Strange as it seems to me now looking back, I have more immediately pressing, if not perhaps more important, concerns at the moment than Jim and how it might be with him in Paris, to which he betakes himself around the middle of March. I have begun work at RCA Records, as senior copywriter in the newly established in-house advertising creative group. In April, I get my first communiqué from Paris (a postcard with a picture of Notre-Dame and some cryptic remarks about French history scribbled on the back, with a salutation of “Dearest” and a close of “All my love”). I am overjoyed, perhaps more so than it is good for me to be.
Still, May brings a real letter, June two more letters and a small package—the last things I am ever to receive from Jim’s hand. The gifts are as they are; but the letters are alarming.
Not so much the first two, save only between the lines: outwardly Jim speaks with real feeling of the beauty of Paris, but then admits he has been ill and unable to write as much as he would like, that he cannot seem to settle into a productive creative groove, cannot find his writing voice, and this makes him unhappy and uncertain. He speaks tenderly of how he misses me, of how it is winding down at last to the final break with Pam, of how there is so much history there, both good and bad, but that this is really it, as far as he’s concerned; of how much he looks forward to our being together in New York as he has promised, by October at the latest, so he can catch the fall colors. In one of the letters, he encloses a poem for me—all about us, lovely, loving, it makes me cry—and he ends both missives on determinedly upbeat notes, as if he were trying to cheer and convince himself as well as me. Still, the subtext of depression is there in both letters, and much plainer in the second than in the first.
But it is the third letter Jim sends me, the last one, the June one, that genuinely frightens me. And frustrates, for I cannot even write back to comfort or to counsel; even though on this one he has put his rue Beautreillis address, in the ancient Marais quarter of Paris, writing it on the outside of the blue-gray envelope in different colored ink, as an apparent afterthought, as if to invite reply without actually wishing to appear to ask for it. But I cannot take the chance of Pamela intercepting any letter I write him, or at least I feel that I cannot…
He calls to mind joyful things—our handfasting in June, a year ago already; a long and funny reflection on our first anniversary; a declaration of how he loves me and misses me—but otherwise there is little joy here. He speaks of standing on the downslope to a void and not knowing where, or even if, he is; of crying himself to sleep on a night of rain and wondering if I heard him; says that for the first time he is uncertain where I am, says that he reaches out for me in his sleep but his side is cold with my absence.
He writes that he thinks he really wants to be dead, not mad, after all, and how I always thought it was the other way round. He speaks of mad Ahab, who “recalled in replete old age the Whiteness of the Whale.” He speaks of Byron, “mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” and reminds me that I said that to him the very first time we met, asks if I remember (as if I could ever forget!); says that he lives by a script, I by a saga; says that he feels cornered, says he’s not even going to mail this to me after all.
And toward the end he writes that he is tired—calls me Patty—says that he walked for miles and came home limping; says he doesn’t really know why he does these things and yet seems to learn so little. He reminds me that once he told me in LA that I hadn’t sold out and says that now he requires that reassurance of me; says he wants me to look at him and tell him that he has not sold anything that could not be bought save by honest coinage.
There is much more in the same dreadful despairing vein: the pages seem frosted with hopelessness; the more I read and reread, the more I weep for him, and the more I want to jump on the first plane to Paris and drag him bodily back with me to safety in my arms, forever, away from his pain.
But his pain seems to be his fellow traveler—supposedly that was why he went to France in the first place, to escape it, to transcend it, not realizing he bore it with him; though why he ever thought the continued company of Courson and her fellow traveler, heroin, would help him do any of that is a mystery, now as then. We will not learn until a long time after, not for certain, just what it is that Pam and her smack will in truth help him to; and ever since I learned it, it has been my prayer that there was, at least, no pain for him in that; perhaps, even, pain’s ending.
But in the end, I do write, as I knew I would—an impassioned plea for him to save himself, whatever it takes, for me and the others who love him, but above all else for himself. I do not know if he ever got the letter.
