Part of my Thanksgiving vacation involved going up to Santa Fe to pay another visit to Cid and Ochd. I let her know when I was coming up and what time I expected to be there.
I had send Cid copies of my cassette release. She said she was impressed and that she knew someone who wanted to use some of the music in a movie. "Are you serious?" I asked. "Yes, Fayd, I am completely serious." Things were looking up for my music.
On my way to Artesia, I stopped in Las Cruces and saw my friend Kird. Kird remembered Cid from college. I told her about all the stuff she had accomplished in Mexico, including releasing a CD with Sony Records there. I played some of her music for him, but he wasn't impressed and mocked the material. Then he suspected that they were running some kind of scam operation. I asked, "Well, who would they be scamming? They haven't asked me for money and I doubt they'd want to have anything to do with me and Abed if they were." I mentioned the newspaper clippings and videos that she showed us the last time. He said they probably made all that stuff up.
On the way to Santa Fe, I was driving my new car, a 1977 Toyota Celica. It was the first car I owned with a working cassette player in it. But there was a problem: I had only one cassette to play and it was my own cassette release. New Mexico is scattered with "no radio" zones that last hours, especially during the daytime, so I had to play my own material for entertainment. I never made that mistake again.
In Santa Fe, I arrived at the house, but there was no one home. There wasn't even a note on the door. I walked around the house, seeing if any doors were open. The guest house was locked. However, the poolhouse was open, and it was warm inside. I wrote a note and left it on the front door telling Cid that I was at the pool. I tried to take a nap.
I was awakened by the sound of someone outside. Cid came into the poolhouse. She told me I did a good job of finding somewhere warm to stay. It turned out they had gone to a screening of a music documentary about gypsies. (It turned out to be "Lachto Drom," a film I would see a few months later in San Diego.) It looked like they were about to have another impromptu party.
I came in and said hi to Ochd. He appeared REALLY happy to see me. I was surprised, because I thought he couldn't stand me and Abed. But I later figured out what had been going on. Cid had been helping her friends from ENMU accomplish their dreams using the money she and Ochd were supposedly making from their music. Ochd was probably getting ticked off at Cid for spending their money for those pet projects and thought Abed and I were another couple of leeches who were likely never going to go away. He was trying to help his friends, but her wants always trumped his. I guess when I self-produced my own cassette release, he knew I wasn't there to waste their money and he could treat me with more civility.
The impromptu party started with a few of us sitting at the table in the kitchen. There was a man just a few years older than me, and an older couple. Ochd brought up an acoustic guitar and showed it to the older man. He strummed it a little, then handed it to the younger man. I asked the younger man if he played. He said, "A little bit." And then he improvised like a pro FOR THE NEXT 90 MINUTES!
About this time, other people started coming in. One of them was a former student at ENMU I had never met, but Cid had mentioned him numerous times during the previous visit. He started there after I had graduated. Cid told me he was a playwright and he was writing a piece they were going to produce in Santa Fe. The play was about vampires. Looking around the house, I saw a copy of a published book with his name on it. It was a collection of poems in Spanish. I started to get jealous. This guy was probably five years out of college and was living his dreams. Dreams that I had before. Dreams that I hadn't accomplished (except for the cassette release, but that would have counted more if someone besides me PAID FOR IT!) I felt like it was unfair.
But it felt even more unfair that he monopolized Cid's time all night. He kept reciting lines from the play like they were the greatest things anybody had ever written. He was just like the guy with the guitar and kept talking straight for what seemed like forever! I'm thinking, "Dude, it's a play about vampires! It's not the next Hamlet!" It really ticked me off because he practically lived there and had all the time in the world on any other day to tell Cid about his work on the project. I had to drive back the next day. And I could see that Cid wanted to pull herself away, but he wouldn't stop talking long enough for her to say, "Excuse me, I have to do something else."
I decided later that the only reason he was doing that was because he sensed that I might be the "new flavor" and kept Cid from spending time with me on purpose. He likely knew about the cassette and that Cid mentioned she was impressed that I had financed it on my own.
