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\u2019d always loved dogs\u2014had been the guardian to numerous labs and retrievers\u2014but was too embarrassed after his death to reunite with Sage, his last companion. From Paris he\u2019d wired money home for kibbles and flea treatment, but was never sure if the funds had gone toward her care.<\/p>\n
Now things were different. That last comment\u2014just another film school fuck-up\u2014had gotten under his skin. Who\u2019d said that anyway? He couldn\u2019t remember. Maybe he\u2019d said it. It wasn\u2019t impossible to say things like that to yourself. At any rate, Cayucos was removed from the fray. He\u2019d already lost some weight jogging on the beach, and had switched from a carnivore\u2019s diet to a regimen of leafy greens, tree nuts, and a food product by the name of tempeh. Jogging. People did that.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s.<\/p>\n
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\u2019d have to stay focused.<\/p>\n
Lunch break, James? Betsy was somewhere in her 40\u2019s, 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.\u00a0She wasn\u2019t the kind of person, like a person in a band, who would choose sides\u2014dogs or cats\u2014and Jim wondered if maybe he was in love with her. If so, he wouldn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t-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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Disinfecting cages before locking up for the day, Jim couldn\u2019t get the image of Little Mort\u2019s pink tongue out of his head. Upon meeting the dog, its tongue flashing out then in, he\u2019d immediately thought of the tongue of a lizard\u2014perhaps a lizard who roamed the borderland dessert\u2014and that at one time, after self-administering lysergic acid diethylamide, Jim had considered himself a lizard. The path to a lizard\u2019s truth was through its tongue, and Jim instinctively recognized Little Mort\u2019s health problem as originating not in the tear ducts, but in the secret alphabet of its tongue. He wouldn\u2019t share this with Betsy. Some knowledge you just keep to yourself.<\/p>\n
The plural of shaman is not \u201cshamen,\u201d 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\u2014he had been fated to cross paths with Betsy. Through her shamanic ways, Betsy had renewed Jim\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
My mom played Puccini on the radio. I didn\u2019t know it was Puccini, I was a kid\u2014who cares what it was? I\u2019d 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\u2019re 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, \u201cYou gonna do something.\u201d<\/p>\n
I\u2019m equipped to feel. Burned enough to think. My dad told me to my face I wouldn\u2019t 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\u2014train it\u2014it will shape your life.<\/p>\n
I unload the night delivery at McDonald\u2019s. It doesn\u2019t matter I\u2019m 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\u2019s when I realized\u2014there\u2019s something better than being great. It\u2019s to do at least one great thing. Make it a thing that can live outside of you. If you\u2019re destroyed, if rage turns on you, you still have that thing.<\/p>\n
Ali said it. He knew he was the better fighter. But that night\u2014I was ready and he wasn\u2019t. He made no excuses, said I hit hard. I will always love him for that. What people don\u2019t understand\u2014you\u2019re put into a ring to destroy the man you love, and when you succeed, you still have all these years. They come for you\u2014the years, everything does\u2014because 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.<\/p>\n
Ali\u2019s words are gone. He just sits in a chair. Rodolfo gave in\u2014to 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\u2014I had to see everything. When Ray grabbed my shoulder and turned me around, I saw the breath rising from his nostrils. He said, What\u2019s wrong with you, man. Don\u2019t you care? All I could do was smile.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
That last comment\u2014just another film school fuck-up\u2014had gotten under his skin. Who\u2019d said that anyway? Maybe he\u2019d said it. It wasn\u2019t impossible to say things like that to yourself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":182,"featured_media":21280,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3530],"tags":[974,3788,3789,3790],"class_list":["post-20810","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-flash-fiction","tag-boxing","tag-jim-morrison","tag-leon-spinks","tag-opera","writer-laton-carter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20810","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/182"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20810"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20810\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21281,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20810\/revisions\/21281"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21280"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20810"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20810"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20810"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}