Burn Down The Night (35 page)

Cops come twice
because of the noise. The last time they come, somebody tries to stomp them. It's that kind of
party.

Innocent Tamara,
in an apron, lost in a world of strangers, wanders from room to room, trying to impose something
nice on nothing that is. Playing hostess while they laugh at her.

I try to stay with
her but people keep dragging me off, talking dope, talking drugs, talking L.A. hard hip, and
she's always left out. I keep wandering back to see her, feeling responsible, hugging her,
keeping her calm when she gets scared. The wild animals are scaring her. I tell her not to worry
when somebody breaks something. And they do.

And then there is
a fight and some people overdosing and others getting naked and getting it on and it's only two
in the morning and the accelerator is stuck wide open and we're gonna tear the roof off of
Saturday night.

I keep ducking
into the kitchen, avoiding the ladies, the ones I've slept with, the ones I haven't. Can't
remember the names of most of them. I especially have to duck a space case with terminal
horniness from Beverly Hills who's been grabbing at me ever since the world began. I avoid them
because I am pushing it to myself and to everyone that I am spoken for. God knows I am trying to
be. Trying.

I am feeling
pretty good, maybe too good. Tamara is in the kitchen, hiding, scared because there was this
fight and somebody grabbed her and tore her shirt a lit­tle, and she won't come out. She won't
come out and I don't feel like going in. Don't know why. I am getting difficult.

And like a bad
penny, a voice I know hits me and I turn around and it's Morrison. Can't seem to get away from
him.

My mouth drops
open to say something appropriately nasty and Morrison pops a pill in it.

I gag, have to
swallow to keep from choking.

"Glad you could
make the party! A swallow in time saves nine!" says Morrison, bowing.

"What do you mean,
glad I could make the party? This is my party! I am your host, asshole!"

Morrison laughs,
drugged up, drinking wine from a gallon jug.

"Well, then, I
want you to have a gift," says Morrison.

He reaches behind
him and hauls out somebody his body has blocked from view.

It's a
girl.

And I look at her
and remember all the promises I made and meant to keep. And something starts to break inside me.
Maybe it is a promise.

Because she looks
like the girl who makes you forget promises.

"I'm a gift?" She
laughs. "Before you can give me away, you have to have me first. My name's Dawn."

I nod at her,
trying not to be interested, turn away. I like looking at her too much.

I see Tamara
coming into the room and I walk away from them, walk toward her.

Tamara looks like
she wants to cry. She doesn't belong in this world. I'm a bastard to have put her in
it.

Somebody knocks
over a lamp and it breaks. "Can't we send them home? I'm scared." She clings to me.

"Just stay in the
kitchen." I hug her, trying to comfort her. "I won't do this to you again. After this party, this
is it. No more parties. This is the last time, I swear. I just need this last run."

I kiss
her.

"These people are
animals," says Tamara with a shudder. At our feet two guys and a black girl make love on top of a
pile of their clothes, put underneath them so they won't cut their backs on broken
glass.

The apartment is
being destroyed.

"We have met the
enemy and he is us. Don't let it get to you. I was like this too. Before I grew up, that is," I
tell her, trying to reassure her. She puts her head against my shoulder.

"I love you," she
says. "I'm glad you're not like that anymore."

"I love you too,"
I say and I feel sad. How do I know I'm not like that anymore?

She takes her head
off my shoulder and my neck is wet from her tears. "I'll be in the kitchen. I feel safer in
there. I hid all the kitchen knives. Some of these people are crazy."

"All of them are
crazy. All of them!"

A nude girl
sprawls on our couch while three guys paint her body. One guy paints a bull's-eye around her
pubic hair. Maybe he's planning a lecture with visual aids.

"Remember all the
things you promised me," she says, letting go of me. "Remember that I love you."

She goes back into
the kitchen and I stand there, watching her go, feeling strange. Very strange.

The party is not
going out of control, it is already gone. I feel something stirring in me that wants to get
loose, that wants to match the violence of this party. Some kind of frenzy I know I should avoid
at all costs.

The inside of my
month feels strange. Then I remember that pill Morrison popped into my mouth. I smile, feeling
something electric beginning to move beneath the skin. I'm going to get ripped out of my
skull.

It fills me with a
special kind of delight. Perhaps it's cause I might fuck up and now I've got an electric
ex­cuse.

Morrison comes up
beside me, alone, having ditched the girl somewhere or vice versa. It's probably more vice versa.
She looks like one grown independent and hard to master.

"I came out of a
long line of souvenirs," he says. "My parents were two holes in the night out of which I tumbled
genetically."

"And I," I say,
"am a prayer kneeling in the snow. I am the blank spaces on a death certificate."

Some violent clown
in black leather tries to take the back off of some guy's head with a bottle of beer. The bottle
breaks as the top of the guy's head opens up, blood oozing onto the floor beside the guy's head.
Why hit somebody who's already down?

Morrison watches
the exchange, curiously affected.

"The wooden
soldiers are gnawing on the furniture. The counselors to the king are shooting horse in the John.
The squires are doing weird things to horses. The planet is out of its orbit and all's right with
the world."

"Don't show
compassion. If you show compassion, they'll take you outside and take away your kingdom." I bow
to him.

"Well, I can't
help it," says Morrison, helping it. "I am an old movie on the late show. I am an old spectacle
looking for a place to happen, heart in hand, sitting there, like a mouse, ready to crawl up the
right pair of pants."

"You are either a
philosopher or in love. Whichever is more infectious." I finish my bow, tipping an imaginary hat.
"You try to be a good boy but you ain't nothing but a Nazi."

