A Ride With Jim

The Doors were a mythic Southern California band, led by a Dionysian shaman named Jim Morrison. I was a Doors groupie in their early beginnings in Venice. It was 1965, early afternoon, and I was wandering on Venice Beach, coming down from an orange sunshine escapade the previous night before, where I had encountered some equally stoned girls from Loyola-Marymount. We ended up tripping together, buoyed upon the perfumed trade winds and the swirling starry skies that appeared like a Van Gogh painting. We landed at someone’s beach house, I’m not clear whose. But in the morning, I somehow felt a vague sense of danger akin to hearing the parent’s car door slam in the driveway while you were engaged in some forbidden activity of some kind. It was because of this that I left without saying goodbye and I found myself wandering down Venice Beach in the morning at the high tide line, which every Southern California boy knew was the property line of beach property and conferred free passage through the otherwise private yards of the fortunate. Aimlessly ambling along in the shiny hard packed sand, I heard some magical melody lilting on the breeze which made me stop and prick my ears like a coyote in the manzanita scrub of the looming hills. There was the unmistakable sound of live percussion. It was a band! I followed my ears and stumbled upon a smallish ramshackle beach pad, the patio facing the ocean, strewn with seashells, beer cans, cigarette butts and whiskey bottles. Eight peeling wooden patio doors opened to the sea, and revealed a large room, which seemed out of place compared to the smallness of the rest of the cottage, and there was a band hard at work on a passage of a song; a small throng of youths sat raptly around sharing a joint. The smoke swirled upward and mingled with the hanging fog of incense. The poetry from the speakers was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard. The band was working on a tune that would later be named “Moonlight Drive”:

Let’s swim to the moon, uh huh

Let’s climb through the tide

Penetrate the evenin’ that the

City sleeps to hide

I heard this marvelous syntax, gasped in admiration and looked at the singer, who was introduced to me as Jim, and said “that is just poetry, man, like Yeats or something.” I had just written an essay on the Yeats poem “Innisfree”. He took a drag from the joint as it made its way around and his eyes lit up. “You like poetry, man?” “Yeah man, I love poetry” Jim cocked his head and looked at me with these deep hazel shiny dilated eyes. I imagine mine looked very similar. “Far out”, said Jim. He lit up a cigarette, smoke curling from his pouted lips. “What’s your favorite?” I scanned my sunshine laced memories, trying to conjure up a suitably hip tome, something cool by Ginsburg or Dylan Thomas. Nothing. But then, I realized my most beloved poem that was with me always, was a piece often read to me by my Grandfather, who cherished it. I look up at Jim, whose gaze is somewhat bemused. “Frost”, I say. “Stopping By The Woods On A Snowy Evening. I love that poem. I have a lot of feelings tied up in it.” He takes a long drag off his cigarette, eyes closed, nodding. And just like that, I was in.

I became a regular in the kid groupie sense. I was funny, smart, and had great acid so Jim loved me. Looking back I realized I probably reminded Jim of a kid from his street growing up, or his little brother. I was also an avid reader; so was Jim. He never talked about it much but he had a pretty cool childhood very similar to mine. Affluent yet grounded. Three kids in the family. He liked to reminisce about his childhood but it seemed like he would keep this aspect quiet when the others came around. The only parts of it that gained legend status was the time he was traveling through Arizona with the folks and they came upon an accident where a bunch of Navajos were riding in a pickup and were scattered all over the highway. I told him that happened to me also; my dad traveled to Arizona to dig in the turquoise mines and we came upon a drunk driving crash that had thrown bodies all over the pavement. He was fascinated by my stories of the petrified forest. Every so often, I was assigned to accompany Jim on one of his errands, possibly because I looked so whitebread and had no fear of cops due to my status as an entitled kid from a wealthy family in Calabasas. They felt that it might serve as a counterbalance to Jim’s various proclivities which often caused him to get sidetracked for days. We were at this old building off Speedway they had set up like a rehearsal hall. Jim wanted to “take a ride and clear my head.” Someone decided I should go with him. Anyway, we were riding around, it was July or August, and we were in a beautiful white ’61 Impala convertible with blue trim and a “409” badge on the fender. Top down, zooming around Venice like you would expect; Jim drove like a teenage guy from So Cal. He loved fast American cars. Suddenly we screech to a halt in front of an Owl- Rexall Drugs and he leaves the motor running and dashes inside. He comes out about five minutes later with a bottle of Wildroot-which in the 60’s was a black and yellow labeled hair tonic/conditioner product men put in their hair when grease was a factor of coolness and the only way to get a true ducktail.

