Burn Down The Night (24 page)

"Glorious bitch!"
says Morrison, to no one in particular, meaning her.

Old Ralph puts a
hand back over his shoulder. "Let me shake your hands there," he says, overwhelmed with
brotherhood or something like that, the cab weaving drunkenly as he reaches back for
us.

"Max Ophuls.
Pleastuhmakeyorequaintance," says Morrison, shaking the driver's hand vigorously.

"Mumble, mumble,"
I say, taking the driver's hand and pumping it, not remembering who the hell Morrison said I
was.

"Let's drink to
L.A.," says Morrison, "and to graveyards."

We all lift our
bottles, all traveling down the road that leads to oblivion.

"This is a real
sombitching good time!" says Ralph, throwing his empty wine bottle over his shoulder. He just
misses my face and I realize old Ralph is drunk on his ass.

The cab careens
all over the road.

I look out the
window, not recognizing this part of L.A. at all. Think we are out in the suburbs somewhere, just
zooming aimlessly through the night.

We pass a big iron
gate on the left side of the road, and old Ralph practically stands up on his brakes.

Everybody in the
back seat almost ends up in the front seat.

Deirdre ends up on
the back-seat floor, sideways, short skirt up over her hips. The cab skids, turns sideways,
finally coming to a stop in the middle of the street.

I look out the
window, glad we are in a section of L.A. where there are no cars. We seem to be in a pretty
isolated section of the city. Steep cliffs and hills around us, very few houses.

"What the fuck's
going on?" snarls Deirdre, climbing off the floor, crawling up into my lap. "A goddamn earthquake
or what?" There's an idiotic smile on her face. She seems amused.

Somewhere between
the acid and the wine, Little Miss Sunshine has lost most of her boredom. With that idiotic smile
on her face she looks like a five-year-old waiting for the tooth fairy.

"A
graveyard!"
shouts Ralph. "A goddamn graveyard!"

"Hallelujah!"
shouts Morrison, raising his arms until they smash into the roof. "Victory is ours!"

Ralph puts the cab
in gear, accelerates, tires squealing, and we do a U turn, coming back around.

We get up to the
wrought-iron gates in a big rush.

The gates are
closed.

"I'll get them
open," says Morrison, handing Ralph his wine bottle, and staggers out of the cab on his
side.

Deirdre is kissing
me on the neck erotically. Old Ralph is grinning like a brown bear at salmon spawning time. He
up-ends Morrison's wine bottle, finds it empty and looks back at me, expectantly.

Holding Deirdre
off with one hand, I reach down and get him another bottle.

"Gentleman and a
scholar," says Ralph drunkenly, staring fixedly at Deirdre's ass, which is up in the air while
she fastens herself on to my neck.

I try to get the
wine bottle cap unscrewed but Deirdre is driving me right up the wall. Deirdre drives everybody
up the wall. She's got a license for it.

I hand old Ralph
the bottle, unopened. He turns in the seat, really fascinated by the back of Deirdre's lap. He
trys to drink from the unopened bottle, hitting his teeth hard on the bottle cap.

Morrison stumbles
around outside in the glare of the headlights, trying to get the gates open. Seems to be having
trouble.

He shouts
something at us, which we can't understand.

"Maybe this ain't
a good idea," says Ralph. "What do you think there, Deda?"

"Deirdre.
Deirdre," says Deirdre, letting go of my neck to come up for air. "My name's Deirdre."

"Dee... dra," he
says slowly, struggling to get it right.

"You got it," she
says.

Ralph swells up
like a toad, proud of himself. "Well, Jesus, Deirdre, there ain't gonna be no place for you to
piss." He smiles, embarrassed. "I mean, there ain't gonna be no facilities for you to,... uh...
no place to sit down is what I mean."

"And no toilet
paper," says Deirdre. "I don't give a shit. I could do it out the window. I could do it in the
glove compartment. I just don't give a shit where I do it, just as long as I get to do it." She
laughs, holding herself in, as if her hands clamped to her sides were the only thing keeping her
from pissing herself. "And soon. Christ! I'm swimming in my own piss!"

