I’d always tried to be like someone but I gave that up when I started on Effexor—it made me friendly. Besides, it’s a tired game, all take and no give. I’m learning to empty myself and I’m learning it may be impossible. I contain multitudes, as they say, packed tightly between a god-complex and self-flagellation—this is what I call my Slavic sensibilities. Every morning I wake up preemptively enraged, then I go do my silly little tasks like everyone else. I spend too much time reading online anonymous forums. I seek out the most insane people online and commit their Twitter threads to memory—this is what I call my socialist education. I’ve never once listened to a podcast, but I know which ones are good—i.e. masturbatory and funny—and which ones are bad—i.e. masturbatory and unfunny. I’m an expert on comedy. Taste may classify the classifier but comedy transcends. I think I should start a podcast myself but I don’t have much to add to the conversation. I can parrot Alex Jones’ poetics and 4chan’s greentext punchlines, but like I said, it’s a tired game. I’d rather write for an obscure online journal in some armpit of the internet that’ll one day hammer the final nail into my coffin. (I could expedite my journey into obscurity, finely craft my cancellation. I know. But 4chan likes nothing more than self-martyrdom and dead girls, and while I’ve always tried to be like someone, I’ve never cared too much about being liked.) I’d always tried to be like someone and I said I gave up when I started Effexor but the real reason is because all my idols are dead. All my idols are dead and I’ve buried them inside me—my guts, tied up with the scraps called memory I could salvage. I tried explaining this to my gastroenterologist, but she still told me stay away from gluten. All my idols are dead and an algorithm will say of my Spotify history that I’m stuck “dry-humping Jim Morrison’s grave.” * It strikes me now that I know very little biographical information on Jim Morrison, but I imagine the sexual fantasies I’ve had about him would be accurate enough. “So much forgotten already/ So much forgotten/ So much to forget” They all start with an open book, its spine cracked beyond repair. It’s probably Nietzsche in the original German. The Doors’ drummer John Densmore said, “Nietzsche killed Jim Morrison,” so it’s only fair that little deaths precede. So, there’s an open book, probably Nietzsche, or something else he’d feel the need to explain to me—like Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, the band’s namesake—not because he saw himself as a conduit—he did—but because he saw everyone else as one, too. He’d know I’d want to know. And I’d let him. I’d let him know and know and know. “Reaching your head with the cold, sudden fury of a divine messenger.” Then, there’s the question of leather’s breathability. And the chokehold grip of his vintage pants. He’s doused in patchouli. In his low porosity hair, a lingering dampness. A dollop of avocado hair mask he hadn’t washed out. “Great glowing funky flower’d beast// Great perfumed wreck of hell” It’s not pleasant but it’s Jim-fucking-Morrison and suddenly I’m self-conscious of my own artificial scent. The antiperspirant he’d say causes cancer. The bubblegum body spray that smells like baby prostitute. I don’t know why I’m performing—it’s my sexual fantasy, I should be the one making the rules. “It was really wild/ She started nude & put/ on her clothes” I suppose I am because we never have sex. We stare at the ceiling and talk about our mothers. Morrison was an army brat. His parents never beat him but used military degradation tactics to discipline their three kids. After graduating from UCLA, he cut ties. Mostly. It’s my sexual fantasy so he tells me he feels remorse about claiming he was an only child in the early days of his stardom. He tells me he understands if his siblings harbor resentment. He was the oldest, after all. We don’t talk about Pamela Courson. He knows he didn’t deserve her. Men never deserve their muses. “Great slimy angel-whore/ you’ve been good to me” * The Village Voice once referred to Morrison as “America’s Oedipal nightingale.” He says he likes the descriptor because of the work it makes the tongue do—Oedipal nightingale, Oedipal nightingale, Oedipal nightingale. This would make a good podcast intro. * I’m watching HWY: An American Pastoral for the first time. On YouTube. Morrison is indifferent to the accessibility of the platform. HWY: An American Pastoral opens with a police siren that morphs into a wind instrument medley that sounds ominously like howling. Morrison emerges from a stream, the flow of a waterfall like electronic feedback. He lies in the sun. He is still in tight pants. HWY: An American Pastoral is everything you’d expect it to be for an experimental piece filmed in Los Angeles and the Mojave Desert in the spring and summer of 1969. Discomfort, even during the musical montages. A sense of impending doom carves its nest in your chest and sits, breathing just enough, for 50 minutes. I mean, I’ve read Didion. I know about 1969. Not the 1969 my mom remembers—the Mets winning the World Series, landing on the moon. She sees the world through rose-tinted glasses. And I love her for it, but no wonder I felt the need to look elsewhere for structure. * A friend of Morrison told Radical Reads that he “really seemed to become what he read sometimes.” Jim Morrison by any other name… To think this leather-clad softboy was trying to be like someone. He was trying to give you something, dear friend, for your own sake, and you misread the generosity as preoccupation. “We are obsessed/ with heroes who live for us and whom we punish.” * I’m disillusioned with 4chan’s performative transgressions. If you’re not familiar, consider yourself lucky—the future is for normies. But for now, it’s for us—me and Morrison and our violently unsexy sex poems. In one scene of the Super8 (do they still sell those?) porno Morrison and I make in Room 32 of the Alta