Lili Anolik is the author of Hollywood’s Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A., available from Scribner.

 

Anolik is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and a writer at large for Air Mail. Her work has also appeared in Harper’s, Esquire, and The Paris Review, among other publications. Her latest podcast, Once Upon a Time… at Bennington College, dropped September 29th, 2021.

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You men eat your dinner
eat your pork and beans
I eat more chicken any man ever seen

So goes the blues song, “Back Door Man,” written in 1961 by Willie Dixon for Howlin’ Wolf, and later immortalized by Jim Morrison and The Doors.

A “Back Door Man” is said to be a man who has an affair with a married woman while her husband’s away. In the song, the chicken line serves as a double entendre. Chicken-eating was rare in 1961. Per capita, consumption of pork doubled chicken consumption; not until 1985 did chicken consumption surpass pork consumption in the United States.

“I eat more chicken any man ever seen,” then, likely referred to the singer’s boast that married women cooked chicken for him and saved the less desirable pork and beans for their husbands.

I am not a “back door man”-at least not in any blues sense of the phrase. However, taken literally, that chicken line is my personal anthem: I really do eat more chicken any man ever seen.

In 2007, the typical American consumed about 87 pounds of chicken. My yearly chicken consumption equals about 525 pounds-a ½ chicken almost every single night.

Most nights, I eat a ½ roast chicken. I adore The French recipe, poulet en cocotte. I believe chicken should be brined. In Puerto Rico last winter, I ate a rotisserie chicken from the supermarket for seven consecutive evenings. I prefer dark meat. I tolerate people who prefer white meat, though I find this “preference” laughable. Chicken legs are finger-lickin’, robust, Whitmanesque. Dark meat, replete with B-vitamins, is more nutritious than white meat, too. I believe that chicken should be shared.  Sundays, I share a whole roast chicken with my wife. Weekends, I grill chicken legs for friends and family.

This was not always the case. Growing up, I was not necessarily a prolific chicken-eater. Then, at twenty, I became a vehement vegetarian. Firm in my belief that I was nourishing my body (and, obviously, supporting the welfare of the earth and its creatures), I ate whole grains, beans, tempeh, raw fruits and vegetables-but no chicken. Skinny to begin (6″ 150 pounds), I slimmed down to beanpole dimensions (140 pounds). I acquired what Gabriel García Márquez, in One Hundred Years of Solitude, calls “the forlorn look that one sees in vegetarians.”

Some thought I was rigid. A Greek chorus of friends, family, everyone, really, except my supportive and loving vegetarian wife, said the same thing: Maybe you should eat some meat.

Perhaps they saw what I did not: vegetarianism was killing me. Throughout my early twenties, I suffered a variety of health problems. In my mid-twenties, my health issues evolved. At 26, I was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis. One year later, during my honeymoon in Barcelona, I checked into the hospital at 118 pounds, and was diagnosed with type-1 diabetes.

Remembering this time, I think of these lines from Tony Hoagland’s poem “Medicine”:

Daydreaming comes easy to the ill:
slowed down to the speed of waiting rooms,
you learn to hang suspended in the wallpaper,
to drift among the magazines and plants,
feeling a strange love
for the time that might be killing you.

I do not think I was unique in my stubborn will to remain vegetarian. We hang onto to diets, to ways of eating, even when they no longer make sense, don’t we? Often, we become attached to habits that might be killing us. Time, food, cigarettes–why do we maintain this “strange love”?

It wasn’t until my honeymoon in Barcelona, when I was hit by a car, and later diagnosed with type-1 diabetes, that I began to reconsider my vehemence.

Post-diagnosis, I spent 3 days in the ER, another 3 days in the hospital. When I was released from the hospital, equipped with a regime of insulin and needles, I felt my life had been cut in two. I knew who I used to be, but I had no idea who I might become.

That night in Barcelona, I fell asleep next to my new wife for the first time in seven days. Married only a month, we had spent a week apart–me in my hospital bed; her, returning to the flat alone after visiting hours had ended. Catalans are known for their late meals. I awoke around two in the morning, to a crisply delicious, salty smell. I stepped to the window and was hit by a waft of potato chips. I stuck my head out the window into the clear air. Smelling again, I realized I was mistaken. I hadn’t been smelling potato chips. No, a lunatic Catalan family was grilling at two o’clock in the morning. The scent struck me-the scent of grilled chicken, a veritable blizzard of aromatic compounds. Something about that scent struck my soul-it came to me deliciously intoning its simple message: You can change. You will survive. Eat chicken.

