A Homer's Odyssey

The nomadic Navy-career Morrison family moved to Alexandria when Morrison's father was assigned to the Pentagon. Opsasnick's portrait of the artist as a high school student describes a well-read, charismatic kid who could be something of a cruel jerk.

Morrison's basement bedroom on Woodland Terrace had its own exterior door that let him come and go as he pleased. When he moved into this teenage lair, he owned only a handful of books. By the time he graduated, Andy Morrison told Opsasnick, he had 1,000 volumes. Nietzsche, Kerouac, Camus, Joyce -- bought, borrowed and stolen on trips to used bookstores in D.C. and the Alexandria library.

Morrison was the temperamental star of senior English class. When the teacher, who honored his literary interpretations, challenged him on a point about Joyce's "Ulysses," Morrison exploded. He "yelled at the teacher that he'd spent 'a full summer reading that book!' " said Stan Durkee, senior class president, as quoted by Opsasnick.

Later, Morrison wrote a poem:

Walks in D.C. in

Negro streets. The library

& book stores. Orange

brick in warm sun.

The books & poets magic

So Opsasnick tracked down the buildings in Georgetown that had housed used bookstores in Morrison's day and noted, for what it's worth, "I looked down at the sidewalks that led to their front entrances and marveled that in each case the walkways were made of distinct orange and red bricks!"

The last, and most important, stop on the tour of Morrison country is a small parking lot on the northeast corner of 10th and K streets NW.

The scruffy Coffee 'n Confusion was here, in the basement of a Victorian rowhouse. One night in the spring of his junior year Morrison got up onstage and recited some of his poetry, and beatniks banged their spoons on the tables in approval.

Now Opsasnick stands in the void of the parking lot -- seeing the present and feeling the past. Across K Street, a new office building and a hotel. Nearby, the last crumbling rowhouse is covered with a Heineken billboard.

"There should be some kind of plaque or monument on this site, commemorating Morrison's first public performance," he says.

For now, the only monument is self-published.

"I feel compelled to honor some sacred sites from this wondrous homeland," Opsasnick once wrote of why he does what he does. "Trivialized for existing outside of mainstream society, they are now in the process of vanishing before our very eyes."