Bill Thomas and Randy Maney were teenagers, growing up in Alexandria around 1960. One day the duo, along with a friend, traveled to Hains Point, the East Potomac Park Golf Course, to knock around a few balls. While they waited their turn on the greens, their friend silently walked over to a round metal railing along the tidal basin and began to stride atop it, as if it were a circus tightrope.
“If he’d fallen into that river, he’s gone. There’s no way to climb out,” recalled Maney. “I think he did things like that to watch people’s reaction, but that really seemed like something more than just trying to get a reaction.”
Their friend’s name was Jim Morrison.
Intense moments like the one above, and interviews with childhood friends of the late lead singer of The Doors, are featured in author Mark Opsasnick’s new book “The Lizard King Was Here: The Life and Times of Jim Morrison in Alexandria, Virginia.” Opsasnick believes his is the first examination of Morrison’s two-and-a-half year stint as a student at George Washington High School and as a resident of Woodland Terrace in the Jefferson Park area of Alexandria.
The book is at once a biography of Morrison, using unexplored stories and inspirations to analyze future actions, and a historic travelogue through a teenager’s life in 1960s Alexandria. It features dozens of recollections from Morrison’s high-school and childhood friends — some hilarious, some insightful, and many that seemed to predict Morrison’s memorable erratic behavior as a music icon.
Opsasnick will discuss and sign copies of “The Lizard King Was Here” on Sunday, Aug. 13 at St. Elmo’s Coffee Shop, 2300 Mount Vernon Ave., from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. Music will be provided by the White Whale New Orleans Band. Visit Opsasnick’s Web site at www.capitolrock.com for more information and to purchase the book.
MORRISON CAME to Alexandria in January 1959, after his father Steve received a promotion in the military and was reassigned to the Pentagon. The Morrison family moved to Woodland Terrace in Jefferson Park, into what Opsasnick said was an infamous house whose tragic history served as an early indication of Morrison’s partiality for all things shocking.
According to the author, a woman named Betty Howard committed suicide in the basement of that house in September 1957. As a neighbor relayed the details of that tragedy to Morrison’s mother, 15-year-old Jim was seated at the kitchen table. “As soon as he heard this story about how a woman had shot herself in the basement, he ran upstairs, grabbed a mattress and basically announced to his mother that the basement was now his bedroom,” said Opsasnick. Later, when asked by another neighbor why he chose to sleep in such a notorious place, Morrison allegedly offered a sinister look and answered, “To get the vibe.”
That instance of bizarre behavior fueled Morrison’s reputation as a rebel at George Washington High School, where he enrolled as a second-semester student in 1959 and proceeded to excel academically until graduating in 1961. “Almost everyone agreed he was extremely intelligent,” said Opsasnick. “They thought Morrison had a photographic memory.”
He also had a reputation: that of a detached loner. But when Morrison was comfortable around certain people, Opsasnick said he’d “put on a show” for them. He also would agitate those whom he felt were up tight or reserved — a “free activity” that the author feels Morrison developed as a teen and continued until his death in August 1971. “I don’t think any of this [behavior] was random. I think it was all calculated — experimenting with his friends and gauging their reactions, just like a social scientist would. There’s no real rational reason for it, but he got some sort of perverse pleasure out of it.”
OPSASNICK FEELS THAT Morrison’s biggest change during his brief time in Alexandria was in his artistic influences — and not necessarily musically. “During his high school years, he never once mentioned singing or playing in a rock and roll band,” said the author.
While in Alexandria, Morrison developed into a multi-media artist. He would create oil paintings and collages in his basement bedroom. He would venture into D.C. to listen to bands and take in Eisenstein and Truffaut films at local art house cinemas. In fact, Morrison also made his first film called “Pinman” at GW High School — a now-lost Super 8 movie that juxtaposed a pinball machine with a classmate bouncing off things in everyday life.
Most importantly, Morrison used Alexandria to fuel a love for literature. He would buy Salvation Army clothes and cheap hair cuts in the city in order to use the leftover allowance to purchase used books. He would spend countless hours at the Alexandria Library on King Street. “When he arrived in Alexandria, he had very few books with him, maybe four or five,” said Osasnick. “When he left, his younger brother told me he went down to his basement bedroom and counted every book in his collection — it totaled over 1,000 volumes.”
Opsasnick makes some bold connections between Morrison’s life in Alexandria and the course of his life in later years, but none more bold than his contention that Morrison used beat generation author Jack Kerouac’s first published novel “The Town and the City” as a blueprint for his own life.
“There’s a character in there, Francis Martin, and when you read it, it’s eerie,” said Opsasnick. “He was a loner, he was detached, his family members thought he was strange. He would sit down in his bedroom and devour literature by people like Nietzsche that Morrison was into. Later in life, Francis Martin cut off ties with his parents and moved to Paris, France. It was Jim Morrison to a tee.”
ONE OF MORRISON’S favorite places in Alexandria was a long pier near the Torpedo Factory. Opsasnick said he would spend nights there talking with local fishermen, and that the run-down features of the Alexandria waterfront held a special attraction for him.
But Morrison’s time in the city was short. In August 1961, he moved back with his grandparents in Clearwater, Fla., to enroll in St. Petersburg Junior College. It was just two months earlier that Morrison pulled an ultimate act of rebellion which left high-school friends stunned and confused: He skipped out on his graduation ceremony from George Washington.
“That tells me there wasn’t something right about him,” said Opsasnick. “There just wasn’t anyone back then that skipped graduation — it just wasn’t done.”
Moments like this are found throughout “The Lizard King Was Here,” as Opsasnick meticulously traces Morrison’s travels around Alexandria and recalls the impressions he made on those who knew him during his high-school years — including the moment when they realized their old friend had become a rock star.
“That was a complete shock to me when he became a musician because the whole time I knew him he never sang a note,” Jeff Morehouse, Morrison’s childhood friend, told Opsasnick. “In high school, the best he could do was to start humming in the Alexandria library just to drive the librarian crazy. That was probably the only time I ever heard him sing anything.”