From 2001 to Prince

Back in the late 1970’s or early 1980’s, Nicki’s mom, my first wife but at the time girlfriend Toni Young and I lived over near LACC. We often stayed up very late, because we didn’t have to be at work until afternoon, and after a work day, often drove down to Torrence to attend the Filipino Kali Academy’s stick and knife fighting classes. Good times. At the time I was working out four nights a week, meditating, and doing yoga…and something shifted in my perceptions. Its hard to explain, but the best way of describing it is that if I was speaking to someone who was being at all threatening, I stopped seeing them as a human being, and started seeing them as a silhouette painted on a sheet of glass, with vulnerable points marked in splotches of red. It was REALLY weird.

At any rate, the most extreme example of this effect happened one night when Toni and I walked down to the local 7–11, maybe four blocks away. It was maybe two in the morning, a hot night, and I wanted a Slurpy. (My old friend Otis used to call my carb cravings “God’s gift to the 7–11”. Miss him)

Anyway, so we’re walking down, and I was talking to Toni, my face turned toward her…when suddenly I felt something touch my “third eye”, the spot between the eyes, above the bridge of the nose, low on the forehead. Strange. I turned as if there had been a string attached there, pulling me, and looked ahead…and up about 100 feet ahead there was a guy leaning against a shop door, mostly in shadow. When he saw me look at him, he stepped out from the doorway, and started walking ahead of us.