IT WAS A matter of days after the incident on Blue Jay Way
when our resident guru materialized outside the front door of Blair’s Mediterranean
Village apartment. Blair was seated at the piano while Stephen and I
flanked him on either side intensely working on a new song. I'm not sure if there
was a knock at the door or if it was merely noises from behind it. Blair got
up from the piano bench and looked outside and saw this slight, baby-faced
Peruvian looking man standing motionless and silent at the threshold. He spoke.
“I have been hearing yous music, it is special. Please may I come in? I
must tell yous about what yous saw.” Blair's eyes widened as he invited him in.
I have never seen anybody that had eyes like his. Although I'm colorblind, they
appeared to be a reddish-brown color and were the widest set apart pair I'd
ever seen. He was the closest thing to what I imagined an alien would look like
if he took human form; not someone from another country mind you, but one from
outer space.
I felt uncomfortable when
he sat down at a barstool in the kitchenette and guzzled down three or four
glasses of water. He then refilled his glass and repeated the action. “I know
what yous saw the other night.” We were dumbfounded, shocked
as if he was setting us up with this yarn, this elaborate scheme, trying to
yoke us as three of his yokefellows. How could he know what we saw or thought
we saw the other night? He didn't know anybody we knew, and we had never seen
him before in our lives. He had our undivided attention now. Blair interjected,
“What exactly do you mean, saw?” Without any hesitation he said, “Yous know
what yous saw.” How did he know? What exactly did he know? Who was this strange
little fellow that had practically materialized in the living room? His English
was broken, and we later found out that he couldn't read or write well at all,
but he mentioned in passing that he came from a small town in Colorado.
He got down off the barstool and
proclaimed that "Yous are." What in the world was that supposed to
mean? Yous are? We are what? He went on to explain how the three of us were a
link to some kind of ancient code and had the key to unlock some kind of
universal message and basically change the world. I think Blair burst out
laughing at this point and Stephen was trying to quiet his outburst, he didn't
want to be rude to this guy especially if it meant we were so important. I was
holding on to the arm of the piano hoping to regain my balance.
Lee never talked about the past or future
only the present. He had no idea about any world events going on such as
Watergate or President Richard Nixon. He had never even heard of the Beatles
for God sake. I don't know about Stephen or Blair, but I thought this guy
was either the real deal or he was completely out of his mind and could be
dangerous. I wondered if he was carrying a weapon and I walked behind him to
see if there might have been a gun or a knife in his back pocket. There wasn't,
of course, but I still felt nervous. He talked in riddles which seemed like it
was meant for us to figure out. He didn't go into detail about the sightings on
Blue Jay Way, but we felt this guy knew something about the mysteries of life
that we didn't, and I felt, as we all did, that certain things could be found
out from him.
He stayed for a few hours, at least it
seemed like it, then wandered back up to his apartment on the second floor.
Over the next few weeks, he came by on a regular basis and we realized he meant
no harm, even if he was from another galaxy far, far away. He was trying to
steer our music in a more spiritual direction. At times it seemed absurd. There
we were writing and playing songs with this effeminate ageless mystery man
sitting on a stool waving his slight hands in the air, his vapid alien eyes
staring out and then slowly closing like he was trying to reel in messages from
places I've never been before.
It was right around then when we met a
girl who lived in an apartment down the hall named Lisa. There was something
very sisterly about her, maybe because she was another member of the tribe
that Blair and I came from, or it could have been her deep love of
music. We didn't have a record player in the apartment, but Lisa did, and she was
gracious enough to invite us over. We would play the ELO album, Eldorado,
the one with the picture of Dorothy from the Wizard Of Oz touching the
ruby slippers. We listened to that record repeatedly, especially the cut
entitled Can't Get It Out Of My Head. Ironically that the album was
released on Jet Records, owned, and operated by British mogul, Don Arden who a
couple of years later would be in negotiations with Silverspoon for a record
contract.
Another artist we listened to and were
greatly influenced by was Cat Stevens. His Buddha and The Chocolate
Box album release earlier that year was a musical bible to the band, at
least it was to me. The song Home In The Sky crystalized the emotions
and direction we would follow in the next short while with the lyrics, Come
the morning I'll be far from here. Slowly rising in another sphere. Old world
goodbye, cause I'll be Home In The Sky in the morning, bye bye. Blair and
I had visions of Lee vanishing into thin air and returning to his home in the
sky. Maybe he was on one of those ships of light we had seen a few days
earlier. We were so gullible and impressionable in those days. Things don't
happen like that anymore; they happen differently now.
We were trying hard to find a balance
between the mundane and spiritual but were fighting a losing battle. Things
were getting very intense now, but we couldn't tell anyone except those we
trusted or were part of the experience. This was around the time when Stephen
and Blair came up with their stream of consciousness masterpiece
lovingly known as The Space Tape. It was Blair playing a classically
influenced piano part with Stephen making up this crazy stuff on the spot. My
mind went blank on an interstellar trip, etc. I wish we still had that tape
but alas it is locked away somewhere in the Akashic records. As Neil Young once
said, "If you guarantee the postage, I'll mail you back the
key."
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