A Twisted Time in 1972

Jim Morrison meets conformity.

They sent him to military school. Somewhere in their minds, it was a good idea. Maybe his attitude would change. Maybe he’d find god. Or grow up. Became an adult and a citizen. He was 17 at the time and, admittedly, reckless.

Valley Forge Military Academy was about to get tested, mano a mano.

Fast forward several months. “Riders on the Storm” is playing in the background. A classic by The Doors. We would hear that damn song three or four times a week,sometimes as often on any given day. We would be sitting in what was called the boddle ( rhymes with poodle), which was an oversized snack and beverage hangout for all the aspiring cadets and plebs ( first year cadets, of whom he was one, of course), who were treated like dogs.

Still, the boodle was fun. It was a brief refuge to chill and relax; take the edge off. We would wax poetic and talk sports or macho-brag of sweet pussy, all a code of unity amidst new-found buddies. The best days, though, were when we somehow escaped the madness of 24/7 conformity and the stinging bite of alienation, just as Holden Caulfield described in “The Catcher in the Rye. “

At a gravitational level, it was a place where we rebels and renegades revealed ourselves while wearing those stolid, stupid and painted masks of disciplined cadets, or of plebs. Therein, the mistreated dogs could bark hard in concert and act the defiant wolves. So we did. Gloriously. Hence the reason why any one of us would prey upon the battered juke box, pop in a quarter, and intuitively select “Riders on the Storm.” It matched our primordial DNA.

The song, if you don’t know, was written by Jim Morrison, the band’s lead singer and then-reigning social outcast. It’s a song that has ambiguous philosophical undertones that speak to how life is random, rebellious, risky or uncertain. We all “ride the storm” of fate, so to speak, and can meet monsters or strangers at any hour, especially within ourselves. Careful when you search the abyss, you might find…you.

But the real irony and import of the song is that it was Morrison’s final one. His last hurrah. He committed suicide a short time later, dying in some bathtub, somewhere in Paris, accompanied by his girlfriend. Some say he bathed with an overdose of heroin as much as with her, though she said he was drunk. We won’t ever know since no autopsy was performed. He was only 27, the voice of his generation at the time, second only to Bob Dylan, and about to ride a rainbow of adulation rather than any metaphorical storm. Pity his end, as enough tears followed him to fill that empty bathtub. Except Jim Morrison, like all decent rebels, preferred his own misunderstood journey, which is never the one others imagine or expect.

But I digress. The real story behind military school is its mythology. It markets fiction. It sells a masculine war ethos. The promise and co-equal pretense is that they’ll make a real man out of your boy, out of your loser, wayward kid, out of your wanna-be revolutionary. They’ll dress your son in a crisp uniform, then make him salute and march like a soldier. They’ll teach him strict obedience, how to follow orders and surrender his chaos. He will even learn how to make his own bed. Why, in no time, your precious problem-child will transmogrify like a Jekyll and Hyde. Courtesy, the military theatre crowd who understand what it really is to become and to be a man. The ultimate man. That’s the spin.

But therein lies the rub. Don’t blink or you’ll miss the magic show. The drama is always fleeting and in super-position, for you esoteric physicists out there. Indeed, the paradox of the man-evolution now begins, and it’s one you will never fully grasp. What you won’t ever know is who was ever the Jekyll and who ever was the Hyde. What thee, became the monster? Who you sought, what you wanted, is maybe what you had. And, worse, who and what you got is what you thought you were giving away.

Maybe we are all both good and evil, and each of us hides our own daunting, haunting secret. Because what you think you saw and what you think you know about your groomed cadet whom you sent for a psychological transition is a somber and dark mirage. It is like the time when you were walking alone somewhere, anywhere, and the air was cool and tight around your delicate neck. You were not in a hurry but not exactly patient, either. Your walk was calculated and yet carefree. During it, you heard all the usual sounds of the pedestrian day: the traffic rushing by; dogs barking; an airplane buzzing in the distant, cloudless sky; a few birds whistling and chirping and some singing boldly to each other. Things seemed normal and friendly and of little event.

But then you thought you heard something strange, something you couldn’t identify. You suddenly sensed something that made you quiver and pause. You stood frozen, alert and witnessed a type of ocular mystery. It was more real in its invisibility than you were in your self-doubts. Something was beyond you, just beyond, but near, too, and it was closing in on you. Fast. And when you turned about to see what you sensed…let us bring it all together now…to see that proud cadet all proud for you in his handsome, stoic image with a dutiful salute and broad stature, just like they promoted, we’ll, what you saw was someone who was never really there. You saw a shape-shifting, yes. But you saw a transformation not of him, but of yourself.

He was only there, as advertised, in your own mind for a twisted moment long ago. And that’s why Morrison died, too. He had a special something that couldn’t and wouldn’t be taken away. He subconsciously did not allow it to be unearthed. So, too, that kid you sent to Valley Forge Military School in 1972. It is in the nature of things to remain what we are, and who we are, for better or worse. We are all just riders on the storm.

Have a nice day,
Mike