by Mick Farren
He sincerely hoped the apparent garbaging of his memory was purely temporary. Painful as it might prove, it was his and he wanted it back. He was fairly optimistic that it would one day return. Something, possibly a perceived familiarity with advanced and multiple intoxication, told him that his life on Earth had been replete with blackouts and memory lapses, and suggested that this could well be a cosmic version of the same condition. If it was, he had only himself to blame. One of his most profound desires, when he had found himself discorporated at such an unexpectedly early age, was that he could somehow avoid the thereafter being merely a rerun of the same drugged, drunk, chaotic shambles. As far as he could tell, and to his eternal shame, his resolve wasn’t holding up too well.
The immediate concrete fact before Jim was that he had suddenly found himself at a party, and he knew enough to realize that it was no ordinary party. Jim had no clear idea of how or why he had arrived there, but it was plain that this Cecil B. DeMille production of howling, dancing, undulating vice was full of others who had rendered themselves as mindless as he was. He could see the unmistakable vacancy in the eyes of a high percentage of the revelers. They, too, had sacrificed mind and memory to the specific moment; for them, it was a moment of vibrance and abandon, a gratifying instant of tongues and hair, sweat and flesh, lips and liquidity. All set against the backdrop of a towering, slowly erupting volcano that spewed majestic flows of bright, sulfurous, hellfire lava and sent them slithering and easing their way sinuously down the upper slopes in ponderous slow motion. All around him, faces gleamed with flame reflections of red-orange heat, and demon-black shadows crouched among the crush of groaning, howling participants.
The thousand or more human beings who made up this plunging mass, plus the hundred or so other entities who couldn’t quite be classified, were crowded into a natural amphitheater at the base of the mountain. The set for this epic surrender to hedonism and sexual abandon was a flat-bottomed basin surrounded on three sides by high black basalt walls that looked to have been carved out of prehistory by some vast, violent geological scoop. Within its confines, men and women, intoxicated to the borderline of psychosis, clawed and pawed at each other’s greased, painted, and perfumed bodies. Some lay sprawled in spread-eagled abandon on the now damp and stained cushions that had been strewn across the floor of polished stone, while others groped, staggered, and stumbled, bent on staying on their feet come what might. Such clothing as had been worn back when the festivities had started was, for the most part, long since shredded or ripped away, and, along with it, any sense of individual identity, even on the most minimal level. The crowd had all but merged into a single, moving, but apparently unthinking, entity. This lust-driven composite was a constant flux of wave motions that, at regular intervals, would erupt into screaming pockets of mass hysteria or moaning cluster orgasm.
On a rock ledge above the seething crowd, Ethiopian drummers, their shining, oiled forms festooned with gold jewelry inlaid with turquoise and ivory, and their faces hidden by the fall of their dripping dreadlocks, pounded furiously on the hard hide heads of leopardskin-draped kettledrums, rhythmically urging the already furious crowd to even greater frenzy. The drummers seemed all but oblivious to the women and men who crouched at their feet, seemingly worshiping what they saw as the driving force of the orgiastic confusion. Intrusive, urgent hands stroked the players’ legs and shamelessly cupped their genitals and buttocks, but the ritual drummers missed not so much as an inflection or accent. Even when bold, eager tongues licked the very sweat from them, the beat went on, relentlessly maintained, unwavering and unchallengeable.
On a second ledge, immediately below the drummers, relays of young men and women, all but naked in sheer drapes of near-transparent Hunan silk, poured dark, aromatic, psychedelic wine from a seeming endless supply of stone jars into the upheld goblets and even directly into the open mouths of the Mad magazine mass that milled below them. The hair of these serving youths was garlanded with twines of white flowers and some wore luxurious orchids behind their ears. Every one of these exquisite servants swayed in time to the throb of the drums as they slaked the mob’s obvious thirst, and they broke frequently from their appointed tasks to allow themselves to be kissed and fondled by absolute strangers and even carried down, unresisting, into the squirming carnality. When these dalliances interrupted the wineflow, celebrants would climb up and help themselves. Entire jars would be passed down and borne away, their contents slopping and staining what remained of the surrounding crowd’s disarrayed clothing, and adding to the profusion of fluids that drenched and lubricated the desperate celebration.