So off we go, and it being summer in So Cal we’re sunburned anyway, and until he mentioned it, I hadn’t noticed riding around in the convertible was kind of sun burning my arms and shoulders even more. By now we’ve gone down Ocean Ave to where it drops down to PCH and we’re headed north, going about 65. “Take the wheel!” yells Jim and starts to fumble with the Wildroot bottle. I think this is hilarious and I’m steering over Jim as he unscrews the bottle cap and chugs down a big slug of the stuff! He then pours out a big white glop in his hands and rubs it all over his arms and neck. He takes back the wheel and hands the bottle to me. Noting I’m giving him that “you crazy motherfucker” look, he smiles and says “No! It’s good for you! It’s made with LAN-O-LIN! that stuff is magic! It’s in Camel milk! Drink some! Drink!” I know perfectly well that Wildroot is fucking hair crème, but Jim knows a lot more than me at my tender age. He’s a fucking shaman, for chrissakes. So I drink. It tastes about like if you could imagine drinking hair conditioner would, and trying to look cool, I suppress a gag. Jim laughs uproariously at this, magnified by the ocean wind buffeting us. He motions with his hand “rub it on your arms!” So I do. To my surprise it feels good, smooth and cool. “Great, Jim, great. It feels good. But don’t ask me to drink any more.” He nods, smiling, lost in reverie by this time, not an unusual state for Jim. We glide north on the warm ocean breeze as the blue lapis of the Pacific glimmers like a dream. It was a magnificent interlude.

A more mature individual who had lived long enough to develop some risk aversion would have been screaming at the top of their lungs by the time we passed Paradise Cove, as we were averaging around 90. I just laughed.

“I’m gonna live forever! I’m indestructible! The odds are with me!”

This was pretty much every teenage boy’s mantra. I suspect this temporary form of insanity was testosterone fueled. Sixty, seventy, eighty, ninety, ninety-five. The speedometer marked our passage through space, and there was light traffic on Pacific Coast Highway past Zuma Beach. I was hoping I could persuade Jim to stop off at “Free Zuma”, where my friends from high school hung out. I thought they’d appreciate meeting one of my “other” musician friends from outside of the usual circles from school. But not this time. Jim was driving with purpose now. No slowing down for anything or anybody. “We could be in Monterrey in five hours” he yells over the wind. “Frisco in seven.” I’m smiling like a crazy person and nod my head, and mumble “groovy, man.”

One thing about Jim, he was mercurial in every sense of the word. I knew anything could happen and often did. I once remarked to Jim my favorite day on the Mickey Mouse club was Wednesday, because that was “Anything can happen day.” He laughed uproariously at that, although he would have been outside the window of Disney’s target audience.

Sure enough, just past the iconic Mugu Rock, home of a million TV commercials, Jim pulled into the parking area to turn around. It was then I noticed I was still really high from the previous night, as the rock appeared to have sails like a giant schooner. I shared this with Jim. He looked thoughtfully at the rock. “I see it, man. That’s fucking poetry man.”

It was among the most beautiful things I had ever heard because the words were floating like gossamer on the ocean breeze, Jim’s rich voice soothing the edges. So we communed with the ocean for about ten minutes and just as suddenly Jim fired up the Chevy and we spun our wheels up the dirt and bumped up upon PCH, spraying gravel everywhere, leaving a bounteous cloud of dust.

The coast, now on our right, glimmered anew, azure deepening to a lighter turquoise as the light changed with the day. We were back in Malibu before long. We caught the Malibu PCH signal in from of the entrance to the pier. It was notoriously long. Suddenly, an incredibly beautiful girl was crossing in front of us. She wore a bikini with a blouse draped over it. Jim was speaking to her over the noise of the traffic almost instantly. She was smiling flirtatiously.

In a half song, his baritone voice regaled the woman with compliments.

“OH, woman, the way you walk! I can’t take it!! You’re gorgeous!” Jim jumped up enthusiastically so he was standing on top of the seat, holding on to the steering wheel. THAT caught everyone’s attention. Jumping rhythmically up and down, Jim began chanting

“Do you want to come with me? Yes you do! You do!!”

I stared straight ahead, wondering about what was going to happen next. The girl looked right at me and said, “Tell your friend he’s crazy.”

I looked back at her. She might have been a movie star. She was that beautiful. Jim was still standing on the driver’s seat, holding on to the wheel for balance.

“Jim, she says you’re crazy, man.”

He looked at me with a mirthful grin. “I am.”

By now the light had changed. PCH was backed up, and a cacophony of car horns started up.

Just like that, Jim hopped down into drivers position and yelled “See you later, darlin’!”

There was scattered applause from the surfers on the sidewalk.

We sped off, headed back for Venice, and ten minutes later, we were back at the ratty building off Speedway. The sun was low on the horizon. I was starting to crash hard. I went into the building with Jim, having accomplished a successful mission. Jim’s attention was drawn to a recording. I sat on the couch across from the far wall, and I was asleep before I knew it.

When I awoke, the band was gone. There were a couple of guys doing tech things by a small console on a card table. “Hey, where is everyone?” I asked. “Laurel Canyon, I think,” said a skinny guy I knew as Paul. He went back to working with the tape thing. I walked out of the semi-darkened building into the warm glow of Venice at sunset. I walked out to Speedway, stuck out my thumb, and caught a ride almost immediately, a silver van driven by a guy with long blonde hair.

“Where to, man?” he asked.

“West”, I told him. “I’m going to Calabasas.”

This story may be embellished. The whole era is a little hazy. Or not. Part of a collection “LA River”.