The august and exalted position of High Mojomuck--which no other may rightfully hold until my demise or permanent resignation to a mental hospital--is so darned prestigious that it's certain to become the green envy of dyads, triads, maybe even dozens of people during the decades to come.

        Yes, I was in Newsweek magazine. Sure, I battled the pseudo-Christian kook Bob Larson for two hours on an international live radio hook-up to fight for the good name of James Douglas Morrison. Yup, I've been in a few newspapers. And of course, I edit that most coveted of all perennially late magazines, The Deadly Doorknell.

        But, still I am constantly asked, "Great One, how did you come to be the spiritual pappy of this here Church of The Doors? And what is the nature of that pseudo-existent thingamajig, anyhoo?"

        So, hearken and attend: by request of an illustrious gentleman from Utah, I will spill the magic beans.

        Know that I was born in 1958 on the ancient Roman holiday of Lupercalia, a feast so given to fecund and flagellatory excess that we still observe it under the name Valentine's Day.

        From the first I was given devoutly to the wielding of dark, sweeping glamours and the building of secret kingdoms. My first ambition (age four?) was to become a Mad Scientist, one of the few ambitions I have achieved--for have I not created a monster? Since then I have been the King of the Vampire Club, Emperor of Mu, Scarlet King of the Penetrated Temple, Magister of the Phoenix Coven (a well-meant attempt), Black Man of the Covenant of Lillith-Lash (a fascinating endeavor), Fantur of the Draugrim of the Secret Flame (comprised of the Three Kindreds of Moriquendi, Cruedain, and Cirithin.) Of course, I continue to be the King of the Pictish Nation in exile, with Kalydon Naddair my co-ruler in Alba.

        Some readers might see the above and think, "This guy seems to have been involved in the occult or something." And, brother or sister, you got that right. Fact is I'm a master of the mystic arts. And humble, too!

        When I was in the third grade of elementary school, my mother asked me what I wanted for my birthday. I said, "I want to go to a grown-up bookstore." She thought that was so darned cute that she packed me up and took me to the center of the great metropolis (ha ha) of Memphis, Tennessee, to a bookstore three stories tall.

       (To the tune of "The End"--)

        And the salesgirl walked up...

         As we walked inside...

         "Madam?"

         "My son."

         "Where are the ESP books?"

         "Madam?"

         "My son. He wants to...

         "BUY SOME ESP BOOKS!!"

        Yeah, the third grade was The Magic of Believing by Claude M. Bristol. The fourth grade was Advanced Techniques of Hypnosis by Melvin Powers and An Encyclopedia of Witchcraft edited by Harry E. Wedeck.

        By the time I was in high school in the mid-70's I would have considered serious body mutilation if only it could be traded for tutoring and initiation into Wicca, but that was not obtainable in south Texas in those days. (You will recall that Wicca, often called Witchcraft, is a slightly polytheistic Neo-Pagan religion based upon the worship of a Great Mother goddess. Adherents, usually grouped into small units called covens, also believe in psychic powers that can be utilized through the ritual practice called magic.)

        If not in Texas, then where?

        Thence to California, the land of the fair, and the strong, and the wise!

        Wiccans in California are as plentiful as mushrooms (flies?) on horseshit.

        I was trained. And I was initiated. But there were rats in paradise. You see, I brought a horrible contagion with me from the hinterlands: the love of great rock music, music with poetry and majesty and the thrill of triumph over the soul-defeating sleepwalk called the workaday world. I was a plague carrier with two germs, the dead Jim Morrison and the living Patti Smith. I infected many, although I suspect I sickened many more.

        At one full moon ritual, during a freeform period wherein any individual could add to the ceremony, I recited The Celebration of the Lizard. It seemed so powerful to me that I wanted everyone to feel the wonder of it. Afterwards, my "beloved brothers" asked me why it was that I hated them so much that I would subject them to such evil, disruptive energy.

        It was then I first knew for certain that I should be hanging with a different crowd.

