Burn Down The Night (7 page)

Gail pulls up
somebody's driveway, trys to edge in between a blue Alfa Romeo and a Thunderbird. Catches the
Alfa Romeo on the left front fender, prac­tically tearing it off.

"Oh, shit," she
says, turning the car off.

"Nobody'll
notice," says Morrison, lost somewhere in a thick cloud of dope smoke. Everybody's eyes are
stinging. Even the oxygen in the air is stoned.

Gail puts on the
parking break and turns to gather me up in her arms.

The thing is, I'm
already ten steps from the car and still moving.

I look back to see
if Morrison is coming. Car is so full of smoke, I can't see anybody in it.

Suddenly the
ground rises up and hits me in the face. I am waaaaaasted!

The door is still
open where I've exited and Morrison stumbles out after me in a cloud of smoke and a hearty "Hi
Ho, Silver."

The ground rises
up and hits him in the face too. He is waaaaasted!

I lay there on my
stomach, trying to stand up without using my legs. Not easy.

Morrison crawls
toward me, near-empty wine bottle in one hand and some of his clothes in the other. He's wearing
nothing but his pants. How he got them back on is one of life's great mysteries.

I can hear his
chick cursing about something in the car. She's looking for something, probably can't find her
clothes, or one of her legs is missing. Maybe I smoked it, thinking it was a pink
joint.

"Mluck," says
Morrison, glassy eyed and mentally keelhauled. "Far... out!"

I'd agree but I
can't get my mouth off the ground.

Smoke is pouring
out of the car. Where's it all coming from? Looks like we arrived in a forest fire.

Morrison drags
himself up to me, nudges me with the wine bottle. "Geeet... upppp."

I roll over on my
side, just so I can get the grass out of my nose. "That's... easy for you to say."

Somebody must be
standing on my tongue.

Morrison gets to a
sitting position, reaches down and pulls me up. We lean against each other to keep our­selves
from falling over.

Morrison looks
around. "Where the... hell are we?" He's so high he's almost glowing in the dark.

"Shit!" he says,
sort of on general principle.

"Did you... you...
uh... I forget."

"What?" asks
Morrison.

"Did you... you...
uh... I forget."

"I don't know,"
says Morrison, staring at the wine bottle. "You were there... wasn't you?"

"Was I? Where was
I where?"

"I thought one of
us was," says Morrison.

"Oh," I say. Then
I remember. "Did you ... you have a smooth ride?"

Morrison nods,
slipping off my shoulder and falling over on his back. "Oh, yes," he says. "Pretty neat. Pret­ty
neat." He drags himself back up, falls over on me, almost knocking me down. "I am in love... from
the waist down."

I can hear Sandy
in the car, still cursing about something. I vaguely remember that there is somebody I should be
escaping from. I remember Gail the Whale, panic and look back to see if she's after me. Some of
the smoke is out of the car, enough for me to see her still in the front of the car, struggling
with her shirt buttons.

I put my arm
around Morrison's shoulder. "You gotta help me. I got to... to... to... I forget."

"Trust me," says
Morrison. "I can keep a secret."

"No. No. S'not a
secret. Except to me. I can't re­member."

Morrison looks
around. "Where the hell are we?" Confused.

I shake my head.
"We already did that line."

"Tell me the
secret." Morrison bends over so I can whisper in his ear. I slip and fall over on his
legs.

I look up at him.
Now I remember. "I gotta escape. Like Ish... Ishmael and the... the Great White
Whale."

Morrison nods.
"All right!" Lifts the wine bottle and kills the last of it. When the bottle's empty he turns it
upside down and stares into it suspiciously. "Some­body stole it," he says.

"You gotta save
me!"

Morrison nods.
"Commit suicide," he suggests.

"No, let's get up
and...I forget."

"Get up and
dance?" suggests Morrison idiotically. "Get up and get down?"

"Run!" I remember.
"Jesus! I got to get the fuck out of here! If I don't I may become the first elephant rape victim
in the world."

"Right!" says
Morrison, putting a hand on my shoul­der. He pushes off me, staggering to his feet. The hand that
steadies him pushes me into the ground.

"Salvation!" cries
Morrison, raising his arms to the sky. He takes two steps back and falls over a bush.

"Shit!" says
Morrison. "Earthquake!"

"You're no help."
I drag myself over to a tree and begin clawing my way up it. Somehow I get to my feet. My head
keeps wanting to kiss the ground but I'm standing up nevertheless.

"Resurrection!"
yells Morrison, rising from the trampled remains of the bush. He raises his arms and falls
forward over the same bush.

I stagger over
toward him. I reach down, grab him by the shoulder and help him up. "Far out," he says, as he
regains his feet.

We stand there,
falling against each other to keep from falling down completely. My head is spinning, dancing
around on synaptic legs. My crotch is in­flamed. Those tight pants haven't let up on me at
all.

Morrison holds out
the wine bottle. "Empty," he says.

Then he pitches it
over his shoulder. There's a crash as it smashes the windshield of a Mercedes. "More, " says
Morrison. "I'm not off yet, not... not high yet."

"Huh?" I stare at
him. "How do you know?"

"'Cause I'm still
standing up," he says.

I look back at the
car, trying to see how much of a running head start I've got on the human hippo. She's still in
the car, still buttoning up the front of her shirt so Mount Rushmore doesn't catch
cold.

"How do you like
the chick I picked for you?" says Morrison, giving me a polar bear laugh. The cool
bas­tard.

"Eat shit and
die!" I tell him.

"She looks like
the place where Moby was Dicked!" For some reason that strikes me as being funny. So funny that I
try to hit him. I miss and we both fall flat on our asses.