"Hail to the
Fatherland! And rain and partly cloudy for the Motherland, highs in the ten thousands, tor­nado
watches in the western portion of our mental health!" says Morrison, waving his arms.

Any minute I
expect him to break out in song.

"If you wrote like
you talked, everybody would read you."

"I'd still have to
give—" The sentence gets interrupted by a black chick who stumbles between us, drunk as a
volunteer fire department at a convention.

"Jive-ass
motherfucking white boys," she says or something like that.

"You got your tits
on backwards," says Morrison. "Either that or your falsies—" He doesn't get to finish that
sentence either.

She passes out
cold like a period at the end of a sentence.

She slides down
Morrison's legs, coming to rest on his feet.

"Give me your
tired, your weak, your huddled masses, yearning to pay income tax," says Morrison, staring down
at her. "She's no fun. She fell right over."

"It must have been
something you said, you insensitive asshole! You jive-ass white boys never get it
right."

Morrison laughs,
moves his feet, pulling them out from under her.

"What was that
pill? What was that monstrosity you tossed into my digestive system?" I ask. "What kind of
strange, as yet unknown to science wonder drug have I taken?"

"A ceremonial
hallucinogen from ancient Babylon. When you get off your mind expands in an overlapping series of
hanging gardens. Forbidden pleasure palaces!"

"Shit! I knew it!
I swallowed a low-rent district!"

I hand Morrison a
bottle of wine I steal from somebody passed out on the floor. Practically have to break the guy's
fingers to get the bottle loose. Either rigor mortis or drinker's lockpaw. Lots of passed-out
people having too much fun.

"What did you
think of Dawn?"

"She's pretty." I
shrug. I had tried not to look at her too close. She did things to my body and my body is being
told it's a no-no.

Morrison jumps,
backs away: "C'mon, man! Pretty? She's just about the best-looking piece of poontang you ever
laid eyes on! I been chasing her all night and I can't get to her."

Morrison looks
depressed.

"
You
can't
get her?" Now I'm really surprised. "What's wrong with her?"

"Nothing," says
Morrison, reaching out to take a joint from a roadie. Lots of band people here tonight. "She's
just about the most independent girl I ever met. She drives me crazy. I want her so bad I can
taste her."

"She looks like
she would taste pretty good." I have to admit that much. She's beginning to interest me more and
more, in spite of myself, in spite of promises.

"I wish I was in
love," says Morrison.

I hear what he
says and it registers. I knew this about him all along. He's a human being in secret.

I see Dawn across
the room and I stare at her, really give her a looking over. Everything male that can still
function is panting, keeping hot eyes on her. She just stands there, listening to the music
blaring full volume from the stereo, ignoring the stares.

I don't know how
to describe her, not even to myself. It's a face you see on magazine covers. Her eyes are so big
they look like they could steal your soul. Dark eyes and raven black hair and a golden-tan
body.

She wears a short
white dress that makes her look like a medieval princess. You imagine her walking through a field
of flowers on a sunlit day in some other century.

"You know who she
is? I mean, really?" says Morrison, also staring at her. "She's the girl of summer.
The
Girl!
If you get to her, winter will never come."

"You don't sound
like a lord," I challenge him. "You sound more like—"

"Put me among the
creatures tonight," says Morri­son, handing me the joint, his voice strange from holding in the
dope smoke.
"We all have to fall off our high horses sometimes. We
have our public horse and our private horse. I'm telling you about my private horse. It's a horse
of a different Technicolor."

Dawn sees us looking at her and she walks toward
us.

Morrison is almost jumping out of his skin. "She
moves like a wild deer," he whispers to me.

And he's right. She has the most beautiful body
I've ever seen, all the graces in the world in the way she walks. A body bronzed gold by an
endless summer.

"Having fun?" says Dawn, smiling at
us.

"Till the day I die," says Morrison.

I don't say anything. I don't trust myself to
speak. My body is telling me it wants her. My mind says no, but it's got such a small
voice.

"What do you think of the people here?" she
asks, looking back over her shoulder at the human wreck­age.

"Pigs," says Morrison. "Happy, greedy little
pigs with all four feet in the trough."

"Is that why they act like this?" she says. She
doesn't look like she believes him.

Morrison shrugs, trying to find the right
lie.

"First you break a window and then you become
one. Nothing else exists. Nothing else can touch you," I finally say.

She turns and really looks at me. "I like that,"
she says, thinking about it. "Did you steal it from somewhere, or make it up?"

"Made it up, I think. I don't
remember."

"You're interesting," she says, and she smiles
and it's like getting kissed for the first time, sly and wonderful.

"Hey! Don't bogart that joint!" says Morrison,
taking it out of my hands. I didn't even know it was in my hand.

"You want a hit?" Morrison offers the joint to
Dawn. She shakes her head no. Morrison shrugs, takes a huge toke. It's obvious to me this one has
him running in circles.

Me too. I am going round and round and I don't
even want to be running, period. At least I've told myself that.

Some people are clearing away broken furniture,
moving passed-out bodies and sweeping aside broken glass. Clearing a place so they can dance.
What a bizarre thing to get into! Who are these people? Escapees from a 1950s sock
hop?

Christ! Some of these people still have their
clothes on. It's maybe not un-American but it sure is un-L.A.

Somebody keeps changing records on the stereo.
I've got lots of albums, free promos from my musician friends, and some of the band people are
standing around playing their latest records and arguing with each other. People from six or
seven bands here.