Dawn's Hwy
Part 1
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 and putting him in the back of the cruiser.
The cops hustled him through the police station and booking, then threw him into an interrogation room, his hands still cuffed in front of him. It was a typical interrogation room — bare white walls, sparse cheap furniture, a wooden table with an ashtray on it, a wooden chair on either side of the table. The room was lit by a single bare lightbulb shining right over the table, probably to have it shining in the eyes of the accused, ‘make ’em sweat, the third degree, the cops have seen too many cop shows,’ Jim thought. He pulled out a chair and sat against a wall, his eyes fixed on the closed door, waiting.
Finally, two plainclothes detectives came in. They looked like cop stereotypes to Jim, two variations on the same theme, crew-cut hair, baggy gray suit pants. One had a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbow that looked slept in or a little grimy at the edges, a dark tie loosened at the neck. On the other the jacket and tie remained intact. Jim understood the game they were going to run on him and wondered which would play the good cop and which would play the bad cop.
“I’m officer Ellison and this is officer Hanson. We’re the investigating officers.” The suit-jacketed cop said. “Right now, we have you for assault of Rosalie Munoz, a minor.” Jim tilted his head at the cop, a quizzical look on his face. “The girl you kissed. But we don’t care about that, we have bigger fish to fry.”
“’Bigger fish to fry’. Did you really just say that?”
“Ok, punk, let’s cut out the shit! Do you know the whereabouts of one Phillip O’Leno?” Hanson asked, taking the lead. Now, Jim knew which cop was which.
“Um, not really.”
“He’s missing, we think he may have been killed.”
“What makes you think I had anything to do with it?”
“All your friends have said you’ve been going around telling a story about how you and one Felix Venable killed him.” The cop stared at Jim hoping the silence would intimidate him, make him uncomfortable. Jim returned the stare.
“Look son,” the other cop, Ellison said, “if you know anything tell us, at least so his father knows what happened.”
“Fuck his father.”
“How old are you?” Ellison asked.
“Twenty-two.”
“That’s a bad attitude son, one that’s not going to get you very far in life. Do you know his father is a prominent attorney?”
“And mine is a captain in the Navy, so what?”
“Where’d you get all those bruises from?”
“Some greasers didn’t like our long hair.”
“Serves you right,” Hanson said. “What about this Felix Venable?”
“What about him?”
“He’s quite a bit older than you.” The question hung in the air a moment.
“Yeah.” Jim said.
“Where’d you meet him?”
“Film school.”
“Film school?”
“He was a graduate student. What’re you trying to say?”
“Nothing, nothing at all,” Hanson said, with a greasy lasciviousness in his voice.
“Man, with a mind like yours I’d watch what I say. Your mask is slipping, and you’re showing your true self, and it ain’t too pretty from here.”
“If we ran your rap sheet, what do you think we’d find?”
“Just what you want to see, man.”
“Do you have a job?” Ellison asked in a softer tone, trying to break through the barriers Jim had up.
“No.”
“What do you do for a living son?” Jim thought a moment, considering the audience.
“Nothing you’d understand.”
“To tell you the truth, son, none of your friends that we’ve talked to believe you did it. Neither do I, you’re not the type.”
“What type is that?”
“College boy,” Hanson spat out, “but you’re not a hard case like your friend Venable. You’re acting tough but I bet you’re shaking in your boots, so just tell us where Phillip is, and you walk out of here.”
“What about the charges?”
“We really don’t care about you kissing some Mexican girl,” Hanson said with a look of mild distaste on his face. “All Phillip’s father wants to know is if his son is, ok?”
“Don’t know, man,” Jim said, then paused a moment, for effect. “What if we did kill him?”
“Did you?”
“Why don’t you just tell us what happened out in the desert son?”
Jim smiled, “what if life is nothing more than an act of remembering?” The cops looked at each other, perplexed by the question.
“What?” Hanson asked.
“What if we’re dead already and we’re just remembering this?” The two cops just looked at each other. “What if we’re just sitting around a campfire in eternity remembering life and telling each other our stories?”
“What’re you talking about son?”
“You know, like Sunset Boulevard, Citizen Kane, Carousel.” Again, the cops looked at each other.
“This isn’t a movie son, this is real.”
To be continued…. Part 2
This is an early version of Dawn’s Hwy which appears in The Lion Communique. I’m also the author of The Doors Examined. For more information and more of my books Jymsbooks to join my monthly newsletter!