Glimpses Page 7

  “What?” Gary said.

  “She was barely hurt, thank God,” Diane said. “She just bounced off the side of the car skinned her hands and knees. She ran right out in front of me as I was coming home. With all that rain and everything I didn’t see her. I can’t help but think what could have happened if I wasn’t already slowing down to turn in the driveway…oh God, it was just awful.”

  Larry put his arm around her and took her to get a drink. I was suddenly aware of the Doors tape again, the very end of the guitar solo, then a clean break and Morrison reciting, “Indians scattered on dawn’s highway bleeding…”

  And suddenly there it was, fully formed, in my head. I was shocked and ashamed that I had even thought of it. Still I knew from that first flash that I was going to do it.

  When Jim was four years old, so the legend goes, the Morrison family moved from Washington D.C., to Albuquerque. I knew all too well what the trip was like: no interstates then, just winding two-lane blacktop crowded with trucks and farm equipment. The Morrisons hit the last stretch, Santa Fe to Albuquerque, as the sun came up. A truck full of Indians had overturned and the dead and dying lay all over the road. Jim had gone crazy at the sight of them, screaming at his parents to stop and help. His father drove on by.

  Later Morrison said it was the single most important moment in his life. He came back to the image again and again, most obviously in “Peace Frog.” Death on the highway. Blood on the streets.

  I came home too wired to sleep. I washed my face and slicked back my hair and went up to the shop.

  I know Morrison liked American cars. Tonight I see him driving an Impala convertible, top down of course. He’s wearing brown leathers and a white cotton shirt. It’s three in the morning. Earlier he staggered out of a session at TTG where they had once again been unable to get anything done. He and Bobby Neuwirth and Tom Baker had driven over to Barney’s and played pool, until Tom wandered off with this teenage boy and girl, slipping Morrison a wink as he went out the door. God only knew what depravity the three of them were up to, even now.

  “Are we, like, going anywhere?” Bobby says.

  “Going anywhere?” Morrison says. They’re headed south on La Cienega, which is totally deserted at this hour, and Morrison floors it and cranks the wheel with his index finger. The car fishtails and careens around in a U-turn, tires screaming, and leaves a cloud of black burned-rubber smoke in the air. “Are we?” Morrison says, and guns it and spins again. “Going anywhere?” He looks totally calm, he sounds calm, but there’s something about his stare, he’s not looking at anything, his eyes might as well be rolled all the way back in his head, because Bobby has apparently pissed him off or made him feel self-conscious or insufficiently entertaining and now the demon has taken over. “Going, going, anywhere, anywhere?”

  Then Morrison calmly says, “Bat turn,” and does another U-turn, and the smell of burning tires hangs over them in a cloud. They’re headed north again, fast enough that both of them are being shoved down in the seat, much, much too fast.

  There is a gray blur off to the right. Then Morrison lunges at the brakes with his foot, his mouth open in astonishment even before the thud of impact, almost lost in the scream of the brakes, and just after it, even quieter, a sound like a hard-boiled egg cracking against a countertop. The Impala skids across the southbound traffic lanes, over the curb, and into a coin box for the L.A. Times.

  Steam hisses out of the radiator. Morrison and Neuwirth stumble out of the car, turn, see the body lying there on the pavement. “Oh shit,” Neuwirth says. “Oh shit, Jim. This is bad. I got to call the cops.”

  Neuwirth staggers off toward a phone booth. Morrison walks out into the street, not looking in either direction, eyes fixed on the body. It’s an old man, a wino, fifty years old, but he looks much older. He’s wearing a heavy tan corduroy coat despite the mild night. There is a pool of blood and yellow-gray brain tissue all around his head, which is cracked and slightly flattened where it hit the bumper.

  Morrison is still standing there when the cops come. Neuwirth sits on the curb nearby, head between his knees. Two other cars have stopped and Morrison is now pinned in their headlights, head cocked at an angle, eyes puzzled and amazed at the same time.

  The cops have their nightsticks out. They poke and prod Morrison into the back of the squad car. He is so stunned that he doesn’t resist them. Neuwirth gets in with him voluntarily. The first cop says, “Who was driving?”