Ralph sticks his
head out the cab window. "Hey, Max! What's taking you so long to get that gate open? This here
beautiful broad has got to piss. Speed it up out there, will ya!"

Morrison points at
the gates, staggering on his feet. "Padlocked. Can't get it opened!"

"We got to get
in," says Deirdre, pretending panic. "I'm dying to get in."

I groan at the bad
pun, start getting out of the cab. I am not going to wait. I got to piss and right now. I am
gonna piss all over the side of the cab.

Ralph gets out of
the cab, reaches back under his car seat and pulls out a tire iron. "You just hold on, honey," he
tells Deirdre. "Let old Ralph fix it up."

Ralph staggers
away, as drunk as a sailor, heading for the gates.

Morrison sees him
coming, steps back, frightened, seeing a maniac bearing down on him and the gates with a
dangerous-looking weapon in his hands.

I'm pissing like
the source of the Nile on the side of the cab. This yellow cab is gonna be twice
yellow.

"A maniac," yells
Morrison as Ralph strikes, attacking the chain and padlock holding the gates closed.

The iron bar slams
into the chain. Once. Twice. The third time the padlock gives up the ghost and the chain parts
with a snap. The gates swing free, one side swinging inward.

Ralph waves the
tire iron over his head triumphantly, the victorious gladiator. He and Morrison grab the gates
and drag them wide open.

Ralph hotfoots it
back to the cab, dropping the tire iron on the front floor of the cab. He puts the cab in gear
and drives through the gates.

Morrison and I
close the gates behind us, and use the chain to tie them loosely, so that it doesn't look like
anybody's gone through them. I'm glad we're still straight enough to be just a little bit
paranoid. You live longer that way.

Morrison and I get
back into the cab.

"All aboard!"
yells Ralph, putting the cab in gear and slamming the accelerator to the floor. We zoom forward,
tires squealing.

"Did you see me do
that padlock?" says Ralph. "Slicker than greased lightning!"

"You're a hero,"
says Morrison, smashed out of his mind.

The cab screams up
a narrow winding road, twisting and turning through the graveyard.

"This is good
enough," says Morrison, opening the door before Ralph can get the cab stopped.

Ralph hits the
brakes, skids off the road and we go careening off the pavement and cut wildly across the grass,
knocking over a row of wooden crosses. The cab brushes up against a heavy granite tombstone,
tilting it at a crazy angle, and finally comes to rest after about a hundred wild yards of
cross-country jouncing around, parked sideways across a grave, somewhere in the middle of the
graveyard.

I lean forward,
dead drunk, to shout something to Morrison but he's gone. The son of a bitch fell out of the car
before we went off the road.

Deirdre, pretty
shaken up, sprawls out the door Morrison's fallen out of.

"Last stop!" yells
Ralph, holding on to his steering wheel, dead drunk. "Everybody out!"

I crawl out after
Deirdre, dragging the last few bottles of wine with me. We already drank a whole grocery sack of
wine. Only a few bottles are left in the other one. What a bunch of maniacs! I count the bottles,
only six more to go, if we don't all get alcoholic poisoning first.

I fall out of the
cab, right onto my face. The moon is out and it's daylight bright. Old Ralph is out there
somewhere, singing to himself some country and western song about a girl in a bar. What else
would it be about?

Morrison staggers
out of the darkness, a cut on his chin, helps me to my feet. His shirt is torn, the palm of one
hand scratched up.

"Where'd you go?"
I ask him.

"Rode the wind.
Proved man can fly. Leonardo da Vinci," says Morrison, looking and sounding destroyed in the
moonlight. "Revenge! Aviators!"

He nudges me in
the ribs with an elbow. "Sometimes you find them sewing for the heathens!"

"What?" I barely
remember anything. I wonder what the hell he's talking about. "What are we doing in a
graveyard?"

"Gonna invoke the
dead," says Morrison. "Stick with me. I'm in control."

"Hey,
Deirdre!"
That's old Ralph, yelling
into the night like a lonesome coyote. "Where are you, honey?"

