Burying Morrison

By Chris Ver Wiel

Did the cards lie? At midnight Rock Star Morrison Love would be dead. 12:02am. That’s when they saw him. The god of Love appeared from the void beyond, fired his weapon and Love was no more. Burying Morrison is a story, which straddles the delicate balance between reality and fantasy, life and death, love and pain. It is a story of true love, death and rock and roll.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chris Ver Wiel
• Release date: Feb 6, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301851669

Chris Ver Wiel

Chris Ver Wiel is an award winning writer/director with credits including Who Is Cletis Tout (Tim Allen, Christian Slater, Richard Dreyfuss), The Waiting Game, Rockula and In The Blink of an Eye. In February 2013, Mr. Ver Wiel successfully concluded negotiations with Parkway Productions and Penny Marshall (Big, A League of Their Own) for his original screenplay The Belle Star Friendly to be both produced and directed by Ms. Marshall in March 2013. Mr. Ver Wiel released the fiction novel Starbuck’s Nation in May 2008. Described as a post modern fairy tale, Starbucks Nation (Arcade Publishing, NY) is a contemporary satire on American pop culture lampooning America’s seemingly endless fascination with celebrity, reality programming and the overwhelming deluge of information and technology. Mr. Ver Wiel received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Arizona and has lived extensively abroad. He currently makes his home in Marina Del Rey, California.

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BURYING MORRISON

Chris Ver Wiel

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Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 Chris Ver Wiel

Published by Grafton Street Press

Cover Design by YourFlask

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1 - LUCIUS SALINAS

CHAPTER 2 - TRISTAN PAYNE

CHAPTER 3 - THE FUNERAL FOR HENRI DeLUTH

CHAPTER 4 - MORRISON LOVE

CHAPTER 5 - THE BAND

CHAPTER 6 - THE GREAT LIE

CHAPTER 7 - AMERICAN PIE

CHAPTER 8 - THE WHITE KNIGHT

CHAPTER 9 - THE DAY THE MUSIC DIED

CHAPTER 10 - DEATH

CHAPTER 11 - THE DESCENT

CHAPTER 12 - THE DISCOVERY

CHAPTER 13 - THE EMPEROR

CHAPTER 14 - THE SALES LIAISON

CHAPTER 15 - THE LOVERS

CHAPTER 16 - REQUIEM

CHAPTER 17 - THE FOOL

CHAPTER 18 - THE TOWER

CHAPTER 19 - THE HERMIT

CHAPTER 20 - UNDER THE GAZE OF AN ANGEL

CHAPTER 21 - THE HANGED MAN

CHAPTER 22 - EPILOGUE

CHAPTER 1

LUCIUS SALINAS

He was six feet two inches tall. When sober his eyes were blue. He was fair skinned, an albino who wore his hair combed back in the style of the iconic James Dean. He was tattooed from head to toe. There was no rhyme nor reason to his body art, each tattoo represented just another day of whim. Why else would he have Patsy Cline's face on the body of an angel he once saw on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel? He got the angel at a dice house in Rome. '05. He got the Patsy Cline after he heard I Go Out Walkin' for the first time. That was some two hundred and fifty years later. Sistine Angel 1705, Patsy Cline 1957. He was 1292 years old. They called him Lucius Salinas and he was the god of Love.

In actuality he was not the god of Love, he was a god of Love. The gods of Love are many. The gods of Love are everywhere, the break of dawn, the dead of night, the birth of a child, the loss of life. Love is there.

Lucius Salinas was not Cupid of Roman mythology nor Eros of Greek. He was not Amor, the son of Venus and Mars. There was no arrow to shoot which inspired romantic love. No wings, no harp. Lucius Salinas was a god of the Sandrine, the dark side of Love. The clouds. The side of love that makes you want to jump, not head first into the bliss, but head first into concrete.

To Lucius Salinas Love was war. His weapon of choice was a pneumatic spear gun, an air compressed, chrome plated hunting rifle. The grip was ivory and notched with his many conquests. His quiver was replaced by a leather pack, which held the razor sharp tools of his trade. He stored the weapon in a holster mounted to his 1994 Harley Softail Custom. The Springer's engine was bored and stroked to 96ci. 6 speed Rev. Tech polished chrome transmission. H.D. Fat Bob tank. Polished chrome motormounts, handle bar switches and shocks. Thunder header, chrome pegs and bad boy bars. The pig was painted bone white. A chrome heart with wings mounted over a midnight blue skull framed the tank.