Cienega Motel in West Hollywood—his primary residence from 1968 to 1970—we talk about anonymity. “Camera, as all-seeing god, satisfies our longing/ for omniscience.” We talk about anonymity and the loneliness one must feel to drag another through an imageboard warzone, uncredited. How a man cannot claim himself if he cannot claim his idea. I don’t know if I believe him, the way the stone blue of his eyes glaze over, power-sick at the thought of his unflinching notoriety on /mu/. We’re falling into a familiar pattern. I want to save him from himself. We talk about anonymity as the Super8 captures the most audacious upskirt shot of the century. Then, a disorienting flicker, and Morrison and I switch outfits. His pants don’t fit me but he doesn’t call attention to it. My dress fits him too well. “Someone new in your knickers// & who would that be?” We read to each other our poems, unheard even to ourselves. He gifts me a line from “Lament for my cock” and tells me to make better use of simile. Metaphor, he tells me, is a kind of restraint. He knows restraint from his army brat origins. He tells me he is interested now only in giving. To himself, mostly. He laughs. “I write like this/ to seize you” * After a conviction of indecent exposure at a Miami concert in March 1969, Morrison tried to keep a low-profile—as low as his stardom would allow. He hesitantly took an interview with Rolling Stone in July, stating, “[T]here’s much less bullshit” in club venues. He’d arrived at the Miami show already drunk. Doors producer Paul Rothchild said booze produced for Morrison a Jekyll and Hyde effect. So, Mr. Hyde played The Dinner Key Auditorium. His stage presence that day was otherwise underwhelming. Jeans and wrinkled linen. His formerly lithe frame had filled out. He stumbled through his songs. He berated the audience. He drank more. Then, he cracked— “You didn’t come here for music, did you? You came here for something more, didn’t you? You didn’t come to rock’n’roll. You came here for something else, didn’t you? You came here for something else—what is it? You want to see my cock, don’t you?” I ask him about it now, if he still feels the concert model lends itself to a “crowd phenomenon that really hasn’t that much to do with music.” If he knows what he meant when he said that, if it was an act of self-preservation for America’s Oedipal nightingale (Oedipal nightingale, Oedipal nightingale). If “crowd phenomenon” is not the ultimate objective of ritual, something he mentioned five times in that interview, alone. I tell him his conviction has since been overturned—he was pardoned by Florida’s clemency board in 2010. I ask if this will change his answer. He cites Doors keyboard player Ray Manzarek. In a 1998 interview, Manzarek said that the incident was a mass hallucination, that “it was Dionysus bringing forth, calling forth snakes." Morrison says he supposes it doesn’t matter, if he whipped it out or not. Celebrity demands uproar. If he stood there long enough someone would’ve whipped it out for him. Like I’m doing now. I think about other stories I’ve heard. Like when Janis Joplin broke a whiskey bottle over his head at a party. I shouldn’t bring this up. I do anyway. I tell him I think he’s superficial, but so am I. I mean, I’m no Pamela Courson. I’m no Janis Joplin, either, but I suppose the body comparison is more accurate. Here, he turns to me. The Super8 zooms into our knees, now touching. He whispers into the bed about actor and spectator and prisoner and dancer and maybe what I feel isn’t lust or love but desire for embodiment— Out of the 49 pins I have in my Pinterest board titled “unfucking real people,” Jim Morrison accounts for 32 of them. The rest are nameless, at least to me, save for some screengrabs of Kristen Stewart in that one Rolling Stones music video. And I ask for an impossible decision. “The skin swells and/ there is not more distinction between parts of the/ body.” * Jim Morrison was found dead by Pamela Courson in the bathtub of their Paris apartment on July 3, 1971, a little after 6:00a. He reportedly appeared to be smiling. Morrison had left California for Paris earlier that year. His alcoholism reached new lows—he was drinking almost 40 beers a day while recording the Doors’ final album, L.A. Woman. He’d gotten fat. His voice lost its sultry quality and took on something groveling. He left California for Paris to get better. Word of his death made it to his family—and the American press—six days later. Courson inherited Morrison’s estate, which is never a good look for a young woman, married or not. Here’s where it gets messy. Or, messier. There was no autopsy— she allegedly misled the American Embassy to say there was no next-of-kin, ensuring a swift burial. No investigation. Again, no autopsy. The death certificate, citing heart failure, is signed with some illegible drawl and she couldn’t recall the doctor’s name. When Doors manager Bill Siddons arrived in Paris on July 6, the certificate had already been signed, the coffin already sealed. Only Courson and Alain Ronay, a friend of the couple’s living in Paris, had seen the body. No one really thought she was a murderer but it was suggested she gave him heroin and said it was coke. He was buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery where he remains today, despite a 2016 bid by Florida officials to bring him stateside. I tell him about the theories. Target of a state-sanctioned movement to wipe out counterculture icons. Murdered by a Wiccan ex. Alive and well and spotted in Tibet. There’s a twinkle in his eye but it quickly dims. Courson herself died of overdose only three years later. She’d been a heavy user. It’s my sexual fantasy so she won’t make an appearance. I tell him I’m sorry. “I met you/ & now you’re gone// & now my dream is gone” * Note: All quoted material comes from Morrison’s The Lords and The New Creatures, a posthumously published collected works.
Rachel Stempel is a queer Ukrainian-Jewish poet based in Binghamton, NY.