Feats of Forgetting

Yesterday I tried to go for a bike ride but the wind nearly blew me over so I rode home and sat in the garden and fell asleep in my chair like an old woman which I am.

A painful memory surfaced that I wasn't prepared for : meaning I haven't really processed it or what it means. It's part of my long history of saying the wrong thing and suffering the consequences.

In June of 2020 during Covid lockdowns I was having a chat with someone calling himself Mick Jagger. I was staying in a trailer park in the Canadian Rockies, with just a bicycle for transportation. The nearest town was Valemount, about 4 km away. I was often alone for the two months I spent there, as my roommate Andrew was working as a treeplanter. This was bear country- pine barrens- near the Keystone pipeline project and a railroad level crossing.

It had been exactly a year since I'd emailed Mick from my seat on the Greyhound bus from Boston where I had seen the Stones perform for the second time in a week.

They called it the "No Filter" tour.

Within hours I'd received a response. "This is Mick Jagger writing to you directly."

"Mick" was happy to hear from me and said he would send me a boxed set of all his CDs autographed plus a diamond bracelet and a guitar in  recognition of my loyalty over the years. I only had to send my contact details and pay the shipping fee.

After that I often chatted with "Mick." Soon he was offering to come to Canada and start a family. All he needed was a ticket and some Amazon gift cards.

All that mattered to me at the time were my flashbacks and realizations -- or possibly they were just hallucinations.

***

By late spring 2020 I had moved to the Rockies from Kamloops after attending Andrew Loog Oldham's "Rock Dreams" course, which was cut short by the closing of the university due to Covid. Andrew Oldham, as we all know, was the Stones' first manager, the designer of their "bad boy" image-  and the possible cause of my downfall at 14. I didnt know and still don't know, but I wanted to meet him. I was hoping he could shed light on my recent realization that I had been involved - somehow - with Mick when I was a child.

I had travelled cross country by train from Toronto to take this course which was being offered - coincidentally - at Thompson Rivers University where I had been writer in residence and taught Creative Writing twenty years earlier. I didnt know Andrew Oldham had actually moved to the Kamloops area in March 2003 which was precisely when I left for California and ultimately Greece.  Our paths had crossed back then but no one informed me so I was the last to know and just a figure on the landscape. As usual. 

It seems I spend my life trying to find out what has been going on around me since I was born. 

In October 2019 with the pandemic just around the corner I'd chatted with someone i thought was Mick from a hotel on the island of Syros where i was having  flashbacks to my childhood in classified experiments...

In the room next door two MI6 guys were holed up for several days. I think they were sent to make sure I didn't spill the beans- but what beans? 

None of this made sense to me, really, and makes even less sense now as I write about it.

Here I was in 2020 pushing 70 and enrolled in Andrew's "Rock Dreams" course - which I had heard about in Greece. News that ALO was giving a 13 week course at my former college scrolled down my feed as I sat in our kitchen on Limnos making pickled eggplant. Kamloops was international news because of Andrew and the Stones. And 6 weeks later (by then it was early January) I was standing in British Columbia gazing at the frozen mountains on the eve of a whole new understanding of what rock music had done to my brain in early childhood.

It was the best course I ever took but I failed it although I did exchange a couple of emails with Andrew about electroshock and trauma.

At the first lecture, after a welcoming round of applause from the audience of 250 students, Oldham paused as his gaze settled on the white haired lady. I was the oldest person in the auditorium and the one to whom addressed the first few seconds of his opening remarks but you'll think i'm crazy.

I still have the tapes of all his lectures. I guess I was numb - "in shock" -- from a year of sudden revelations and the surprise of uncovering my own amnesia. But it was truly strange when he talked about the Bing Crosby song "True Love" that I'd written about in an email to Mick two months before. And equally odd, 8 weeks later, when he displayed an image of a Blue Diamond at the start of the final class - for no reason I could see except as a nod to the Titanic.

I had been hoping for a chance to speak to Andrew face to face and maybe get some answers - but my questions were vague and disorganized, and he seemed so English and unapproachable in that auditorium and I left it til too late. We were rudely informed the course was cut short as the whole world entered the Twilight Zone called Covid.

