Chapter 19 - Blue Jay Way

THE NUCLEUS OF the band was Stephen, Blair and me. We were inseparable. Lee, our resident guru, had christened us with the magic number 43, and Triangle 43 productions was born. These were times when things happened and could not be explained with any kind of rationale. I've tried to reason some of these things out in my mind but what happened on Blue Jay Way that early October evening in 1974 still gives me pause. I know many of you will think this was all part of a chemically induced hallucination or mass hypnosis but think what you will, this happened to the three of us.

It was around dusk, and we drove up to the top of the hill in my mom's 1969 coffee with cream colored Mercedes and we sat in the empty lot next to the house where George Harrison was staying when he wrote “There's a fog upon LA”. It was always a special place to go for the three of us, a place where we could try and connect with that Beatle vibe. This, after all, was our life's passion at the time. 

   To get to this location you had to go up Doheny Road past Gil Turner's Liquor through the West Hollywood Hills to Thrasher Drive and make a left onto Blue Jay Way. It was a tremendously steep road with a cul-de-sac at the top. Beyond that was a dirt utility road that led to a water tower or a small electrical power station. There was a Keep Out sign draped on a rusty chain that hung suspended between two cement posts. A few minutes earlier, Stephen and I were sitting in the Mercedes listening to a Carpenter's song ironically, On Top Of The World. With the dense fog below, we were safely draped in a sanctuary of orange-red sunlight above. The next moment the radio went dead, and the car wouldn't start. Stephen got out of the car to find Blair who was wandering around the lot up near the tower.

The fog was beginning to lift and was creeping closer, only fifty feet below the surface of the road where the car was parked. Stephen looked down at me struggling with my car dilemma when he saw a beautiful girl, like an angel, come out of the fog calling out “Jimmy, where are you?” I never did see what he saw, but I could tell by the way he was acting something out of the ordinary was happening. I got out of the car and walked up the hill to try to get help. Stephen was the first to see it. In the seconds that followed I looked out and there were four transparent shapes hovering in the western sky above us. If it weren't for the sunlight refracting through them I would not have been able to see the group of four ships, or whatever they were. The ships seemed suspended in midair, when out of the blue, a fifth craft jetted up to join the formation and within a second they had warped into deep space somewhere into the great beyond. Gone!

We stood there speechless for what seemed to be hours but I'm sure it was only a matter of minutes. At that moment I really wasn't sure of anything except that I was still here, and those ships of light were gone. Had anyone else seen it, I wondered? Maybe, maybe not, because all of it seemed to be happening in a vacuum meant for the eyes of the privileged or ill-fated few to see. I came to my senses and knew I had to deal with the reality of getting the Mercedes back to its home on Oakhurst Dr. We walked down that hill vacillating somewhere between disbelief and utter amazement, got in the Merc, turned the key and voila, it started. Ok, maybe I flooded the carburetor, and I gave it enough time to recover but I figured fate was telling me I had seen enough for one evening and it was time for this one to go home. 

We never called the papers or the UFO hotline and merely mentioned the incident to some choice people. Things were so bizarre most of the time that this seemed to be another run-of-the-mill experience in the day-to-day life of a Spoon. I must say that after this things began to change. I noticed that on occasion streetlights would flicker and burn out when I passed under them and sometimes, the computer would go on the blink when I was checking out at the grocery store. I had a new nickname after this: the Human Sunspot. That evening on Blue Jay Way was my first unexplained sighting but it would not be my last.