• The Last Stage
• Stranger Souls
• Becoming Angel

• Links

Is Everybody In? I’m dead. Not the cold corporeal type of death, but a warm, living death, a ghost trying to regain what he has lost. A death where everything is a faded, pale facsimile of the life I had. I went into my study and sat at the desk, it’s an old theatrical make-up table with a gilded mirror surrounded by those old fashioned bulbous lights, naked, astringent, that push light into every crevice and nook, no where to hide. Every night I sit surrounded in this room, a shrine to my "career.” The desk is stuffed with my newspaper reviews, photographs, journals, scrapbooks and notes. The mirror was cleaned up and glimmered, a relic of an age gone by, salvage from my past..

I lit a candle and popped a tape into the player on the desk, I watched the candle flicker and dance, casting shadows against the wall, hoping it would set the mood. A voice from the speakers said, "ladies and gentlemen, from Madison, Wisconsin, The Unknown Soldiers!" I cleared my mind and let the music transport me back, opening the flood of memories. It was a ceremony I've been practicing, a little ritual to help induce self-hypnosis. I closed my eyes, and I could see the audience cheering, an impressionistic flash of colorful clothes, and faces looking up at me. I had been the singer in a Doors tribute band, The Unknown Soldiers, it seemed like if I could concentrate hard enough and remember all the sights, sounds, smells, and feelings, I'd find myself on that stage again. The music was raw but powerful, then my voice came booming out of the speakers, it was huskier than Jim Morrison’s, but I was able to tear out screams as well as his. We sounded like what The Doors had on a night Morrison wasn’t too drunk. I remember those days like the touch of a lost lover, the sensation lingers. More salvage.

I liked playing Morrison it made me feel powerful. Getting a reaction from the audience, and being able to move them to ecstasy, despair, or joy. I imagined it to be something of how Morrison had felt. People had given me things, presents, trinkets, beads like Morrison's, poems that they thought I'd be interested in, women gave themselves to me because of it. I later realized they were only trying to get close to me, so they could touch something of Morrison, a ghost of someone not even myself. It had also gotten me to Los Angeles and my chance at fame, I can still almost feel the “whoosh” of air as fame rushed by me. I opened my eyes to the usual disappointment, I was still in the here and now. No audience, no cheering, no applause.

Jim Morrison, was the charismatic and controversial lead singer of The Doors, the 60's rock group that had such hits as Light My Fire, Touch Me, and Riders On The Storm, but also songs like The End which at first glance was a paean to lost love but in the end had a modern telling of the Oedipus myth, like many young men Morrison worried about death, every twenty year old feels like he’ll never live to thirty, while simultaneously feeling immortal. Since I was a teenager people, friends had told me I looked like Jim Morrison. I hadn't really paid that much attention to Morrison, or his music, but I took the compliments to heart, it had boosted my ego to think I looked like someone famous, and that's how my life took its form.

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