Burn Down The Night (23 page)

We get back into
the cab, with two big sacks of wine.

"He made a pass at
me," says Deirdre, almost amused in spite of her professional boredom.

The driver fingers
the rim of his battered cap nervously, afraid we're going to do something to him. The horny old
goat.

"More power to
him," says Morrison. "Maybe he's just what you need. He could mount you with his customary
arthritic grace."

Relieved, the
driver clears his throat nervously. "Uh, where to, from here?"

It's night now,
came on us by surprise. I never even noticed it getting dark. Our taxi pulls out into a soft dark
tunnel that's lit by neon land mines on the buildings of L.A. We go cruising aimlessly past the
bars and other open sores.

Our driver's in
his fifties. Red face from drinking too much, half of a soggy cigar in one corner of his mouth,
racing forms on the dashboard. Heavy beard in need of a shave, permanently bloodshot
eyes.

Deirdre's got a
short skirt on and short is an understatement. She puts one leg over mine, spreading her legs,
knowing the cab driver is looking. His eyes are glued to the rearview mirror. The cigar falls out
of his mouth as he stares at her central goodie, struck dumb.

The cab swerves
and we almost go up the ass end of a parked car.

"Hey! Watch what
you're doing!" says Morrison angrily, aware of what she's doing to the driver.

"Sorry," says the
driver, sweating. Deirdre's got him all hot and bothered. She has that effect intentionally on
almost everybody. Not that she's really interested in the driver. She just likes prick
teasing.

Morrison leans
over and stares at Deirdre. "You know something, Deirdre?"

"What?"

"If you don't get
what you want, you better want what you get."

Deirdre frowns.
"What's that supposed to mean?"

"You'll find out,"
says Morrison, and coming from him it's some kind of heavy, deep-down threat. He's out for
blood.

The tension in the
cab is loosening my teeth. They keep tearing at each other like wild dogs. Who needs
it?

"We ought to go
someplace definite," I say, trying to think of something definite for us to be thinking
about.

Morrison digs in
the sacks, opening bottles of wine. He staffs handing them out like party favors.

"Hey! No drinking
in the cab!" shouts the driver, looking at us over his shoulder.

Deirdre lays a
ten-dollar bill on his shoulder and he takes it, almost lovingly, as if she had rubbed it on her
crotch first and he wants to savor its delicate aroma.

Morrison hands a
bottle of wine forward, passing it to the driver. The driver scratches his chin, mulling it over
in his mind. Finally, he shrugs, takes the bottle. "Be careful you don't drink none when you see
a cop car going by," he says. He up-ends his bottle and takes a healthy slug. A third of the wine
in the bottle is gone.

"You kids ain't so
bad," he says, enjoying the wine and glancing to his right, seeing the amount already run up on
the taxi meter. He's doing well tonight, very well, and getting to look at Deirdre's crotch is
more than worth the price of admission. "Some of these young punks that get in my cab, I swear I
could just puke. You know what I mean. I could really puke, you know. You wouldn't believe
'em."

"Yeah," says
Morrison. "You could just puke."

Everybody's got
their own wine bottle and we drift into it. The wine's just what we need. The cab streaks through
the night, an island of warm, heated by wine, by inner electricity and a gradual loosening we all
feel.

"It's drugs," says
the cab driver. "These drugs, that's what it is. They get in my cab, marijuana addicts and heroin
addicts and junkies of all shapes. I tell you I could just puke."

"He could just
puke," says Morrison.

"I could tell you
kids weren't addicts the minute I seen you. You kids are a little bit wise-asses but I don't take
it personal, you know. See, I don't take it personal."

Deirdre yawned.
"Why, that's ever so sweet of you."

"Anything for you,
toots!" says the driver, waving his wine bottle magnanimously.

