Roundup

 This is not about unrequited love for a rock star.  Most people have no idea how things changed in the 1960s with Britain becoming the fashion and music center of the universe. Ten years earlier the Brits were our poor cousins - dreaming of emigrating to the promised land of Canada.

I knew Mick in childhood when he came over long before there was a band called The Rolling Stones.

Our meeting coincided with a program which was being run out of the Tavistock Institute in London with a satellite hub at McGill University in Montreal. In those days Montreal was still the Paris of North America not the backwater it later became.

This is about Mick's unwitting role in what happened to me without my consent or knowledge, and the impact on my family and my life of having known him. We can't predict the outcomes of our own actions especially when we're denied basic information. My mother's hidden role behind the scenes and her earnest effort to create a happy life for me drastically backfired. 

She was naive and well meaning but had an inflated sense of herself that was her (our) undoing. She recognized Mick's gifts including a good, loving heart. And also his ambition. But this is not about my "losing Mick" - I was the one who decided. At 14 I followed my deep instinct that I'd been set up. I was quickly and severely punished. My father was already missing in action thanks to the criminals at McGill who were known as heroes of medicine those dark days.

By time I reached high school I'd begun looking like a young lady. My mother didn't know me from the inside out, though -- she didn't know what went on in my head. She was busy arranging my life, saving my reputation, fixing things in the background. She knew Mick and I might have had sex in 1959. I believe she had help from his mother, Eva, whom he often tried to please, in trying to make sure he did the honorable thing.

Mick felt pressured but he was a diplomat, prepared to play suitor to a girl he had wronged. He was an actor while I was incapable of lying under pressure. No one helped me rehearse otherwise I might have known how to behave when he showed up. And things might have turned out differently.

Mick happened to be vain and volatile. When I blew my lines he also blew up and never came back. Not only had there never been a courtship, but there was no second chance. Not even a real conversation just a one-shot, last-minute show - not that different from those concerts the police broke up after 25 minutes. Not unlike the Maurice Richard Arena later that night: escape by the back door, don't look back. 

Likely he felt nothing but relief to be bolting from the trap laid out by the Moms. Now he was free to do what he wanted any old time -- and sing his song. 

Because of my split-second rejection, my mother lost face and status. She turned to the doctors - who had already destroyed her husband (making him easier to live with.) Now her daughter was having a "nervous breakdown". Henceforth there would be two zombies in the house. Later in her loneliness she bonded with my brother. They formed a couple while I still had the remnant of my dad...

Days later I saw Mick on TV and as far as I was concerned nothing had changed - I had never really imagined him as a lover and only had a vague sense of having ever known him as a young boy. I found his stage persona fascinating, provocative and shocking when I first encountered it in October 1964. But Ilya Kuryakin was my romantic ideal: sane, stable, subtle, sexy in my 13 year old mind -- 

My mother must have quickly realized Mick was the new Elvis, while I still got to watch him on TV and share him with my girlfriends. 

I had the best of both worlds with my amnesia since they hid the truth of my brainwashing treatment. Instead they spoke of a nervous breakdown, but not to me. So as with my rape at age 8, I was the last to know.

"I'm Free" was released 6 months later. I twigged to its irony but never connected it to me. I'd been released from remembering the day my life got rebooted without the boy I was meant to marry.

Quite likely my mother stayed in touch sharing news on my progress: high school yearbook photos etc. I do see references in certain songs. After I left home and we stopped communicating she kept a scrapbook of clippings on me. I made the papers a few times, probably not in the way she had hoped. Dressed as a witch for the Abortion demo. On trial with the Milton-Parc 59. And so on. 

I think Mick missed the little girl who had been his first sweetheart and kept tabs on her in secretive ways. 

I think he may have sent proxies to usher me into womanhood, beginning in 1969 when I actually became a Factory girl for the summer. Later a rampaging women's libber. Creating the impression of a lost girl on a tragic collision course with herself.

Moral of the story: don't marry a child thinking she will give you unconditional love. And don't let anyone hand her over to the Nazi doctors when she lets you down.

Although I think Mick knows better than anyone what really happened, I don't think he understands all the dimensions of this story and how they played out through decades of amnesia ... Or how this also affected him. His efforts to reconnect with me were sabotaged by (for lack of a better term) the "program" --