A phone booth stands alone, empty in the Los Angeles night, its dull plastic light an island, in the sea of neon fused darkness. A car pulls up to the curb and a lone figure gets out. The car pulls away, the figure walks to the phone booth closing the door behind him. The inside light pops on illuminating him, a silhouette in relief against the night. He takes a dime out of his black jeans, and picks up the receiver, he puts the dime in the coin slot and listens as it clinks through the phone’s mechanism waiting for the dial tone and dials a number on the rotor and waits as the phone rang on the other end, a woman picks up.

            “Yeah, it’s me,” he said, his voice a soft conspiratorial whisper, “we just got back into town tonight.” He listens as the woman asks something, then says, “yeah, we wasted him.”

Jim was walking down Sunset Boulevard. He’d been wearing the same clothes for the last couple of days, black jeans, t-shirt, boots, a dark welder’s jacket, because in January even Los Angeles is cold. His pants still had some remnants of desert sand in the creases and folds. He had other reminders of the desert as well, the cuts and bruises on his face.

It had only been six months since he’d come down off of Dennis Jacob’s roof, where he’d subsisted on acid, Nietzsche and the occasional can of beans. Under the summer sun he came face to face with himself and burned away a lot of old ideas about himself; and while the rest of the city slept, he took notes at a fantastic rock concert in his mind. He wrote down the songs he heard as fast as he could. He had met the spirit of music and it had changed him forever. No one, not even his friends, had understood that. They saw the physical changes. He was lithe, a mere waif, and they thought they saw the change in him, but they only saw the Jim they wanted to see, the Jim they expected.

A police cruiser drove past. One of the cops was looking at him. Suddenly it screeched to a halt and the cops jumped out.

            “Are you Jim Morrison?”

            “Yeah,” Jim said defiantly, “who wants to know?”

            “We do wise guy. You’re under arrest.”

            “What for, man?”

            “Suspicion of murder.” The cops pushed him against the wall of the nearest building and patted him down before handcuffing him and putting him in the back of the cruiser.

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From The Lion Communique