"I'm pissing,"
says Deirdre, shouting at him from somewhere. "What it to you, you horny old fart?"

Morrison and I go
over to Ralph. The old man is bent over a tombstone, a wine bottle in his hand. Morrison takes
the grocery sack of wine from my hand, sets it at Ralph's feet, centering it over the
grave.

"I consecrate this
place," says Morrison. "Forever after it shall be holy."

"I ain't
religious," says Ralph. "I'm drunk is what I am."

"Drunk? Nobody's
drunk in this graveyard," says Morrison, disagreeing.

"Drunk on my ass,"
says Ralph, not to be talked out of it. "And she's pretty. Goddamn, I'll say she is! What a great
pair of knockers she's got!"

Ralphs looks at
us, remembering something. "No offense, ya understand! I just think she's a terrific-look­ing
piece of tail is what I think."

"Yeah," says
Morrison. "You noticed?"

"I call them the
way I see them," says Ralph. "And believe me, I've seen them and I've seen them!"

Deirdre yells,
"Hey, assholes! Where the fuck are you!"

Ralph yodels at
her, "We're over here, you great big beautiful hunk of woman!"

Ralph starts to
move toward her, almost falls on his ass. The old guy is really shit-faced.

Morrison laughs.
Standing next to him, I feel an icy wind in that laugh. A really wicked laugh.

Deirdre yells
again, "Where are you guys?"

Old Ralph rises
up. "Over here! Over here! You stay right there, honey! I'll come and get you! Don't you worry!"
yells Ralph, the white knight in shining armor who needs a shave.

"Go get 'em
tiger," says Morrison, clapping Ralph encouragingly on the back. The old man reels under the
blow, damn near falling fiat on his face.

Ralph stumbles
off, still yelling for Deirdre. "Love is the plan," says Morrison. "The ultimate weapon is the
sound of sex on skin. Are you riding with me?"

"I'm not sure. I'm
kind of drunk, you know." Besides, he isn't making much sense either.

"Don't fail me,"
says Morrison. "The lords will have to have their day."

"I'm with you," I
tell him. "I'm with you all the way. Except right now." I hold my stomach, feeling a tiger biting
me. "Except right now I think I am going to—"

I finish the
sentence by throwing up all over a tombstone.

"You've got too
much respect for the dead," says Morrison.

Ralph and Deirdre
stagger up, weaving like two mongoloid idiots who've been dropped on their heads too many
times.

"Keep your
frigging hands off me," says Deirdre, giving Ralph a shove.

Ralph nods, trying
to squeeze her tits. "I never laid a hand on you," he says. "You're so goddamn
beautiful!"

Ralph sees me
tossing my cookies. "Can't hold your booze!" he says. "Pretty damn chickenshit if you ask me. Yes
sir, pretty chickenshit!"

I wipe my mouth on
the sleeve of my shin. "So who's asking you?"

Morrison's got
more wine bottles out of the sack, tries to pass them around, but there's a fine line between
sanity and insanity and we already passed it a couple of bottles ago.

Nobody takes a
bottle.

I'm weak, dizzy
from heaving up. At least the stuff I tossed up wasn't down long enough for it to make me smell
bad when it came back up. Actually, I even feel a little more sober now, losing all that wine
that way.

Deirdre puts her
arms around Morrison, whispering something to him. Old Ralph is practically standing on her feet,
rubbing up against her like a cat wanting to be scratched.

Deirdre ignores
Ralph altogether, turned on by the prospect of jumping Morrison.

I go over and sit
down on the top of a cold marble tombstone, content to sit back and watch the world spin without
me.

"How you feeling,
old dude?" asks Morrison of our driver, not responding to Deirdre wrapping herself around
him.

"Fucking-A great!"
says Ralph, weaving from side to side in front of Morrison and Deirdre. "And who says I'm old!
I'm a goddamn stud!" He sticks out his scrawny chest, beating it with a bony fist. Not very
impressive. He's lost his cap somewhere, revealing a crewcut and brown hair heavily frosted with
gray. The old man looks like his cab has been parked on his face all night.