Since that time, seven years ago, I have eaten approximately ½ chicken almost every single night of my life.

Diet is the most idiosyncratic trait a person owns. Married people often share religious and political beliefs-but rarely the same diet. I admit, my chicken-eating habit might seem obsessive-akin in many ways to my prior vegetarianism. There is a difference, though: as a vegetarian, in pursuit of a “pure” body, I had viewed certain ways of eating as wrong or evil. Even as I refined my diet to an impossible degree, my health suffered. Today my diet is even more refined-and yet, I thrive.

I’ve abandoned the absurd belief that any way of eating is inherently right or wrong. I do not trust dietary dictums. In terms of food, my experience has taught me that the spirit with which you approach food is as important as the food itself.

How do you eat? In penance? With joy?

Food choices are vitally important to a type-1 diabetic. I had to re-learn my relationship with food in order to live healthfully. Every time I put food into my mouth, I must calculate the effect it will have upon my body, and I must make adjustments to my insulin regime accordingly. I cannot just eat whatever I want, whenever I want. I am bound by diabetes to live my life within proscribed boundaries.

Within these boundaries, though, I’ve discovered joy: perhaps it is a form of compulsion, but I enjoy eating the exact same thing every night. I know exactly how my body will react to chicken. I love the bluesy feeling of mirth, the wild joy of sucking on a chicken bone. I do not mean to be flippant. When I eat chicken I try to remember that I’m engaging in a significant moment–a moment that must be cherished, for it has been afforded to me through a great sacrifice of resources: land, energy, life. I cannot deny, though: to me, chicken is momentous. Chicken symbolizes my return to life.

I’ve posted recipes for my ½ roast chicken and whole roast chicken on my food blog. Here is a recipe for grilled chicken.

Grilled Chicken with Pantry Spice Rub

Over-cooked chicken, like over-cooked steak, is an offensive abomination. A good way to precisely gauge the internal temperature of chicken is to use an instant-read thermometer. Optimal temperature varies between white and dark meat, typically the best chicken measures 160-165 degrees at the breast, and 165-170 degrees at the leg.

4 naturally raised whole chicken legs 
6 tablespoons kosher salt 
2 tablespoons brown sugar 
¼ cup extra virgin olive oil
4 medium garlic cloves, peeled and crushed 
1 teaspoon sweet paprika 
1 teaspoon dried thyme
1 teaspoon chile powder
1 teaspoon cinnamon

Dissolve the salt and brown sugar in a gallon-size plastic bag. Add the chicken, press out the air, seal, and refrigerate for 1 ½ to 2 hours.

Meanwhile, in a small bowl combine the olive oil, garlic cloves, and spices.

Remove the chicken from the brine, rinse, dry with paper towels. Rub the pantry spice rub all over the chicken parts.

Light your grill.

If using a charcoal grill, make a two-level fire by stacking most of the coals on one side of the grill. Place the rack on the grill, cover, and allow the grill and rack to heat up for 5 or so minutes. Cook the chicken over the hot coals until browned and crispy, 3-4 minutes per side. Move the chicken to the cooler part of the grill, continue to cook, skin-side up, and covered for 10 minutes. Turn, and continue for 5-7 minutes, until done.

If using a gas grill, turn all the burners to high and heat the grill until very hot, about 10 minutes. Leave one burner on high and turn the other burners to low. Cook the chicken over the hotter part of the grill, uncovered, until browned and crispy, 3-4 minutes per side. Move  the chicken to the cooler part of the grill, continue to cook, skin-side up, and covered for 10 minutes. Turn, and continue for 5-7 minutes, until done.

Things you’ve said under your breath.

Things people have said with their last dying breath.

Things that drive people to drink.

Things that made Jesus think, “Maybe I’m in the wrong line of business…”

Things you can only find in Detroit.

Things that make you jump for joy.

