rubbing its back against the floor.

"Tamara." It's the
only word I find. I have too much to say and she's too far away.

And she knows. I
don't know how but she knows. She knows everything from that one word. Maybe it is all in that
one word somehow.

"I love you," she
says.

"I'm coming home!
I love you! I'm coming home to stay." The words rush out like expelled breath. Just hearing her,
being able to say what I feel, the nightmare eases. I've found her again.

"I'll be waiting
for you. Where are you? How soon will you be home?"

"I'm in Phoenix.
I'm hitchhiking. Don't go anywhere. I'm coming home. I love you. We're gonna get married. We'll
have the baby. Everything! Don't leave. Just a few hours, baby, and then I'll be
there."

"I knew you'd be
back," she says. "I knew." She sounds so happy.

"Be there when I
get there."

"Hurry home, love.
I miss you."

The phone goes
back into the cradle. I go back to the highway. Put my thumb out. It's an easy ride from here on
in.

An easy ride.

It starts going
wrong. Not her, me.

After three weeks
I am climbing the walls I don t know what's wrong. Not exactly. Maybe it has some­thing to do
with being too young, with trying to live past my years. Anyway, I am restless. Restless and
crazy.

Tamara is doing
domestic things, cleaning, cooking, singing happily to herself, alive like no caged bird is
alive.

I've got all this
money in my pocket, the money that I was holding for the band. I didn't steal it, jus couldn't go
back to the hotel with it. No sense return­ing it now. Wouldn't know where to reach them even if
I could. Unless they did something magical they are all probably in jail somewhere
anyway.

This money is
burning my pockets. Tamara wants to buy things, toasters and cookbooks and baby clothes and
whatever else. Half of the money ends up with her and I don't mind, but with what's left, I feel
I got to do something. I don't know what.

Have a party, I
guess. Haven't been going out at night. Been a good little bastard. Even been out looking for a
job. Doing all kinds of mental numbers in my head, trying to adjust to the idea of being a father
and husband, all this at the ripe old age of sixteen. Settling down is unsettling.

Despite trying to
keep it down, I still want something. I don't know what. Just something. Kicks, excitement. I
don't know what.

So a
party.

I do it. I spread
the word on the beach and with some bands I know, with the hangers-on and druggies and the party
people I know in L.A. Telling them it's something loose, a party party.

It's a weird
notion for Saturday night L.A. I think I am celebrating being in love, celebrating Tamara being
four months pregnant. I tell myself that anyway. Tell Tamara that too. Celebrating settling
down.

Good way to
celebrate not raising hell anymore is to raise hell, right?

Party starts
Saturday night at midnight and goes. Really goes.

Snort, pop and
inject. The mad and the maddening arrive in droves. I become the kind of host, drugged up to my
freaking eyes, who cuts the hearts out of small children to amuse his guests. Everything comes
full circle.