The Golden Calf itself squatted balefully at the center of the entire sensual maelstrom, presiding over the sinuous chaos. Over fifteen feet high from its cloven hooves to the tips of its branching Texas horns, and constructed entirely from beaten gold and crusted with precious gems, it provided the ultimate focus and singular provocation of all that happened around it. Ultimately pagan in its sculptured ferocity, the tall idol’s nostrils flared, and the huge rubies that formed its eyes glared down with implacable bovine contempt at those who prostrated or disported themselves before it. The Golden Calf had been festooned with more white flowers, splashed with wine, and columns of smoke rose on either side of its massive head from braziers of burning incense, all but creating the impression that the beast was breathing fire. Two women, bodies bare from the waist down, straddled the wet ridge of its metallic spine, rocking their hips backward and forward, riding the towering effigy with eyes closed, faces ecstatic, locking in lewd oblivion. The idol even came with its own sacrificial maiden, who hung in chains suspended from its mighty horns and, in the tatters of her blue silk ball gown, bore an uncanny resemblance to Debra Paget in the Vista Vision, wide-screen version of The Ten Commandments, although in the movie Debra Paget had not been used with such repeated depravity by such a representative cross section of the massed celebrants. In historical and mortal fact, that kind of thing had been the prerogative of Howard Hughes.
That Jim had no idea of how exactly he had come to be under this particular volcano at the time in question had, after repeated draughts of the purple wine, pretty much ceased to bother him, in part because, as the crowd swayed around him, he was hallucinating to the point of near-blindness. At one point the effects of the wine had prompted the vaguest of recollections of being in the middle of a pitched battle in a high mountain pass between the Dionysians and the Apollonians. The Apollonians had come in with automatic weapons and air support, while the Dionysians had only coup sticks and ghost shirts. Needless to say, he had been on the side of the Dionysians in this unequal conflict, and his memory may have been the price that he paid for his ill-advised participation.
About the only thing of which he was sure was that he hadn’t created the orgy himself. His recall might be down, but he still knew his own personality, and he was confident that his tastes, although certainly of a Bacchanalian bent, didn’t run to such old-Hollywood, pornographic grandiosity. When he found himself at the base of the Golden Calf, caressing the exceptionally full and well-formed breasts of a naked and nameless young woman who resembled a very young Mamie Van Doren, he knew it was the work of some mysterious other. If he had been in control, he would never have allowed himself to be dragged from off her so early in the encounter.
Initially the young woman had been energetically eager, and in the mere space of their first minute together she had entirely ripped away his white linen shirt. Jim hadn’t been too concerned about the shirt, and when the woman had started unbuckling the belt of his ancient leather jeans, he had been quite prepared to swim with the prevailing sensual tide. The only thing that bothered him was that, when she spoke, he found himself unable to understand a word she was saying. At first he was alarmed that he had been deprived of language as well as memory. This theory hardly seemed to fly, though; he not only thought in English, but when he attempted to say anything, he formed English words and sentences despite the drunkenn
ess of his condition.
The woman’s speech also seemed to lack the form and natural repetition of language; it was little more than a sequence of unstructured grunts and glottal cries. Jim’s next assumption was that she had consumed so much of the psychedelic wine that she was actually talking in tongues, but then he noticed that a similar glossolalia was being mouthed and uttered by most of those around him. Could it be that whoever had fashioned this lavish and ultimately impressive event, and possibly even brought Jim there from wherever he’d been, had problems with giving speech to his creations? Either that or he wanted to keep his celebrants in mindless noncommunication in his lush pit of Babel. It was while Jim pondered this question that he discovered that he who ponders can also lose. Two men, a bull-dyke lesbian, and a creature who could easily have been a Sasquatch had picked up the Van Doren replicant by her arms and legs and physically removed her, while the surrounding crowd brayed with laughter. Jim considered the action neither friendly nor sexually ethical, but he was too loaded to make an issue of it.
