Jim Morrison’s Adventures in the Afterlife

Epilogue

On Blue Bayou . . .

Jim leaned on the porch rail with a twenty-four-ounce bottle of Ivory Coast Mamba Beer in one hand and a skinny Jamaican cheroot in the other, watching the sun sink behind the volcanoes and the sky turn bruised-fruit purple. Semple didn’t mind Jim smoking cigarettes in the house; that was a given. But she claimed the cheroots stunk up the place and that Dr. Hypodermic only brought them to piss her off. Both the cheroots and the West African beer came courtesy of Dr. Hypodermic. He always brought a couple boxes of one and a case of the other on his regular visits, along with the rather large parcel of extremely assorted chemicals. Dr. Hypodermic might have tortured Jim once, but now, as a retired agent of the gods, Morrison found himself incredibly well treated. Hypodermic seemed to know when Jim was running low on supplies and would appear well before the situation threatened to become desperate. The only fly in this otherwise impeccable ointment was that Hypodermic and Semple just didn’t get along. Whenever the great and ancient jet-black Rolls-Royce hearse would appear away across the swamp, driving on the surface of the water, swaying slightly on its shimmering private force field, Semple would retreat to the attic of the spooky old house to work on her dark abstract oil paintings and refuse to come out until after the Mystere had departed, which was usually after a couple of relative days of intense narcotic excess.

Jim wasn’t exactly sure what lay at the root of the enmity between the two of them, but knew it had something to do with the fading and ultimate negation of Aimee. Although it had been Danbhala La Flambeau who had brought the freaked- and stressedout Semple to Jim at the house in the Jurassic swamp, it was Hypodermic who had been there when Aimee had finally passed to nothing. He had been around during the demise of the “good” sister and must have seen things that made Semple uncomfortable around him. Semple had never really explained to Jim what exactly went down between her and Aimee that had left her as the lone survivor. He knew in broad terms that, once they were left alone in the wreckage of Heaven, a strange process of transfer had been set in motion: Semple became stronger while Aimee weakened, becoming progressively more ineffectual and transparent. Neither sibling was able to reverse or arrest what was happening to them, and Aimee had apparently gone into almost monstrous bouts of furious recriminations that only served to speed things along. What Jim didn’t know, and was one of Semple’s most veiled and shadowy secrets, was how Aimee had actually departed. All he knew was that it had been highly traumatic, if the state of shock in which La Flambeau had brought Semple to him was any indication.

Semple’s powers of recovery were such that she had recuperated in surprisingly short order; to all outward appearances, she had returned to her old perverse, hedonistic, and curious self. The only detectable scar that remained surrounded Aimee’s passing. No matter how Jim might coax her, when the night grew blue-black late and the brontosauruses sang their low winding trills off among the conifers and giant celery, the subject was strictly taboo. The closest she had ever come to discussing the matter was one night when, after consuming a number of orange and yellow pills washed down by half a bottle of fine cognac, she had smiled enigmatically. “Aimee is no more, my love. She didn’t flex, and thus she broke. And when she broke, it all came to me. Ezekiel 25:17 included.”

Prior to Semple’s unexpected arrival, Jim had spent a long time, unshaven and rootless, on the run with a gun on his hip, wilding with Doc Holliday in all the environments that countenanced that kind of behavior. Eventually, though, he decided it was time to settle someplace and attempt to pull his poetry back together. Doc reminded him constantly that the dead had all the time in the world, but ultimately Jim felt he was compelled to go back to his avowed vocation, if he was to reclaim even a few shreds of his self-respect and not lose himself in the easy out of the drunken spaghetti-western yahoo.

Once Jim settled to it, the writing had been exciting, but after a few hundred pages, mainly concerned with the pantheon he had encountered on the Island of the Gods, it grew too weird to be workable. When he tried a course correction, he went to the other extreme and found that all he could produce was rhyming couplets so mawkish they would have sickened a greeting card hack. He’d attempted to bail himself out with William S. Burroughs cutups, Scrabble tiles, a planchette, all the way to automatic writing, hoping he’d make a little headway even if it had to be by means of chaos, random chance, and spirit intervention.