"He could just
puke," says Morrison, drinking wine. The taxi driver finishes his first bottle before I can do
much more than taste mine. He lets go a little, gets very hail-fellow-well-met. "Say, I'm
enjoying this!" he says. "Usually I'm hustling my ass out at the airport and my frigging fares
want to go two blocks. This is all right! Yessireee!"

He points to his
picture on the roof of the cab. "My name's Ralph," he says, waving the wine bottle.

"Who are you?" he
asks, staring at Deirdre's tits in the rearview mirror.

"Max Ophuls," says
Morrison, referring to himself. "Jean-Luc Godard." Now he means me. "And this," he says,
squeezing one of her tits hard so that she jumps in her seat, "is sweet Deirdre, a former child
star who made silent films for blind people."

"Pleased to meet
you," says Ralph, saluting us with the wine bottle. "It's a pleasure to meet some nice young
folks. I can tell just looking at you you aren't the kind to be taking drugs or smoking
LSD!"

Morrison chokes on
his wine, trying not to laugh, and sprays wine all over the back seat. He slumps forward,
laughing and choking at the same time. I laugh a little myself. It is kind of funny when you
think of it. When it comes to drugs, we three are the three most likely.

"Say, you want to
hear a joke?" asks the driver.

"Oh, shit," says
Deirdre. She's hitting her bottle hard. It's almost gone.

"Drink up," says
Morrison, finishing his bottle. "There's plenty more where that came from." I hurry to catch up,
almost choking trying to chug the rest of my wine.

The driver up-ends
a new bottle, still three quarters full after one little sip out of it, and slugs it all
down.

"Pretty neat!
Pretty neat!" says Morrison, watching the driver with undisguised admiration. "Now there's a man
that knows how to drink!"

The driver
inflates like a toad in mating season. "Shit! That wasn't nothing! You should see me on my day
off! I go through booze like shit goes through a goose!"

Morrison passes
out new bottles to everyone. We are all getting gassed.

"Say, you want I
should tell a joke?" says Ralph readjusting the cap on his head. "It's a hot one."

"No," says
Deirdre.

"Yeah," says
Morrison. "Tell us the joke."

"Well, there's
this traveling salesman, see," begins Ralph.

"Oh, fuck that!"
says Deirdre, looking drunkenly bored, if such a thing is possible.

"Shut up!" says
Morrison, pinching her tits. "Let him do his thing."

"And he goes to
this farmhouse, see," says Ralph.

"And he knocks on
the door," I add.

"Yeah," says the
driver, giving me a hostile look.
"And he knocks on the door!"
Ralph gives me another
hostile look so I shut up and decide not to try and mess him up anymore.

Deirdre looks
bored enough to have puppies.

Morrison looks
fascinated.

"The farmer knocks
on the door. The traveling salesman says, 'My car broke down. Can you put me up for the
night?'

"The farmer seems
reluctant. He says, 'Yeah, I guess so.'"

Deirdre sticks her
tongue out at the driver, not interested at all.

"'But you'll have
to sleep with my fourteen sons,' says the farmer," finishes Ralph, looking back at us in the
rearview mirror.

Even Deirdre looks
surprised.

The driver stops
talking, takes a long pull on his wine, drawing it out, building the suspense. It's so left
field, we all lean forward, wondering what the frigging punch line is.

The driver
pretends to busy himself with his driving, making a turn and crossing over into another lane,
keeping us hanging.

"Well?" says
Deirdre, who has no patience. "The farmer says, 'You'll have to sleep with my fourteen sons.'
Then what?"

Ralph says,
absolutely dead pan, "The traveling salesman shakes his head, says, 'Excuse me, I must be in the
wrong joke!'"

He slaughters us.
He takes our heads off at the knee. Deirdre dissolves into a laughing fit, spitting a gulp of
wine all over everything. Morrison and I are roaring like an Arctic windstorm and old Ralph is
beating the steering wheel one-handed, wheezing like a mad monk at his own joke.

"Son of a bitch!"
says Morrison, riding high on drugs, wine and a nowhere joke. "It's a frigging party!"

