Mr Mojo Read Online Free Page B

values, little Jim’s stability was constantly threatened by this continual uprooting. Life in the services offered welcome financial security in the fifties, but it hardly fostered emotional stability. Morrison was alwaysrootless, and soon developed a shield and a way of responding to people with whom he knew his relationship would be brief. Without a peer group to call his own, he remodelled himself wherever he went – a chameleon with a satchel.
    Morrison grew up quickly. In adolescence he discovered a gregarious side to his nature, and developed an extreme way of dealing with the world. He wanted to be liked, and the easiest way was to show off by acting the fool or performing outrageous stunts. Morrison was already behaving in a resolutely odd manner, and each new set of classmates quickly learned to avoid the nascent rebel. He was also discovering a Machiavellian streak in himself, finding it easy to manipulate his school friends, and a sick sense of humour was beginning to manifest itself. Morrison could be deliberately mysterious, and was already acquiring an armoury of masks.
    It was at George Washington High that the softly spoken and articulate sophomore began writing poetry. He discovered he was adept with words, and started to keep a diary and write short stories. He immersed himself in his books. He had a formidable capacity for learning, and devoured William Blake, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Colin Wilson, Aldous Huxley, Sartre and Rimbaud, while at the same time developing a taste for beer. He was soon fascinated by the romantic notion of poetry, as Jerry Hopkins andDanny Sugerman point out in their biography,
No One Here Gets Out Alive
. ‘To be a poet entailed more than writing poems. It demanded a commitment to live, and die, with great style and even greater sadness; to wake each morning with the fever raging and know it would never be extinguished except by death, yet to be convinced that this suffering carried a unique reward.’
    This was something to which Morrison could aspire. The tortured artist? Sure, he could do that, no problem. But although he was alarmingly intelligent and a gifted, if lazy, student, Morrison was completely indifferent to any possibilities of a long-term career. Being remarkably bright, the Navy brat didn’t have to study much to achieve high marks and consistently got good grades, even though he spent most of his time reading poetry, writing his diary or getting drunk. His parents, sensing his apathy, enrolled him in St Petersburg Junior College in Florida, informing him that he had to live with his grandparents in Clearwater. Morrison reluctantly co-operated, and in September 1961, while the rest of the family travelled to San Diego, he moved to the Sunshine State. After an unremarkable year he transferred to Florida State University in Tallahassee, before dropping out and forcing his parents to allow him to switch to UCLA to study film in early 1964.
    Morrison had been fascinated by cinema since his early teens, though the transfer to UCLA was as much about moving to Los Angeles as it was aboutstudying film. And although he hurled himself into the course, it was his first experiments with drugs that really fuelled Morrison’s thoughts. Twelve frustrating and uneventful months later he was gone. After receiving negative grades for his end-of-term film, he quit college and disappeared to the beach. His project, a free-form short with no discernible script, was, to quote Morrison, ‘a film questioning the film process itself . . . a film about film’. In reality it was a series of abstract and surreal images stuck together like a proto-pop video. Nazi soldiers were juxtaposed with the title sequence from the TV show
The Outer Limits
, as the cameraman’s girlfriend jumped about in bra, panties and high heels. This medley of meaningless images failed to impress Morrison’s tutors, who gave him a ‘complimentary D’. Throughout his