Somebody to Love? (16 page)

Another country. Another night.

“We're going to the red-light district, you wanna come?” the group asked me. Frankfurt had an area of prostitution that was more like a Gene Kelly set for
An American in Paris
than the usual sleazy appearance of hooker hangouts. There was a huge cobblestone courtyard surrounded by quaint two- or three-story apartment buildings. Men and women lounged around on the windowsills or walked around the ground floor area, showing themselves and waiting for a trick. As we were crossing between the front entrance and the large yard area, a girl came toward us screaming and yelling, threatening me with a knife. As if he was Errol Flynn, Paul whipped off his blue leather cape and swirled it in front of her like a bullfighter. I guess she thought I was infringing on her territory. We concluded that my presence was upsetting the status quo, and we went off to more hospitable nightlife.

Now Paul had become both the strong and sensitive “leader” of the group and the mythic hero figure for Yours Truly. But still the relationship took only platonic forms.

26

Strawberry Fuck

D
uring that tour in Europe where we were co-headlining with The Doors (one night they'd open the sets, the next night it was Airplane), my most vivid memories are of Paul, but I also remember Jim Morrison.

In London, the Doors/Airplane concerts took place in an old structure called the Round House. Located at the end of a railway line, the interior of the house had a floor with radiating tracks, and there was a huge turntable-type machine, originally used to turn the big locomotives around. It looked like some kind of gigantic record player made out of iron, and although the sound was cavernous, the atmosphere more than made up for it.

Images of The Doors performing there are still vivid in my mind. No colors, all black, except one spotlight on Jim's face. Both of his hands holding the mike right up on his mouth, eyes closed and silent. You could see him just waiting for ignition to come flying up through his body. The long silence was full of music he could hear, but everyone else only
felt
. Then, in a sudden step backward, arms lifting out to the sides, he yelled, “FIYAAHH!” The audience let out a collective scream, relieved by the explosion they'd been anticipating. Most of them had never seen him before, but he had the ability to draw people into his mood without opening his eyes or his mouth.

I was always fascinated by the way he seemed to go from one side of his brain to the other, ignoring all the synapses in between. It was just like his lyric, “Break on through to the other side.” And beautiful? He looked like a rabid Johnny Depp, perfectly formed and possessed by abstraction. I'd been backstage before and after all the shows, talking easily with members of both of the bands, but when I directed a remark to Jim, I usually got back a colorful non sequitur.

“Jim,” I'd say, “did you see that broken chair by the speaker system?”

With a pleasant smile and pupils dilated to the very edges of the iris, he'd respond with something like, “Lady in smoke shop, nobody for broken, chair broken, chair broken.”

He inhabited two places at once, and although I knew there was some pattern of events going on in his head that connected what I'd just said to what he was thinking, it never made sense. I'm sure that the people who knew him well must have heard normal dialogue out of him like, “What time does the plane arrive?” But I never heard anything intelligible I could respond to until I was able to see what he was like alone, away from the frantic energy of the music halls.

We co-headlined in Frankfurt, Copenhagen, London, and Amsterdam, and I can't remember which country we were in when it happened. But I
do
remember strangely isolated things like the color of the rug in the hotel hallway (rose pink and maroon) and the nervousness I felt standing in front of the door to Jim's room.

“Jim Morrison” (Grace Slick)

It's daytime, he's probably asleep. If he's asleep, then he won't answer my knock, and I can go back to my room and stop shaking. What if it's the wrong room? Oh, fuck it.

I did the “secret knock,” which he wouldn't have known anyway because it was Airplane's private signal, the opening beat to one of our songs, to let each other know that it was one of us standing outside the door. I was surprised when Jim didn't even ask, “Who is it?” Instead, he turned the handle and pulled the door all the way back so I could see him and the whole room. He smiled. “What's up?”

I wish I could remember my answer, but some specifics about the past are clear while others are vague. Since I had no idea that anyone would
care
about this thirty years later, I never kept a diary. In fact, if I'd known the enormous impact Morrison would have on future generations, I might have been tempted to wear a tape recorder. I also wish I could tell you that
he
came to
my
room to hustle
me.
But it didn't happen that way. I was, once again, the perpetrator.

Either the hotel had sent them up as a complimentary food tray, or he'd ordered them from room service, but either way, there were strawberries sitting on a plate on top of the coffee table. I went over to look at them, just for something to do, while I tried to figure out what to say next. Jim flopped on the bed and watched me. I brought the strawberries over to the end of the bed, and then, for some stupid reason, I put my finger into the middle of them. There was an extraordinarily cold and hard center. Frozen strawberries.
Thank you, Baby Jesus, for a topic to guide my conversation with Mr. Non Sequitur
.

“Okay if I put this plate on the radiator?” I asked. This was Europe, 1968. No central heating.

“Sure, but it's not on,” he said, one of the most coherent remarks I ever heard from him. After I set the plate of strawberries on the cold radiator, he crawled over the top of the bed, reached down, picked one up, and squeezed it till it turned into juice in his hand. He laughed and did it again to another one and kept on laughing. Words are hard to respond to, but laughter makes its own sense. I can play this, I thought, and I relaxed.

It wasn't
9½ Weeks
with Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke using food as erotic lubricant; it was more like kindergarten play—mud puddles and Silly Putty. Smash it, shove it around, not on each other, but we just individually tried to make a bigger mess than the other could. He outdid me by smearing the strawberries all over the cream-colored bedspread, but then suddenly, the private stories in his head made him stop and go over to the top dresser drawer. He opened and closed it without putting anything in or taking anything out, and he came back to where I was kneeling at the end of the bed, still playing in the fruit tray. I didn't ask him what the dresser move was all about; I was afraid I'd be stepping on that
Fantasia
tape that seemed to be running in his cranium.