"Twenty-mule-team
Borax!" says Morrison, wild-eyed. "The fucking wind is gale force tonight!"

We both begin
staggering to our feet.

"Oh, no!" says
Morrison. "Here come the Cos­sacks!"

Morrison grabs me
and pushes me toward the party. Stumbling like paraplegic marathon runners, we get our feet down
on the good earth and try running with them.

Over my shoulder I
see Gail the Whale coming up behind like an approaching ice age. It's. like seeing a tenement
lift up its skirts and run.

We race for the
door, coming out tied, smash into it, and fall over ass backwards. Jumping up at the speed of
barbiturated light, we both bang on the door.

It opens, five or
six people hanging on the door. We push past them before they can ask us in. Once inside, as one,
we both turn and help slam the door.

"Hey, what you
doing?" asks one of the drunks hanging on to the door.

"Lions!" says
Morrison. "Tigers!"

An old chick on
the bad side of forty with a face like a collapsed universe stares drunkenly at us. "Lions?
Tigers?"

Morrison reaches
out, pats her on top of the head. "Don't worry! If they get in, wink your hysterectomy scar at
them and they'll vanish."

The old lady puts
her hands over her lap and stares down at her crotch. Morrison pinches her on the butt and
staggers away, looking for the john.

"Oh Lord! Let
me make it to the next gas station before the prayer runs down my leg!"
he yells and van­ishes into the party crowd.

Me, I am trying to
focus an eye well enough to find the back door, the back door and the fastest way out of
there.

I start wading
through the party pushing and shov­ing, trying to get to the back door. I also got to piss and
anything that even remotely looks like a toilet is gonna get wet.

Guess I am too
enthusiastic. Somebody hits me on the side of the face. I think I stepped on his toe. I take two
quick steps sideways and fall over an end table. A ceramic sculpture on the table joins its
ancestors.

I shake my head.
Dizzy. Not sure what happened. Maybe I better just lay here until the earthquake is over. I close
my eyes, willing to sink into a coma. A couple of pairs of hands seize me and I find myself
catapulted into a standing position. A couple of people I don't know are dusting me off. Somebody
hands me a can of beer, says, "Hey, man, like don't worry. Everything's cool."

I sip the beer and
nod.

I can't focus my
eyes and I have a definite list to star­board, but if somebody is sure everything is cool, who am
I to disagree?

One side of my
face feels like the section of the
Ti­tanic
that kissed the iceberg. I stagger forward,
with only the vaguest idea where I am going or why. Seem to remember there is something important
I got to do but can't remember what it is. Something nautical, something hazy about a
whale.

Somehow I find
myself with an arm around a little blond girl with pimples. Either I know her from some­where or
I don't. Can't tell.

She's talking
about getting busted for possession. She sounds like a vacuum cleaner going over linoleum. Really
dumb. I know she'll never get busted for posses­sion of her faculties.

Drinking my beer,
nodding my head up and down in time to the music of her mouth. She's speaking B flat or
something. Morrison's gone. I remember enough to remember that he's disappeared. Probably he fell
in the john and drowned in those little white bowls they al­ways got in those kind of
rooms.

Am just getting to
remembering that I ought to get out of there and why when something like fifteen pounds of raw
meat puts the vice grips on my shoulder and spins me around.

My eyes just about
pop out of my face and I spill beer all over myself. Oh, no! Gail the Whale has arrived. In my
spinning vision, looks like six of her standing there. Maybe a dozen. All in the same pair of
ready-to­-split-and-spill-fat tight pants.

"Remember
me?"

Before I can claim
to be dumb, deaf and blind or pre­tend to go into a coma, she puts her arms around me and gives
me a hug.

The little
pimple-faced blonde is still chattering away. Don't think she notices that I am gone. Probably
didn't notice I was there in the first place.

I feel something
wet in the middle of my chest, something wet creeping down and getting inside my underwear. Gail
crushed my beer can and I'm getting Miller High Life on my swizzle stick.

I feel my face
getting red as all the air squishes out of me. I try to push her away and she tries to kiss
me.

"Let's find a
bed." I can't hold her off. She kisses me and I choke, half a can of beer trying to come up from
my stomach and say splash to the floor.

"Gonna pass out,"
I say and try to fall down. She re­leases me and I start to collapse on the floor. But she gets a
death grip on one arm and begins dragging me off. Hard to pass out when you're being dragged, one
arm threatening to come out of its socket.

"Help!" I try to
pull free, try to resist, but I'm too wasted and she's stronger than truck-stop
coffee.

"Help!"

Somebody hands me
another can of beer as she drags me across the room. Some wise-ass. "You better drink it," a
long-haired freak advises me. "Looks like you're gonna need all the help you can get."

Wise-ass!

We're almost
across the room, almost to the hallway that leads to the bedrooms. I am trying frantically to get
away. I grab hold of a tall guy with beads and a black beard. Grab him by the leg as I am dragged
by. "Help!" I say, pulling him over on top of me. "I'm be­ing raped!"

He's
unsympathetic. He takes one look at Gail the Whale and beats a hasty retreat, throwing my arm
off.

"Better you than
me," he says.

In desperation, I
put one leg between Gail's legs, try­ing to trip her. She hits my leg, damn near breaking it, and
I fall on my face, hard. It doesn't slow her in the least. She's dragging me by one arm like I am
a six-foot sack of cotton.

"Tote that bale,
lift that barge!" says the bearded bead wearer, an unnatural-born comedian. A couple of people
are looking at me, laughing. Terrific. Just ar­rived at the party and already I'm a social
success. Shit!

Out of the front
room and down the hallway, manag­ing to get to my feet at least. We approach a door, the
downstairs guest bedroom door, and she tries to open it.