        The great singer and priestess Patti Smith had taught me that unbending will and lust toward poetry and music could achieve miracles. So I set out to conquer the poetry world and form a rock band. My model in the first case was Ms. (now Mrs.) Smith, and, in the second, The Doors. The Wiccans sniffed their stiff disdain. It was, after all, the late 70's and they were terrified that I might dye my hair and put a safety pin through my face, thus bringing shame upon my entire lineage. Even so, miracles did happen, thanks to many beautiful heroes and eventually, I had a band called E.L.F.

        "Boy, you guys sound like The Doors," was the refrain that followed after most of E.L.F.'s (endless stream of) pitiful gigs. But never enough like The Doors to make them come back for more.

        After four years the band bailed out. The parting shot was, "Man, get a life. The Doors is like some kind of religion with you!"

        That made me think of those two weird dreams I had about Jim Morrison. The first two, the ones I can always remember.

        The first dream I ever had about Jim Morrison: I was in the back seat of a convertible car. In the front seat were two people who were supposed to be Danny Sugerman and Jerry Hopkins on their way to do research for the book No One Here Gets Out Alive. We sped through the hours of a dusty, glaring summers day in California desert. At last, out near some isolated old beer-and-gas station, we found the trailer home of the woman who had known Jim Morrison. I let Danny and Jerry do their job while I wandered about the place, half listening, half snooping. At last I found a cheap, beat-up, strings-broken, discarded electric guitar.

        "What's this?" I asked.

        "Oh, that's Jim's guitar. He wanted to learn guitar for a while."

        I fell in love with it instantly and completely and hopelessly. I asked if I could have it, and of course she said no. Soon I was reduced to a kneeling river of gut sorrow. I cried, sobbed, wept, and begged. There are depths of grief that make death look like up to me.

        Then she relented! The guitar was mine! Into the car! Wailing down the road, laughter against the jail of life!

        Then we slammed into a speeding locomotive and died.

        The second dream I had about Jim Morrison: The details are cloudy on this one. I was in the military, though not at war. We were stationed at a big base, stateside. Weird phenomena began occurring and I was the first to form a theory and then a solution to the riddle of the weird occurrences: The simple truth was that the spirit of Jim Morrison was boring its way through from the other side. But no one believed me. That left me in the unhappy position of having to choose between the truth (Jim Morrison) and my duty to obey my superiors. The ultimate result was me holed up in a corner of the "mess" (cafeteria) with tables stacked all about as a barricade and a siege of hostile soldiers surrounding the building. I had no choice but to defend to the death the site at which Morrison would manifest. A shimmering began to appear behind my shoulder. It increased for days. If only I could hold out, Jim Morrison would be returned to the world minus all the weaknesses that hobbled him in the 60's. How did the dream end? All I remember is that Morrison did return.

        "The Doors are like a religion with you." Hmm...

        I thought, "Don't people make pilgrimages to his grave? Haven't I seen a picture of Patti Smith sitting in the rain at Morrison's grave, looking like she was about to cry?"

        And then a terrible picture formed before my mind's eye: Someone else starting a church of The Doors and me spending the rest of my life kicking myself and pewling along saying, "Well, I thought of it first back in 1984, but I was too mature and rational to do anything about it." That was the last straw! Nobody was going down in history as a more mystically obsessed Doors freak than me, by Jim!

        But, what to do?

        Well, there was only one thing I could do. I had to make a poster with a mail-in coupon. And some letterhead. And I had to use the word "first" and I had to use the phrase "established in 1984."

        Sure, most religions have grander miracles. The burning bush, the Resurrection, bodily ascensions, Saul/Paul knocked off his horse. But for me it was a drawing of Jim Morrison and a coupon that shouted, "I'VE SEEN THE DARK! SIGN ME UP!"