Things that make people jump from the Golden Gate Bridge.

Things that get stuck between your teeth.

Things you’ve stuck in your ear, up your nose, or up your butt.

Things that change from ugly to beautiful.

Things that frighten you.

Things that enliven you.

Things to help raise your credit score.

Things to help lower your cholesterol.

Things organisms have done to adapt & survive.

Things that make certain men become priests.

Things that make certain women wrestle alligators.

Things serial killers think about.

Things you find in a dead man’s pockets.

Things you find in your own pockets.

Things named after Greek Gods.

Things people have done in the name of God.

Things that cause acne.

Things that cause cancer.

Things to consider before having a baby.

Things to consider before joining the French Foreign Legion.

Things you’d do if you had wings.

Things you’d do if you had the Green Lantern’s power ring.

Things to help clear your aura.

Things you can clear out of your orifices.

Things you should always buy generic.

Things you’ve always wanted to know, but were afraid to ask.

Things associated with winter.

Things associated with summer.

Things you’d do if you only had a week left to live.

Things you’d do if you were President.

Things the atom bomb thinks before going boom.

Things the flower bud thinks before going bloom.

Things they put into processed meats.

Things you do during the five stages of grief.

Things you’ve learned from the Bible.

Things you’ve learned from the National Enquirer.

Things to say while sexting.

Things you should never say to someone who’s depressed.

Things you forget.

Things you desire.

Things you’ve done while under the influence of drugs.

Things you’ve done while under the influence of love.

Things that make you go “Hmmm…”

Things you see when staring up at clouds.

Things your pets do when you’re not around.

Things you can smoke.

Things you can recycle.

Things behind the sun.

Things to make your car run better.

Things you find alongside the road

Things you find washed up on the beach.

Things you build.

Things you compete for.

Things you do when you’re alone in your room.

Things Van Gogh thought just before cutting off his ear.

Things that go in one ear and out the other.

Things you can burn.

Things you can save.

Things to say to get a girl wet.

Things to say to get a guy hard.

Things to say to get kicked off jury duty.

Things you can carry.

Things you can hide.

Things that decay.

Things that rejuvenate.

Things made of plastic.

Things made of corn.

Things put into time capsules.

Things put into compost piles.

Things that live under your skin.

Things you find around Jim Morrison’s grave.

Things that remind you of Buddha.

Things that remind you of Judas.

Things your doctor won’t tell you.

Things your parents won’t tell you.

Things your lover won’t tell you.

Things your best friend won’t tell you.

Things the major corporations won’t tell you.

Things the government won’t tell you.

Will never tell you.

Click here to see the author recite this piece.

Southwest Florida, 1976: at sixteen Kathy and I are not quite there. We are half girl and half woman. Our knees still bear the shadows of scrapes from roller skating falls while our hips and breasts swell and curve beneath our batik cotton sundresses. We kiss boys with skin as hot as toast, their tangles of sun-bleached hair longer than ours, whose surfboards hang out the back of their dented el Camino’s and who want more than we are ready to give.

When we aren’t at the beach after school we are at Kathy’s house where our time is not governed by parental law. Kathy’s mother left when she was five. She lives with her father and an older brother who returned from Vietnam to sit in a green webbed lawn chair in the middle of their backyard where nothing but scrub pine grows gnarled and deformed in a sandy soil of crushed shells. His chair faces away from the house and ringed around the base are empty cans of beer. When he first came home his head was shaved but it has grown back into long dark ringlets. He looks like Jim Morrison from the Doors and I tell Kathy this but she frowns and tells me she doesn’t see this even though I know she does. The only time he leaves the chair is to go to the 7-Eleven at the end of the block to purchase more beer. If you didn’t know that fact you could easily imagine the beer magically replenished itself.

For a while his high school girlfriend, (who he had promised to marry before he enlisted), came over in the afternoons. We hear them fighting and then having sex until they scream or cry or both. The roar of their pain crowds the narrow hallway of Kathy’s house that leads to the chain of bedrooms occupied by Kathy, her father and her brother. Their cries are like a fire given oxygen: his deep and guttural and hers high and reedy. They cut through The Stones You Can’t Always Get What You Want and force us out of Kathy’s room to the galley kitchen where we sit on opposite kitchen counters and eat Skippy out of the jar, (an anomaly for me since my mother insists on the peanut butter from the health food store that tastes like sticky dust, but Kathy shops for her family and so the choice is hers) the room is so narrow we can stretch our legs all the way out and rest our bare feet on the opposite counter.

