The Lizard King Returns
The Metamorphosis Redux
A Teacher Hallucinates That He’s Been Transformed Into Jim Morrison
One late winter afternoon, when I woke from a terrifying COVID-19 dream, I found myself transformed on my couch into the übersexyrockicon Jim Morrison. I lay on my suddenly suntanned back, and if I raised my head somewhat I could see my flat belly, brilliantly bronzed and my ribs ripped like a twenty-year-old swimmer. The blanket was on the floor, as were my clothes, and my legs seemed much longer, and scrawnier, touching the end of the couch.
How in the heck did this happen? I thought. It was no illusion. My family room, a decent sized room in a New Jersey suburb, wavered psychedelically, psychotropically, between its four, now not so familiar walls.
A smorgasbord of empty whiskey bottles lay spread out on the wooden coffee table — on top of my remote lesson plans that I had been creating, I’m an English teacher, and I like craft beer on the weekends, but not this crazy stuff on a Wednesday — and above the table twinkled a photo I had recently framed of my wife, or what should have been my wife, of twenty-five years, in a tie-dyed peasant skirt, a bloody-red blouse, and a white hat.
But was that my wife? Had I crawled through her window? What was her name? Mary Jane? Gloria? Pamela? Meg Ryan? How old was she? Was her father home? And just what type of mushrooms were in that chicken marsala last night?
I turned to look out the window and saw my Brad Pitt-Achilles-like locks reflected in the window stained with raindrops. How about I sleep some more to cure this awful Ken Kesey-Further-Magic-Bus-Trip, I thought to myself, but that was something I just couldn’t do because I kept playing with my hair, oh that hair, and I hadn’t been to a barber in months, and I felt so much more confident as the poet-angel Jim Morrison.
I was wedged between the cushions and struggled to get out. I would have been much happier looking like Jim Morrison if I didn’t feel like Jim Morrison. There was this dull, persistent pain that I had never experienced before. I had smoked a cigarette once, and that made me feel awful. Did I take peyote, too, on top of the booze? Was I really thinking in Navajo? Wait! Was I now speaking Spanish, too? How was this possible? I almost failed Spanish III Honors with Señora Synder!
“You got to beep-a-gunk-a-chucha/ honk-konk-konk-kadanta/ each-ya-puna-ney-cha, Bap-pa-lula-ni-chao/ Pao-pati-cha/ Ni-saong-kong/ Yeah, ride!”
Oh, gosh! I thought, How did I get so multilingual? And what will my students think of me on Zoom if I look like the übersexyrockicon, Jim Morrison? Will they even know ‘Touch Me’ and ‘Light My Fire?’
Will they ask me to sing? Recite some of my verses? Gosh, I hope so! I thought. Or would I be discarded, forgotten, so quickly after . . What? Almost fifty years? Would they think I just green-screened myself? Or Photoshopped Jim Morrison’s “Lizard King” picture? And what Jim Morrison was I? ‘Break on Through’ Morrison or ‘Riders on the Storm and heading to Paris’ Morrison?
I shivered.
I didn’t want to belong to the 27 Club. How was that possible? I was 51. Was I really 51? I had been postponing my “mid-life crisis,” month by month, year by year, but now . . . was this it? Did it have anything to do with visiting his grave in Paris in my ‘younger and more vulnerable years’?
Had his Being merged with mine? In Paris, did some shzu-shzu happen? At the cemetery? But I also visited Marcel Proust! Oscar Wilde! Richard Wright! Chopin! And Edith Piaf! Why hadn’t I been transformed into the Voice of the Sparrow! I always wanted to sing in French!”
It was difficult enough being a reasonably good-looking and funny teacher, but this body and this hair and this new attitude, and my breath, which mysteriously smelled like the ambrosia from the gods, what would everyone at school think? And what of my toxic male rock god lyrics? “Show me the way to the next little girl” . . . that’s just not right.
How would I explain the double entendre of ‘a back door man?’ My exposure on stage? Would parents complain that I was not morally fit to teach English?
Well, I just needed to explain the time period… my God! the Zeitgeist! I felt a slight wiggle in my boxers; that was different, I thought. Was this what was meant by a Mr. Mojo risin’?
I pushed myself off my back and lifted my head to see better what was happening. That movement was not like anything I had experienced . . . like that… really . . . and when I lifted my boxers, I realized that I was covered in little white dots and sores . . . Was it bed bugs? A type of venereal disease? And was I really that wasted at the Whiskey A-Go-Go?
I drew back quickly onto the couch, as the shock of being Jim Morrison finally overwhelmed me. This is the end, I thought. Or is it the beginning? I wondered how my daughters and my wife would take this? Did they change too? Maybe COVID-19 had transformed them too! My friends? My bandmates?
Maybe they didn’t even exist, as I had been reborn in another life in another time, far from that Hollywood bungalow. Or was I going stir crazy inside my home under quarantine? Maybe I was not really Jim Morrison. Maybe I was not opening for Van Morrison. Maybe I was not opening the doors to perception.
That insight made me relieved but also a little sad. I really didn’t want to set up Google Classroom and PowerSchool and learn FlipGrid and Nearpod and Screencastify and EdPuzzle and Canva and Tinkercad and iMovie and Audacity for my classroom and this whole hybrid-remote-acronymous-synchronous-in-person-mask-shield-wearing-teaching thing must really be getting to me . . .