(I should also mention that I found it odd that the play appeared to have not been written yet. I mean, maybe it was and he was just talking about punching up the lines, but if they were going to try to get more people from outside on board with this production, they're all going to want to see the script. If there isn't one ready, no one's going to invest. If the dialogue needs work, people still aren't going to invest until they like the improvements.)
Sensing that I wasn't going to get to spend any time catching up with Cid, I went to bed. I got up the next day. Some people from the party had spent the night. I was lucky I didn't wake up to find that I had been sharing my bed with some guy I didn't know. I did see Cid and Ochd before I left the house. One of her friends (whom I had met a few months earlier) invited me and some others to go with her to a bagel shop to have breakfast. She was rather attractive, so I agreed (but knew I wasn't going to get anywhere because I was about to hit the road).
I left about 12pm. I planned to drive straight to Las Vegas and spend the night there. I knew I could get there in about 12 hours. About an hour outside of Santa Fe, it started to snow lightly. I thought, "This is nice. I haven't seen snow in a couple of years." As I continued into Arizona, the snowfall got heavier and heavier. It got harder and harder to see outside. All of a sudden, I saw emergency lights ahead and slammed on the brakes! The car started skidding, got turned around and I was sliding backwards! I could see vehicles pulled off to the side because there was an accident there and I thought for sure I was going to hit them and DIE! I had the sense of mind during the skid to shift the car into neutral and it eventually came to a stop without me hitting anything, going into the median ditch or flipping over. WHEW!
However, my worries weren't over. I didn't have liability insurance for the car. A highway patrol officer approached me. I was still shaking. He asked if I was okay. I said I was. I thought he was going to ask for my registration and insurance and that I was about to get a ticket. However, he told that the roads were very icy and I would need to drive about 30 miles an hour down the highway. He told me to drive safe and have a good night. My heart was still pounding.
While I was driving 30 mph, the snow kept getting worse. I figured I couldn't risk my life to get to Las Vegas that night and decided to stop and get a motel in Williams, AZ. This was the same town where I stayed with Bez and her family when it was snowing heavily on our way back from Los Angeles.
I had a hard time sleeping because all I could think about was getting to Las Vegas and gambling. I worried that I wouldn't be able to start the car and drive. I woke up about 4am, went out and started warming up the car. By this time, it had stopped snowing. I left and continued driving to Las Vegas. When I got there, I had to tell my boss I was going to be getting back a lot later than I expected because of the snow storm.
I didn't do a lot in Vegas, and I still had to work the next day, so it was kind of a wasted trip out of my way. I should have just driven straight to San Diego instead of stopping, but I had a one-track mind. And it was that track that nearly took my life.
I kept in touch with Cid for a few months after that. Nothing ever came of that movie that wanted to use my music, and I don't think the vampire play ever got produced. Sometime later, I tried to call them, but was directed to another phone number in Cincinnati. That phone number belonged to Dawz. She told me that Cid and Ochd had suddenly left Santa Fe. Her phone number was listed because the woman who used to teach dancing at ENMU (and had been hired to do choreography for Cid's shows) was still receiving calls at that number and had the phone company provide the forwarding information. Basically, Dawz was having to deal with a lot of calls from bill collectors. Maybe they were running a scam, but one in which they couldn't score a lot of cash.
I did get to see Cid and Ochd a couple of times after they had moved to Hollywood for a brief period. I never asked about what happened in Santa Fe, but it was nice to be around them without all the leeches. Again, they sort of vanished from this residence without a trace.
Was it all a scam? No, there's more than enough evidence on the Internet that Cid was a minor entertainment force in Mexico for a brief period of time in the early 1990s. However, it has been suggested that they were involved in certain illegal activities. I have to admit that was a possibility. The last couple of times I saw them, at least one of them seemed to be on the phone all the time speaking Spanish. I couldn't tell what was being discussed, but the tone was not "friendly" nor veered into the category of music.
I last talked to Cid about seven years ago. She was living in Mexico at the time, but I don't think she was active artistically. And everything I'm able to find on Google is about seven years old. However, Ochd is still performing music. And for some reason, he wears an eye patch. His Facebook page only features one photo of Cid, and it's the cover off of one of the singles they produced for Sony.
But I would like to hear from her again.
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