When Kathy’s brother left for Vietnam he gave her his record collection. We worked our way into an appreciation of the Doors, Janice Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, the Who, and the Rolling Stones. With the music playing we closet ourselves in Kathy’s room where she has lined the walls with Indian tapestries from World Bazaar and burns sandpapery cones of incense and we talk about how far we might let the surfer boys go, not as far as they want, but we want, oh how we want, and how that wanting is in danger of unraveling.

One afternoon her brother’s girlfriend walks into the kitchen for a glass of water and tells Kathy loving her brother is like fucking a ghost before she drops the glass onto the plastic sink mat and walks out the door. Instead of leaving she sits in her car on the street parked next to the mailbox. We know she is waiting for him to come out but when an hour passes and his bedroom door is still closed, she leaves.

The first phone call comes on a rainy afternoon. We are sitting on the carport, waiting out the storm, talking about the waves, about who might be surfing, about the possibility of thunder and lightening and riding our bikes in a storm to the beach. We dash out into the yard and hold our faces and arms up to the rain. We spin in circles like children yet our bodies ache for something else, for something more, to go back but at the same time to go forward. My skin, the hair on my arms, the blood coursing through my veins: everything quivers from the power of wanting.

We are soaked, my patchwork skirt clings to my legs, and my bikini top is visible through my t-shirt as Kathy runs to answer the phone. I see her through the window twirling the long black floppy cord stretched out now from years of pulling it down the hallway to her room. Her face is dark and then light, the fingers of her other hand flutter around her breasts, holding the thin wet material of her tank top away from her body. I press my face to the sliding glass door and she motions me forward, holds the phone out to me and opens her mouth as if in shock or surprise.

When I get there she presses the phone to my ear, I smell her musky shampoo on the receiver, I hear the sharp intake of breath on the line, a low moan, like the sounds Kathy’s brother makes when he is having sex with his high school girlfriend.

What are you wearing? The voice rasps. Are you all wet?

Who the fuck is this? I ask.

Kathy leans closer and tilts the phone so we both can hear. The guy moans again.

Fuck off, I shout and push the phone out of Kathy’s hand. It dangles a moment on the long loopy cord before it smashes against the table and we laugh out of nerves and fear and excitement. We are standing there like that when we notice her brother walking up the driveway with a six-pack. He is shirtless and shoe-less and his chest looks remarkably like those of the surfer boys we like to kiss. He disappears around the house and reappears in his lawn chair. It doesn’t matter that it is raining. He settles himself and the beer in his usual position.

After that first afternoon there is a pattern to the calls. A half an hour after we get in the door from school the phone rings. The caller asks what we are wearing. He tells us what he will do for us. He tells us things that we have to guess at their meaning, he tells us what we can do for him. There is a lot of heavy breathing on his part. We are scared and thrilled by the game because we are newly sixteen and virgins and the idea of sex is ever present. We lay on the floor in Kathy’s room shoulder to shoulder with our feet pressed against the door in case anyone tries to come in, the cord squeezed between the frame and the latch. The calls last no longer than ten minutes and after my nerves jangle, my legs feel like rubber, and in my chest nests an apex of anxiety. After several calls Kathy acts funny and says she wants to be alone. As I leave, her brother twists around in his lawn chair and stares as I take my bike from the crumbling concrete slab. I wave, but he turns back around before my hand is even in front of my face.

One day I ride my bike to the beach after leaving Kathy’s house. I find Daryl, the sweetest of the surfers, the one that I have the deepest crush. His mother is a teller at the bank where my parents have an account. He tosses my bike in the back of his car along with his surfboard and we go to the apartment he shares with his mother and he shows me his room with the surfing posters and the blue plaid bedspread. He kisses me and opens a beer and takes a sip and hands it to me and I do the same. We kiss again and our teeth are cold when they accidentally hit. We laugh and readjust positions and when Daryl tries to kiss his way down my neck I start to cry. Embarrassed I make my way to the door. Daryl jogs after me outside and says: Hey, I like you. Did I do something wrong? I can’t even look at him as he lifts my bike out of the back of his car and holds it steady until I get on.

