The Doors Read Free

civilian not to want to go crowding on through it,
horny and giggling as always, looking for that latest thrill. Lots of overtime for me and the boys I guess, but it brings us all that much closer to the end of the world”—and you can almost see Squeaky Fromme, not to mention four or five previous generations of Southern California mystics and psychics, perched on his shoulder, smiling like Natalie Wood.
    Manson’s shadow is everywhere, whether it’s Sportello and a black militant arguing over who’s hotter, Fromme or Leslie van Houten (“Submissive, brainwashed, horny little teeners,” says Sportello’s old girlfriend Shasta Hepworth, “who do exactly what you want before you even know what that is . . . Your kind of chick, Doc, that’s the lowdown on you”), or Sportello and three other people in a car pulled over for no reason they can see. “New program,” says a cop, “you know how it is, another excuse for paperwork, they’re calling it Cult-watch, every gathering of three or more civilians is now defined as a potential cult.” It’s a joke people use because the punch line is all around them, until Manson changes into a story so sensational no one thinks to look behind it, into “a vortex of corroded history,” into what Don DeLillo, in Great Jones Street , a novel set about the same time as Pynchon’s, called “the true underground,” where presidents and prime ministers “make the underground deals and speak the true underground idiom,” where “the laws are broken, way down under, far beneath the speed freaks and the cutters of smack.”
    Out of all this, Pynchon can produce a beach joint where customers argue convincingly “about the two different ‘Wipeout’ singles, and which label, Dot or Decca, featured the laugh and which didn’t.” He can craft a shootout that turns on a line that in any other hands would be ridiculous, but on Pynchon’s ground feels right—a line that to get off the ground
needs a whole book behind it, a line that hits the note the book needs to lift itself into the air. “He waited till he saw a dense patch of moving shadow, sighted it in, and fired, rolling away immediately, and the figure dropped like an acid tab into the mouth of Time”—a moment that fades into an ending so delicate and tragic in its apprehension of all that is soon to pass away it could change places with the last page of Tender Is the Night .
    You can hear the last pages of the story Pynchon tells in “L.A. Woman” as the Doors played it at the end of 1970, in Dallas, on December 11, the day before their last show, in New Orleans. “It also looked like a crime scene waiting on its next crime,” Pynchon writes; if you had that image in your head, you might hear it playing out as, from the stage of the State Fair Music Hall, “L.A. Woman” begins. It’s spooky, immediately calling down night fog. On the tape that survives, the band sounds very far away. Morrison screams out an enormous Yeeeaaahhh! and then there’s nothing, only a beat moving without a destination. Even as something like music begins to take shape, all you hear is restraint, a refusal to move—a suspension that would turn a corner the next night, the Doors’ last night, when in the midst of his performance Morrison began to slam his microphone down until the boards broke, then sat on the stage and refused to move or sing. Pynchon could have reviewed that show: “It was as if whatever had happened had reached some kind of limit. It was like finding the gateway to the past unguarded, unforbid-den because it didn’t have to be.” Or rewritten it as a dream: “Doc followed the prints of her bare feet already collapsing into rain and shadow, as if in a fool’s attempt to find his way
back into a past that despite them both had gone on into the future it