Lucius Salinas loved music. Rock and roll music in particular. Bitten by the monster in 1954 when he first heard Elvis belt out That's Alright Mama, when he was introduced to Big Jo Turner's Shake, Rattle and Roll. To his mind everything went better with a hard driving guitar. He wasn't only mired down in the hard-edged beat of rock and roll, because as a god of Love, he understood implicitly how a perfectly crafted melody could both save and break a heart.

Nobody knocked Lucius Salinas on his ass. And if they did? He'd smile and say, nobody keeps love down. Then he'd stand up and punch you in the mouth. He'd break your jaw to remind you that love is pain.

To Lucius Salinas, the rhythm of love is a sublime orchestration, a delicate note, which weaves through the music of time. He has felt the broken hearts of countless generations, heard the cries of those not fated to love and was shepherd to their pain. That was the world of the Sandrine, for the Sandrine only traffic in True Love. Not the love of schoolgirl crushes. Not the love of the souls that coupled to escape the silence. The Sandrine traverse the world of fate and circumstance, the world of tragedy. Every notch on the rifle of Lucius Salinas was a victory for the light that was True Love.

***

Lucius watched him from the dark of shadow, the man with suicide on his mind, the man whose feet teetered some one hundred and fifty feet from the ground. The full moon carpeted the roof in light. Draped over the shoulder of the broken man was a two-foot glimmering chrome heart. A hollowed out, oversized charm one might find languishing from a chain on a neck. Affixed to the heart was a bulky chain, which was coiled up and around the desperate man's opposite shoulder. The chain was cuffed to his ankle. A ball and chain so to speak.

Lucius pulled his weapon close. The safety was off. He was in killing mode. This was not the first time he had watched the man. He had been watching him for years. The seeds to his love story being sown more than twenty-five years before. Still all Lucius could do was wait. Would tonight be the night he would finally do it? Would tonight be the night that Tristan Payne would jump?

CHAPTER 2

TRISTAN PAYNE

Who is the man that is Tristan Payne, the man ready to throw it all away? You could look on the internet, but what you'd find in your Google search is both a carefully groomed, well ordered and diligent portrait of the man, as well as a malicious, embellished and down right perverted recounting of a life. You see, Tristan Payne is famous. Rock star famous. Rock star rich and famous.

Tristan Payne is a founding member of arguably one of the most influential rock bands of the last quarter century. Morrison Love is that band and Tristan Payne has written every song on every album Morrison Love has ever recorded. He is six feet tall and weighs one hundred and seventy five pounds. He has an athletic build. A surfer’s build. His hair is shoulder length. He is a dreamer, a romantic- actually, a failed romantic.

He was born in Portland, Oregon on February 14, 1976. Valentine's Day. On the eve of his eighth birthday his mother Gwen and his father Michael were killed by a drunk driver on Portland's rain soaked Hawthorne Bridge. It was the first contact Lucius Salinas would have with Tristan Payne. As the young boy watched the caskets of his mother and father descend into the ground of Riverview Cemetery, Lucius Salinas reached out from the world beyond, he reached out to touch Tristan Payne's broken heart.

Thirty four year old Tristan Payne has never been in love. In his youth it was the very emotion he most desired. Love. True love. It was the truth that he would never acquire this virtue which defined him as a songwriter. He was famous for the broken heart which he brought to his music.

Of late, Tristan was again reminded of the pain he felt as a boy. He quite unexpectedly began to think of suicide again. He did not know why. Suicide was a feeling he thought he'd outgrown. With the world-wide success of Morrison Love he had learned to smile. It was an attribute he perfected even though he had all but given up on the idea of true love. Tristan Payne had given up on the very aspiration, which defined him. He feared that love could not find him now. He was famous. He was what he had dreamed of being. He had reconciled that love was not to be, that nobody could have it all.

Now, after all those years, Tristan was again reminded of the void, he was reminded of what it meant to be incomplete and his heart began to pine for a mate to his soul.

Lucius Salinas knows when Tristan rediscovered the pain. The void. It began after a dream, a dream orchestrated by the god of Love. It was time for Tristan Payne to find true love. It was time for Tristan Payne to jump.

