This is the end/Beautiful friend/This is the end/My only friend/The end Jim Morrison—The Doors We called her Alice because she could get anything you want. Names didn’t matter then— her parents would not have recognized her, anyway. Alice lived in that condemned house on Allen Street. You climbed in through a window on the alley. I tried to sleep there once, but the walls moaned as if the house were alive All night, I could hear the newly dead climb the crippled stairs. A tape of Jim Morrison singing, “this is the end,” played so often in that house you might come to believe he lived there. And at night, in the dim light, you had to watch where you stepped because the trippers, the lovebirds and the junkies sprawled any which way on the splintered floors. Alice, a lapsed Catholic, wore a St. Raphael medallion and kept a drawer full of multicolored meds. I brought a friend there once— bad trip. She was just a child, really. Alice tried to bring her down with barbies and baby talk, but she never made it all the way back. The cops came in force in ’69. Took a battering ram to the front door, dragged the hippies out into the sun, watched as they scattered like a litter of feral cats. We found the St. Raphael medallion in the gutter across from the house, but we never found Alice.