After that, he had wandered aimlessly through the chaos of the orgy, shirtless in his jeans and scuffed engineer boots, finding himself repeatedly splashed with wine and fondled by total strangers of both sexes and none. This licentious buffeting soon grew tiresome, and he looked around for some detached vantage point where he could observe the epic debauch without any compulsion to become part of the action. He noticed a hollow niche some twelve feet up on the rock wall, opposite the ledges occupied by the Ethiopian drummers and the youths serving the wine. A usable if rudimentary path led up to the niche and it seemed to be exactly the kind of spot to which he could happily withdraw. The only snag was another individual already had the same idea. A fully clothed man was sitting there, knees drawn up, shoulders against the rock face, and a wide-brimmed black hat pulled down so it concealed his face. He was the only fully clothed, not to say elaborately dressed, character in sight, which, in context, made him appear singularly perverse.
As Morrison observed the man who had beat him to the sanctuary, his rival pulled a silver one-pint flask from his coat and took a long drink. He then returned the flask to his pocket and almost immediately fell into a spasm of uncontrolled coughing. He struggled to extract a white lace handkerchief from another pocket and bring it to his mouth. When he finally withdrew the uncharacteristically dainty piece of linen, Jim could see, even from a distance, that it was stained with fresh red blood.
The man looked strangely familiar to Jim, although he was of course unable to put a name to him or locate him in any context. That someone in the Afterlife should be suffering from what appeared to be not only a terminal earthly disease but one that was classically Victorian was remarkable enough, and the man’s style was certainly in profound contrast to any of the other guests at the orgy. Where the rest were primitive or Old Testament, he was clearly a son of the nineteenth century. The cut of his black velvet frock coat and ornamental brocade vest could only be described as rakish, and the same applied to the long, old-fashioned cavalry boots that extended well above his knees. His soft floppy hat was turned down at one side in a decidedly dandified manner, and in Morrison’s estimation he had struck an almost-balance between western gunfighter and dissolute pre-Raphaelite aesthete. Jim wasn’t quite sure how he recognized these origins, but he was relieved to find that at least his cultural reference bank hadn’t completely gone off line.
While he was entertaining these thoughts, Jim also found himself being pawed at by a naked and grossly obese hermaphrodite who not only talked in tongues but did so with a repulsively sibilant lisp and a spray of drool. Jim quickly decided that enough was enough. He ducked away from the creature’s damply eager clutches and unappetizing, fish-belly flesh and began to negotiate the series of hand- and footholds that led up to the niche now occupied by the familiar stranger in the frock coat and soft hat. The hollow in the rock was large enough to accommodate three or four grown men; the worst the stranger could do, Jim reasoned, was scream at him to go away. As he approached the man, Jim called out, extending what he saw as a minimal social courtesy even if it wouldn’t be understood.
“Do you mind if I join you up there?”
The frock-coated stranger pushed back his hat, revealing a sickly pallid face with a dark drooping mustache, hard blue eyes, and the expression of one who is easily irritated. To Jim’s surprise, he answered not only in English but in a deceptively indolent drawl that might have had its origins in the old, and largely fictional, antebellum south. “May I assume that you’re looking for some peace and quiet and not some kind of homosexual liaison?”
Jim halted halfway between orgy and niche. Despite the lazy speech, the stranger’s overall demeanor was quite enough to warn him that this was not a character with whom to trifle. “I’m definitely looking for some peace and quiet.”
The stranger shrugged. “Then come ahead, young man. Come right ahead.”
As Jim reached the hollow in the rock, the stranger looked at him questioningly. “You seem, sir, not to be remembering me?”
