Leap! : What Will We Do with the Rest of Our Lives?

Looks at the opportunities and pitfalls confronting the baby boom generation as they approach the second half of life, offering portraits of those making voluntary choices, those being forced out of work, and those using their experience to seek success.

Chapter 1

The Long and Winding Road

When I walk through the stage door of the Roseland Ballroom in New York, I hear an unmistakable riff—the long electric piano solo that spirals up and down until it can’t go higher or become more intense and then it resolves as Jim Morrison comes in to sing: “The time to hesitate is through . . .”

“Light My Fire” by the Doors was the number one song in America in 1967. But onstage at Roseland almost forty years later are Ray Manzarek, the original keyboard player, Robby Krieger, the original guitarist, and between them, replacing Jim Morrison, is Ian Astbury, a singer in his thirties who looks so much like Morrison that the image of the three suggests The Picture of Dorian Gray. Ray and Robby are in their sixties, with silver hair and deeply lined faces, but Jim doesn’t seem to have aged—he looks frozen at twenty-seven, the age he was when he died.

The Doors of the Twenty-first Century, as they call themselves tonight, are doing a sound check for a concert celebrating fifty years of rock ’n’ roll. Ray stands at the electric piano, wearing a black Issey Miyake shirt with pleats over gray pants. His hair is slicked back, and he’s rail thin from lifting weights, swimming, and yoga. “I feel juicy,” Ray says into the microphone, testing the level. “I feel juicy now. I got filth running through my blood, Robby. It’s gonna be a dirrrrr-ty night.” It’s also going to be a loud night, and I make a note to come back later with earplugs and my glasses.

The Doors created and released albums for only four years, 1967 to 1971, but they’ve been embraced by succeeding generations, and my son has the lyrics to a Doors song on his blog. After Jim’s death, Ray kept making music on his own and wrote two books, none of which connected with a mass audience, but that was all right. He hadn’t played a Doors song in thirty years when in 2002 the Harley-Davidson company asked the Doors if they would re-form the group to perform at an L.A. concert celebrating Harley’s hundredth anniversary. “Robby and I said, ‘Let’s do it!’ ” Ray recalls, but John Densmore, the third living Door, said his ears were too badly damaged to play drums. Their manager brought in another drummer and, to sing, Ian Astbury of the Cult.

Playing for thousands of inflamed Harley-Davidson riders at the California Speedway was “so much fun,” Ray says, that they went on the road as the Doors of the Twenty-first Century, until a lawsuit forced them to drop the Doors name and perform as Riders on the Storm.

Backstage at Roseland, I ask Ray how he deals with the fact that his most well-loved work was done more than thirty years ago. He waves his hand, dismissive. I tell him I have the same issue on a smaller scale. “My first book was a bestseller—it was number two in the country and made into a miniseries. I’ve written five books since then and hundreds of articles and screenplays, but none has had that impact. I used to feel upset because people would meet me and say—”

“I know what they tell you,” Ray says. “You were big once upon a time, and you don’t have it anymore. Well, thank you very much, really nice of you to point that out. Have you ever had a success? No, you haven’t. I see, you . . . LOSER!” He shrugs. “What can we do with this society? We’re vicious that way.”

“How do you handle it?”

“You don’t. You get pissed off and say, Fuck you. Fuck you! You got the nerve to say that stuff to my fucking face, you fucker?”

He imitates the guy confronting him: “ ‘Well, Ray, you know, a lot of people have said you’re just doing it for the money.’

“Like who? Is he there with you? Put him on the phone, let me talk to that asshole.

“ ‘No, no, no, there’s nobody here. I’m just saying . . .’ ”

Ray sighs and tells me, “You have to put up with shit like that.”

I say, “I spent a lot of time feeling that I wasn’t fulfilling my early promise, whatever that was. Now I’ve come around to the fact that I wrote a book that’s still in print after thirty years. That makes me feel . . . humble.”

“Exactly,” Ray says. “Here’s the point. Did you do one thing? Yes, you did. You got any friends from high school who did one thing? You got any friends from college . . . Do I have any friends from UCLA film school who did . . . one . . . thing? No.”

“You did more than one thing.”

“Whatever.”

“You don’t have those demons?”

“Oh sure, absolutely. I’m more competitive than you are, and you’re obviously very competitive. We’re competitive animals. That’s the nature of being human, and that’s what drives us to accomplish great things. You live your life to the fullest, but at some point, things are snatched away from you. Death is going to happen.”

I ask if he still takes psychedelics. “No. That’s for your twenties and thirties. Once you open the doors of perception, they stay open.”

“Not for some,” I say. “The doors clanked shut when they became workaholics and tried to be superparents.”

“If they’ve forgotten the message, well, now that the kids have grown and retirement is approaching, let’s reinvent the gods. That’s what Jim Morrison said. ‘Let’s reinvent the gods—all the myths of the ages.’ The problem for Jim was that he had no idea how far he could go, how high he could get, before he was eased out.

“Psychedelics do a strange thing,” Ray says. “You accept that death is going to happen. Your friend is gone, you’ve danced for a while— you danced feverishly and madly around a bonfire and had that ecstatic joy and now the dance is over and all you can say is: So be it. Another kind of dance begins.”

•••

I had this conversation with Ray Manzarek toward the end of a three- year period when everything I touched turned brown and died. Everywhere I’d go people would ask, “What are you doing now?”

“Different things . . .”

If I’d told the truth, I would have said: I’m doing nothing. For the first time since college, I have no work. After twenty-four years and several award nominations, I can’t get hired to write for television. In Hollywood jargon, I can’t get arrested. I can’t sell articles to magazines or books to publishers and I don’t know how I’ll earn money. The phone doesn’t ring, and I have to crank myself up to go out and hustle and why, dear God, do I have to hustle at this age? It’s humiliating.

During this same period, my lover of seven years, a cowboy artist I’d expected to spend the rest of my days with, rides off with no discussion. My children, who’ve occupied my first thoughts on waking and my last before falling asleep, are going off to college. As long as they lived with me, I got up at seven and made pancakes, drove them to school, soccer, Little League, ballet, music lessons, helped them write their papers and do research on Egyptian history and carve pumpkins for Halloween. No more. My kids, my lover, and my livelihood are being yanked from me at once and there’s nothing I can do. When I tell this to a friend, Peter Simon, the photographer, he says, “Oh, honey, you’ve got money problems and no sex. That’s not good.”

Not good...