Jim Morrison's Adventures in the Afterlife (9 page)

Jim didn’t know what whores were like when they got religion. All the whores he could remember had pretty much remained whores, except the ones who switched careers to become junkies, but he let it pass. “So where did they go?”

The dog shook his head. “I don’t know for sure. Rumor was that they split to some holier-than-thou ectosector run by this broad calling herself Sister Aimee.”

“Sister Aimee?”

“That’s what I heard. Seems she’s got a place set up way down yonder, like some Sunday school heaven.”

Jim thought about this. “Didn’t Doc kinda take it amiss?”

The dog frowned. “Why should Doc worry?”

“Didn’t he create the whores in the first place?”

The dog looked at Jim as though he were an idiot. “Hell, no. Doc didn’t create too much of this.”

Jim was surprised. “He didn’t?”

“Well, I mean, he made the buildings and stuff, but you can see how much trouble he took with those. Dr. Caligari lavished more care on his cabinet.”

Jim looked around. Most of the buildings were unfinished in some way, leaning on each other at disconcerted angles.

“Goddamned things are held together with nothing more than faith and baling wire,” the dog continued. “I gotta tell you, I don’t even feel safe pissing on them when Doc’s not paying attention. It’s a miracle they make it from one day to the next, but Doc doesn’t exactly cotton to making things too solid.”

“But what about the people?”

“Doc didn’t make the people.”

Jim was having trouble getting a handle on what the dog was saying. “No?”

“He didn’t make you, did he?”

Jim was still confused. “No, but I assumed—”

The dog cut him off. “Don’t come around here assuming, boy. This is not a place to be making assumptions. Doc strongly disapproves of dreaming up people just to act as extras in the fantasy. It’s like he always says, ‘If you can’t attract a population of real folk,
then fuck you.’ Doc thinks cookie-cutter populations tempt the psychos and sadists.”

“So how did all these people get here?”

The dog looked at him impatiently. “Listen, if I gotta be the goddamned talking guidebook, you could at least give me another drink.”

Jim held up the bottle. Little more than an inch and a half of whiskey left in it. He looked at the dog. “If I give you a drink, it’ll kill the bottle. You fucking spill half of it.”

“So you get up and go over to the cantina and get another one. What’s the problem?”

“The problem is I’m not sure I can walk.”

The dog regarded him bleakly. “Of course you can walk. You just don’t want to make the effort.”

The dog’s attitude was starting to piss Jim off. “So why don’t you go and get your own bottle? You’ve got four fucking legs.”

It seemed that Jim was beginning to piss the dog off, too. Its voice took on an aggrieved snarl. “It’s hard to carry a fucking bottle when all you’ve got is paws.”

Jim didn’t need to be snarled at by a damned alcoholic dog. “Maybe you should hang a barrel of cognac around your neck like a fucking St. Bernard.”

The dog bared its teeth at Jim in what amounted to a snarl. “Fuck you. I’ll go someplace where the drunks are a bit more hospitable.”

For a moment, Jim thought the dog was about to bite him and he wondered how the hell he should deal with that. Could you actually punch out a dog? Then the dog started to walk away. Jim realized he’d probably made an error in good manners. He called after the dog. “Hey, wait up. You can have the last of the booze.”

The dog turned and looked at him with an expression of utter canine contempt. “Keep your fucking booze. I got friends, if you know what I mean.” And with that ambiguous parting shot, it trotted off in the direction of the cantina.

Jim watched as the dog vanished inside the cantina. He half expected it to reemerge a few moments later, followed by an entire pack of talking dogs intent on ripping him to shreds in canine retribution for the disrespect that he had afforded one of their number. Although Jim had never actually witnessed or even heard a firsthand account of such an occurrence, a rumor did exist in the Afterlife that, should you be torn apart by dogs, blown up, or otherwise have your quasi-corporate body fragmented into multiple pieces, you
were in a lot of trouble. The essential core of one’s being, the part that some called the soul, would almost certainly return to the pod; that wasn’t the problem. The real problem was that the other bits might actually attempt to reconstitute themselves with often grotesque and monstrous results, and even come looking for you.

