A Homer's Odyssey

"Someone in the store once referred to him as 'Mark Obsessednik,' says Joe Lee, owner of Joe's Record Paradise in Rockville. "You gotta be, to gather that amount of data about what was happening in the clubs."

Meanwhile, Opsasnick lavished special attention on his home county in two books -- "Miscellaneous and Unknown: Cultural Souvenirs From Prince George's County, Maryland" and "The Cultural Badlands Tour: An Outsider's Guide to Obscure Landmarks and Offbeat Historical Sites in Prince George's County, Maryland."

One of his most celebrated feats was unearthing the back story of the 13-year-old Prince George's boy whose strange torments in 1949 inspired former Georgetown student William Peter Blatty's 1971 best-selling novel, "The Exorcist," which was made into the film in 1973. Using old-fashioned tools like city directories, property records and neighborhood canvassing, Opsasnick corrected five decades of news accounts. He interviewed a church witness and people who knew the boy and his family, and he reported a brief conversation with the now-grown subject of the exorcism, whose identity he did not reveal.

It turned out the boy's house was in Cottage City, not Mount Rainier -- since confirmed by Blatty; that all the exorcism rituals were probably performed in St. Louis, none in Georgetown; and most of the alleged supernatural phenomena were witnessed only by the boy's family. His 24-page article, "The Haunted Boy of Cottage City: The Cold Hard Facts Behind the Story that Inspired 'The Exorcist,' " was published in Rockville-based Strange Magazine in 1998.

"It was a kind of masterwork of following the clues to some kind of local mystery," says Norma Tilden, assistant professor of English at Georgetown, who teaches literary nonfiction. "He's like the detective of the absolutely mundane detail, and I just love that about the 'Exorcist' article. . . .

"One thing I thought was completely great and charming was that most of his research was done at the Hyattsville branch library."

Jim's Room

The tour of Morrison country continues.

"This is the route Morrison would take to school," Opsasnick says, arriving at George Washington Middle School -- formerly the high school -- an art deco pile on Mount Vernon Avenue.

Next, the public library on Queen Street: "It was one of Morrison's favorite spots." And the Torpedo Factory on the waterfront, which in Morrison's day was near the site of old industrial buildings and rotting piers: "He would come out on this pier and talk to the fishermen."

Opsasnick interviewed 60 of Morrison's classmates and 90 other sources, including Morrison's younger brother, Andy. Opsasnick argues that Morrison's "overall creative process and the identity as an artist he developed had their origins here."

Is it plausible that Morrison's high school years mattered so much? In an interview quoted in a forthcoming Doors oral history by former Rolling Stone editor Ben Fong-Torres, Morrison said "Horse Latitudes" was a Doors song that "I wrote when I was in high school. I kept a lot of notebooks through high school and college."

Anyway, high school never receded too far into the past of a guy who died of heart failure in a Paris bathtub before his 10th reunion.