Number Nine: Chapter 8

NIGHT OF THE WORM


FADE IN:

EXT. DESERT HIGHWAY – NIGHT

Ruby and Jake drive beneath a starlit sky. Pools of car light shine on a two-lane highway, heading east in a sea of sand, tumbleweed and mountains of naked stone.

The Beatles’ BLACKBIRD plays in the foreground.

Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these sunken eyes and learn to see
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to be free…

Fade out BLACKBIRD.

Fade in HELTER SKELTER.

When I get to the bottom I go back to the top…

INT. LAZERRI’S PENTHOUSE SUITE – NIGHT

Minnie, Slim and a security guard stand facing an enraged Guido Lazerri, his shirt undone and his fly open.

Do you don’t you want me to love you…

Guido holds a gun to Minnie’s head and holds it as Minnie breaks down and cries.

Well you may be a lover but you ain’t no dancer…

Guido places the gun on his desk and makes a phone call.

Now Helter Skelter, Helter Skelter…



Their minds flew across the barren wasteland, forgotten lands of no tomorrows, where Mother Nature’s daughter remains unspoiled, unused, untapped, naked in her thirst and virgin in desire. Particles of light danced before their eyes, painting pictures in the heart, transforming all it graces into images of living art.

In another part of the world, men and women, children and newborn babies were living with the constant, pounding drumbeat of war. Bombings, night raids, torture, rape, suffocating gas, electro-shock, burying the dead, nursing the wounded, and the ever present wailing of mothers in mourning.

Here in America, we were only beginning to awaken to the nightmare. Our money wasted, our freedom shackled, our lives of quiet desperation, sifting through the sands of time for something lost or something found to renew the dream.

“How did you do that?” asked Ruby.

Jake had disarmed three grown men without killing or being killed, without harming or being harmed, without even firing a shot. Like a native superman, he answered her hour of need when he could have easily put out his thumb and taken the next ride.

“I’m a ghost,” said Jake. His mind was still soaring on desert winds high above them, breathing in the land of his forbearers. “Kachina magic,” he added.

Ruby laughed but the pain of her swollen face choked her spirit. She was a broken girl on a road to nowhere. She had no future and her past was cut off like a severed limb. Vegas was fading in the rearview mirror, a neon dream turned night horror. Vegas was her town, the only place on earth that breathed life into her tired, broken soul. Now she realized she could never go back. Vegas used to be her town. Now she was homeless.

“Asshole,” she muttered through her tears.

Jake came to attention and Ruby smiled. “Not you, baby. I was just thinking of Tony and that worm Guido. The people we learn to trust because we’re on the same side, we go to the same joints, know the same friends, speak the same lingo. People with power. The rest of us are just peons, chumps, idiots.”

“People with dreams,” replied Jake. “People with stars in their eyes.”

Ruby ran through it a few times before deciding she liked it.

“Thanks, baby,” she said. “People with stars in their eyes.”

She drove on into the endless night, thinking about how strange life could be, how difficult it was to keep believing that everything had a purpose, that somehow everything would turn out for the best. She desperately needed to hold on to that dream no matter how unlikely it seemed, no matter how often life’s twists and turns beat her down like an ill-mannered dog. She needed to believe or she would fade away. Now more than ever she needed to be strong.

She linked up with the asshole because he offered her a life that was just a little better than the one she had – or so she thought at the time. It was a way of life, inching along, clawing and scratching, climbing up the endless stairway one step at a time. A fool’s game never delivered what it promised. She thought she could handle it and she had until fate played its hand.

The life she had lived before Tony was not all that bad: a stripper/dancer/singer, sleeping by day, working by night, consuming drugs for food, trying like hell to find the door to Hollywood success just like a hundred thousand other pretty girls just like her. Well, they were not exactly like her. Ruby could sing like Billie Holliday. She could act like a young and fearless Norma Jean, she could dance like Gwen Verdon in a Bob Fosse dream, but all they saw and all they wanted to see was flesh.

Ruby gave them what they wanted but they always wanted more. All that crap about casting couches: Ruby wished it was that easy. Sleeping with a director or producer was the surest way to put you outside the Hollywood circle. It might work if you were already inside but if you were outside looking in it kept you there. The scumbags didn’t want to be reminded of the scumbags they really were.

She sighed and imagined translucent blue light surrounding her, emanating from the core of her being. She breathed in the cool dry air and found herself floating on a sea of green waves to a paradise of tropical ease. She glanced at the golden bronze face of the man beside her and wondered how long it would be before he asked who was who and what was what. As he floated in his own wonderland of flight, she realized he never would. He was a different kind of man, a kind she had never encountered, the kind that would always be a mystery.

Ruby loved mysteries.

She felt the attraction of a Sleepy Time Motel before it came into view. She pulled off the highway onto the gravel lot and took note of a run down bar across the street.

“I need a drink,” she said.

