HWY Office

A likeness, spring 1971. Not Jim Morrison, and not affiliated with his family or The Doors.

I took the stairs. She took the cloth. That was the whole contract. Downstairs smells like sandalwood. Up here it smells like film and last night.

This is not the Doors office. That room is for the band. This one is a table, a moviola that fights me, cans that aren’t labeled the way they should be. A map of the desert curling off the wall. I am cutting a picture. HWY. An American Pastoral. I wrote ten pages and called it The Hitchhiker and then we went out and made it true.

Paul has the camera. Babe. Frank. April. Tahquitz first. Then Joshua Tree. A man walking. I don’t explain him. Water. Heat. The road like a blade. We shot the city at night from a roof so the neon would lie the right way.

There was a coyote on the highway. Pink tongue. Already leaving. I wanted to put my hand on his head and I didn’t. That is in the picture. Dawn in the desert is in the picture. What I saw as a kid — the truck, the bodies, the first time the world was not a glove compartment — that is in it too. I don’t cry about it. I cut it.

The blue car is in it because nobody bought the damn thing. Sixty-seven Shelby. I put it in the paper. It sat. So the hitchhiker drove it. It is still for sale if you came up here for a noisy toy. I didn’t.

We ran a print last March. Fifty minutes. Not finished. Fred for the music. Bruce for the sound. When the shop fills up I come back and sit with the reel. The workprint is on the bench. Dawn’s Highway. Look if you want. Then leave the film where it is. I am not done. Neither is she. That is why we rented the stairs.

Jim