Paris,Jim Morrison and me
Created | Updated Jan 28, 2002
I hadn,t been to France for about 10 years since me and my parents and my two brothers had gone there in my fathers yellow cortina.Finding myself at a bit of a loose end one January i decided to go to France by Eurostar.So i caught the train from Waterloo and a couple of hours later was arriving in Gar de Nord in Paris. Contrary to the sterotype of French people as rude and loud all the locals i met in Paris were very pleasant and and smiled when i tried to speak French badly.i visited the Eiffel tower and wandered around a lot of Paris in the three days i was there.In fact i did most of the usual tourist things.What i wanted though was to do something different,not just to be a sheep following the herd.I tried to speak French as much as possible,i read lots of French papers ,i drank and ate in ordinary pubs that were full of ordinary people and tried to avoid the tourist traps. I remembered from years ago ,having listened to a lot of Doors albums at university that Jim Morrison had died in Paris and that he was buried in Pere La Chaise cemetery.So i decided to go and see his grave. I arrived at the cemetery ,which was surrounded by a large stone wall.On the road outside were several newspaper kiosks selling maps of the cemetery,I decided not to buy one and this was a mistake. Pere La Chaise cemetery is huge and i spent a good hour and a half wandering around and got hopelessly lost.I went back to the kiosk on the road and bought a map for five francs.So armed with my map i made my second attempt Jim Morrisons grave was quite far away from the kiosk where i bought my map and i soon became aware that i wasn,t the only one looking for it.There were about twenty or thirty other people wandering backwards and forwards ,some of them hopelessly lost as i had been on my first attempt.One or two of them noticed i had a map and decided to follow me.As i walked past graves and tombs over to the other side of the hill where the grave was i passed more and more tourists and people with back packs all ofthem looking for the grave. To my horror i actually saw a funeral taking place.What the poor relatives of the bereaved must have thought of us all i cannot imagine. So finally i arrived at the grave.There was only a solitary plain grave stone and a tired looking policeman.Yes the grave of Jim Morrison has a police guard by it,probably because of graffiti written by fans in the past.I have to admit that the feeling of "Is that it " was huge.I felt silly and i felt i had intruded on the grief of the relatives attending the present day funeral.I and all the other fans had spent most of the morning looking for the grave of someone we had never met.While neraby real relatives were greiving at the funeral of a real person and probably a lot of tourists wandering around the graveyard to them must have appeared in pretty poor taste I don,t really know what i expectedto find at Jim Morrisons grave .I went out of the cemetery and sat in a cafe where i drank a beer and read the papers in French.I think i learned a lot that day about fandom and perhaps how myth can overtake reality sometimes .
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