Burn Down The Night (5 page)

He's got a point
there. It makes sense it does escapes me. At that point everything escapes me. Thinking about it
for a few hours or seconds, I don't know which, I stab the gas pedal and cramp the wheel. Swoop
into a maniac U turn against the light.

Universe threatens
to turn over on its side. Citizens in the cars going the other way wetting themselves as I scream
through their ranks. My U turn is about two weeks too wide. Sloppy driving. Going to lose my Ben
Hur license.

Lots of
freaked-out drivers slamming brakes. Tire shrieks like whips at the Roman arena.

Wham!
Suitable sound effect
as car lifts up and scoots over the curb, goes smashing down the sidewalk for about thirty feet.
Did I say a sloppy turn? If it got any worse, I'd be driving through somebody's house.

We slam off the
sidewalk, lightly kissing the tail end of a parked car, crash with a grinding clatter as muffler
meets curb. Panic time. I whip the wheel in one direc­tion, not sure which way, just keeping
busy.

Car makes an
unexpected surfboard twist and we suddenly find ourselves back on Van Nuys Boulevard, heading in
the opposite direction. Reading for what I don't know but going after it in something resembling
a straight line.

Morrison's hanging
out the window. Yelling about something. What the hell is he doing? Maybe tossing his cookies.
Got his head bent down toward the street. Yeah. I bet he's tossing his cookies, either that or he
grew up poor and couldn't afford to have his tonsils taken out so he paid to just have them
loosened.

The car sounds
loud. Very loud and getting louder. I hear a scraping noise, metal against pavement. Some­thing
snaps, car now sounds like a jet engine with bad compression. I look back in the rearview mirror
in time to wave goodbye to the rest of the muffler.

"Hey, what did we
turn around for?"

"Over there," says
Morrison, resurfacing inside the car.

I look where he's
pointing. I see two chicks thumb­ing it in front of same kind of army/navy store, some­thing
appropriate like that.

"They got the
secret of fire," says Morrison with a grin.

"And crabs and
clap and—"

"Psssssssst!"
Sounds like
steam hissing out of a steamboat snake. Smartest thing he's said all night.

I stop for another
light. This time I do it perfect. Cor­rect lane, smooth stop, proper distance. Only thing
spoiling it is that the light is green not red.

"What are you
going
pssssssssssst
for?"

"'Cause I am
psssssssssst!"
Morrison tilts the wine bottle, drinks an armadillo full of wine. Least it
looks like that to me. One man's apple is somebody else's or­ange.

"Yes sir, I am
definitely
psssssst!"

As I ease through
the intersection on yellow (the light turns red before I get halfway through) I turn and look at
him. "It doesn't show on your pants. What's wrong? Find a woodchuck in your wine
ration?"

Morrison waves his
arms. "Well, Jesus! I go a million miles out of my way to arrange us some entertainment and
immediately you start making social disease jokes and armpit jokes and all kinds of shit like
that. Where's the old respect for motherfucking nature?"

"Huh?"

"Crabs are
organic."

I shift as I
accelerate and miss the frigging gear again. I swear the gears are moving around just to tease
me. Car stalls for the millionth time. Start the car as a stream of cars go detouring around
us.

"We'll never get
there!"

"Look, you wanna
drive, you're welcome. I'm doing the best I can. I can't help it. Somebody dropped a midget in
this gear box and he's moving things on me."

Finally I get
organized and we progress. After two centuries, one of them pregnant, we finally pull up to the
two chicks who are thumbing. I manage to pull over without hitting any parked cars or the two
hitch­hikers. Morrison opens the door for them and they crawl into the back seat.

One of the girls
is a real looker. Maybe sixteen or seventeen. Blond the way girls can get only in the Cali­fornia
sun. Tall with wicked long legs you could sense through her tight blue jeans. Thin and
high-breasted, face set in that phony cover-girl pose.

But her friend is
a place called hunger. She looks like second place in a two-man hatchet fight. Overweight, mouth
two sizes too big and too too much in the chest, if that's possible. Putting your head on her
stomach would be like putting on a pair of soft pink head­phones.

I smile at the
good-looking one in the rearview mir­ror but she's smiling at Morrison, who's turned in his seat
to face her. I turn and look at the other one and she's staring at me the way a shark stares at
its next bite of swimmer. I close my eyes and sigh.

"Hey, where are
you guys going?" asks the pretty one. She shakes her head, throwing her long blond hair off her
face like a wild horse tossing its mane. Morrison smiles at her and she smiles back. "My name's
Sandy."

She points at her
friend. "And this is Gail."

Gail asks again,
"Where you going?"

I look at Morrison
and he shrugs. Neither of us know.

"Probably to
jail," I answer, "the way I've been driv­ing." I forgot to tell Jim I didn't have my driver's
li­cense yet. I had one but the picture only looked a little bit like me and the name was nothing
like mine at all.

"I'm glad no cops
saw that U turn. I'm glad no cops saw anything, period." Suddenly I feel
superparanoid.

Morrison ignores
me, offers the bottle of wine to the girls in back. "Uh, we haven't exactly decided where we're
going. We're just kinda going. You chicks got any ideas?" Morrison's forgot the unlit joint, now
very wet from wine, still hanging out of his mouth.

"Far out," says
Sandy, blinking her cat-cold green eyes. "Me and Gail were just out cruising. We were thinking of
maybe going down to the Strip to see if anything is happening."

"We'll go anywhere
you want," says Morrison as I start the car moving.

I just pull back
into traffic when I hear the sirens.

"Oh shit! I knew
our luck was too goddamn good to be true!" Guess we did one too many intersections. That last U
turn had to be the clincher. Kiss our collec­tive asses goodbye. Wine in the car, beer in the
car, dope in the car, underage chicks in the car, me under­age in the car and without a license.
Also one central bad-news secret too depressing to mention let alone think about. Dream a little
dream of reformatory blue.