        As the following summer (1985) crept upon me, the spirit of Jim Morrison revealed to me that I must start an annual festival to commemorate his death. Thus was born the very first Celebration of the Lizard. Jim had been dead for two-times-seven years at that time (playing strange games with the girls of the island, no doubt). July was the seventh month of the year, as it still is. We held the party on the full moon, at which a man pointed out that there were to be two full moons that July, the second being what is called a "blue moon." On that blue moon, late at night, I got out of bed telling my girlfriend that I couldn't sleep due to chest pains and that I was going to take a bath. Humming "Let's swim to the moon," I stuck my toe in the bath water. That's when the deja vu hit. "Whoa! This is weird," I said, and dashed naked into the living room where I scrawled my last will and testament before daring the bathtub. Presumably, I didn't die that night, although sometimes I wonder.

        I sold a few membership cards, mostly to schizophrenics and card collectors, but I couldn't get any further than the cover toward producing a church newsletter. And the poor cover was a mess. As news kept changing out there in the real world, the blurbs for the proposed lead stories kept getting pasted over and rewritten. There was "Trunkful of Morrison Poems Just Found," "Legal Battle Over Morrison Poems," "Patricia Kennealy Bewitches Publishers' Row," "New Book of Morrison Poems Just Published," "Second Morrison Poetry Book." The cover eventually came to look like a group paste-up project from some kindergarten class.  I always maintained July 3 as a holiday, but there were many years when the Celebration of the Lizard consisted of no more than myself, a stack of Doors' tapes, and a bottle of whiskey holed up in my room for five or six hours.

        Well, time has a way of going by and things have a way of changing until, eventually, a great circle was made and I found myself staying, in 1991, with the same people at the same house in Berkeley wherein I had founded the Church in 1984. I remember standing in the kitchen talking long-distance on the phone to my dad. I was duly admitting to him that, yes, I was still an unemployed bum with delusions of grandeur, when the first ad for Oliver Stone's Doors' movie came on the TV. In mid-sentence my voice jumped an octave and I began shrieking things like, "OH MY GOD! IT'S HERE! IT'S HERE! THEY DID IT!

        On the phone, my father was chanting, "Hello? Hello? Can you hear me? Are you OK? Are you injured?"

        "The Doors! 'Light My Fire.' You don't understand. I'm the founder of The First Church of The Doors. I can't talk now. Omagawd, it's here!"

        Now let me explain an odd detail about this place in Berkeley that will illustrate the influence of divine intervention in the founding of the Church. Back in '87 a salesman had caught me on the phone. This annoyingly persistent fellow was dead set on selling me a package of magazine subscriptions at a discount price that I was to render to his firm. When my complaints of poverty had no effect upon him, I conceived the fiendish plan of allowing him to sign me up while fully intending never to pay a cent. I thought it would teach him a little moderation. One of the stupid magazines was Esquire. As time passed with me never paying, the subscriptions ended, one by one. All except Esquire. When I returned four years later, Esquire was still being delivered faithfully to the mail box each month--and going from the mail box straight to the trash can!

        Then, in early Spring of 1991, there came the day that I pulled Esquire from the box only to stare straight into the eyes of Jim Morrison. He was the cover story! If it had been displayed only at newsstands I would probably never had seen it (I ignore newsstands).

        The story was a slanderous hatchet job by Mirandi Babitz' evil sister, Eve. Mirandi had been an old buddy of Pam and Jim's. Eve, her sister, had grown up to be the smart-ass token female writer at Esquire, and this article was her chance to be cooler than the fourth most famous attraction in all Paris.

        Now, not only does time move in cycles, but it also moves forward (in its own piddling way). Thus it chanced that my Berkeley friends, by 1991, had acquired a modest computer and printer. For those among my readers who have not yet discovered the addictive wonders of desktop publishing, let me explain that one of the absolutely greatest things about modern computers is their ability to quickly produce high quality documents that have the look of expensive typeset printing. So it was with a feeling of great good fortune that I jumped my friends' computer, first composing some new Church letterhead and then whipping out a scathing letter to the editors of Esquire.

        Well, brothers and sisters (and all you infidels who haven't sent me $10.00 yet) I didn't realize what a hornets' nest I was stirring up with that letter to Esquire.