***

April 18th, the Coachella Valley Music Festival. The band that was Morrison Love headlined that show. Three hours. Six encores. In the ensuing haze that is the after party of such an event, Tristan Payne had a dream. A vision. It was not real. It was a vision in a dream as he slept. A vision of a girl. She had green eyes, dark hair and wore an army jacket. On the jacket were pins, not medals, but tokens of remembrance. Mementos. She wore a silver chain with a hollowed out heart charm that hung effortlessly on her neck. She held a thermos in her right hand. A coffee thermos.

He did not get her name or where she was from. It was a dream. What he remembers most was her smile and what she said to him. I love you. I always have.

Tristan was overwhelmed. True love had finally found him. The only witness to the declaration from the girl who wore her heart on a chain was six feet two inches tall. He rode a Harley Softail Custom. He was the god of Love.

Tristan became depressed after the dream. For the first time in his life he knew what he wanted. Who he wanted. But where to find her?

***

On his return to Los Angeles, Tristan found himself alone in the back of a limousine, traffic on Vine Street in Hollywood stopped in both directions. It was a film premier. Lightbulbs flashed as stars walked the red carpet. Tristan was only minutes away from his entrance. No matter, as his thoughts were with one face, one voice. The girl in the army jacket, the girl with the thermos, the girl with the silver heart on a chain.

He was in the shadow of the Capitol Records building when it happened. It was just a blur that fell through the frame of his peripheral vision. There was no mistaking the crash. Something had fallen from the sky. Voices began to call, to scream. The curious climbed from their cars. Onlookers scurried from the sidewalks and into the street. Eyes turned from the red carpet.

Tristan didn't have to move at all. He had the perfect vantage point. His eyes looked out his window, his view clearly unobstructed. A man was dead on the roof of the car next to him. His eyes open, they seemed to stare directly at Tristan.

Fingers began to point up to an open window in the Capitol Records building. A window some ten stories above the ground. The facts pointed to the obvious conclusion. The man had jumped.

Tristan's eyes did not look to the open window above. His eyes watched the dead man who stared. He was transfixed by his eyes, which seemed far from dead. Transfixed until a photograph was freed from the dead man's grip. It wafted to the street below.

Tristan climbed from the limo. He crossed to the homeless photograph and picked it up. Before he could see the picture he was besieged by flashbulbs. Cameras all around flashing pictures. The oddity? The flashes were for Tristan. Photographers scrambled for a picture of the rock star beside the man who jumped. Nobody cared about the man who had fallen from the sky, only Tristan with a man who would never smile again.

Tristan quickly retreated to the safety of his limo. His eyes fixed on the dead man on the roof of the car. Now, to the photograph in his hand. It was wedding picture. It was the dead man on the car with his wife some twenty-five years before.

His name was Henri DeLuth. That night, the night the man that is Henri DeLuth jumped, Tristan Payne sat at his piano in his home in the Hollywood Hills. With the photograph in front of him he wrote a song for Henri DeLuth. It took all of fifteen minutes, as if the dead man was dictating the song himself.

In the following days papers it was reported the man was a widower who had lost his wife in the months before. He was an artist and musician from Echo Park. Friends and neighbors described him as a happy man prone to melancholy since his wife of nearly twenty-five years had passed. He called her his true love and from her loss he could never recover. There was no mention of Tristan in any of the papers.

The man who jumped, the man that was Henri DeLuth, profoundly resonated with Tristan Payne. So much so that Tristan used both his influence and stature to gain access to the tombs that are the Los Angeles Morgue. His intentions were noble enough. The dead man that seemed to look into Tristan's eyes deserved to have the photograph to which he so desperately clung. But it was not to be.

As Tristan arrived, the body of Henri DeLuth was being loaded into a hearse owned by the mortuary of Chaplin, Rommel and Krupp. The person that loaded the dead man's corpse wore an army jacket with a multitude of pins. She had green eyes and dark hair. She wore a silver chain with a hollowed heart, which rested effortlessly on her chest. As the body of Henri DeLuth mechanically slid into the back of the hearse she reached for her thermos of coffee.

Tristan retreated into the safety of a dark corner in the morgue garage. The person loading the body into the hearse from Chaplin, Rommel and Krupp was the girl that Tristan had dreamt of the night that was the Coachella Music Festival. The girl who said, I love you. I always have.

