Victor Lavalle - Lucretia and the Kroons

“No,” Pepper admitted. “I was born in ’69. I read about this. In an interview with Ray Manzarek, their keyboardist.”

Pepper looked to Coffee and Dorry and Loochie, but none of them seemed to recognize the name. Pepper decided not to be disappointed in them for this.

“Morrison performed, but he didn’t sing much. Mostly he yelled at the crowd. And at a certain point he told the crowd he knew why they’d really come to the show that night. ‘You want to see my cock, don’t you?!’ ”

Dorry snorted, a little laugh.

“That’s what he said,” Pepper continued. “Then Morrison waved his shirt in front of his crotch and pulled it away and said, ‘See it? Did you see it?’ ”

Coffee looked confused.

Loochie said, “This doesn’t sound like a very good band.”

“Listen to me. Four days later, the city of Miami issued a warrant for Morrison’s arrest. After a trial, Morrison was convicted of two misdemeanors. Open profanity, I think. And indecent exposure. And yet, Ray Manzarek swears Morrison never exposed himself. No pictures were ever developed, from a crowd of twelve thousand. And no one ever showed real evidence that the … exposure ever happened. Manzarek called it a mass delusion.”

Pepper stopped for a moment, to let the phrase sink in.

“But even years later, there were hundreds, thousands, who swore they’d seen Morrison’s penis. It didn’t happen, but to them it was still real.”

Loochie and Coffee and Dorry backed away from Pepper. Pepper looked at his feet.

“You understand what I’m saying?”

Dorry nodded and shrugged.

“You’re not one of us,” she said. “Sure. We understand.”

Loochie said, “If I had paid to see that concert, I would’ve got my money back.”

Just that fast, they departed. Coffee slipped into the phone alcove. Dorry returned to her room on Northwest 3, where she slipped those cookies into a plastic bag, a kind of care package she was putting together for another patient, one of the many she took care of at New Hyde. And Loochie wandered back down Northwest 5. Her half hour of TV control would be coming soon and she wanted to watch something stupid and fun, music videos maybe; something to make her forget the story about Jim Morrison’s penis. And how Pepper meant it to say she was seeing something that wasn’t really there. Fuck you, Frankenstein . That’s what Loochie wanted to tell him.

And Pepper? He returned to his room alone.