I remember during our rave DJ days, Mario and I got booked to play at The Alexandria Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. I had never been there before and I wasn’t aware of the place’s reputation, but I could tell just standing outside, it had a creepy vibe. Our set was at midnight and it was 10pm when we showed up, so we had some time to kill. Mario smoked so a good bit of that time was spent hanging outside talking it up with people. I did not smoke, but in this case I didn’t mind because the longer I stayed in the building the more uncomfortable I got.
The restrooms seemed to be in kind of a basement area. Walking down the stairs there was an overwhelming feeling of dread. It felt physically heavy. I didn’t waste any time there before scurrying back up to the first floor where the party was going on. Mario went down there after me and when he came back up, he was as white as a ghost with a kind of vacant stare. I tried to shout over the driving beats emanating from a wall of speakers, “What’s wrong?”
Obviously having a conversation was tough in that kind of environment but I made out that he said something along the lines of that he saw something, “very f***ed up” downstairs, which was definitely unsettling, but we were about to go on so I tried not to think about it.
The set went well, but afterwards we both kind of looked at one another and I mouthed the words, let’s get out of here, and pointed in the direction of the door and he quickly shook his head up and down. We grabbed our record bags and headed out.
We made our way back to the car without incident and without saying much but once we were safely inside I asked him, “so what did you see downstairs.”
What he proceeded to tell me was something I was not really expecting and it goes down as the first time Mario let on to me that, well, he could sense and sometimes see dead people, among other things. What he saw that night when he descended into the bowels of that hotel to the basement restroom was basically a grizzly murder scene. Was it real? Well, he had no reason to make it all up and his reaction when he came back up from there certainly validated that something definitely shook him. The feeling of dread I ad down there also tracked.
I did look into the history of the hotel that next week and it also confirmed a sordid past.
There were quite a few incidents after that one where Mario would share things he saw or we’d experience things together, just each in our own ways. We had many long conversations about the paranormal and the unexplained, which also included talking about my ability to “feel things”.
During his last year, it almost seemed as if his ability to see things got oddly more intense. He talked about an “old farmer guy” who basically hung out around the neighborhood and was interested in all that was going on, even small, everyday things. One day, out of the blue, he said the farmer felt compelled to tell him that his dad had driven up to the house in his new car but didn’t stop to come in. I thought that was odd. If he did come by, why hadn’t he stopped to at least show off the new wheels? We’d been there all day too. I asked Mario if the farmer said what the car looked like and what color it was and he said, grey. I kid you not, right after that, Mario’s phone rang. It was his dad. He’d called to tel him that he and a friend of his drove by, but didn’t stop. He said he didn’t want to bother us, but just wanted to show his friend where his son lived. He told him to come by the next day so we could see the car, which did turn out to be grey.
As those last months were upon him, we did talk a great deal about what lies beyond death. He’d always claimed he’d already seen what happens when one dies when he claimed that he lost consciousness and stopped breathing after partying a little too hard by himself in his old neighborhood where he grew up. He claimed that a man who had been talking an evening stroll revived him. Did it happen? Only he knew the answer to that, but he said that he saw what seemed to be infinite space but e could see something that appeared to either be getting larger or he was getting closer to it. Long tendrils of light, too many to count, spiraled off a central core. At the end of each there were countless dots of light hovering around. And then, he felt himself being drawn back and the light tendrils becoming smaller and smaller.
I do wonder if he got to see the giant light tendrils again.
