Chapter 35 - Doppleganger

IT SEEMED THAT West Hollywood had followed us up to Santa Cruz. Kathy V. and Yadi, Stuart Collins' wife, arrived in Aptos with Jon Marr around ten that morning and there were immediate tensions between the visiting city-dwellers and the residents of the halfway house, but feelings began to escalate when Kathy V. mistakenly walked into Carl and his wife's (whose name was also Cathy) bedroom. We all heard yelling and screaming coming from one of the seven rooms upstairs and I knew things had gotten off on the wrong foot. 

I grabbed my guitar and went outside to the deep forested area in the back of the mansion with Stephen to work on some new song ideas, but Yadi had followed us out there. She kept asking me to play a new song I had written called Everything's Gonna Be Fine not once, not twice but at least three times. I was beginning to hate that song. The whole point was to have Stephen practice his vocal and guitar parts, not Yadi. At that point I had given up on getting anything accomplished musically, so I ventured out deeper into the woods, sat down on a sunny patch of grass and began to meditate. Stephen and Jon Marr had convinced me to come back to the fold and before too long we were sitting in the forest playing acoustic guitars and singing Buffalo Springfield and Byrds songs when it started.

Jon had decided to hitch back to LA by himself while Kathy and Yadi were going to drive up to San Francisco. Bambi Byrens, who had driven her Mercedes up to Aptos the night before, was leaving for Sausalito and Blair decided to tag along with her. As usual it all seemed funny to me and I was making a mockery of the situation by singing some cynical and apropos song, I’m A One-man Band by The Who, playing that old J-200 with a tambourine around my neck. Stephen was bitching at Blair, saying he would never talk to him again if he abandoned us in the half-way house. I really don't blame Blair for leaving because the piano was so god-awfully out of tune it was unbearable to listen to. Before he left, Blair made me promise to try and get Stephen to play music. It was my mission, should I decide to accept, to get him to focus on the songs. It could be like it was before, just the two of us. That's really how the whole Spoon thing started out in the first place. Pat (remember her) had also left for San Francisco a few minutes later after complaining that Ric was putting the moves on her. So, all in all, seven people had evacuated the mansion in less than an hour.

          There was a knock at the door the being the closest one to it, I answered it. It was that friend of Ric's, Steve with a guitar in his hand. He came inside, sat down by the fire, and opened his guitar case. I was taken aback when he pulled out a blonde Gibson J-200, almost an exact mate of the one I had sitting in the corner of the now much less populated living room. Steve came off as this aggressive type with the clipped tones of a western drawl. I listened while he played a few of his songs, I think I even picked up my guitar and jammed along as Ric tapped on the coffee table with his sticks. Stephen, now feeling a bit more optimistic, suggested we all go into the music room where the drums were set up. That was fine with me, since my mission was to get his head back into the music, any music. 

          Steve, when he sang sounded a lot like a red-neck Jose Feliciano mixed in with The Ohio Players. Soul and Gunk meets funk, skunk. After the jam we went back by the fire and started talking. Because I was into astrology and numerology and all that jazz, I asked him when he was born. He said it was November the second, nineteen hundred and fifty-two, the same as mine. Was this guy my doppelganger? We didn't really look alike but maybe there was a similar determination in the eyes. Three Scorpios in the room with a Leo (Ric), anything could happen.