I hung on the horns of this dilemma until I got a call from New York saying that if Michael Korda got his way, publication plans for Poorboy might be “revised.” What did that mean? Who was Michael Korda? I had no idea, but it tipped the scale and I declined Jim's invitation. When I told him I wasn't going, he gave me a hard look, turned and left without another word. A few days later, he dropped his copy of The Maniac Responsible in my mailbox without a phone call or note. I thought that was the last of my brief friendship with Jim, but as the future unfolded, he grew larger as a presence.

        About a year later, a girl visited me in Malibu, said she was Jim's girlfriend during their teens. The teenage Jim Morrison she told me about faked out his mother by pretending to leave for school, walking out the front door with his books, then around to the back of the house and down into the cellar, where he'd spend days reading and writing. School bored him but learning lit up his life. She said she was visiting California and just wanted to let me know that the famous rock star was largely self-taught.
        A few years later when news of his death in Paris hit, I was not surprised. Everyone who knew Jim doubted he would live to a ripe old age. It seemed his soul's address was the crossroads of sex and death. He seemed most alive when he was risky dancing with the Grim Reaper. Some fans refused to believe he was dead, though, and a couple of years later, I was sent a book titled The Bank of America of Louisiana by Jim Morrison. Last I checked, it was selling online for $95 and up. I have no idea who really wrote this book—someone using Jim's name, or maybe another Jim Morrison—but its sly humor reeks of the famous rock star's perspective.
        Then came the book No One Here Gets Out Alive, a portrayal slapped together into a caricature of sensationalism by Danny Sugarman and Jerry Hopkins. That title, a poetic line of Jim's, had brought goose bumps to thousands of concertgoers when Jim breathed it into microphones as he created the mood for a performance. Hopkins had spent most of a day interviewing me for this book. In reaction to the misconceptions perpetrated by Sugarman and Hopkins about my relationship with Jim, I wrote an article, published in the Santa Barbara News and Review (March 19, 1981), now the Independent. I'm told that this edition sold more copies than any other.
        One response to that article was a call from Frank Lisciandro, who'd been The Doors' official photographer and had filmed the documentary, “Feast of Friends.” He had attended UCLA film school with Morrison and Manzareck. His wife Kathie had been The Doors' secretary. We spent hours remembering the climatic times of the late sixties, and Frank used large chunks of my article in his book, An Hour of Magic.
        During the late seventies, I became involved with a French film director who was writing a script, a story that ends with Jim happily flying out of Paris, in disguise, free from the burden his rock star fame had become, ready to devote full time to his poetry, while someone else's body is lowered into the ground at Père Lachaise Cemetery. This version was soon to be eclipsed by Oliver Stone's movie, “The Doors.”

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