Burn Down The Night (28 page)

"How do you feel
now?" she says, as the waitress hands back the credit card.

I almost belch in
her face. "Better. Much better. I feel almost human again."

"Have you got a
place to stay?" she says, almost managing not to sound too desperate.

Jesus! She's a
little bit previous. Doesn't even give me a chance to be clever about it. This is almost too
easy. I look her over. She's no beauty. But her car is ex­pensively new and she doesn't dress
like she's rich, which means she probably is. The more money you got, the worse you can afford to
dress. Besides, I had seen her digging into her purse to get her credit card. She had credit
cards for everything except maybe a trip to the moon.

"Uh, no. I thought
I'd sleep on the beach. I didn't know where else to go." I sigh, looking the part of the homeless
orphan. I'd be more eager to jump her if she were a little better looking and one hell of a lot
younger, but she'd do until something better comes along.

She looks at her
watch, suddenly shy. "How would you like to stay with me?" She looks up at me suddenly, as if she
expected to catch me laughing at her or something. I understand how she feels. After all, she's
got to be thinking I'm probably around eighteen and she knows I know she's at least thirtyfive,
if not a little older.

She could be ten
years older and I wouldn't give a shit. I put my hand on her hand, jiggling her coffee cup with
my arm. "I'd like that very much. You've been so nice to me. I don't know how I'm ever going to
repay you."

"You'll think of
something," she says with a smile and we both know what she's talking about.

I squeeze her hand
and her smile widens and her false teeth slip a little and she closes her mouth quick to cover it
up.

I just smile,
pretending like I haven't seen it. I had to pick this fossil! Sometimes you lose when you win and
this is going to be one of those times. I hope she leaves her teeth in when she makes
love.

We stand up and I
move next to her, leaning against her affectionately as we walk out. "Oh, damn," she says,
looking at her watch again as we go out the restaurant door.

"What's
wrong?"

She looks put
upon. "Listen, I've got to get to work. I
have
to go. Can't get out of it." She stops
walking, trying to think out the logistics of the situation. "I'd take you to my place right now
but I'm not going to have time. I've got to be at the studio by two and I'm barely going to make
it if I leave right now."

She looks
upset.

"Hey, no problem.
How about taking me back to the beach? I'll meet you there when you get off work?" Of course,
maybe I'll meet somebody better before she gets back. I hope so.

"Oh, that would be
great 'cause I go right by the beach where I met you," she says, looking relieved. "I do set
design and I've only got a little work to do but I
have
to do it today."

Holding hands, we
walk to the car. "I'll be back no later than five. You'll be there waiting for me?" She seems
afraid I won't show up.

I put my arm
around her waist, give her a reassuring hug. "Meet you in the same place where we first met,
okay?"

She smiles,
relieved.

In the car, before
she drives me to Venice beach, I kiss her once, not too frigging sincerely, afraid her false
teeth will fall out in my lap, and I paw at her flabby breasts a little just to show her I know
how. What a drag!

Back at the beach,
I strip off my clothes and lay back down in the sun, wearing nothing but an old pair of cutoff
blue jeans with no pockets and so many holes I am practically nude. I ate too much. I feel lazy,
feel like a bloated dog who's caught too many rabbits. I put my shirt over my face, dig out a
comfortable hole in the sand with my shoulder blades and doze oft the sound of sea gulls lulling
me to sleep.

And it's one long
dream about Tamara. But sometimes I see Deirdre in it too. But mostly it is Tamara. She's lost
and I'm trying to find her. I am lost too and we pursue each other through the night. I almost
catch her in the dream and sometimes she almost catches me. Sometimes it isn't Tamara with tears
and love in her eyes when I get close, it's Dierdre, an evil witch with the sun burning in her
hair who kills everything good I try to touch.

In the dream I am
running up a hill, a crazy dream hill that glows with the warmth of summer, a hill that gets
higher and higher as I run. And Tamara stands at the top, free and beautiful with the wind in her
hair, beckoning to me. And I run and run, hear her crying out, hear her calling to me, and the
only thing that matters is that I reach her.

The top of the
hill is before me and I break through some barrier I can't see and Tamara's there with tears on
her face and her arms out to me. I seem to be floating toward her.

Just as I touch
her, just as her hands reach out for me, Tamara melts like wax. It's Deirdre now who stands
before me, her hand reaching for my face. Her fingers become knives and drive into my
eyes.

I wake up
screaming.

My hands are
pressed tightly against my face, covering the eye I lost to a knife long ago. A knife that still
pursues me in my dreams.

I roll over on my
side, feverish, sweating. Suffocating under the shirt that covers my face, I throw it off, as if
it were a snake that might bite me.

It's dark, the
edge of night. I must have slept for hours.

Fully awake, still
haunted by the dream, I slowly sit up. The world I see before me, a sullen beach turned silvery
by the coming dark, seems no better than the world of my dreams.

Somebody was
supposed to meet me, I remember, at five o'clock. I look up at the sky. It's a lot later than
five. More like eight thirty, maybe nine o'clock. Looks like the lady with false teeth stood me
up. No loss. I got a big meal out of it. Better than nothing, but that still leaves me with where
to spend the night.

I stand up, my
body stiff and sore, and begin walking down to the boardwalk, after pulling my clothes on against
the cold. There's some fires on the beach, people partying, drinking and drugging. I'll crash one
of those parties if it gets too cold. Getting kind of late to hustle a place to stay now. Might
have to sleep on the beach. Not a real thrilling prospect.

I need a little
something to help me make it through the night. Check my pockets, not enough money to buy a
bottle of wine. But a bottle of wine is the best friend to have if you have to sleep on the
beach. Without money, it's going to be a little tricky getting one but I'll get one. I leave the
beach, head for a liquor store.