He struggled to his feet and stood waiting, but when, after a reasonable passage of time, no vengeful dog crew snarled from the cantina, Jim sat back down again and resumed his previous indolence. Long Time Robert Moore had started in on another tune, and Jim simply relaxed, closed his eyes, and let the sound wash over him.

If I wake tomorrow
I ain’t guessing where I’ll be
Maybe in some other time
Maybe in misery

Jim’s eyes remained closed, until a second voice roused him. Someone else seemed bent on breaking in on his precious internal privacy. He looked up and discovered a bulky man wearing a dashiki, a riot of red gold and green, with his hair puffballed out in a vast Afro. The man was standing over him, grinning down with a mouthful of jewel-encrusted teeth that put Long Time Robert Moore’s lone diamond to diminutive shame. “I’m Saladeen.”

Jim nodded. “Saladeen?”

“Right?”

Jim found it hard to drag his eyes away from the gem-filled bridgework, but he extended a tentative hand. “I’m pleased to make your acquaintance.”

Saladeen grasped the offered hand, fortunately with no fancy ritual handshake. “You Jim Morrison, ain’t you?”

Jim tensed and slowly drew his legs up protectively, in readiness to flee or fight as circumstances might dictate. “I was last time I looked.”

“I saw you one time.”

Jim relaxed slightly. Apparently he didn’t owe Saladeen money and he hadn’t done anything terrible to his sister. He raised a neutral eyebrow. “You did?”

“I did. It was in Oakland in 1968. Of course, you didn’t see me. You was up on the bandstand posing in the spotlight, I was down in the crowd selling loose joints and nickel bags.”

“I hope you enjoyed the show.”

“I thought you were a crazy motherfucker.”

Jim decided to accept that as a compliment. He eased himself out of fight-or-flight mode and raised his bottle. “Well, thanks. I’d offer you a drink, but this bottle’s all but dead.”

Saladeen shook his head. “I’m okay for the moment. Besides, I’ve got my own euthanasia.” So saying, he pulled a fat, double-corona, three-paper reefer from the folds of his dashiki, and gestured to the sidewalk next to Jim. “You mind if I take the weight off? I ain’t invading your space or nothing, am I?”

Jim raised an invitational arm. “Help yourself, man. I got all the space I need.”

Saladeen lowered his bulk to the wooden sidewalk. “I see that crazy fucking Euclid was hustling you for drinks.”

Jim was puzzled. Had he missed something? “Euclid?”

“The dog you were talking to.”

“That’s Euclid?”

“That’s what he calls himself.”

“Euclid the mathematician?”

Saladeen lit the imposing joint by simply igniting his index finger. For a moment his Afro was so wreathed in smoke that the two were almost a single cloud. “Fuck no, Euclid the dog, man. Euclid the mathematician has to be out somewhere with Einstein and Stephen Hawking by now, helping run the universe.”

“He seemed kind of put out when the bottle started to run dry.”

“Euclid’s kinda short on good manners. Mostly folks let him slide, though, on account of he was executed and all.”

The conversation seemed to be making odd jumps and Jim attempted to slow things down enough for them to make at least minimal sense. “The dog was executed?”

“You think he was a dog in his mortal life?”

“No, but . . . ”

Saladeen passed Jim the joint. “He told you the electric chair in Parchman was banana-colored, am I right?”

Jim inhaled deeply and immediately felt a little solarized at the edges. “Yeah, that’s right. It was his opening line.”

“So how do you think he knew that?”

“I don’t question it. I was talking to a drunken, crazy-looking dog.”

Saladeen’s smile faded. “You got some kinda prejudice against dogs? You maybe think you’re better than a dog?”

Jim wasn’t going to go along with this one. He did his best to avoid conflicts, but the guy was going too far. He passed back the joint. “You may not believe this, but there are times when I really do think I’m better than a dog. I mean, you won’t ever see me catching Frisbees in my teeth.”