Jim instantly adopted an improvised approximation of the stranger’s fanciful speech patterns. “I fear, sir, I have no memory at all.”
The man’s eyes narrowed dangerously. “Considering the nature of our last encounter, I’m surprised that you would have forgotten it in such a hurry.”
Jim was quick to explain. “I mean I have no memory of anything. I appear to have materialized here with no recall beyond a sorry and confused blur.”
The man seemed content with the explanation, at least for the present. “That’s unfortunate.”
Jim sat down, allowing a civilized distance of almost two paces between them. The man seemed to accept this as a mark of well-mannered respect. “At least you and I are not the wanton creations of whoever started this thing.”
“What makes you say that?”
“If you and I were mere fantasy figments, we would not be up here, playing the part of nonparticipant watchers. We’d be down there, wallowing with the rest of the recently invented swine. To mangle Descartes a little, we observe, therefore we are.”
This statement was so far from anything that Jim might have expected that he was temporarily at a loss for a response. The stranger, for his part, seemed to have nothing to add, and the two of them sat quiet for a time while the bacchanal continued to howl and throb below them. Finally, Jim could contain his curiosity no longer regarding the familiar stranger’s identity. “I fear, sir, you have the advantage of me.”
This time the stranger didn’t bother to raise the brim of his hat. “You think so?”
“I do indeed. You would appear to know who I am, while I have no recollection of either your name or where we might have met. In fact, I’d be more than happy if you could tell me who I am. My own identity also appears to have escaped me somewhere in the mysterious transit that brought me here.”
The man chuckled and then coughed as a result of the unguarded laugh. “Are you saying that you want me to introduce you to yourself?”
“I suppose I am.”
“That’s some singular request, my friend.”
“But one that I need to make.”
The familiar stranger paused for a very long time, toying with Jim, perhaps, or pondering the ethics of reuniting an individual with his mislaid identity. Below them the orgy showed no signs of abating. The Debra Paget look-alike chained to the golden calf was now being forced to pull a train for a gang of burly Cro-Magnons with thick red hair all over their bodies. Finally the stranger made up his mind. “In that case, my friend, your name is Morrison . . . James Morrison.”
“James Morrison?”
“James Douglas Morrison, commonly known as Jim.”
“You’re telling me that I’m Jim Morrison?”
“That’s what you were calling yourself last time I saw you.”
“You’re putting me on.”
“Indeed I am not.”
“The Jim Morrison?”
�
��So you said. You claimed you were the Lizard King, whatever that might mean. You went on to boast that you could do anything.”
“I suppose I was drunk.”
“As a skunk. Indeed, a good deal drunker than you would appear to be right now.”
Jim nodded slowly and thoughtfully. This took some digesting. “No shit.”
“As I recall, you were inordinately proud that you had made something of a nuisance of yourself for a short while in the twentieth century.”
Jim was beginning to get the distinct impression that the stranger was making fun of both him and his disability. “I’m beginning to remember.”
In fact, a whole block of memory had abruptly tumbled back into place, memories of crowds and lights, fame and fortune and a myriad of women, of hashish and heroin and massive quantities of alcohol. Of flash and flamboyance offset by monstrous hungover depression and a constant dicing with the death that had ultimately become inevitable.
The familiar stranger took another pull on his flask. He also coughed again, but only a couple of times and without the previous painful violence. “Of course, you may not really be Morrison.”
Jim frowned. “What do you mean?”
“You know how it is.”
“No, I don’t.”
The stranger pushed back his hat. “That’s right. I was forgetting. You don’t have a memory.”
“I’m getting some memory back and it’s all Morrison.”
“Well, it would be, wouldn’t it?”
“It would?”
“We all indulge our fantasies, my friend. We strive for seamlessness.”
Jim was now totally confused. “We do?”
“It rather goes with the territory. In fact, it quickly becomes all the territory we’ve got.”