Jake smiled, stealing a moment of reorientation as she parked in the back. They booked cabin number nine and crossed the street, walking past an old Desoto and a couple of Harley Davidson’s. When their eyes adjusted to the dim lighting, they made out two bikers at the bar, half watching a baseball game on TV, a cowboy bartender, and a couple of Navaho men at a corner table.

All eyes zeroed in on Ruby’s sensual grace. They hardly seemed to notice her bruised and battered face as she excused herself to the restroom with a wink and smile.

“What are we drinking?” she said in parting.

Jake took a quick account of the situation, the circumstance, the alignment of planets and the pull of gravity.

“Dos Gusanos,” he said.

Ruby smiled again and blew a kiss over her shoulder. It was the night of the worm. The last time she ate the worm she woke up on an unmarked grave in a pauper cemetery somewhere outside of Hornitos in the California foothills. She vaguely remembered a couple of Chicanos who went by the names of Joaquin and Three Fingered Jack. That was the last recollection she had. The worm was always good for erasing memories. What could be more perfect?

The first time Jake ate the worm he was riding a peyote vision, trading tales with Don Juan on a private tour of Ixtlan, sharing laughter and an appreciation of the lucidity of life. It was when Jake learned to fly. The last time he ate the worm he almost jumped off the edge of Grand Canyon.

The bartender poured a couple of shots with a couple of beer chasers and Jake made two trips to a table at the front of the bar, next to the door. Worm or no worm, it was the kind of place that called for a quick exit. He returned to the bar, dropped a large denomination and the bartender handed over the bottle – con gusanos.

It was half full or half empty and the evening was filled with possibilities.

When Ruby made a stunning re-entrance, the bikers swiveled on their bar stools and openly drooled as she strutted to their table, grabbed a shot and toasted, “The Worm!”

Jake took note of the bigger of the two bikers, the kind who went by “Tiny” in high school, never graduated from the football field, and later was christened “Bear” or “Moose” in a supreme insult to the animal kingdom. Trouble was brewing in the space behind his yellowed eyes and he made no effort to hide it.

One eye on Ruby and one on Jake, he hitched his jeans and walked to the old jukebox, plopped in a few quarters and pecked out a three-digit number he knew by rote. Everyone in the house had heard this tune before.

I’ve been a fool for every fallen angel…

He stood before them, leather and blue jeans, hands behind the back, like a teen at his first social, shuffling his boots and rattling his chains.

“Wanna dance?”

Ruby examined the back of his skull and went for the bottle.

“Sorry, Cowboy, I’m all danced out. Let’s go, Jake.”

Cowboy shuffled to let Ruby by and planted himself in Jake’s path.

“That’s fine, little lady. Some women like half-breeds who slap them around.”

Jake went for the balls with his knee, followed by a stiff left and pushed him back with a kick to the chest. He motioned Ruby to stand back, placed himself by a solid brick wall, lowered his center of gravity and braced. Cowboy charged him like a rabid bull, snorting and heaving as he pounded across the wooden floor.

Jake grabbed Cowboy’s clenched fists, absorbed the blow against the wall and let his body serve as conduit, channeling his aggressive force into a well-placed knee at the center of the beast’s personality disorder. The monster was dead and all that remained was a groaning mass of flesh on the floor, holding his hands like they were useless appendages.

It happened so fast the biker’s partner was still on his stool.

“Kachina magic!” announced Ruby. “Don’t mess with it.”

The Navahos at the corner table smiled and glared at the cowboys still standing.

Jake and Ruby walked out, arm in arm, like Frankie and Johnny at the height of their madness, an undeniable force, a bullet train to the heart of darkness, invincible and true. Their legend would follow wherever they went and stories would be told to grandchildren.

As they walked across the street to cabin number nine, Ruby took a swig and passed the bottle. It felt like a beginning, a bond consummated in blood, tears and the liquid language of eternal love. Ruby felt alive and Jake had no desire to be anywhere but at Ruby’s side. It did not matter that they came from different worlds. Nothing mattered but the moment and the understanding that all of life on earth was encapsulated in a single particle of time. Divinity or chance, a hand reached out of the great mystery to push two particles together and together they would remain until they broke apart.

Tonight they would drink the worm!

They sat on their king sized double bed, feasting on vending cuisine, smoking and drinking until the worm settled and their souls began to dance.

Sweet serenade of sensual rapture, wet reptilian curls, a dance of moonlight on crystalline waterfalls, the magnetic pull of black hole gravity and the salted sea of earthly desire. Paralytic enchantment, suspension of time, abdication of the laws of physics, giving without will, receiving without wonder, Jake and Ruby danced to the music of life in the swirling, twisting, writhing center of all creation.

If this was not love, then it had no name and love was filled with envy.

Captured by Ruby’s glistening white body, her movement the poetry of truth, admiring Jake’s golden grace, his heaving strength, swimming in each other’s ponds of devotion, Jake believed in love and Ruby believed in destiny.

Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to arise…