The Lizard King by Jerry Hopkins

Author:Jerry Hopkins [Jerry Hopkins]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780859658843
Publisher: Plexus Publishing Ltd.
Published: 2015-03-21T16:00:00+00:00

I asked Danny, ‘She never said anything about heroin being a part of his death?’

Danny said, ‘I seem to remember her saying something. In a real stupor, when you’re nodding out, you don’t know who you’re talking to, you don’t even know if you’re talking, and I feel not unqualified to tell this story, but I feel not awfully secure in its reportage, because I was awful high, too. But I do remember a conversation regarding her guilt and her getting really down on herself … something to the effect: she was busted, Jim found it [the heroin].’

‘What’s this!’ Jim said. (As Danny recalled the conversation.)

‘It’s coke!’

Jim dumped a quantity on the table, deftly pushing it into long, thick lines, probably with the edge of a paper matchbook or a credit card. He inhaled the first line.

Pam said, ‘Jim, don’t do too much. Jim, don’t do too much!’

Danny again: ‘… rather than say “Jim, it’s smack.” Because she had been hiding it from him, and she knew damned well he did not do that. And he did not want her to do it. He saw what heroin did to friends like Tim Hardin. [Another singer-songwriter who died of a heroin overdose.] He knew the hazards of it.

‘So I remember a guilt feeling, and an implication … that Jim had discovered her stash and Pam said, “Oh, Jim, it’s just coke,” which he really wasn’t into, at that point anyway, and Jim said, “Let’s do some.” He put it out and snorted it like it was coke.’

Danny insisted that he didn’t know the true story, because this was only one of many that Pamela told, and the one she told most consistently was the ‘official’ version, of a heart attack in the bathtub. It is, however, the story he believes.

It is the story that was told by Alain Ronay and Agnes Varda to Paris Match in 1991, twenty years after Jim’s death, that makes this story most real.

Pam took Ronay’s arm in the Paris apartment as the doctor was examining Jim’s body. Pam said she and Jim had been snorting heroin for two days. Pam said they snorted heroin the night before and again that afternoon, after Jim had taken his walk with Ronay and before he went out to dinner alone. When they returned home from the movie and the bistro, the heroin came out again. In this version, Pam did not mention washing dishes, or say Jim watched home movies. Now Pam said Jim started playing the Doors’ recordings, including the first album, which contained the song, ‘The End’. She said Jim got out of bed and snorted some more heroin, so, she added, Jim actually had consumed more than she did. She said that one of the Doors’ records was playing when they nodded off to sleep.

Ronay quoted Varda as asking, ‘Who had the heroin? Was it you?’

Pamela said, ‘Of course …’

Pam said she woke up to Jim’s heavy breathing. This matched the story she told police. She

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.