COULD IT BE OVER BEFORE IT BEGINS?

“The Jimi Hendrix Experience is over,” the talking heads repeated again and again on the five, six, and seven o’clock news. “The acid rock musician died today in a London hospital, apparently from an overdose of drugs after collapsing at a party. Jimi Hendrix parlayed his electric guitar into some of the most unusual sounds of an unusual music.”

“Overdose? Collapsed? What is going on?” Lance kept running the devastating news over in his head, still shaken hours after first learning about Jimi's death earlier that day.

“Lance,” a familiar voice rang out above the seagulls’ cries gliding over the crashing waves as he crossed the crosswalk at Laguna's Main Beach.

“John, hey man, what’s happening?” Lance said, pleasantly surprised. It was always a trip bumping into John. He was one of those off-the-wall kind of guys, completely harmless, but you usually never knew what he was going to come out with. John seemed pretty mellow today, though. “Sorry, but I’m in kind of a rush, John. Just wrapping up a few things before I take off for New York,” Lance was so excited. He was beaming. He wanted to tell everyone he passed on his way delivering a t-shirt design that he was going to work for Hendrix, but he didn’t have time to dawdle. He had a plane to catch.

“Didn’t you hear?” John said cautiously, then paused…“Hendrix died.”

“Hendrix died, Hendrix died,” John’s echoing words stung Lance's brain like alcohol in an open wound.

“Last night, he choked on his own vomit,” John added.

“No way,” Lance thought. He had to be wrong.

Sitting in front of the television that night in a friend's apartment above Victoria Beach, next to a half-packed suitcase and a box of his belongings, Lance was numb from head to toe. Was this real? Was everything that happened in the last five months being flushed down the toilet? What now?