  Bobby looks at his feet. Morrison says, “It was a hitchhiker. We picked him up over in Hollywood. He split after he hit the guy, just took off running, man. We tried to stop him.”

  “Bullshit,” the other cop says. “It was one of you two queers and I’m going to find out which one.”

  Morrison sneers. It’s not convincing. If you kill somebody while you’re driving drunk in California it’s murder. He’s facing hard time. His hands are cuffed behind him, so he had to slide forward to keep his knees from shaking.

  “Okay, fine,” the first cop says. “We’ll go down to the station.” He reads them both their rights from a small card.

  The station is linoleum and plate glass, the walls painted two shades of green. Even the prostitutes and drunks stare at Morrison’s long hair with open contempt. The face in his mug shot is bewildered, withdrawn. The cop who arrested him has by this time seen all the DUIs on his record. “Make a habit of this, don’t you, pretty boy?” he says. “My shift is over at six. I got us a private room booked. Just you and me, sweetie.”

  At five forty-five, Doors manager Bill Siddons arrives, lawyers in tow, to swing a quick arraignment and bailout. Siddons is tall and blond and long-haired, wearing a motorcycle jacket and no shirt. He has never seen Morrison look so afraid.

  “Get me out of here, man,” is all Morrison says.

  For two days Morrison holes up in the Alta Cienega Motel. Bobby Neuwirth and Tom Baker both come looking for him and Morrison sends them away. He’s not drinking anything stronger than Coors, no more than a six-pack or two a night, which his nervous system burns off as soon as he swallows it. When he comes into the studio again he is wired, pale, in the same leathers and white shirt he’s had on since the accident. “Let’s do it,” he says.

  They start “Celebration of the Lizard.” Morrison moves through the recitation much faster. His words are crisp. There is an urgency to them that everyone in the studio can feel. He breaks off during the “run to the mirror” section and says, “I don’t like it, Robbie, can you play something like,” and hums a guitar part. It’s somewhere between a police siren and a cry for help.

  Robbie says, “Yeah,” smiling.

  Ray says, “How about this against it?” and plays a riff. Order forms in the chaos.

  “I dig it,” Morrison says. “Let’s do it again. Harder, faster.”

  They take it from the top. Instead of a dead president, Morrison sings about a “dead derelict’s corpse on the side of the road,” and then goes on about “bloodstained cement like a terrible sunrise.” Rothchild sits hypnotized, just like he did during “The End,” unaware that he’s even in the studio, riveted by Morrison’s performance. It lasts seventeen minutes and thirty-two seconds. There are a couple of mistakes that can be edited out. Everyone looks at everyone else.

  Morrison leans against the window of the vocal booth, his face pushed up and distorted against the glass. It’s dead quiet for maybe a minute, then the girls on the couch start to applaud. Morrison slowly straightens up. He starts a smile, then it goes away. “I want to do another one. Can we do another song?”

  “Sure, Jim,” Rothchild says. “Anything you want.”

  There was more that I was too tired to hang on for. The remote fell out of my hand and the room went quiet.

  I only got up once on Sunday, then only long enough to make sure the song was really on tape, that it was as good as I remembered it. It was. I told Elizabeth I was sick. It’s something she can understand, a way for her to deal with me that doesn’
t involve sex or power games. A little of what I felt was triumph. I’d beaten Morrison and gotten what I wanted. I felt somewhat creepy about the way I’d done it, about the dead wino and the cops, but in the end it didn’t matter because none of it was real.

  Mostly I was exhausted.

  Elizabeth brought me chicken noodle soup for dinner. It was set out nicely on a tray with a placemat and a linen napkin in a holder and a Coke in a glass with ice and a flexi-straw.

  “Ever thought of becoming a waitress?” I asked her.

  “Ever wonder what it would feel like to have an entire Coke poured on your stomach?” She sat on the edge of the bed and smiled and pushed the hair away from my face. “I know what’s wrong with you.”

  “You do?”

  “Your mother’s coming Tuesday.”