"Goddamn right!"
says Ralph, waving his wine bottle at us.

"Let's drink a
toast to our driver! Good old Ralph!" says Deirdre, bouncing her leg on my knee so her skirt
opens and closes. Old Ralph's blood pressure must be going into orbit by now. He sees what she's
doing and it's driving him crazy. He practically bites the top off his wine bottle.

We see a lot of
L.A. rolling by the cab windows, soft neon stream of color and sound, softened into something
beautifully velvet by acid and wine. And the wine flows and flows. The taximeter click-clicks,
like a soft woman's heartbeat. There is nothing in the world except the cab in which we ride, an
island in the storm. We drive on ever deeper into the night.

Finally, it is
Morrison, looking out the windows, who asks, "Hey, man? Where are we?"

Ralph puts his
wine bottle down and peers none too soberly out the front window. "I don't know. I think we're
lost," he says. "I think we been lost the last three or four hours."

Deirdre laughs. "I
didn't know cab drivers could get lost!"

"Shit! I get lost
all the time," says Ralph, taking another swig of wine. "Everybody gets lost once in a while,
honey. Everyone!"

"A philosopher!"
says Morrison, delighted.

"Now, you take
good old Daniel Boone, for in­stance," says Ralph, looking out the window, trying to get
oriented.

"Who? Take who?"
says Deirdre.

"Daniel Boone!
See, he was always going out there in the wilderness and stuff where there weren't no highways or
roads or Holiday Inns or nothing. So somebody once asked him, asked him did maybe he ever get
himself lost. And you know what good old Daniel Boone said?"

"What?" says
Morrison.

"No, I never got
lost, but I was mighty confused once for three days."

Morrison whoops
with delight, pounds Ralph on the shoulder. "You're a fucking genius," says Morrison.

Ralph farts,
looking embarrassed about it, hopes no one notices. He looks around at Deirdre to see if she
noticed. She smiles at him, blows him a little kiss as if she was giving him a reward for
producing natural gas. Old Ralph lights up like an atomic light bulb.

"If I'm so fucking
smart," he says, "how come I'm lost?"

"Have some more
wine," says Morrison, digging into the sacks again. Morrison's got the answer to everything and
the answer is in all the liquor stores.

"Maybe we ought to
go someplace definite," I suggest, thinking of the big numbers on the taxi meter, not that I
really care. It isn't my money we're riding around on, after all.

"Let's go to a
graveyard," says Morrison, staring out the windows of the taxicab. It's the middle of the night
by now. "Seems like we been driving for hours!"

"I got to piss,"
admits Ralph, finishing another bottle of wine. He looks over at the meter, then looks at the
mileage on the speedometer. "Jesus! We have been driving for hours!" He looks embarrassed at the
amount. He's making a fortune.

"I got to piss
too," says Deirdre.

"Me too," I chime
in. My middle half is stiff from wine and drugs but I'm not that numb that I can't tell a
gigantic piss coming on.

"All God's
children got to piss!" says Morrison.

"Well, son of a
bitch," says the driver, "let's go find us a place to piss."

"A graveyard,"
says Morrison. "Nobody will bother us there. We can sit back and drink."

The taxi driver's
staring at the meter. "Well, shit," he says finally and reaches over and flips the meter off, "I
made enough money. From now on it's a free ride."

I'd seen the meter
turning back to zero I don't know how many times. He probably doesn't make that much in fares in
four weeks' driving.

Deirdre reaches
across the seat and caresses Ralph's cheek with one hand. Deirdre is drunk. Old Ralph damn near
goes through the roof of his cab. "Hey, that's a really nice thing you just did," she
says.

Deirdre bends over
and gives Ralph a faked passionate kiss on the side of his neck. I see the expression on her
face. She looks kind of disgusted, with the kind of look you get on your face when you have to
kiss a funeral director goodbye, but she's enjoying the heat she's building in the old man. What
a prick tease!