I pass the 7-Eleven and notice Kathy’s brother outside the store. He is leaning against the glass, and his eyes are closed. He lazily strokes the skin below his belly button with his fingertips and my stomach squeezes and then as if he senses someone watching him his eyelids flutter open and he disappears inside the store. Through the glass I see him remove a six-pack of beer from the cooler and put the money on the counter. I pedal fast to beat him to his house and when I get there I follow the phone cord down the hall to Kathy’s room. I press on the door with my full weight but it doesn’t budge. Kathy, I whisper, let me in. When she doesn’t answer I push harder and say her name louder. Again, there is nothing and I slump down on the floor to wait. It is crazy to feel jealousy but I do. The guy has chosen her. I try to think hard if she has better responses to his questions and I realize I am mostly mute, always listening, slightly embarrassed by the way my body is reacting to the sound of a stranger’s voice asking me the color of my underpants. It is Kathy who is always ready with an answer, Kathy who always seems to know the right thing to say and I wonder how she has gotten so far ahead of me when we started in the same place.

I get up to leave because no matter what my mother expects me home for dinner. I know what I will see before I get there. My father will have arrived home from work and taken a shower after a long hot day fixing pools. He will be on the carport having a drink while he pokes whatever is cooking on the grill while my brother runs soccer practice drills on the patch of adjacent grass calling out to my father over and over again: Are you watching? Dad, are you watching?

My father will look up at me and wink and the ice will rattle in his glass as he raises it to his lips. Nice to see you sis, he will say. How was your day?

I will drop the kickstand on my bike in the shade of the carport. I will allow him to tug on my ponytail as I pass although I will pretend to hate it and squirm away. I will enter the coolness of the laundry room, slip through the landing strip of a kitchen, and push wide the swinging doors into the dining room where the phone sits on a desk. I will lift the phone while my mother, still in her white uniform, asks me to please make the salad. I will dial Kathy’s number. I will hold my breath when I hear the busy signal. Before I put the phone back in the cradle I will whisper: light blue with lace, just to hear myself say it out loud and then gently, quietly, I will hang up the phone.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sometime during the summer I turned thirteen, my neighbor, who was about three years older, began wearing corduroy pants with little flying ducks embroidered on them.

When a friend strikes out in a bold new direction like this, it can be a scary ordeal for everyone around him.  It can also present a number of opportunities.  Realizing that the onset of the mallard-inspired cords would likely usher in the obsolescence of all things non-preppy, I petitioned for and became the grateful beneficiary of a number of his now-unwanted possessions.  Specifically, his copy of The Grateful Dead’s American Beauty.  And most importantly, his copy of the Jim Morrison biography No One Here Gets Out Alive by Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugarman.

My life hasn’t been the same since.

You don’t like “The Doors” as much as you think you do. Jim Morrison was outrageously gorgeous, I grant you. His nipples are about the most perfect things God ever created. You know that picture where he’s all Christ-like, arms outstretched, pleading to be strung up like the original man on the cross with his quintet of bursting wounds that Thursday (or Wednesday or Friday, however you do your crucifictional math) long ago? Yes, he’s a perfect specimen in many ways, but I’m fed up to the ears with people giving that ultimately maudlin and bloated old sot more credit than he deserves. That’s why we stole from him. That’s why. And we were drug addicts.

It’s different now, but back then, we’d have to jaunt over to France to get our tourist visas back in effect. These trips were often fraught with more rigmarole than art-gazing at the Louvre or posing as “The Thinker” in front of “The Thinker” or whatever it is people do in Paris. On our first train ride into the Gare du Nord, I was beset by an explosive gastro-intestinal ailment that saw my friend James and I running for what we thought was our lives down the train tracks leading out from the station into what looked like scorched earth. Where is Paris? What’s around it? If you ever discharge the contents of your bowels all over the wall of the completely foreign bathroom facilities at the Gare du Nord and have to run for your life, you’ll see what I mean. James and I sat at the train station for hours, as James was convinced that the train station was probably the best place to score hash. He had a preternatural ability to find drugs, so I trusted him. Furthermore, I couldn’t travel more than a few steps without running furiously to the WC.