  “You don’t have to remind me.”

  She’ll stay with us through the end of the week, then we’ll all drive to Houston for Christmas, exactly a week away. That’s where Elizabeth’s mother and father are, Edna and Willard Dean. For the last ten years, both sets of parents had insisted on having us for the holidays. We’d always spent Christmas Eve in Dallas and then driven all night to get to Houston for Christmas morning. If nothing else, this year promises lower mileage on the car.

  Even though Willard is retired Navy, like Morrison’s dad, Elizabeth never turned rebellious. Part of it may be her older brother and sister, who helped spoil her outrageously. Just the same, there is a lot of tension there, a lot of love-hate, especially between Elizabeth and her mother.

  Edna’s father, Elizabeth’s grandfather, was a fisherman in Cape Cod, but Edna brought Elizabeth up to be Queen of England. Literally. She taught her everything she would need to know just in case Prince Charles happened to pop the question. Still Edna seems to like me fine. I think she understands better than Elizabeth does that it’s okay to be working-class.

  I don’t know what it will do to add my mother to the mix. The Deans insist she’s welcome but I know she’s going to humiliate me somehow. Cry the entire time, or tell embarrassing stories from my childhood.

  “You need to talk to her, Ray. I mean about your father and everything. The way you feel.”

  “She knows how I feel. That’s one of the things she keeps apologizing for.”

  “I just thought it might help to actually say the words. To get them out there.”

  “How would that help? It’s Christmas, her first Christmas without him. It would only make things tougher on her.”

  She stood up. It was only a couple of feet but she was suddenly a long way away. “It wasn’t her I was worried about.”

  “You still think I’m crazy, don’t you? Because of all this music stuff.”

  “It’s not the music. Nobody’s saying you’re crazy. It’s just you’ve got all this resentment and anger and I think you need to figure out who it is you’re really angry at.” She closed the door on her way out.

  I looked at the food and couldn’t eat it. Me not talking? Me keeping things bottled up? I couldn’t believe she had the nerve to say it. I put the tray on the floor with the napkin still in its ring and watched the ice melt and the soup turn cold.

  I meant to work on the album Monday. Instead I went through my videotapes, watching The Compleat Beatles and Jeff Beck at the ARMS Show and finally Enter the Dragon. A wasted day. I couldn’t face Morrison again, not yet.

  I hadn’t had any beer all day Sunday. By Monday afternoon I was overdue. I skipped lunch and ate popcorn and drank Coors in front of the tube.

  Tuesday was the twentieth. My mother arrived and that was the end of the Doors for now. I fixed us grilled cheese sandwiches when we got home from the airport, and my mother prowled uneasily around the kitchen. There was a paper sack of Coors empties that I hadn’t yet taken out to the garage. She made sure I saw her look at them even though she didn’t say anything.

  After lunch she came upstairs with me and sat on the couch while I worked. Mostly she read or did needlepoint, and the rest of the time she sorted through her paperwork and copied one list onto another. I already wanted a beer but I didn’t want a lecture. I waited another hour then went downstairs on some excuse or other and chugged one while she wasn’t looking.

  Morrison told the Elektra publicity people that his parents were dead. In fact both his parents outlived him, but once he was in the band, once he had the power to cut them off, he did. He told his management not to take their calls or let them backstage, and he never set eyes on either of them again.

  I crushed the empty can in my hand and looked at the stairs to my shop. “Be gone,” I whispered. “Go away.”

  When Elizabeth got home it went from bad to worse. Elizabeth makes my mother nervous. She still isn’t convinced that Elizabeth likes her. I can sympathize. After eleven years I’m not entirely sure Elizabeth likes me. Loves me, depends on me, whatever those things mean, sure. But you have to know somebody to like them, have to be willing to take them pretty much as they are.

  When she’s around, my mother apologizes for everything. “I’m sorry, but I have to go to the bathroom.” “I’m sorry, but I’m going to go ahead and have breakfast. I can’t help it, I’m hungry.” Worst of all, she starts talking baby talk: “We gonna have us dinner now?” Her voice goes up an octave or two, she squints and shows her teeth, sometimes she grabs the thighs of her sweat pants and tugs at them like a shy five-year-old. Apparently this behavior was some kind of turn-on for my father but now it seems so desperately out of place that it knots me up with rage.

