Paris, 1971

This is the end ...

Jim, alone, not in a bathtub but on the toilet, head down, trousers around his knees, found just like his hero, Elvis, would be six years later, arms dangling lifelessly by his sides, brains fried. Gone before they'd even broken down the door to get him. Overdosed on heroin. China white. The kind Paris was awash with that summer. Jim, alone, as always, surrounded by people.

He'd been predicting his own death for months, of course. Janis had gone the previous October, Jimi just two weeks before that. "You're drinking with the next one," Jim would only half-jokingly tell friends. Except that Jim didn't really have any friends. Certainly not Pamela, with her hell-red hair and her smack and her new boyfriend, the Count ... or Ray, with his touch-the-brave-sunlight trip to the public and his needy please-Jim-just-forme shit to your face ... or John, that asshole, always with the long hard looks and the judgmental eyes ... even far-out Robby, his mind blown by the acid and the permanent midnight, all mumbled passive-aggressive bullshit. Robby the secret businessman ...

Where were they now, hey? Now that Jim didn't need them anymore? Or said he didn't, anyway. Standing up suddenly on the dance floor at the Rock and Roll Circus, loudly declaiming his crappy, drunken poetry while all around the models and gangsters, the dealers and pop stars, the street trash blown in by the Paris summer wind sat writhing in the shadows, laughing behind their hands, waiting for fat old Jim Morrison to shut the fuck up and sit back down again. Or fall over. Again. Whichever.

Poor old Jim, alone in Paris, surrounded by all the people he thought he'd left behind in sun-shitty L.A. Same eager faces happy to hang out, listen to his bullshit, then see him home safely when he was too shit-faced to do it himself. Crazy, fat man Jim, best friend to all the waiters at Café de Flore hovering over him like flies, as he guzzled his brandy, his whiskey, his beer, and his endless wine. Big-bearded Jim, out of breath climbing the steps to the Sacré-Coeur, out of luck lounging in his borrowed apartment waiting for fucked-up Pam to come home from the Count's, then sick of waiting, grabbing a taxi to Rue de Seine, staggering toward the red neon sign of the Rock and Roll Circus, waving hi to the blonde cloakroom girl, who always gave him the same smile even as her eyes swooped past him toward whatever was coming next down the street behind him. Tiptoeing down the narrow steps into the darkened basement of the club, the DJ in the glassed-off booth always — always, man! — playing the Stones, ever since the night Keith walked in with his knife and his entourage, gave him the gypsy eye, and let him know it was all cool, baby.

Worst thing about the Circus, man, having to walk past the Count's private room on your way down into the club ... the one with the floor cushions and incense and pot smoke and the same old hippie in robes, strumming the sitar ... the chicks all droopy-eyed and creamed on smack and Tuinals and cheap fizz. Jim couldn't make that scene, man. The only time he went in there was with Pam or to score for Pam. Jim preferred to grab a table or stretch out on one of the couches in one of the vaulted corners of the club, looking for his new friend Sky Eyes, half Apache, half US Army deserter. Sky Eyes had been out there, man, Vietnam, man. Killed a cop as a kid and was given the choice: jail forever or five years in Nam. Sky chose the army and he did good, man. Part of the elite force. Killing gooks for fun. Then with less than two years to go — the old switcheroo! He'd skied it to Amsterdam. But why, man? "It wasn't my war, man," was all Sky Eyes said.

The first time Jim saw Sky Eyes he was dancing barefoot at the Circus, his shirt off, some chick's red lipstick daubed across his face like war paint, long dirty hair hanging down to his waist. Man, what a beautiful sight! "Hey, man!" Jim told him. "I'm going to write a song about you!" Jim with his bags of notebooks and pens, his postcards and newspapers and his pockets full of francs, not here for the sights or the poetry or any of that horse-shit. Here like all the other American draft dodgers and dropouts because there was no extradition treaty between France and the United States, so if the shit went down in Miami he wouldn't have to go home to jail if he didn't want to, and Jim really, really didn't want to, man. Fuck that shit. Jim had watched that day at the bail house in Miami as one black after another got sent down for shit that made what Jim did look like kindergarten stuff. Jim knew he was doomed, man. But that didn't mean he was gonna kneel and pray for it in some roach-infested shitbox in Miami, man.

By then the Circus was like Jim's second home. "He came in all the time," remembers Patrick Chauvel, then a twenty-one-year-old war photographer working part-time at the Circus as a bartender. "I'd got back from Vietnam a few weeks before, and I was saving up money to get back out there. Or maybe to Northern Ireland, where everyone said the next war was going to be." The first time Jim showed up, it was a big deal. But that had been weeks before, and now he was "just another regular, really. A nice guy to speak to when sober, a monster when drunk." And Jim was always drunk.

It must have been two in the morning when one of his staff went to complain to Sam Bernett, the manager, about a stall in the ladies' bathroom being locked. People were banging on the door and shouting for whoever was in there to hurry up, but it had been nearly an hour, and nothing. Sam should do something!

Wearily Sam made his way up the steps to the bathrooms. It was not the first time someone had locked themselves in, but usually it was in the men's. He knocked, he banged, he shouted. Suddenly he feared the worst. Drugs — cocaine, heroin — were part of the lingua franca at an all-night dive like the Circus. It was the same for the trannies, homos, and whores at the Alcazar next door. These places were tolerated without police interference. As long as nobody died in them.

Sam called for two of his men to break down the door. That's when they found him. Jim, alone, zeroed out on the john, big belly hanging out, foaming at the mouth, face blood-spotted and gray, head down.

"Merde!"

Sam spun on his heel and ordered his staff to clear the bathrooms out, make sure the clientele were informed they were closed for the rest of the night. Panic took over as Sam tried to find a doctor — someone discreet — who could come and give an opinion....