"I hear sirens," I
say, starting to ease the car back over to the side of the street.

"Christ!" says
Morrison, draping an imaginary noose around his neck and hanging himself with it. "I forgot we
should have put wax in our ears so we'd be safe from the sirens."

Morrison starts
grabbing up dope, booze, slamming the window down for instant ejection.

"Let us out!"
That's Gail, the furiously fat one with too much of everything. She starts to open the door
be­fore I even get stopped and I have to swerve to avoid depositing the opened door on a parked
car. Gail shrieks and nearly falls out.

Me, I nearly pass
out. We streak across the center line. Too enthusiastic about saving the door, I miss an oncoming
car in the other lane by such a short distance it's almost molecular.

Morrison drops all
his illegal goodies, nearly falling under the dashboard. Both chicks in back scream bloody
murder.

That's when I say
the hell with it. I fasten on to the wheel with a death grip and whip it around. Gun the engine
and we do a stunt-man turn.

"I'm
running!"

As U turns go, it
almost didn't. I slammed into the side of a parked car, zigged crazily off of it, zagged back
across the center line, shot back into the right lane.

The fat chick with
the open door is really screaming now. My turn caught her by surprise and this time she damn near
falls out of the frigging car. Not that I would miss her.

My wild-ass turn
doesn't quite make it up on two wheels but I come close. If Gail's boobs hadn't got caught in the
door she would have went out.

Morrison's tossing
out bottles of beer, eating the joint in his mouth, yelling something at me from his green mouth.
Everybody's yelling at me but I'm too busy for conversation.

I wiggle-waggle
across a couple of lanes, trying like hell to straighten out this runaway crap pile of Detroit
metal.

Sirens getting
louder and louder and I respond by slamming the gas pedal into next week. For once, I get the
shifts right. The front end lifts up, the tires squeal like scorched demons and we go whipping
along.

Everybody's pushed
against the backs of their seats and I'm trying to keep us there.

I'm hoping I can
get going so fast toward them that by the time the cops know it's us, we'll be so long gone they
won't be able to turn around in time to catch us.

Accelerator
buried, I get up to eighty-five miles an hour and the car is vibrating like two mating chain
saws.

Then the sirens go
screaming by... on an ambu­lance.

"Shit!" I don't
know who says it but it sums up the whole thing pretty well.

I ease up on the
gas, ten years older, downshift and miss a gear. Jesus! Here comes another intersection! Engine
sounds like it's going to go into orbit! Shift again. Miss it again. I duck.

There's a big grey
blur like a World War Two torpedo streaking across our bow. We just miss the tail end of a black
car by the width of two and half molecules. Just ran another stoplight. Becoming
habitual.

One of the girls
is screaming. I don't know which one 'cause my head is under the dashboard, looking for
religion.

I pull my head up.
Morrison's got the wheel and we're still going straight, beginning to slow up. I rise up,
believing in miracles and wondering if maybe there is a God who is betting on our
team.

Morrison gives the
wheel back to me and I'm okay. Had enough of this street though, so I turn down a one-way street,
luckily going the right way and plenty slow. I shift, miss it and stall the car again.

"Do you always
drive like this?"

I look back in the
rearview mirror. It's Gail. She looks like yesterday's menu is forcing itself back up to­day's
throat.

"Usually I'm not
this good," I say, looking at the fat marks under her chin. "Maybe you'd like to drive? I'm
having a little bit of trouble with the video portion of this broadcast." Understatement. Only
thing I'm doing well at the moment is heartbeats. About three million of them a
minute.

"Sure. I'd feel a
lot safer. Besides, I really dig driving. If I had me some wheels, I'd be cruising all the
time."

What a relief! So
glad to get to let go of the reins. Be­sides, I've just done something brilliant on an
interga­lactic scale.

Gail, bursting
with youth, several thousand pounds of it, can drive and sit next to Morrison and ooze her fat
out at him. Me, I'll be in the back with Sandy (Let's-pick-her) Peaches and (see if she knows how
to) Cream. My time to get lucky. Maybe I'll get to be the juicer and she can be the
juicee.

The car doors fly
open, and before I can orient my­self, Morrison is climbing in back with the looker and doughnut
overdoser is slamming me across the front seat with a hip that Moby Dick would have been proud
of. Oh, Jesus!

I'm not saying
this chick is fat, understand, but if you saw her running around naked and you were a lit­tle
nearsighted, you might think her clothes badly needed ironing.

I look back at
Morrison. He's grinning like a Chesh­ire cat discovering downers. I look at the whale beside me
and she gives me a look that makes me shudder. I think they once made an Edgar Allan Poe movie
about her:
Masque of the overfed Death.

She winks at me
and gets some sort of expression on her face. Either a provocative look or gaspains. With her,
how could you tell and why would you want to?

Morrison's happy
as a cocained cobra. Me, I feel like putting my head in the glove compartment and slam­ming the
lid.

Gail shifts, eases
out the clutch and we take off smooth. No jumps or false starts. When I was driving you got the
feeling you were riding a five-dollar epilep­tic Mexican whore.

The car runs down
the street. I think even the car is relieved now that somebody competent is behind the
wheel;

"Jesus!" yells
Morrison suddenly, scaring the shit out of everybody.
"Fire!"

Everybody turns
and looks at him, frightened.

"Fire!" That's me
shouting, for a few seconds even feeling the flame on my back. I'm staring at the back seat. The
idiot! I'm sliding down the other side, trip wise, mellowing out on Cream Ale. So why am I
screaming fire?

Morrison holds up
his wine-soaked joint. "We need the secret of fire."