  When my father died he was working on an underwater site in the San Marcos River. PBS did a documentary about the river and my father was in it for fifteen minutes or so. My mother has a copy of the tape but no VCR, so she brought it with her to Austin. We all sat and watched it Tuesday night.

  It was disorienting to see my father and hear his voice. Mostly he seemed pompous and artificial. I couldn’t get past my annoyance enough to feel anything else.

  Even worse was a tape she brought from one of the other divers on Cozumel. My father is in the background of a couple of shots—sitting in a taxi with my mother, suiting up with a couple of other people on deck. He looks old, used up, his eyes too wide, like he’s having to strain to keep them open at all. Most of the tape is underwater footage but there are shots of the hotel, the divemaster, the boat, some women in swimsuits, and it all seems kind of sexy. Maybe it’s just the idea of the tropics, what with the weather so cold and gray outside. Maybe it’s memories of my honeymoon with Elizabeth, which we spent there nine years ago.

  Elizabeth took my hand as we sat there and rested her head on my shoulder. It was a comfort, though I doubted it would lead to anything more. Sure enough, by the time we got to bed, the mood had passed and she went right to sleep.

  Wednesday morning my mother had me show her how to work the VCR. She watched both tapes again while I worked upstairs. First I turned the stereo up so I wouldn’t hear her. That made me self-conscious, so I turned it off and found myself listening to every creak of the furniture.

  Friday, on the drive to Houston, she rode in the back seat so she could lie down if her back started to hurt. She talked continuously, reading the highway signs and billboards out loud, like she would disappear if she couldn’t hear the sound of her own voice. We stopped for gas in LaGrange and while Elizabeth was in the rest room I took her aside. “Look, Mom, you don’t have to talk all the time. We can just listen to the tape deck or look at the scenery.” Her face was numb. “We love you.” I put my arm around her, which was like hugging a marble statue. “You don’t have to entertain us or anything. You don’t have to apologize all the time. We want you here. Just your being here is enough.”

  We never touched each other much. She didn’t seem to know how to react. “I’m sorry,” she said, and went back out to the car.

  I paid for the gas and Elizabeth came out of the bathroom. “I talked to her,” I said.

  “And?”

  I shrugged. We
got back in the car and a few miles outside LaGrange my mother started to cry. I was driving and there wasn’t much I could do except reach back and take her hand. She squeezed it hard, and used her other hand to fumble through her purse for a tissue to blow her nose. Elizabeth looked at me, then stared out the windshield.

  As soon as we got to Houston, Edna took my mother under her wing; they immediately retreated to the kitchen for coffee. Elizabeth’s brother and his longtime lover were already there, with a pitcher of vodka tonics already mixed. They gave me hugs and a couple of drinks to get me through until Elizabeth’s sister and her husband pulled in from New Orleans. They put Wheel of Fortune on the TV and I begged off to study a manual I’d brought with me on CD lasers.

  I went upstairs and lay down. I could hear them shouting happily down in the den as I closed my eyes. I was wiped out from the drive, from my mother’s constant pain, from the effort of keeping up a show of holiday spirits.

  This is not my favorite time of year. When I was a kid it seems like we were always on the road for Christmas. My birthday is the week after and what I remember most is waking up in some antiseptic motel in nowhere I’d ever been before, being told “Happy Birthday” as I climbed back into the car.

  As far as I could tell, Christmas was one long imposition on my father, to the point where he actually walked around saying “Humbug” all the time. I never understood the problem. The only person he actually had to shop for was my mother, since she took care of everybody else. As soon as I was old enough, he delegated that to me. One year, after I’d refused to help anymore, all he gave her was some money—which was pretty meaningless since they had a joint account and she didn’t work—and a chocolate bar. Practical gifts were always big around our house: silverfish packets, nose hair clippers, toilet seat covers.