The wrestling match with his muse had been so thoroughly interrupted by Semple’s arrival that his writing was again put aside as first he helped her, as best he could, regain her strength and equilibrium, and then, with that accomplished, they enjoyed a prolonged and at times quite spectacular honeymoon of depravity that found the two of them raving and rampaging through the echoing rooms of the house in the Jurassic swamp. After this frantic period of red-in-tooth-and-claw renewal, they had settled into a comfortably routine relationship that was both sheltered and secure, if perhaps a little isolated. Not that Jim and Semple lacked for diversion; over and above what they could provide for themselves when motivated by lust, devilment, or ingenuity, Doc Holliday visited on a fairly regular basis, usually crossing the swamp from the Great River in a borrowed launch or speedboat. When Doc didn’t come in person, he wrote long, rambling, and very Victorian letters in a scratchy and curliqued dope-fiend hand. These missives always arrived by bizarre means that Jim assumed was a part of Doc’s correspondence shtick. Often it would be an Aztec runner, with beaded apron, feathers in his braided hair, and oiled body, who would hand the familiar pale parchment envelope to either Jim or Semple without a word and then immediately turn and start jogging back along one of the less soggy trails across the swamp. On other occasions, the improvised mailman was a humanoid amphibian, a gill man who looked like a close cousin of the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and who, unlike the taciturn Aztec, expected to be invited in for a while and tipped with cans of sardines, anchovies, or tongol tuna before he swam off. The oddest and most memorable of these deliveries from Doc was brought by a trained eagle with a small leather pouch chained to its left leg. While Jim had removed the letter from the pouch, the eagle had eyed the Mammal with No Name as though the reincarnated western outlaw might make an acceptable snack to speed him on his way.

The Mammal with No Name had moved into the mansion and made himself at home in a compact little nook adjacent to the wine cellar, even before Semple had arrived. He obviously considered Jim’s dark residence an ideal protection against pterodactyls and other Jurassic predators, and Jim, from his side of the arrangement, was actually glad of the company. The accumulation of what Jim later referred to as his and Semple’s own private Addams Family had not stopped with the Mammal with No Name. In the wake of Jim and Semple’s exhaustive and exhausting honeymoon, Mr. Thomas had arrived, looking much the worse for alcoholic wear and obviously hoping to be adopted for at least long enough to recover from his latest epic debauch. He had even offered to assist Jim with his poetry in an attempt to sweeten the bargain. In fact, no bargaining had really been necessary. Although Semple wasn’t terribly fond of the Mammal with No Name, being less than keen on his interminable tall violent tales of the Old West and finding it hard to forgive him for his nun-raping past, she was overjoyed to see the goat, whom she considered a trusted comrade in arms from the fall of Necropolis. Jim, while not being as intimate with the goat as Semple, had no objection to someone who had perhaps once been an illustrious poet becoming a permanent fixture under his roof.

For a while, after they had left Aimee’s derelict Heaven, Mr. Thomas had tagged along with Jim and Doc, but his physical limitations, and his habit of drinking the worst bathtub gin by the bucketful, had made it hard for him to keep up with the fast and furious, pistoleer ways of the other two. He had dropped off the wildman bandwagon and elected to become the town drunk in a strange little settlement where almost all the inhabitants had reincarnated themselves, either by accident or design, as deliberately eccentric animals.

The final arrival had been Igor. Semple’s longtime butler had appeared a couple of relative months after Mr. Thomas had shown up at the house. He had apparently made it all the way from Aimee’s failed Heaven under his own steam, with little help and no sense of the shortest route between two points. The trek through the Jurassic swamp had all but finished him, and he had fallen onto the porch and collapsed, one early dragonfly morning, filthy with slime and waxy and insubstantial from exhaustion and fever. As with the goat, Semple had greeted Igor as an old and trusted companion and retainer. He, too, was nursed back to servile health, and joined what was now becoming Jim and Semple’s little colony in the swamp. Once again, Jim had no objections. A butler was a largely beneficial addition. Now Jim had someone who seemed more than pleased to bring him drinks when he was too idle to get up and make them for himself; plus he was freed from doing almost any chores around the place. About the only peripheral drawback was that Jim, now living the life of the idly pampered, had started to put on weight, much as he had done on the lifeside, and a nascent beer gut was already starting to protrude over the concho belt of his leather pants.

As the sun made its last curtain call, shooting majestic rays through the valleys between the volcanic peaks, Jim continued to lean on the front porch rail. He took a swig of beer and dragged on the cheroot. The cheroots were rum-soaked and mildly opiated and produced a very slight hallucinogenic buzz. As often when stoned, Jim’s mind wandered to the odd paradox that, sooner or later, a younger version of himself would come slopping through the mud and water, attracted by the light of the house, to creep and peer in the windows, just in time to watch Semple carve her initials on his back with the rapier. So far, his and Semple’s lovemaking had only infrequently drawn blood, and certainly no sharp steel objects had yet been employed on the endless quest for higher and more esoteric planes of fun. So maybe it would be some time before the young Jim came tiptoeing by.

