the ringleader. Everybody wanted to be like Jim, they all competed for his attention, "Jim's magnetism was becoming obvious" (Surgeman 16). Right down to his expressions, his peers mimicked all of his actions. However, Jim never led them like they wanted to be led. Jim once again started taking death-defying risks that he would also subject his brother to. He forced his brother, Andy, to walk along an edge that hovered fifty feet above the ground. All of the risks that he subjected others to were ones that he was never afraid to complete. "Throughout his senior year his parents pressured Jim to apply to colleges, just as they badgered him into having his photograph taken for the high school yearbook" (Hopkins 25). When graduation came around, Jim decided not to attend. Later, his parents succeeded in enrolling Jim at St. Petersburg Junior College in Florida. The instability and ruthlessness of Jim Morrison's child hood, helped build a character that later became the emptiness of this great poet. It was also in high school that the intellectual side of Jim's unique mind started to emerge. The same year that he moved to Alameda, Jim stumbled across a new novel by Jack Kerouac, “On the Road”. This novel held Jim captive for hours upon hours. He also started to copy down paragraphs he liked into a spiral notebook that he would carry around with him from that day on. The more Jim read, the more he started to drift away into the infinite world of poetry. He also read Lawrence Ferlinghetti, along with other favorites Kenneth Rexroth and Allen Ginsberg. "Ginsberg made one of the greatest impacts, for he was the real-life Carlo Marx '' (Hopkins 12). It was an image that stuck with Jim like glue, "the sorrowful poetic con-man with the dark mind". Young Morrison was greatly fascinated by Dean Moriarty, "the side burned hero of the snowy west." Jim began to copy Moriarty word for word, right down to his "hee-hee-hee-h...
