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Sometimes, we would smoke a little pot she cadged off a male admirer, exhaling through an empty toilet roll with a Downy sheet pulled taut over one end to mask the smell.
"What do you mean, the devil?" I asked.
"Like, he's been to the dark side, you know? But he's still, like, good. He's just so . . . alive."
Well, kindof.
I preferred the poster on the other wall, a color photograph of a softer, gentler Jim in an unbuttoned shirt and aviator sunglasses stood on a beach, literally gazing at his navel. A piece of his poetry was superimposed over the image in large italics, something about inner freedom and the children of the sun in the infinite universe. It didn't make a lick of sense to me and suffered from what I found even then a debilitating lack of punctuation, but I was certain it would, very soon, once I had started high school and experienced a boy's tongue, among other things, in my mouth.
And when that did finally happen, on an air mattress in the dark basement, Riders on the Storm egged me on.
Girl, you gotta love your man, Jim entreated me, and I imagined extra lyrics: despite his sour breath and copious saliva and the fact that your beautiful friend is giving a hand job to the guy you really like in the next room.
It was my obligation to make out with this boy, even though his skater shorts camouflaged hips of alarming width. A cause greater than myself depended upon it. Dionysus needed me to unzip his pants.
You gotta take him by the hand.To gingerly remove his penis from his underwear was to score one for the all the naked Indians. To
To put it, gagging, into my mouth, guaranteed no less than total enlightenment. |
put it, gagging, into my mouth, guaranteed no less than total enlightenment.
A couple of days later, when my mother saw the hickey on my neck and grounded me, by rights I should have run off to Venice Beach to be with the flower people and live a life of inner freedom. But I didn't. Instead I sat in my room, ate an entire bag of marshmallows, and thought, Fuck you, Jim Morrison!
So I started to look past the man himself and at his influences, the list of which reads like an ur-canon for a certain kind of disaffected teen. There was William Blake (too spiritual), Rimbaud (too self-pitying), the Beats (why couldn't any of these people use a fucking comma?), all of which clutter your bookshelf and your knapsack until you figure out what you really like. It turned out I liked Evelyn Waugh and crossword puzzles and watching reruns of Taxi with my dad. I liked Garrison Keillor. I developed new, more discreet crushes on charismatic singers; while one could hang pictures of Stephen Malkmus or Wayne Coyne on one's wall, few people would know who they were and if they did (after all, this was Omaha in the mid-nineties) they were probably opening for them on tour that summer. The American voice of the sixties I most identified with turned out to be less Ken Kesey and more Philip Roth. I didn't want to take peyote and have visions in the desert; I wanted to marry a nice psychoanalyst or film critic, live in a brownstone in Park Slope with books and really nice rugs, and send checks to progressive political causes.
I didn't want to die young. In fact, I wanted to put off dying as long as possible.
So, Jim Morrison, I salute you for setting me at a tender age on the path to the utterly bourgeois. For holding me up to the magnifying glass of Total Freedom and finding me wanting. Also, years later, having ingested many hallucinogenic drugs, drunk countless bottles of alcohol, traveled abroad, meditated, and had sexual relations with many, many, people, I can safely say I still don't know what the fuck that poem was about.
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| ABOUT THE AUTHOR: |
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Rachel Shukert is the author of Have You No Shame?. Her work has also been featured in Best Sex Writing 2008, Best American Erotic Poems, and 2033: The Future of Misbehavior. She lives in New York City with her husband and her cat. Her website is rachelshukert.com. |
©2006 Rachel Shukert and Nerve.com
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