Jim Morrison of Cayucos
In the summer of 1972, a year after his death, Jim Morrison moved to the beach community of Cayucos, California where he found employment as a lab tech assisting the local veterinarian. He’d always loved dogs—had been the guardian to numerous labs and retrievers—but was too embarrassed after his death to reunite with Sage, his last companion. From Paris he’d wired money home for kibbles and flea treatment, but was never sure if the funds had gone toward her care.
Now things were different. That last comment—just another film school fuck-up—had gotten under his skin. Who’d said that anyway? He couldn’t remember. Maybe he’d said it. It wasn’t impossible to say things like that to yourself. At any rate, Cayucos was removed from the fray. He’d already lost some weight jogging on the beach, and had switched from a carnivore’s diet to a regimen of leafy greens, tree nuts, and a food product by the name of tempeh. Jogging. People did that.
Mortimore was a pug. Little Mort, as his owner called him, had keratoconjunctivitis sicca, or KCS, which the vet explained as dry eye. It was common in pugs. Their eyes bulged from their skulls, and the lacrimal glands had to work overtime to produce enough tears to keep the eye healthy. If the glands became inflamed, you had KCS. The tell-tale sign was a stringy mucoid discharge covering the cornea. The vet gestured to Jim when she mentioned this. Jim nodded and pushed some hair behind his ear. Little Mort puffed and smiled, his quick pink tongue exiting and re-entering his mouth like a reptile’s.
Having lived in Paris, Jim knew that Little Mort meant Little Death, which of course meant orgasm. This is where Jim connected with dogs. There was a mystical, Theater-of-Cruelty aspect to an orgasm, and both dogs and Jim were unafraid to publicly inhabit that space. But that was the Jim of Paris. He would go home and write a poem about it later. Work was work, and this was a different Jim, and if he wanted to ascend the veterinary ladder he’d have to stay focused.
Lunch break, James? Betsy was somewhere in her 40’s, intelligent and calm. Her glasses appeared too large for her face, and for work she carefully pulled her wavy scrawl of reddish hair into a severe ponytail. Every animal mattered the same to Betsy. She wasn’t the kind of person, like a person in a band, who would choose sides—dogs or cats—and Jim wondered if maybe he was in love with her. If so, he wouldn’t start off the relationship by trying to copulate. He wanted to prove to Betsy that he was a listener, that he was capable of being more than just a lab tech. Standing before her was the 28 year-old Jim of Cayucos, not just another film school fuck-up.
Lunch meant walking down the street to the Natural Foods grocer. Betsy liked spears of dried papaya, and Jim found some in the bulk section. For himself, he purchased a small bag of carob chips and a yellow onion. One of the amazing-facts-that-you-didn’t-know about Jim Morrison was that he ate onions much like any other person would eat an apple: raw and unsliced. Of course they did a number to one’s breath, but for that Jim would suck on mint leaves and a sprig of catnip. The sprig often came in handy when Jim performed feline ear or rectal exams. He would slowly breathe on the patient, and the nervous cat might flop on its side or try to nuzzle his mouth. Betsy thanked him for the spears.
Disinfecting cages before locking up for the day, Jim couldn’t get the image of Little Mort’s pink tongue out of his head. Upon meeting the dog, its tongue flashing out then in, he’d immediately thought of the tongue of a lizard—perhaps a lizard who roamed the borderland dessert—and that at one time, after self-administering lysergic acid diethylamide, Jim had considered himself a lizard. The path to a lizard’s truth was through its tongue, and Jim instinctively recognized Little Mort’s health problem as originating not in the tear ducts, but in the secret alphabet of its tongue. He wouldn’t share this with Betsy. Some knowledge you just keep to yourself.
The plural of shaman is not “shamen,” but shamans. Shamans were everywhere. All you had to do was look around. Wherever there was healing, there was a shaman. Betsy was a shaman. Upon her care, sick animals renewed their lives with purpose. Now Jim did badly want to copulate with her. Driving 101 miles per hour on the way home to his apartment, Jim realized his destiny—he had been fated to cross paths with Betsy. Through her shamanic ways, Betsy had renewed Jim’s life without even knowing it. He owed her something. Pulling into the parking lot, Jim scrambled up the stairs to unlock his door. No, not jogging. A poem was brewing. It would be about a dog, maybe a dog with an orgasm problem. Now the words were coursing through him. His hand and the pencil in it trembled.
Leon Spinks’ La Bohème
My mom played Puccini on the radio. I didn’t know it was Puccini, I was a kid—who cares what it was? I’d sit under the kitchen table with my plastic soldiers while she ironed and sang. Never let anyone tell you how to dream. Or what you’re best at. All you need, all you really need, is for one person to believe in you, for that person to look you in the eye and say, “You gonna do something.”
I’m equipped to feel. Burned enough to think. My dad told me to my face I wouldn’t amount. Did my little brothers hear that too? In the opera, Rodolfo bottles up all his hurt and explodes. You have to let rage out. Hold it, measure it, tell it it matters, then let it go. Everybody thinks rage is meant to destroy, but if you take care of it—train it—it will shape your life.
I unload the night delivery at McDonald’s. It doesn’t matter I’m an Olympian, world heavyweight champion, even when they took it away. When I was mugged, the gold plate ripped from my gums, I walked home and bled on the couch. That’s when I realized—there’s something better than being great. It’s to do at least one great thing. Make it a thing that can live outside of you. If you’re destroyed, if rage turns on you, you still have that thing.
Ali said it. He knew he was the better fighter. But that night—I was ready and he wasn’t. He made no excuses, said I hit hard. I will always love him for that. What people don’t understand—you’re put into a ring to destroy the man you love, and when you succeed, you still have all these years. They come for you—the years, everything does—because an audience wants to see you fail. If you reach a place they could never get to, they want to see you at their feet.
Ali’s words are gone. He just sits in a chair. Rodolfo gave in—to thinking he could control the world around him. I remember a night in Montreal. It was the Olympics, Sugar Ray was our captain. He had to make sure we were in our rooms and went to bed on time. So I turned up my boombox and crawled out the window. They only found me because of the tracks in the snow. My clock was ticking loud. I heard it and knew—I had to see everything. When Ray grabbed my shoulder and turned me around, I saw the breath rising from his nostrils. He said, What’s wrong with you, man. Don’t you care? All I could do was smile.