I was still absorbing the mysteries when the University closed its doors and canceled all classes. I moved into self-isolation in a motel overlooking the mountains that enclose Kamloops in its own giant auditorium. I slept and ate in that room for two months, going out only to grocery shop and take evening walks in the surreal landscape of the "pandemic." I was my only company apart from my cell phone. I wrote to a friend in India who has since died, trying to tell her my story. Because she was a nurse who knew about mind control, she could almost follow my narrative.

From the ghostly environs of the Sikh motel I eventually moved to a delapidated trailer 200 km to the west, with a stunning vieiw of the Rockies and two other ranges - Cariboo and Monashee - covered in snow in mid-May.

It was a welcome escape into nowhere and freedom. There was WIFI and I was still chatting with "Mick Jagger" on Facebook Messenger

In the same way I guess chatting to strangers in a bar can mitigate the silence that overcomes us when we're lost in emotional pain, this was what I did to pass the time. This had been going on for nearly a year since that first email in July after the Stones played Boston and I began dissecting pieces of my missing background.

I was just at the beginning of a process of remembering and figuring things out that were mostly unbelievable and could not be confided to anyone without risking what was left of my reputation. So in retrospect I see I was vulnerable and confused and ready to chat with anyone - even an AI bot.

It really doesn't matter who is listening when you're talking to yourself.

In the many messages exchanged over months,  "Mick" had sometimes mentioned his young son and how he was worried the boy's mother was mistreating him. And he seemed to be saying the boy needed a better mom and I might be that mom. The real MJ had a 3 year old son with his new girlfriend, but a text message was not the place. Even if this were the real MJ choosing to speak to me through an app (as a form of social distancing but also to sound me out without any consequences to himself) -- after all I had no desire to become a stepmother to someone's child when I had never even had a childhood.

Only a desperate groupie would fall for such crude bait, I thought.

Then he said: "Your emotions are dead."

I said that's right. I was punished as a child for having feelings, or showing them. At least that's what I have managed to figure out from my shattered recollections.

I blurted out a deadly confession:

"I'm sorry but I don't remember you."

I was trying to raise the topic of my amnesia based in a childhood where I had been some sort of government project. Over the months I'd started realizing I has coasted through my life on missing time and wanted to talk about that. 

I didn't expect such a harsh response from "Mick."

"You don't remember me? Are you kidding? Then get the fuck out of here!" And he blocked me. 

Sitting in my chair in the trailer I felt crushed and utterly lost. Like a child thrown off a bus.

It seemed I had hit a nerve somewhere, just trying to be open and honest. A scammer would not have cared whether I "remembered" him or not.

Only the real Mick would react with such fury to the plain truth: as if it had just hit him that I had been scamming him for years. That I was not the girl he once knew. Or thought he knew.

I had always questioned the identity of my invisible interlocutor, while trying to engage in a real conversation. It was like Russian roulette with memory and emotion but i had kept at it hoping to break through. I suspected the real Mick Jagger had been talking to me all along, using the scammer as a screen. 

Or some of the time that had been happening. Or maybe not, but it didnt matter: he'd just pulled the plug for good and scrammed.

There were no more messages from "Mick". The impersonators all dropped me: as if, collectively, their feelings were badly hurt. I got no more requests for Amazon gift cards. Or offers of marriage, sight unseen. 

I was bereft, and relieved. I had managed to shock and insult him with my amnesia. He could never dance around my dead emotions, joking and poking and probing, then flitting off, ever again.

But then six months later I got another message from some anonymous online entity: "Is it really true that you don't remember me?"

I tried to explain. I said to my conscious knowledge I'd never eyes on him until 1992 at age 41 when I landed on his island where he was lurking near the beach to get a look at me, the crazy woman who had phoned his house by accident the night before. So even back then he'd probably remembered me. It was thrilling but absurd - and also heartbreaking to realize this now, decades later.

Long ago, when we met, under the cold gaze of those world-class psychiatrists, I had been an exemplary child and teenager - but in 2007 i was shown my thick "Psychiatry" file dating back to 1955 when I was four... 