“Number one or number two?” asked the large, black bathroom attendant. She had a nobility to her, even dressed as some kind of European translation of how an antebellum servant might have appeared.

“Number two,” I said sheepishly. The woman gave me a single sheet of single ply toilet paper and I entered the, faute de mieux, restroom. This restroom consisted of a vertical wall of porcelain, at the bottom of which was a small drain, giving one the idea that the French shit in impossibly small portions. I dropped my pants and tried to be quiet and discreet and French about the whole affair. Snake eyes. My bowels roared with a thunderclap and I soiled the entirety of the porcelain, managing to befoul the adjacent wall as well. Humiliating. I discarded the piece of toilet paper, hiked up my pants and walked gingerly back to where James was looking for an Algerian named Carlos who had promised to come back with a chunk of hashish.

“James, I just shit all over the place.”

“Like in the terminal? What are you saying?”

“No, I made it to the bathroom, but I exploded all over the wall.”

“Serves the French right. Where is this goddamned Algerian?”

“I didn’t wipe.”

“Solid. Don’t stand so close to me. Hey, that reminds me. What’s a Frenchman’s favorite expression?”

“I don’t know James.”

“C’mon guess.”

“I don’t know. I give up.”

“Exactly.” James laughed his laugh and I was marginally appalled at this half-assed joke. James stewed around as I sat nervously, fetidly.

“Hey look, dude. When you find Carlos the Algerian, I’ll be hovering around the bathroom, okay?”

“Yeah, yeah. Whatever. I’ll find you.” I repeated my performance in two other bathrooms in the Gare du Nord. I went back to find James. He was gone. I had to go again. I went back to the scene of my original crime against decency and was asked again by the noble Frenchwoman, “Number one or number two?” I thought about how terrible it was that even in Europe, they stick the black people by the toilet. Have you ever seen a white bathroom attendant? I haven’t either. I ruminated on this for a moment, my liberal leanings seeping out like so much shit, I thought to give her a life-changing tip. I didn’t know what that was. I had little money. When does a tip become life-changing? You hear about it. Some waitress gets a $20,000 tip from some greasy old man and it’s off to the races, probably. Off to lose it all at the races. As I was barraged with this charge of magnanimity, a look of recognition came over the bathroom attendant’s face. Then a look of ferocity. Then this:

“Putain! Fucking American you shit all over the toilet and you don’t clean it. You shit all over like a fucking animal. You shit all over my house!” My house? That can’t be right. I felt terribly. I don’t know why I tried to speak back in French. Maybe let her know I wasn’t THE shitty, shitting American.

“Mon Dieu manquez Je suis désolée, je ne sais pas comment les choses fonctionnent en France, je suis comme un idiot. Puis je vous aider à quelque chose? Tu dois croire que je ne voulais pas le faire. C’est mon estomac. Il n’y a rien de personnel à propos de cette merde. Je suis désolé!”

“Tuez-le!” she shouted, and began to run at me. Both stomach ailments and fear pulsing through me, I ran shittily away, toward a train platform that looked empty, followed by the bathroom attendant and a cadre of her fellows.

“James! James! James!” I ran screaming through the Gare du Nord. I made some distance from the angry bathroom attendant horde (to the French’s credit, all the other bathroom attendants chasing me were white, something that made me feel a little better in real-time and in retrospect). I jumped off of the platform and onto the track toward nothingness, toward away from Paris, away from the Gare du Nord. As he always did for me, James appeared by my side, running with me out into nothingness. No questions, no nothing. This time he ran with me, not away from me. He looked back to see what in the smash was happening and at the sight of a half-dozen antebellum servants shaking their fists and running toward us had divined what happened. He began to laugh and fell on the train tracks in paroxysms of joy. For, what greater joy is there than laughing at the laughable shortcomings and peccadilloes of your friends? Admit it. There is nothing more pleasing. Nothing more tender.