Out in the depths of the swamps, the diplodocuses and the other long-necked herbivores were starting into their sunset chorus, and a big carnivore, maybe a T-rex, was baying in triumph after an evening kill. By the rusting Buick, Mr. Thomas and the Mammal with No Name were taking turns drinking mint juleps from a plastic bucket while, overhead, pteradons were circling for one last snack while they still had the light. Jim knew that when darkness fell, the flying saucers would commence their nightly display. Of late, the UFOs of the night had been big and bright, close to a continuous traffic pattern. Paradoxically, however, no abductions had occurred, unless of course the aliens were now targeting some of the smaller dinosaurs for microchip implants and rectal probes. When, on one occasion, Jim had speculated about how it was that he hadn’t been abducted a second time, Semple’s answer had been simple, to-thepoint, and not especially complimentary. “They’ve had you once already, and besides, you’re a self-involved idiot who still insists on wearing foul-smelling leather jeans after all these relative years. What would any fastidious E.T. want with you?”

Jim had mixed feelings about alien abduction. He knew he would be exceedingly reluctant to go through the process again, but on the other hand the encounter with Epiphany and Devora-even though he still believed them pure illusion-had been one of the most memorable sexual thrill rides of his entire continuance, and had, after all, in its own strange way, brought him to Semple. Now and again he fantasized about somehow reuniting with the two space beauties and organizing a foursome with himself and Semple. He suspected that Epiphany and Devora were so formidably exotic that Semple might well have agreed to it, but he could hardly see how that kind of negotiation could be conducted with the big-headed little aliens.

As these thoughts passed idly through Jim’s very slightly fogged brain, Semple herself came out onto the porch. “You never tire of watching the sunsets, do you?”

Jim smiled and nodded. “I guess it’s a legacy from living so long in LA. The worse the pollution, the more awesome the sunset.”

“Bloody red sun of fantastic LA?”

“That’s about it.”

Semple was wearing a long, black, almost transparent peignoir over a leather bustier, sheer black stockings, and five-inch Lucite heels, and Jim knew that in this instance it wasn’t for his benefit. “Igor?”

“He was getting fractious and required a little attention.”

“And where is he now?”

“Probably curled up in a fetal ball in some dark corner of the attic, nursing his cuts and welts and fondling himself while he relives his memories, detail by painful detail.”

Jim had long since ceased to allow the psycho-erotic content of Semple’s relationship with the diminutive butler to upset or bother him. “So he’ll be in a fine mood tomorrow?”

Semple smiled. “Bright and early and more anxious to please than we’ve seen him in a long time. We might even get breakfast in bed.”

Jim sighed and shook his head. “Is the way we exist weird or is it weird?”

Semple moved beside him. “You know as well as I do that none of the old lifeside criteria apply here. Here in the swamp it’s just us. We set the standards. Whatever we do has to be normal because we are all there are.”

The first of the UFOs moved across the sky; a cluster of the small, skittering red spheres that Jim always thought of as the jokers. Mr. Thomas and the Mammal with No Name both looked up and then glanced at Jim. Mr. Thomas’s speech was slurred from the mint juleps. “Here they come again.”

The dancing red spheres were followed by a pair of Adamski saucers, close together, line abreast with under-apron searchlights raking the swamp. Semple took hold of Jim’s hand. “The Bee Man is coming.”

“He is? How do you know that?”

“I can feel it.”

“When?”

“Soon.”

“You think it will be like the last time?”

Semple squeezed his hand harder. “It might be even more extreme. Plus we’ll have the honey.”

Jim turned and looked at Semple. “Is this love?”

Semple laughed. “Maybe.”

Two large triangular spacecraft swung over the house. Semple’s hair began to stand up on her head, and Jim could feel his own doing the same. “For all we know, its an eternal cosmic punishment,” she continued, “but it doesn’t seem so bad. Or maybe it’s just another fake-out by the gods. Who the fuck knows for sure?” She moved close to Jim and kissed him. “And does it really matter? We’re here, we’re dead, and, by and large, we get along. What more can a human being hope for in eternity?”

A third triangular UFO swung low over the house, hurrying to catch up with the others.