Prologue
Our narrator introduces the "mystery man" and why it is important to find him...or not.
I've been telling stories about mystery man Orlen Rollando for years, and these days most people think I'm making him up. It doesn't help that I can't produce a photo, video clip, or any other evidence of his existence. It doesn't help that the era when I knew him is long past and today's mainstream perception of those times has been constructed by people with no direct experience of the way things really were. Nonetheless, I feel compelled to continue testifying about Orlen and his unique relevance to the personal histories of people he influenced.
Orlen was wild, crazy, impossible to get along with, yet I don't believe he had any ill will toward anybody on Planet Earth. There was something mystical about the way he suddenly appeared among us, and later, the way he abruptly vanished somewhere between Hearst and Wawa along Highway Eleven in Northern Ontario; but that's a part of the story for later on.
Every aspect of Orlen's personality was bigger than life, for better and for worse. He was instantly likeable, yet drove people mad spewing wild conspiracy theories and disdain for authority in any form. He loved his wife and children fiercely, yet spent more time on the road than he did at home. He adamantly refused to separate fact from fantasy, using his own imagination as his guiding force, yet he possessed encyclopaedic knowledge of current events, history, natural science, and art. He abused alcohol and drugs at a level I had not encountered before I met him, nor since, yet was one of the most gifted and creative musicians I ever met.
He was pathologically spontaneous and completely disorganized, but was capable of finding and following subtle structure and patterns in his music that were awe-inspiring to everyone who heard him play. He was self-taught in music theory and played entirely by ear. If he took a fancy to an instrument, he could master it in a matter of weeks all by himself, without instruction. He was a daring soloist, pushing out onto the thinnest branches of musical predictability, dragging me and his other band mates along with him. We often had no idea how we could get back to solid ground, but somehow he always led us there.
If I found that he was still alive somewhere, if thought I could reconnect with him, I would be both grateful and wary. His was such a profound influence on me, at a time in my life I remember so fondly, that I imagine finding Orlen Rollando might rekindle some of the fire, passion and optimism of my younger days. At the same time my older, more skeptical, self-protective inner voice reminds me that there were good reasons why I left all of that behind me.