With Carlos the Algerian nowhere to be found, my pants soiled beyond recognition and a credit card, I insisted we take a taxi and find a hostel, somewhere we could regroup.

“We’re not taking any cocksucking taxi, T”

“I’ll pay for it, James. Come the hell on. I’m covered in shit.”

“Just walk it off, man.”

“Walk it off? I don’t have a sprained ankle, dickhead. I need a shower.”

“No taxis. I have an idea.”

“You’re going to dump me in the Seine? Man, I need soap!”

“No, I know where we can get some weed. Not hash, man. Trees!”

“Fuck trees, James. Can’t you smell me?”

“I don’t know. All of Paris smells like shit. People will just think you’re a dog, or stepped in dog shit. See? You just did.” I had.

“What’s the plan, dope fiend?”

“Where is that cemetery, the famous one?”

“Père Lachaise?”

“Is that where Jim Morrison is buried?”

“Yes.”

“Alright, peep this, playboy. I read in the guidebook that greasy hippies leave joints and acid and all sorts of shit on his grave. I know how you hate The Doors and I could care less.”

“Mother, I want to fuck you?”

“Don’t say that.”

“It’s from ‘The End.’”

“Anyway, how far away are we from it?”

“I have no idea.”

“We’re taking the bus.” James rifled through our guide book and discovered some bus route that would allegedly deposit us at the cemetery. By some stretch of fortune, we got on the bus and made our way to the famous resting place. James was kind enough to let me borrow his bottle of “Cool Water” cologne, which I sprayed all over my pants. I now smelled like Cool Water and shit, but it was better than nothing and the bus passengers didn’t seem to mind. But then, even in France, how do you confront somebody covered in feces? Some people in the world are just left alone.

We bought a site map at the entrance off the Boulevard de Menilmontant.

“Jesus, there’s some famous dead motherfuckers up in here.”

“Yep,” I added, a little tentative about robbing Jim Morrison’s post-mortem drug cache. We walked along the southeast side of the cemetery and found Morrison’s grave. It was covered in flowers, graffiti, torn pieces of paper with Morrison-esque poems written on them; some had actual song lyrics printed on them. And, as promised, there were, in front of his bust, at least a dozen joints and sundry other items of drug paraphernalia to ostensibly keep Jim loaded during the afterlife. There was also a full handle of Jack Daniel’s, which appealed to me. Who knew how long these joints had been there? When did it last rain? Whiskey you can count on. My interest was piqued. The problem was, along with all the dead rock stars’ booty were about a half-dozen worshipers, all lathered in patchouli and the requisite Guatemalan/Tibetan neo-hippie attire, sun dresses, he-sarongs, and of course, some prick with a didgeridoo, and a retinue of confused people singing the words to ‘The Crystal Ship’ along with the bizarre tempo produced by this horrible “instrument.” The didgeridoo is, in and of itself, perfectly fine, but when put into the hands of a young American on some kind of hallucinogen sporting those nauseating white person dreadlocks is unforgivably offensive. Non-aboriginal people who play the didgeridoo are fit for nothing more than violent extinction. Also, it’s hard to run with a didgeridoo.

James and I assessed the situation. “One, two, three, four….oh, come the hell on, T. It doesn’t matter how many of them there are. You grab the Jack Daniel’s because I know you’ve been eyeing it and I’ll scoop up all the joints and whatever other shit I can fit in my hands. Then we run north.”

“Why north?”

“That just seems like something people say before a heist. Besides, we don’t have a safe house or a, uh…”

“Home base,” I ventured.

“No, something more gangster, but fuck it. Are you ready?” James asked.

“Which way is north?”

“Aw, man. Just follow me.”

“What if we get split up?”

“T, you’re acting like a bitch right now. If we get split up, we’ll meet at the bottom of the Eiffel Tower, how’s that? How do you say Eiffel Tower in French?”

“Tour Eiffel.”

“Ok, then.” I knew James would be the first to make the dash toward the loot, so I tried to dart toward Morrison’s headstone first. James and I then crashed into each other violently, both of us falling on top of his grave.

“Hey, man…be peaceful!” shouted an American.

“Oye…tranquilo, colegas!” a Spaniard.