       Long before I heard a peep from Esquire, I was being interviewed by phone for Newsweek!

        Here is my vague theory of how it all went down. Apparently all those chic, important people who work for big New York magazines eat from the same huge feeding troughs. I imagine ferns, classical music or jazz--you know. The noise of all that slurping and bullshitting must be nauseating. The buckets of martinis coming and going in fire- brigade fashion...

        So I imagine this writer from Newsweek (Josh Hammer) sidling up to the trough next a stunning blonde letters page girl from Esquire. He flings his necktie over his shoulder so he won't accidentally swallow it down with the Thai beef salad.

        "Mona."

        "Josh."

        (Much grunting and belching. The occasional scream from a waiter too slow at yanking his hands away.)

        "Mona, I don't know what I'm going to do."

        "What's the problem, Josh?"

        "Oh, it's this stupid Doors thing. All of a sudden everything and everybody is Doors, Doors, Doors."

        "Hey, tell me about it! He's our cover story this month. And the mail we're getting...uurrp."

        "So the editor says, 'Josh, I want the figures, the dollar signs. I want to know how much, where, when, and who. But put the human touch on it.' The frigging deadline is three days away. I'm sick of the goddam Doors."

        "Oh, you're sick of The Doors? You should see the letters I have to read. Like the one from The First Church of The Doors. This is, like, their religion. Who farted?"

        "Yech. I don't know. Wasn't me. Church of The Doors. It's a joke, right?"

        "Hell if I know. Says they've been at it since 1984. At least he can spell and punctuate. Waiter, can we have another bucket of martinis?"

        "Say, Mona, could you get me that guy's phone number?"

        "Well, Josh, you know that's confidential information. When would you need it?"

        "By five tonight."

        "No problem."

        And so in some such fashion, the High Mojomuck of The First Church of The Doors became the "human touch" in Newsweek's run-down of the financial status of The Doors. The entire first paragraph, to be exact. My favorite parts were when I claimed to have over two hundred members in the church and the final sentence wherein I am quoted saying that Jim Morrison is a force of nature that you can't keep down.

        The story ran in the April 8, 1991 issue. Things started popping very quickly after it hit the stands. The very first events were phone calls from ardent Doors freaks Jane Oliver (now deceased) and Rhonna Soubiea--two women who had instantly called the Newsweek offices and forced them to surrender my phone number and who became the first and staunchest members of the "new" revitalized church. Then there was the lady from Infobonn, a German radio news network that broadcasts in most parts of the world. All of this in the first three days after the magazine article appeared. Harper's wanted to look at my (hastily slammed together) magazine, as did The Whole Earth Review.

        On the second of July, 1991, there was the live radio telephone debacle with "Christian" evangelist Bob Larson. I've written on that matter elsewhere, so I'll only mention here that Bob makes a lucrative living from panicking the gullible with his fairy tale nightmare rants about a worldwide Satanic conspiracy that wants to kill our children or abuse our daughters for breeding purposes. Oh, also-- if he had a fatal accident I doubt if the world would be much slighted.

        Since then it's been just one goofy bumper car nonstop funhouse rollercoaster of a horror freakshow after another. Everything I am (except bald-headed) I owe to Jim Morrison. Which is to say I am an unemployed insufferably arrogant drunken social parasite with the soul of a clown and an occasional luck with words.

         "That's probably all well and good," the reader might say, "but why did you start The First Church of The  Doors?"

         Why, to meet some other Doors fans, of course. And it worked...and I thank you all very, very much.

 
 

Well-- I did write this in 1993. Some things are no longer accurate. In fact the Church of the Doors is presently in an innactive phase, and that includes the magazine as well. However, you can still purchase your very own copies of issues 3 and 4 from His Coolness the Mojomuck of Utah and the World Wide Web, Kerry Humpherys, at his most supreme nexus of all Doors collectable consciousness: THE DOORS COLLECTOR MAGAZINE ONLINE.

 

 

Draconian Elven Witchcraft