Again Jim tensed slightly in anticipation of a possible negative reaction. To his surprise, Saladeen merely laughed. “So you ain’t buying my line of bullshit, huh?”

Jim shook his head. “Not tonight.”

The gems in Saladeen’s teeth flashed in the lights from the cantina. “Just checking, if you know what I mean.”

Inside, Long Time Robert Moore was still rocking the joint.

If I wake tomorrow
I ain’t guessing where I’ll be

Saladeen glanced at Jim. “Cat sings like a motherfucker, don’t he?”

Jim nodded. “He surely does.”

“I don’t figure that his real name’s no Robert Moore.”

“No?”

“You just think about who he sounds like.”

Jim thought about this, but he didn’t feel that any answer was required right there and then. Particularly as Saladeen had already turned the discussion back to the subject of the black dog. “If you’d met Euclid back in the world, back when he was a human, it’s likely you’d still have thought you were better than him.”

“Yeah?”

Saladeen nodded solemnly. “Oh yeah.”

“Low?”

“Real low.”

“How low?”

“Low motherfucker. A piece of sorry-assed white trash that went by the name of Wayne Stanley Caxton. Shot three folks dead in a fucked-up, thirty-five-dollar armed robbery at a corner grocery in Tunica, Mississippi. I figure it was no loss to the world when they fried him. Some of the shit must’ve gotten through to him, though. If he come out of the pod as a dog, motherfucker must have developed some sense of shame.”

“You think so?”

“Lot of folks here got themselves executed. Doc’s real good
about letting them settle in his area. Figure it’s because he came close enough to getting hung himself a couple of times. When you get yourself executed, man, you hit the pod feeling about as lowdown and abject as it’s possible to get. A lot of the worst of them just wraith out and become haunts and night creepers. Particularly the serial killers and sex butchers. By the time you make it to the priest and governor and the thirteen steps to the Great Divide, you’re thinking that you don’t got any other option. The man got the system set up so you be feeling like an all-time fucking wretch when they strap you in the chair or the gas chamber or onto the gurney for the lethal jolt. Think about it. You spend years on death row. Eight, nine, ten years, man. Twisting and turning, appealing and petitioning, with everyone telling you that you’ve sunk so low you no longer deserve to live. So, when you land in the Great Double Helix and all them dreams come to you in the pod, they ain’t about you going into the Afterlife as King of the fucking World, I can tell you.”

“You’d know about that, bro?”

“Is that a discreet way of asking me if I was fried myself?”

Jim kept a perfectly straight face. “About as discreet as I could put it.”

“Well, the answer is no. I didn’t go to the chair or the gas chamber or the lethal injection, or even a Utah firing squad or a French guillotine. Me, I was shot by a fucking cop. A small-town, red-necked, Coors-beer, pig son of a bitch who thought he’d pulled over Eldridge Cleaver or some shit. November tenth, 1972, Barstow, California at nine-seventeen in the evening. Just trying to get myself the fuck away from L.A.”

“I guess that didn’t make you feel so good, either.”

“I’m telling you, man. I came out of that pod as mean as hell. After a while, though, when I saw how things were, I started figuring that I was probably lucky.”

“How did you figure that?”

“I never had to trip on no death row contemplation, bro. Or no terminal cancer ward, for that matter. And for those mercies I was profoundly grateful, you know what I’m saying? If you gotta go at the hands of the man, you best make it fast and furious.”

The joint was now down to a roach; Saladeen nipped off the hot coal with a callused thumbnail and ate what remained. “That’s maybe why Doc lets them hole up here. He didn’t go no fast and furious.
He did his own share of twisting and turning on them TB blues before he passed over. Fast and furious be the only route.”

Jim nodded. “I can see that.”

“Lee Oswald, man. That’s the only way to go. You’re walking through the door into that parking garage, man. Nothing on your mind except how the fuck are you going to get out of this deep shit and then BAM! Jack Ruby with his hat on and you gone before you even know it, homes. No ten years of lawyers and thinking about it.”