“Faites gaffe!” a Frenchwoman. Then an indecipherable squeal of admonitions, as James scooped up everything non-alcoholic and I, everything else. I got up first and ran to what I thought was north. I carried a 1.75 liter bottle of Jack Daniel’s and a few airline bottles of rum, brandy and maybe gin, which I dropped as I ran into Frederic Chopin. I wasn’t sure if I’d been followed, but by the time I reached Apollinaire, then turned toward Marcel Proust, I saw I was being chased only by a portly security guard. I guess he was on liquor patrol, but I wasn’t too worried because he looked as if he were flagging after I made a sharp right and hid next to a bush and Isadora Duncan. I figured James had been pursued by the druggies and that was okay. James was fast and agile. I imagined him driving toward the exit and toward the Tour Eiffel like Kobe Bryant driving through stoned defenders—a total mismatch. Of course, James was extremely tall—a drawback in France, and at Père Lachaise. I took a long draw from the bottle of Jack Daniel’s behind Oscar Wilde and rested for a brief moment, when I saw James playing fugitive pinball between Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein and Edith Piaf, his unmistakable big, reddish coif running back and forth in shortened bursts. I thought to advise him to run toward Molière, but in retrospect I think that may have just been the desire to be the first person to utter the phrase “Run toward Molière!” at least since the 17^th century.

There had been too much violence during our stay in Spain, in Europe. I did not want James to punch a hippie and neither did I. Not to mention, there was at least one security gendarme hot on my trail. Who knows what would have happened had I shouted “Run toward Molière!” but I didn’t and instead I took my shitty pants off, rhino charged the group of hippies and whipped them with my crappy Levi’s, again and again. The young man with the didgeridoo (who was brandishing it like a primitive lightsaber) dropped it and it broke into pieces. I heard a whistle from behind us (there are always whistles going off in France) and looked at James. He, too, put his head down now that the most threatening weapon had broken (aside from my pants, which I spun around my head like a helicopter.

James and I finally made it out an entrance onto the Rue de Bagnolet. We were now both covered in filth, but at least I had abandoned my pants and now ran down the streets of Paris in sandals and boxers given to me by my mother that featured sumo wrestlers in various attack poses. We ran aimlessly, laughing, panting. We came across a Métro station, Alexandre Dumas. So many famous dead. We jumped on and headed back to what James insisted was west.

“This takes us to the Arc de Triomphe, if we take it to the end of the line” James said.

“Then let’s,” I said. I passed James the bottle of whiskey and he took a long draw.

“We have joints, too, but I’m not going to fuck with that on the Métro.” Sometimes you never know if things have gone colossally wrong, or right. We traveled along the 2 Line in grinning silence.

The cold air from the Métro air conditioning felt good on my naked legs.

It all began with a fuck. What doesn’t? I fucked the wrong person; I fucked up the right one; somebody played me a song. It changed my whole life, that song. That’s why I later went to so much trouble to find the guy who wrote and sang it. His name was Jim Cassady, or at least that’s what he called himself. His real name was Eddie Brown, but he’d changed it in tribute to Jim Morrison and Neal Cassady. I’d never heard of either one before I discovered punk rock. I grew up in a small city in North Carolina where I’d never known a single soul who listened to the Doors or read Jack Kerouac. I was a jock—a varsity pitcher and All-District linebacker who dressed like a preppie and hung out at frat parties. Even in high school I was hanging out at frat parties. My girlfriend was a cheerleader. My parents were diehard Republicans. Life was good. I hated my life. Nothing ever happened in North Carolina in those days, the early eighties. I used to pray for something to happen, and I’d stopped believing in God at fourteen.

Jerry and Mary Neeley used to own the best video store on the east side of L.A. That’s where I met them, and since they closed shop two years ago to sell movie collectibles online, we’ve occasionally met for coffee and talk of, among other topics, true crime. We’ve also kept in touch by e-mail, and last week Mary sent the following message:

As you know, the 40th anniversary of Tate/LaBianca is this August 8th & 9th. (Technically, the 9th & 10th because both parties were killed after midnight.)

I wanted to go to the LaBianca house around 1am on the 10th to see if anyone else shows up. Would you be interested? I don’t want to walk up there alone at 1am.