05/10/2015
The first few pages of "The Last Stage"
I’m dead. Not the cold corporeal type of death, but a warm,
living death, a ghost trying to regain what he has lost. A death where
everything is a faded, pale facsimile of the life I had. I went into my
study and sat at the desk, it’s an old theatrical make-up table with
a gilded mirror surrounded by those old fashioned bulbous lights,
naked, astringent, that push light into every crevice and nook, no
where to hide. Every night I sit surrounded in this room, a shrine
to my “career.” The desk is stuffed with my newspaper reviews,
photographs, journals, scrapbooks and notes. The mirror was cleaned
up and glimmered, a relic of an age gone by, salvage from my past.
I lit a candle and popped a tape into the player on the desk, I watched
the candle flicker and dance, casting shadows against the wall, hoping
it would set the mood. A voice from the speakers said, “ladies and
gentlemen, from Madison, Wisconsin, The Unknown Soldiers!” I cleared
my mind and let the music transport me back, opening the flood of
memories. It was a ceremony I’ve been practicing, a little ritual to help
induce self-hypnosis. I closed my eyes, and I could see the audience
cheering, an impressionistic flash of colorful clothes, and faces looking
up at me. I had been the singer in a Doors tribute band, The Unknown
Soldiers, it seemed like if I could concentrate hard enough and remember
all the sights, sounds, smells, and feelings, I’d find myself on that stage
again. The music was raw but powerful, then my voice came booming
out of the speakers, it was huskier than Jim Morrison’s, but I was able
to tear out screams as well as his. We sounded like what The Doors had
on a night Morrison wasn’t too drunk. I remember those days like the
touch of a lost lover, the sensation lingers. More salvage.
I liked playing Morrison it made me feel powerful. Getting a
reaction from the audience, and being able to move them to ecstasy,
despair, or joy. I imagined it to be something of how Morrison
had felt. People had given me things, presents, trinkets, beads like
Morrison’s, poems that they thought I’d be interested in, women gave
themselves to me because of it. I later realized they were only trying to
get close to me, so they could touch something of Morrison, a ghost
of someone not even myself. It had also gotten me to Los Angeles and
my chance at fame, I can still almost feel the “whoosh” of air as fame
rushed by me. I opened my eyes to the usual disappointment, I was
still in the here and now. No audience, no cheering, no applause.
Jim Morrison, was the charismatic and controversial lead singer
of The Doors, the 60’s rock group that had such hits as Light My Fire,
Touch Me, and Riders On The Storm, but also songs like The End
which at first glance was a paean to lost love but in the end had a
modern telling of the Oedipus myth, like many young men Morrison
worried about death, every twenty year old feels like he’ll never live to
thirty, while simultaneously feeling immortal. Since I was a teenager
people, friends had told me I looked like Jim Morrison. I hadn’t really
paid that much attention to Morrison, or his music, but I took the
compliments to heart, it had boosted my ego to think I looked like
someone famous, and that’s how my life took its form.
I looked into the mirror. I had the idea that I could look into
myself to find the questions of my life, and I hoped the answers lay
within the formulation of those questions. But all I could see was my
craggy face being torn by the toll of time that Morrison never had to
endure, kind of like Dorian Gray without the luxury of a portrait.
My friends and I had missed the 60’s, on a geologic scale it was
only a stones throw away, on a cultural scale it was ancient history, it
was like looking back to the age of heros, and beholding past glories
through the ambered memories of our older brothers and sisters.
So we tried to recreate that time, our own Summer of Love, going
out to the park and smoking dope, at the feet of our very own Dion,
listening to him play James Taylor songs on an acoustic guitar.
I wanted to be a rock star, everybody wants to be a rock star!
Including you! You become something more, something special, it’s
like alchemy from lead to gold, the mortal to the immortal. Being a
rock star is power, power over authority, power over women, power
over the truths of reality, by definition, a hero!