***
Then, a few nights later, I have a visitant.
It is the deepest, darkest hour of a summer night; I am not asleep, but I know I am not entirely awake—or perhaps I am superawake, hyperawake on some other level. There is not a sound anywhere, not even from the street three stories below, and Jim is standing beside the bed, looking down at me, eyes deep in a pale, pale face.
In one of his space-fantasy books, C.S. Lewis writes that people often mistake dreams for visions, but no one ever mistook a vision for a dream. How right he was. This is no dream: Jim is so real, so vivid, so here that I can see every line of him, every shade and light on that beautiful face; I even take careful note of what he is wearing, the length of his hair, the fact that his beard is gone (I last saw him full-bearded and do not learn until much later that he shaved it off in Paris).
And I wish with all my soul that it were just a dream, because I know only too well what this really is and what it betokens. It is in fact the fetch, that phantasm of the living that appears a little before a death, when the departing soul is loosening its hold in the body and its ties to the world, putting its skates on, getting ready to roll. In that brief time, a day or two at most, the soul travels to people and places it has known and loved in life, going by the “low road” of the old Scottish song “Loch Lomond,” in which the lover tells his beloved that, traveling by the low road of the soul, he will be in Scotland before she will, traveling as she must by earthly highways; he is, of course, telling her that he is dead.
And as I look on Jim as he stands before me, I know beyond any last lying, desperate hoping doubt that he has come to say farewell. It is indeed the fetch, that quiet visitation from which there can be no appeal, and it has come right on schedule. Probably the one night in his life that Jim Morrison was on time for a gig…
We look at one another for many moments; Jim leans over to kiss me, to whisper to me—I feel him against me, breathe him in, so real is he that I can smell him, even, his own unique indefinable scent of wine and long hair and clean scrubbed male body. And then he is gone. I feel him leaving not merely my side but the planet, spiraling out on a long arcing road, drawing away like a comet that whips round the sun and back again to space, outward bound. It is good-bye, and all is forgiven, and I love you very much; I give him the same, and more besides. It is exceedingly final. I think it was over for us before we had ever even met.
When I open my eyes to the sunrise lighting the room, I remember it all immediately, and sit up so fast I almost black out. I begin to raise my left hand to my unfocused eyes, then halt the motion in midair. My wedding ring, my silver claddagh, that never leaves my hand—fitting, indeed, so tightly upon my finger that I could not get it off without the greatest difficulty even if I wished to—is on my other hand. Somehow, in the night, it has mysteriously migrated, transplanting itself from the wedding-ring finger of my left hand—which it has left only once since Jim first put it there last year (when I threw it at him in Miami), and never since he put it there again (right after I threw it at him). It now sits snugly, correctly facing inwards, upon the third finger of my right hand.
I stare at it for a long time. So, Jim was here last night, after all…Not only that, as I discover when I rise at last: a picture of him—a lovely Paul Ferrara shot, with a leather hat and a big grin—has somehow escaped from its place tucked away behind the private-edition Lords and New Creatures, and lies now on the floor between bookshelves and bed, not far from where Jim had stood in the night, where often he had stood in life.
Way too cosmic even for cosmic old me…When I am once again in control of myself, I call a couple of friends and recount to them the events of the night past. It is now the morning of July 2, 1971, and I somehow sense that I will be needing some before-the-fact corroboration very soon now. I tell them to remember what I have said, and they promise to do so.
The next day I get up early—a clear, warm day—and go to one of the windows overlooking the street. My intent is to check on traffic, but as I part the draperies I startle back as if I have been shot. Clinging to the inside of the screen is the biggest white butterfly I have ever seen. I recover myself and slowly move closer; it does not fly away, not even when I reach out a trembling hand to gently brush its wings. It stays there for many minutes, wavering a little in the warm breeze; but when I take a last look before leaving the house it has gone. I have never seen a butterfly, white or otherwise, on my East Village street before or since.