Editor's Note: "The Bloody Red Sun Of Fantastic L.A." is part of Michael Juliani's poetic series, "From Young Rooms."

I could watch television or I could read, or: go stroll down Jefferson to the crosslight, walk to Heritage Hall to watch the dancers practice to hip-hop and tribal shit, hear their laughs, stand there like a detective in mild mist.  I’m reading Danny Sugerman’s Wonderland Avenue, the book the fly came out of when I opened it to random page 110 or so.  Sugerman’s one of the few people I know of in history whose fame was summed up partly as being a “fan” of a major band like The Doors.  He managed The Doors and Iggy Pop, had a fucked up wealthy kid childhood, nearly died at 21 when he had it all and wrote two definitive books of note in modern rock, including one of the best music biographies ever in No One Here Gets Out Alive, and it’s marvelous that he’s remembered for being such a fan of Jim Morrison and The Doors, that someone can pull that off.  

Right there on the New York Times obit when he died from lung cancer: “Danny Sugerman, 50, Fan and Manager of Doors.”  From reading his memoir it’s easy to realize how there’re perhaps few other people more tailored to feel spoken to by rock & roll and especially Morrison than Danny Sugerman, and that’s a beautiful thing it was there.  Mostly I feel sad for him.  Not sorry, but sad.  You don’t have much sympathy for Morrison because he wouldn’t want any, but Sugerman seems like the other side of the Wild Child coin, all vulnerability, without the fully developed sociopathic teeth and claws nature gave Morrison.

I had a dream that my friend and I were sitting on the sidewalk on Jefferson Blvd. and I had to convince him not to propose to his girlfriend.  I had a dream that a porn actress was tutoring me in Social Studies in my first girlfriend’s house.  I had a dream that I was in the same house, and people were coming to pick me up and I didn’t want to leave, but there weren’t any other people in the house with me and nothing was happening.  I dreamt the dragged-out dry lake where I went to summer camp as a kid got filled with criminals and I had to make it to the other side with my high school friends, given only liquor.

The next girl I kiss I’m gonna call “Suzie Q,” sing this while rattling her around the room: “I like-a way you walk / I like-a way you talk / I like-a way you walk, like-a way you talk / Suzie Q.”  In AP English in high school my senior year our teacher played rock songs for us while we did our class journals, a time at the beginning of class that I cherished more than anything else my senior year.  When he told stories about previous students he’d always refer to them as “Johnny B. Goode” and their prom dates as “Suzie Q.”  Cool guy I didn’t take for granted.  I’d write him into my newspaper columns till the moderator called my cell phone one night I was in line at In-N-Out to tell me it was getting “a bit sycophantic,” she said with her neurotic shrill.  I dreamt my newspaper moderator called me again with more complaints, her voice in my subconscious ear as if from a radio.

Smells like someone lit a candle in our living room, which would be unorthodox.  Sugerman’s book’s spine’s brittle, in use since the 90s.  Can’t treat him like a normal book unless I want him to crack.  When it came in the mail, a slip of paper was still tucked inside with a handwritten letter from a previous owner, saying how much her friend would enjoy reading the book for his birthday.  I liked thinking about the wine party in ’93 or so where it was given to some kind of jivin’ guy the woman thought would enjoy a rock & roll story.  She called it a beautiful book, or something gentle like that.  The tone of the letter made it seem like he was an old friend, or someone she had a crush on, something unresolved from adolescence.

But I hate projecting, because a writer doesn’t give a reader the credit of trusting that he or she will read into the projections, understanding how personal they are to the writer.  Projections seem weak, flaccid as salmon on ice in the supermarket.  I wrote in a poem once that a woman’s face crying, puffy and red looked like raw fish, like that bright orange-pink salmon on ice in the supermarket.  The workshop strained to understand.  Then I strained to understand.  Fish on ice, no matter how similar in color, doesn’t steam like a woman’s fraught face.  You put your hand over her cheek and your hands feel cold.  You take your hand away and the white outlines of your fingers fade back to red like in a sunburn.

One night I did this.  I was over her looking down, and I was thinking how I had all these people swimming around as angels and demons in my consciousness of the room, all the writers, musicians and actors she only knew from my versions of them, in my enthusiasm and in her attempt to know me fully.  I thought of all the snow that must be swimming around in hers, all the white cold and standardization, and I thought, maybe for the first time, “We’re fucked,” and batted the idea away like shame.  In between us I rolled the covers, lay on top of them next to her, huffing a sigh in the way I do when I’m at that stupid loss in between words with someone I’d meant to love.  That huff doesn’t sound as male as I want it to, or as confident.  4 a.m. every Saturday I walked across the parking lot back home to sleep.

Besides Sugerman, I’m doing a lot of reading for my classes.  It’s the best semester of school I’ve ever had.  In high school I had high hopes for college, expecting it to be a controlled form of “real life,” which young people so demand.  I’m sort of breathing easy at the thought that I haven’t had to see the real Jim Morrison as a father figure.  Danny Sugerman wanted Jim to be his dad, it seems like, or his older brother.  That’s the tallest drink to order.  Can you imagine.

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