I ease into the
store and float around the aisles until the clerk turns his head, then I grab a bottle of cheap
wine, stuffing it down my pants in back and pulling my shirt down to cover it. I do it quick,
only takes a few seconds. The clerk's head is still turned the other way.

I wait until he's
waiting on somebody before I slide out the front door. The clerk doesn't even glance in my
direction. It's almost too easy. Reminds me of the winter I lived off what I could shoplift. The
slum dweller's version of living off the fat of the land.

It's darkest dark
now, and I button my shirt all the way up, shivering in the cool sea breeze. Start toking on the
warm wine. Tastes like horse piss but warms my insides against the cold.

Walking out on the
pier, staring out at the dark waves crashing on the beach, I see a young couple walking toward
me, arms around each other, obviously in love. I don't want to see them because I'll see Tamara
and me in them and I don't want to see anything. I don't want to see anything or hear anything or
feel anything. Wish I had some drugs, some real heavy drugs so I can get wasted, really totaled.
Wish I was slipping into peaceful unconsciousness, temporary unthinking oblivion.

I climb off the
pier and jump down into the sand, start walking under the pier. There's a body down by the
water's edge, tossing and turning in the sand. I hear a voice, the sound of words not clearly
spoken. Curious, I move down the beach, coming closer.

"Father! Father...
I want... I want to..." It's a threat and the voice gets lost, mumbling nonsense. I've heard that
voice before. It's Morrison, in the grip of some nightmare. He rolls in the sand, face gleaming
with perspiration in the fading light, arms digging into the sand as if he swam into the night in
his sleep.

I watch him with a
peculiar sensation of disquiet. That is me there on the beach too, trapped in the same nightmare.
We both sleep in all the rooms of hell. And we wake up screaming.

I hold out the
wine bottle, tilt it over Morrison's face. Let a few drops splash on him. He comes awake
instantly, looking like an animal driven into a corner, fighting for its life.

Morrison sits up
slowly, not speaking, gathering his senses.

"It's you," he
finally says.

I bend down,
offering the wine bottle to him.

He takes it and
belts back a healthy slug of wine. Politely, he doesn't gag at the taste, even though he's got
every right to. It's really rancid stuff.

"It's been me ever
since I can remember and I've been able to remember years and years too long," I tell
him.

Morrison gets up,
rubbing his eyes, stiff from sleeping on the beach. "Learning to forget is the only important
thing," he says. "Christ! What a nightmare!"

Morrison staggers
around, unsteady. "I need a bath, a shave and a real bed to sleep in. And something female with
long legs and a talent for entwining."

"Is that order to
go or will you have it here?"

"I'll take it to
go. You got any ideas?" says Morrison.

I shrug. "Don't
look at me. I am in exile myself."

"Chick throw you
out?"

"I threw myself
out."

"No difference,"
says Morrison with a scowl. "I smell like a sock taken off a hibernating bear. We've got to find
us someplace to hole up for the night. Find us a cave where we can be blind cave fish, eyeless,
safe and warm."

"There's a party,"
I start to suggest, thinking of an ugly girl with terminal acne I know in Hollywood. I know she's
having a party 'cause that's all she does do, is have parties, seven nights a week.

"Fuck parties,"
says Morrison, holding his head as if it were ready to fall off. "I need to get out of the
trench­es."

I'm thinking,
considering the possibilities. "Well, there's this girl. She's following the band I came into
town with. Far as I know, the band's still in town. If I call them, they can tell me how to find
her. That would solve everything."

"How would that
solve everything?"

"She's got money
coming out of her wahzoo. Her old man owns a chain of hotels. She gets free rooms for herself
wherever she goes, and a free room for anybody who balls her. If you jumped her bones, she'd get
us a free hotel room."

"A free hotel
room? You mean like with beds and baths and room service with booze and food we can charge to
her? Just for screwing her?" Morrison grins like an idiot, liking it. "Oh, wow! It's a gold mine!
It's the frigging mother lode!"

Then he frowns,
thinking about it. "Uh, just how ugly is she?"

I shake my head.
"Ugly is not one of her problems. She's built like the girl 
Playboy
magazine puts
staples in the middle of. Also she's got one of those cute little-girl faces you see on magazine
covers and a backbreak­ing routine in bed that any cathouse would be proud to rent
out."

"Charge!" says
Morrison, swinging an imaginary saber. "Onward to horizontal victory!"

I have to warn him
a little, though. "Uh, she's a little bit weird, you know," I caution Morrison. I sigh.
"Actually, she's a whole lot weird."

"Weird like whips
and chains?" says Morrison, not really giving a damn.

"On her, that
would be pretty close to normal. No. I mean she's really weird.
Like
mentally disconnected."

"For a few days'
free ride in a hotel, I could overlook cannibalism," says Morrison. "Let us not hesitate. Let us
hurry hence. Lead on, Macduff, and all that razzmatazz!"

"I don't know if
she's into cannibalism yet but she'll probably get around to it. Like I said, she's strange. I
mean
really strange!"

Morrison and I
start walking off the beach, sharing the wine.

"How is she
strange? I mean, you really got to work at being strange in L.A. I mean, everybody's so
brain-fried here anyway," says Morrison, belting back some wine. "Is screwing her going to be a
hassle? Like how strange is strange?"

"Listen," I tell
him, hoping I don't scare him off but feeling he at least ought to know, "she travels around with
this St. Bernard. And she and the St. Bernard drop acid together and ball together. She gets it
on with her St. Bernard. I'm not making that up. That's for real."

"A real dog
lover," says Morrison, shrugging, thinking about it. "You mean I have to take sloppy seconds from
a dog, from a frigging
St. Bernard?"
The idea seems cosmic. Morrison's face lights up.
"Outta sight!"