This was new. Like making love to a floating art form with eyes. I'd never had anyone “study” me like that. It wasn't the standard evaluation of body parts. He seemed to be appraising the distance between us as if it was an invisible garment that needed to be continually breached with each motion. With our hips joined together and his body moving up and down, it felt like he was taking a moment each time to circle the area between our bodies with his eyes and consider the space that separated us. He was a well-built boy, his cock was slightly larger than average, and he was young enough to maintain the engorged silent connection right through the residue of chemicals that can threaten erection.

At the same time, he was surprisingly gentle. Somehow, I'd expected a sort of frantic horizontal ritual. It's interesting: the most maniacal guys onstage can be such sublime lovers. But everybody has to stop being a jerk sometimes. Jim mystified me with that otherworldly expression, and at the same time, his hips never lost the insistent rolling motion that was driving the dance.

When he did look
directly
at my face, he seemed to be constantly searching for the expression that might break the lock, as if I might be wearing a disguise. I'm not sure what I mean by that, but I can say that it was both intriguing and disconcerting, waiting for him to ask me if I was someone else—an impostor or a product of his imagination.

I have no idea how long I was there, but there was no lying around afterward having a cigarette, dreamily looking at each other. I knew I should leave before I got caught—we both had other relationships—and I felt like an intruder. I dressed as fast as I could, without looking like it was a race. Jim didn't seem to notice; he appeared to be totally unconscious, just lying there motionless on the bed. But naked, with eyes closed and without moving a muscle from his completely immobile posture, he said, “Why wouldn't you come back?” Since I hadn't said anything about coming
or
going, I didn't know what he expected to hear, so I went into proper Finch College mode and said, “Only if I'm asked.” He smiled, but he never asked.

Because I have the Robin Williams disease—If-You-Can-Remember-the-Sixties-You-Weren't-Really-There-itis—I've blanked on what
country
the Strawberry Fuck was actually in, so I called author Danny Sugerman, who probably knows more about The Doors than they know about themselves.

“What countries did we play with The Doors?” I asked him.

He gave me the Frankfurt, Copenhagen, London, Amsterdam list.

“And where, if you could possibly figure this out, would we have been when I fucked Jim?”

Danny took a long pause, and then he said, “You know, Grace, I'm glad you're telling everybody you screwed Jim. You can't believe the amount of ugly women who've claimed to have fucked him.”

Backhanded compliment.

Since Danny was only thirteen when all of this was going on, he could only come up with answers by process of elimination. “It couldn't have been Amsterdam,” he said. I agreed, because on the first day in Holland, the two groups had gone on a loose trip to a downtown area. We'd been told there were a lot of head shops and interesting things we couldn't get in the States, and we all wanted to check it out. The kids on the streets of Amsterdam recognized us, so while were walking around, going in and out of the stores, they'd come up and talk, handing us various drugs as gifts of thanks for our music. Most of us just said “Thank you” and put whatever it was in our pockets for later. Jim, on the other hand, stopped, sat down on the curb, and did it right up. Pot, hash, coke, whatever. I thought he was ingesting an overly interesting combination of chemicals for that night's concert.

I don't know about The Doors, but it was the first time most of Airplane had tried “poppers” (amyl nitrate), and because of the legality of so many drugs in Amsterdam, it was a temptation for everybody to overdo it. We all ingested heavily, but Jim was the champ. An all-day, all-night consumption of everything available had turned him into a running pinwheel. Airplane opened that night and he came flying onto the stage during our set and collapsed. Dancing toward death, he was rushed to the hospital, and Ray Manzarek, The Doors' keyboard player, had to do the singing that night. Jim recuperated through the next day and was back onstage for the following evening's performance; that he lived as long as he did was amazing to me. But when we were in our twenties, we all thought we were invincible, and those short overdose situations came and went as part of the territory. It wasn't until death started picking us off on a regular basis that we started reflecting on our mortality. I don't think Jim ever thought of himself as a possible future drug casualty. It was always the other guy. “Not me. I won't die. I'm different, not like they are. I know what I'm doing.” We
all
thought that way.

It was the reverse of Chicken Little—the sky would
never
fall. Some people
did
get the message, but most of us kept right on behaving as if we were made of steel.

27

The Big House

W
hen Airplane returned from Europe to San Francisco, we spent a lot of time in the big Victorian mansion we'd acquired. We called this place the Big House, because for us, it was. The whole Victorian package, it featured four floors of activity, including an office, a kitchen, six bedrooms, a parlor, a dining room, a living room, a foyer, plus a carpenter/martial arts expert/coke dealer. He made his “office” in the basement, which also housed tools, a small bed and desk, and a couple of jumbo-sized nitrous oxide tanks. The members of the band would go down there from time to time and sit in a circle on the floor around the big blue metal totems, while our road manager, John Scheer, adjusted the six-spigot contraption on the top that allowed a group of people to get high, all at the same time. The “laughing gas” made us dizzy enough to pass out, so staying on the floor was a less painful way of enjoying the experience.

Jorma, for some reason, preferred to stand. Having hit his head twice (to the point of bleeding) on the sharp metal conduits at the top of the tank, we could never figure why he kept resuming his upright standing position. It's one of the few stupid things I've seen him do. Extremely bright and pragmatic, Jorma normally conducted himself with more restraint than the rest of us. Not to say that he wasn't into the extremes of the time as much as anybody else, but he was generally the most quiet and self-contained member of the group.