Just up ahead of us a husky black man was standing in the middle of the street, as wet as I was, waving us down like we were a locomotive.
“Hey, I need a lift, man! You got a lift?” he shouted to us. The driver backed up and started to drive around him when the black guy grabbed one of the driver’s door handles and held fast. We dragged him a good five feet.
“Where the fuck are you going? I said I needed help!” The driver, an old man in a golf cap, spun around an locked all the doors as he began a chant of what I thought were New York cabdriver words.
“Crazy, foking nigger! Getoutahere!”
The black man took a knife out of his pocket and banged on the window with the handle. The driver put on the emergence brakes, reached under his seat and pulled out a bayonet. I thought, “Holy shit! These guys are crazy!”
I sat up in the back seat, fascinated and terrified as the driver got out of the cab and squared off with the black guy in the street. I figured that if the black guy got the driver first, I would be next, so I opened the passenger door and tried, drunkenly, to get across the street. I was sloshing around on the wet pavement when somebody took hold of my arms and helped me stand up. It was the black guys.
“He owes me ninety-five cents,” the driver yelled from the other side of the cab. “Leave him alone.”
“Watch the knife! Watch the knife!” I begged him. “You want a lift, I’ll be glad to give you a lift. You can have a lift, all right! Just put away the knife.”
We all calmly got back into the cab as if nothing had happened, and the driver turned around and said, “Where to?” The black guy gave him an address and I just sat there numb and wet, drunk and petrified. The driver kept mumbling. “What a job. What a craziness.”
“What’s this stuff, man?” the new passenger asked, fingering my clothes.
“What’s all this stuff you got on? What’s your scene?”
I told him I was a singer in a rock and roll band.
“No shit, man! You’re not a faggot?”
“Not really. I’m a singer in a band.”
“What’s it called? What’s your name? Do I know you?”
I told him my name was Jim Morrison but that didn’t seem to impress him.
“Listen, I got some girls I manage, you know? Really foxy ladies. They got voices like angels. You think I can get them to be stars? You know, like the Supremes?”
For five uncomfortable minutes I tried to explain that I didn’t know anything about the music business. I told him I was drunk and would be glad to drop him off wherever he was going if he just took it easy. The driver seemed very calm until we stopped in front of a closed bar and the black guy paid him some money, then he came hurtling around the passenger door and threw me out into the street. “Hey, no! No!” I yelled. “Take me to the Chelsea!” But he got back into the cab yelling, “Foo! Faggots and niggers!”
The black guy stood on the street and laughed at me as the cab pulled off. “You better come in and have yourself a drink to warm up,” he said.
“No thanks. I’ve got a meeting to go to.”
He laughed again and hooked his arm tightly under mine and led me into the dark bar. Although it looked pitch black from the outside the jukebox was still going, and there must have been a dozen people at the bar. When we walked in everybody turned to look at us. The place reeked of stale cologne and body odor. My new friend, who said his name was Norm, introduced me to the bartender and said I could order anything I wanted on his tab. Norm talked to people and spit on the floor. I spit on the floor with him and sipped my VO and Coke, waiting to make a dash for the door, amazed that I had allowed myself to be thrown out of the cab and went inside. I couldn’t wait to tell the guys.
“She is ugly!” a woman screamed in the darkness. “You found the ugliest fish of them all, Norm. Where’d you find that fish?”
She was talking about me. A black girl in a short skirt came over to me and ran her hand up my leg. When she brushed against my cock I made a feeble “oh, oh, oh” sound at her and shook my finger.
“This is Melissa,” Norm told me, “I think she likes you.”
I felt like I was going to be sick and told Norm, who walked with me and Melissa to the back of the bar and sat me down in the phone booth. When I was ready to throw up Norm led me into the bathroom, still tightly gripping my arm (his fingers reached all the way around my tiny bicep), and stood there unmoved while I threw my brains up into the toilet bowl. When I sat back down in the phone booth, exhausted, the girl said, “I bet that boy’s no bigger than my pinky.”
“Why don’t you leave him alone?” Norm said protectively. “Can’t you see he’s sick?”
“Sick. That’s just a junky drag queen throwing up her shit. Why you takin’ up with drags?” she asked Norm.
“He ain’t no drag. He’s a singer in a rock band, you know?”
“I still bet he’s no bigger than a pinky. He’s a fag, man. I telling you… look at the way he’s dressed up.”
Norm looked at me with what I was afraid was a dubious expression on his face. Finally he said, “You want to get laid?”
“I want to get to my meeting,” I told him.
“I told ya. I spotted that a mile away,” the girl said. “Lemmee see. C’mon, honey. You want to get laid?”
I shook my head no but the girl was in front of me in the phone booth fiddling with the top of my pants. I tried to push her head away but I couldn’t get a grip of her tightly curled hair. Norm was laughing and people in the bar were whooping and cheering. I looked down and all I could see were two huge black lips painted with thick lipstick closing over my pale asparagus stalk. I pretended to pass out.
I can remember being thrown in the back seat of another taxi and Billy shouting at me with a towel wrapped around his waist, “That’s AWOL, man. You get two years in prison for that kind of shit, man!”
He shoved me through the door to my room and in the early morning light I could see Glen and a girl with matted hair asleep in my bed. I crawled into the bathtub and conked out.
I would say by the time we left New York, except for the thieves, pimps and rip-off artists, only twenty people remembered we were even there. One of them was Bill Graham who said, “I’ll never let those faggots on one of my stages.” The other nineteen were the high kings and queens of cult taste and pop culture. We had paid them some dues in New York, and they would remember us the next time around.
The morning we left New York Billy overslept. It was a Sunday, and we had to catch the eight o’clock flight. Shep had given Billy strict orders for us not to miss that plane, otherwise we’d have to drive all the way. I was still half asleep, throwing up my morning phlegm, when we piled into a station wagon and rushed to the airport. Even as we ran through the airlines terminal to the gate we could see the plane pulling off to taxi down the runway. Billy ran after it, pushing people aside, screaming through the window, “You goddamn son-of-a-bitch fucking plane! You eat shit!” He beat on the glass doors and almost cried out of frustration.
Two of New York City’s men in blue pointed out that it was Sunday morning, and arrested us for creating a riot and using foul language in public. They held us for five hours in a Queens station house until Shep came down and got us.
Billy, thank God, was fired.
CHAPTER 9
By July of 1968 — a short ten months after it all started — the band was $100,000 in debt, most of it passed in bad checks for plane tickets and hotel bills around the country. We had practically no money at all, not even the twenty-dollar-a-week allowance that Shep and Joey had paid to us from their own pockets. They were legally responsible for the $100,000 debt, and Shep was still trying to keep us out on the road and pay for the rent on the John Phillip Law house in Los Angeles.