Watching, from the seat of his idling Harley soft tail, was Lucius Salinas.

Tristan kept the secret that was Henri Deluth, the secret of the man who fell from the sky and brought him in contact with the girl of his dreams. He kept the secret that was the girl with the thermos. These two secrets he kept for himself.

CHAPTER 3

THE FUNERAL FOR HENRI DeLUTH

Tristan did not attend the memorial for Henri DeLuth. Not exactly. He watched the small ceremony from the mausoleum, which overlooked the burial sight. He looked for the girl in the army jacket but she was not there. He thought of her eyes, her hair, the hollowed out heart shaped charm, which hung effortlessly from her neck. He thought of the dead man in the box. Was he with her now? The wife he missed so terribly?

Tristan crossed the cemetery lawn for the freshly dug grave of Henri DeLuth. The small gathering was gone. His eyes watched the two mortuary workers entrusted to lower the box and fill the void that would be the final resting place of the man who fell to his death.

Tristan stopped at the edge of the hole and the simple wood casket. The first worker readied the skip loader that would push the mound of dirt into the hole. The second worker pulled hard on a cigarette as he rested on his shovel. His eyes stared at Tristan.

I know you. It was an almost involuntary response from the man. You're the dude who plays piano.

Tristan's eyes turned from the dead man's box. He stared. Yeah. I play piano.

You're taller than I thought. That's the sort of crazy things people with shovels say when they meet somebody who's famous.

Tristan looked at the man. Yeah, I get that a lot. You guys want to make five hundred bucks?

The skip loader started. The man with the shovel crossed quickly, he reached in and turned the key to the skip loader off. Five hundred bucks? Did he hear right? The man in the skip loader wasn't so happy with his associate who operated the shovel, a tool anyone could manage even under the influence of prescription drugs or alcohol.

Five hundred bucks? For what?

It was the first time the man with the shovel or the man in the skip loader had ever opened a coffin on cemetery lawn, but five hundred bucks was five hundred bucks and open the box for the dude who played piano they did.

Tristan laid two things on the dead man's chest. First, the picture to which he so dearly clung, the wife so deeply missed. The final piece left by Tristan Payne was the original handwritten score he wrote for Henri DeLuth. He titled it simply H. DeLuth.

Tristan then turned his eyes to the marker of his wife Elizabeth. His fingers brushed the engraving. He thought she must be smiling.

The box was closed and sealed, five hundred dollars handed over. Tristan Payne turned and crossed the great expanse that was the Hollywood Forever Cemetery.

In the three months following the memorial for the man who jumped, Tristan wrote eleven songs, a rock opera inspired by the man that was Henri DeLuth. The songs were recorded in a small recording studio above a bar in Hollywood called Boardner's. Boardner's was Hollywood's oldest bar and a favorite haunt of the band before they were famous. Within one week of publication, the title track became the most downloaded song in the history of ITunes. Within two weeks the album had gone platinum. Double platinum within the month. A deal was made to bring the musical to Broadway, and of course this was Hollywood, so a deal was immediately struck to bring the opera to the big screen.

Still, all Tristan thought of was the dead man who stared at him from the crushed roof of the car. He thought of the girl who worked at the mortuary, the girl whom Henri DeLuth, through his simple act of giving up, brought into the reality of his life.

The story Tristan told of Henri DeLuth was an affair of the heart. The story was a simple one. A lovesick man devoted to the paramour he cannot have, for she lives in another world. His true love, the girl of his dreams, walks among the dead.

He never confessed to the true inspiration for his opera in order to protect the anonymity of the man. He used his name but told those who asked he took it from an obituary notice in The Los Angeles Times. That the name was simply the right meter for the music he wrote.

Tristan had never mentioned to a single soul that day on Vine beneath the shadow of the Capitol Records building. Nor that afternoon in the cemetery when he slipped the original score into the box that held the body of inspiration. Tristan confided to no one that in the three months in which he wrote the opera for Henri DeLuth he had watched the girl who wore her heart on a chain. He confided to no one that he was in love with the girl in the army jacket, a girl with whom he has never had one iota of personal contact.

He knew her name was Sarah. He knew she worked on the ninth floor of a building not more than two blocks from the street where Henri DeLuth crashed onto the roof of the car. He knew that she worked with the dead. In the three months in