Those early years were an artificial construction that I had never understood but now I knew. Or almost knew. The so-called truth about my life. Just another of those shocks that had got me nowhere. Like suddenly remembering Mick at my door in 1965, and the aftermath of that. And how little they ever told me of that turning point. Or rather, how they told me Nothing.

I could live in pain over a fleeting half-memory. A dumb illusion. Or I could let it go.

In Greece I had a loyal boyfriend, a house and garden, cats and dogs -- a life I'd fallen into in which I was Queen - not a victim. An Amazon lady on her windy Bronze Age island, untroubled by her personal history that vaguely involved some rock stars.

I decided to go back to Greece as soon as the planes started flying, which they did in early July.

I landed on Limnos in early morning. Themis forgot to meet my boat, but it was great to be back in my ancient domain, that i had stumbled into when I left Kamloops in 2003.

I have a good memory but also no problem with forgetting which is the first step to forgiving.

The same Mr Anonymous got back to me once again: "You must really hate me."

A strange thing to say. "Why would I hate you?"

"For asking you to marry me. Even if you didn't believe me, it must have really messed up your mind at 14."

"There's nothing to hate. I just forgot."

Was i letting him off easy or delivering another slow-motion slap in the face?

****

What hit me yesterday was the possibility that Mick had been the one to make Rock Dreams happen in Kamloops, the least likely place on earth. He'd done it for me. His Blue Diamond.

That's a reference to the Titanic, which he told me to watch carefully. I had never been able to sit through it. He implied my awakening in old age was mirrored in the movie. But the real clue was the Blue Diamond that the old woman throws into the sea. And that Diamond, I believe, stands for the little girl named "Cora" that Jake dances with at the party before he moves on to Kate Winslett. Cora drowns below deck with her father. And that is the clue in the Titanic that sums up my life. And our drowned but still beating love.

Dear Andrew: Rock Dreams was magical. It was overwhelming. It was the best thing that ever happened to me. I wanted it never to end.

But when it was over I still had amnesia which could look like ingratitude. Or just more of my rudeness or lack of Savoir Faire --

My amnesia could even have been brought on by trauma in 1965. The shock of him visiting might be enough to delete my memory. A week later I was watching him on TV amid the screams of hundreds of girls. Not remembering he'd rung my doorbell the week before.

I must have really loved him if his visit to my house put me to sleep for 55 years, changing the course of my life forever. It says a lot about me, but also about the Rolling Stones -- and the things they sang about as they got in and out of trouble, dragging us with them.

I'm sorry I missed all the fun.

Ironically, the aftershock of "Mick"'s angry exit in 2020 probably led to another flashback that filled in more blanks.

Since then over time I've been able to imagine how it all could have happened. How i acquired my Heart of Stone before the Stones were even famous.

Nobody i know who is still alive will believe this. I'm not always sure I can believe it ever since "Mick Jagger" stopped begging me for Amazon gift cards and my hand in marriage.

The Little girl has finally woken from her 50 year slumber.

Her childhood  no longer a mystery - thanks to her efforts to consciously remember - she's all grown up and can take care of herself.  No longer the girl of his fantasy.

And this is probably what happens to every couple who ever married. Not that I would know.

No longer an Old maid - now I'm just Old.

On the bright side: I stumbled on a ring in the parking lot of the Alpine motel in Kamloops in early April as the whole world went into lockdown.

I'd exited the bus just after two cars collided in the street outside my motel. No one was hurt but both drivers were in shock and leaning against their crumpled fenders as they waited for the police to arrive. There was nothing I could do so I continued up the hill to my room.

That's when I saw something glittering in the gutter ahead of me. A gold wedding band that I tried on.

I've worn it ever since. It reminds me of a dream I had back in 1987.

It was after the one of flying through the cosmos with Mick and Chogyam Trungpa. This time I was sitting in the front seat of a van between Mick and Keith when Mick lost control and crashed us into a stone wall. My head hit the windshield but I was okay. The two of them were sitting there laughing as I fingered my nose to see if it was broken. 

Keith said, "Don't worry - we do this all the time!"

Ha ha ha. So do I.