What Happened Later Excerpt
Pages 4 - 5
Before Jack Kerouac could change my life, Jim Morrison had to save it. Every Almighty needs an ambassador down below to do his dirty work. Mine wore tight brown leather pants and shouted out his rock and roll couplets like it somehow actually mattered.
You can read William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience or you can take my word for it, but walking on water wasn’t built in a day, every epiphany has to pay its own way. Jamie Dalzell and I were being bored together in his bedroom one afternoon after school when he slipped the Doors’ Greatest Hits onto his stereo turntable as casually as anybody who’s ever transformed somebody else’s life without trying. Forget about music videos, I’d only just discovered FM radio the year before. I thought Elton John was a poet. I thought Kiss were punk rock. We all had ten-speed bicycles, and the city buses snaked our neighbourhoods until six p.m. five nights a week, nine p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays, and the suburbs that connected us seemed like they went on forever.
The Doors were Morrison—you knew, because it was his chiselled cheekbones and dripping brown curls that crowded out the faces of the other three on the album cover—but the music was what made me sit down on the edge of Jamie’s bed and be quiet and listen. You didn’t have to sit down and be quiet in order to listen to REO Speedwagon. When I headed home for supper in the early evening February grey, my red Adidas bag full of school stuff hanging from one hand, the borrowed record album cradled tight in the other, the nightmare soundtrack organ sound of “Light My Fire” hummed me the half-mile walk back to my house.
My sneakers crunched in the snow in the frozen dark. No one over the age of fifteen worth talking to ever wore boots or hats in the winter, no matter how nasty frosty it got. The less you wore, the cooler you were. The really, really cool guys in grade thirteen came to school in jean jackets that they let flap open in the freezing breeze in the parking lot while they smoked. That, and getting a girlfriend and scoring touchdowns and potting hat tricks in hockey, was about as good as it was ever going to get.
I had no idea. I pulled the Doors album closer. I really had no idea.