End Of The Night

This short story details three dreams I’ve had about Doors singer Jim Morrison. I was a big fan of the Doors in grade school and high school. The second dream I had of him is happy. The first and last dreams are sad. Janis Joplin even came along for the ride in the last dream. I don’t think that Jim would have made a great friend, based on the way Doors manager Danny Sugarman portrayed him in the 1980 biography, No One Here Gets Out Alive, but Jim was certainly a colorful character.

     I had another vivid dream about Jim Morrison this morning. The first dream I had about Jim was pretty gross. I dreamt that my father dug up Jim's grave so that I would have someone to play with. He was a carbon copy of Jim, as if someone actually traced Jim's lines and overlaid him onto a video screen. Everything was cool, we hung out, but then he started decaying and walking with a limp, and the traced lines became blurred until they were totally distorted, and then he died again. Gruesome, yes, but it's strange the way our subconscious works.

     My second dream about Jim is nicer and more vivid. I dreamt that Jim Morrison, Arthur Rimbaud, River Phoenix, Leonardo DiCaprio and my friend Ross and I were drinking absinthe at a bar and hanging out talking. Then we grew wings and flew around the sky over the mountain tops like eagles! The view was majestic and breathtaking, and the feeling of freedom was truly exhilarating. I guess we flew because we are all poets and it is symbolic of the rush we get when we write something cool (actor River Phoenix was experimenting with symbolist poetry before he died and would leave poetic messages on friends' telephone answering machines. Leo also writes poetry).

     My third and most recent dream about Jim Morrison is a little sad. Janis Joplin came along for the ride too! I dreamt I was in a bar and in walked Jim. He had a black leather suit on. I made some comment to him, and he took out $20 and handed it to me and said, "Hey kid, buy yourself a drink!" I handed the bill back to him and said, "No way, you're the king! You keep it!" We talked for a bit and then Janis Joplin came by and they decided to leave. I walked outside with them and Jim turned to me and said, "You can't come!" They turned and ran into the parking lot and jumped into a Volkswagon Beetle, but they hesitated just enough for me to jump into the running vehicle. I slammed the door shut as the car took off and piled into the back seat. Jim was driving erratically and telling stories and laughing. He asked me where my parents were and I said my mom died of a drug overdose and I lived with my father.

     We came to a field and stopped for a bit. The sun shone brightly on some rocks nearby. Janis sat in a field and we talked while Jim took a leak. She looked radiant and tan. And she looked strangely like Melissa Etheridge, who might be playing Janis Joplin in an upcoming bio pic. I said to her, "You look beautiful, like a sunflower." "Really?", she said in her raspy voice, with a smile. A tear gleamed out of the corner of her eye. I told her not to tell Jim that my father lived close by, in a big house. I didn't want him to think I was a rich brat. She nodded. Jim zipped up, walked towards us and yelled out, "Ok, let's go for a road trip!" "Let's go to the Trading Post," exclaimed Janis, "they have a lot of sluff jackets (snakeskin jackets)." (I didn't know what "sluff" meant until I looked it up in the dictionary and was taken aback by its definition of "discarded snakeskin"! As director Akira Kurasowa once said, "In dreams we are geniuses.")

     Jim pulled into a farm that had a gas tank and he offered the lady $10 to fill up. She said through the window to hang the tenspot on the clothesline and she'll reel it in through the window! So he filled up the tank, but then got a mischievous grin on his face and doused the car roof with gasoline. "It's getting hot in here. C'mon baby, light my fire!" he exalted with glee as he lit the match and set the car on fire with us inside (a product of watching Oliver Stone's factually incorrect The Doors movie I guess). We jumped out of the car and rubbed the flames out with our jackets. "That was a pretty sick thing to do, Jim," Janis exclaimed. The police came by to make sure everything was alright and Jim drawled in his Southern accent, "The car just caught fire, officers, it was spontaneous combustion I think!" The officers said "Now you've gone and missed the Music Festival you were supposed to play at." "Oops", Jim smirked. We piled into the cars and drove off.

     "What year is this?" I asked Janis in a drunken haze. "It's October 1st, 1970," she replied. I started crying because I knew she would be dead soon, in three days, on my birthday no less. "What's the matter?", she asked with concern as she wiped a tear from my eye. "Oh, nothing, it's my birthday October 4th." Suddenly Jim's arms stretched out until he was pushed back into the back seat but still driving because of the length of his arms. Janis and I were pushed to either side of him as he drove. Then his arms started bleeding and we pulled over to the side of the road. Jim collapsed and just died on the spot in our arms. It was eerie and sad. There's nothing more to report, except the dream ended there abruptly...

Ralph Haselmann Jr. Bio (Short)

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Ralph Haselmann Jr ,editor
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ralphylucidmoon@yahoo.com, www.lucidmoonpoetry.com