And why not The Doors? The Doors had both mainstream success
and a cult following since their inception. Rock ‘n’ Roll is a lifestyle,
high volume, dress, attitude, rebellion against authority, and nobody
embraced that better than Jim Morrison, he’s the model of a rock
star to rock stars. And The Doors were a truly revolutionary group.
The music was primal, and Morrison’s lyrics and his confrontation
of his audience was a message of revolution, not storm the palace
walls, but a subtle revolution, an exhortation to change from within,
the revolution within yourself, and that’s what scared people, because
real change is always from within.
But I wasn’t a rock star, maybe a simulacrum of one, a modern
Prometheus, ever changing, facile. I’d had a taste of what being a rock
star was like. Probably a shadow of what it really was like, but I’d been
closer than most. I saw the top of the mountain through the mists.
Performing had been the best high I’d ever experienced. Better than any
drug I’d ever tried. I’d had a taste of what most people can only fantasize
of, only dream of, and will never experience, nor can they imagine what
it feels like even as they sing along, play air guitar, or beat out a rhythm.
I looked at the blank page staring back at me from the desk. I’ve
been trying to write my autobiography on and off for years since the
band broke up. I have to write it while I can still hear the chorus of
voices of those I met, those I befriended, those I cheated, those I loved.
The band had been my idea I was the lead singer. I’d gone through
a lot of things with the band most people wouldn’t understand. As
the lead singer, I was the focal point of the band. I’d experienced
a lot of things even they couldn’t understand, but they had never
understood me, or what I was trying to do. But if I can get this one
thing right, if I can put this together and make you understand, then
maybe others will understand. The one thing Morrison taught me
was to have some irreverence for art, maybe I should sit here and
write ‘f**k’ a hundred times.
My ‘fame’, my ‘celebrity’ were now things of memory. Things were
different now that I was a chef, albeit in a “fancy” restaurant. I had
to “take orders” from people, and conform to other’s expectations,
such as wearing a uniform. I learned the trade by going to one of
those six month schools you see advertised on TV at three in the
morning, financing and student loans available, it was either this or
gunsmithing. I spent a couple of years working as a prep cook doing
most of the actual preparation while the chef heated up the food, put
it on a plate, added a colorful garnish, and took all of the credit.
I haven’t been to work on time in weeks. I try, but something always
seems to get in the way. Tonight was typical I was running late and as
soon as I walked in the manager, Sergei, was on me, pots clanking on
their hooks as he rushed passed. He caught me in the prep area as I was
trying to make it look like I’d been there a while. He came up to me,
close, I could almost taste the decades of garlicky food on his breath.
“Hey rock star!” He yelled, his thickly accented voice reverberating
harshly off the stainless steel. I had told all my coworkers of my past
“celebrity”, regaling them with my tales, on and off stage. “You’re
late again, Michael.”
“I know, I’m sorry, it was . . . .” A smile crossed my lips as I tried
to find the right lie. I was beyond any pretense of caring if I could
think of one or not. I was beyond caring whether or not I kept the
job. My wife would be the only one to care, but only momentarily
because she would understand, and support whatever decision I made.
From the moment I met her she believed in me.
“I don’t want an excuse, I’ve heard them all from you,” Sergei
said, looking me up and down with disgust, “and look at your shirt,
it’s starting to look dingy.” Every night sweat stained the shirt a little
more, and a little more dirt clung to it. It became just a little dingier,
just like the work, “do me a favor, Gray,” he said moving even closer
to me and pulling at the shirt, “wash it.”
Then there were the customers and invariably the complainers,
‘the soup was too hot’, ‘too cold’, ‘how is the fish prepared?’, ‘the steak
is too well done’ ‘too rare’, ‘not done enough’, and inevitably the less
satisfied they were, the ‘ruder’ I became. But Sergei couldn’t fire me
because I was too good a chef, and had a small local following asking
for me whenever they came in. Finishing this book is the only way
I can get back what’s been taken away.
Available at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Last-Stage-Jim-Cherry/dp/1413495400/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1444054576&sr=1-1&keywords=The+last+stage+Jim+Cherry
