On the Beach

It has taken me years to realize I may have had another life that got erased. To say it was stolen from me by the doctors, is maybe an exaggeration or distortion. It was a combination of circumstances and choices that were made without anyone consulting me, which culminated in some kind of massive memory loss, similar to what was done to my father.

Probably dad and I bonded over our shared amnesia. He would have known at least a part of the truth --  which had to be kept hidden from me for my own protection. So her and I almost never talked even during long hours in the country or in the car driving to school and back. 

Probably it just boils down to the fact that I was too young to do what was set out for me by my elders. I was too shy and insecure and also too stubborn to play my part. Before my 14th birthday I at least had a chance at connecting with the boy of my dreams -- but by the time he showed up he was unrecognizable to the little mermaid who had known him as a young boy.

The scientists had set me up to fail with their relentless programming. They had no time for girls who blew their assignments. Only taped messages, endlessly repeated: "You're no good You will fail You will never succeed at anything"

Therefore after the London launch of "Come On" I got shelved. Returned to my parents in a box, or perhaps a taxi. They would have informed my mother -- and I must have gone through a debriefing of some sort on my return. In London, my 12 year old self had failed to charm Mick, who was already practically engaged. Soon after the Stones first single made the hit parade, he proposed to Chrissy, sister of cover girl Jean Shrimpton -- and I prepared for another long lazy summer at the river with my aunts, uncles and cousins.   

Instead, we took our unplanned two-week car trip across Canada. Were we fleeing some invisible threat in Montreal? Cars were like a moving piece of heaven in those days. On the road in our station wagon, our family felt safe with my dad, a steady driver, behind the wheel.   Driving the Trance Canada, mostly in silence, observing the landscape for thousands of miles. Through forests and rock shield. Along the shore of Lake Superior, past the Sleeping Giant all the way to the prairies. An unfolding movie without a sound track -- our car had no radio,

Silence had always suited our family everything worth knowing was left unspoken to avoid open conflict. You had to know how to navigate subtext and even then you missed most of the background. I don't remember my parents arguing much but I know they disagreed about politics and religion, topics to be avoided according to my mother who cared about appearances and insisted on proper etiquette.

Buy maybe I have repressed a lot of what I overheard in my adolescence. Nowadays I often think about the hours when my parents were home together following my dad's six weeks in hospital when he pretended still to be going to work so my brother and I would not find out he had become a psychiatric outpatient. Surely they must have talked, made plans, even schemed together about how best to manage our lives.

Did they know about and agree to my trip to London? Was it planned with the help of the friendly pshrink Dr Peter Roper? It's somehow logical to assume that. I was a government project. Money -- I'm not sure how much - had been invested in me as a child of the Air Force and hierarchical asset. Great hopes were pinned on my future career -- my mother thought I would end up working for the United Nations.

But when I came home with nothing to show for my trans Atlantic trip but a pink pair of baby doll pajamas, there must have been questions. What did they think had happened to me over there?

What did happen? I don't know because a. Nobody told me anything and b. The McGill psychiatrists were the same gang that had depatterned not just my dad, but hundreds of unwitting patients at the hospital. In fact they were the same psychiatrists who, immediately following World War II, had erased the memory of Rudolf Hess, the defector from Nazi Germany.

I was in good hands when it came to having my memory deleted.

My bout of depression was over in no time. On July 23 1963 the Beach Boys released Little Surfer Girl, and I was primed for takeoff. Hearing their siren-like harmonies coming out of the radio I floated away on a happiness cloud. It was as if I had found true love through the magic of dissociation. 

Meanwhile over in England, another kind of wave was building. The British invasion was a few months away.

In the fall started 7th grade with the brilliant Mrs Macdonald who was among other things an atheist and a rationalist. She warned us that in her class we would learn to think. British history was her passion -- Magna Carta and King Canute and the Venerable Bede and Joan of Arc.

On November 22 in the afternoon the intercom behind her desk began to crackle. This never happened. Mrs Macdonald put her ear to the speaker and the voice of our principal Mr Campbell made the solemn announcement. "President Kennedy has been assassinated." We all sat frozen. Should we cry now, or just go home? The full story came later when Walter Kronkite named the man who had been arrested for Kennedy's murder.

Lee Harvey Oswald. Communist sympathizer. "I'm just a patsy" -- who happened to have visited Montreal the previous summer and had been to see Dr Cameron, my dad's psychiatrist. But of course we weren't told that then.

I got through Seventh Grade with flying colours, as usual, bringing home the Book Prize for best student. A biography of Catherine the Great which I read at the cottage. I identified with her lonely strength and eclectic taste in lovers.

I had graduated from elementary school -- looking back it had been a cakewalk. It was time to go out in the world and be a high school girl.

Surfin USA sat poised on my turntable downstairs in our basement where I listlessly practiced Bach preludes.

The Beachboys released Fun Fun Fun in February 1964. I can pinpoint my emotional state at the time: I had recovered from the serial shocks of 1963, had a successful year at school and could relate to the girl in the song enjoying a joyride on the freeway in her dad's Thunderbird - until he takes it away, at which point she finds a boyfriend. I felt smart enough and cool enough to be anything I wanted. My fantasy career pulled out of thin air was to be "a rich meteorologist" when I grew up- how flakey. And how detached from the thought of marriage, husband, children. I saw myself as a singular recluse without earthly ties or solid ambitions. A Joan of Arc in the clouds. But maybe observing the sky and it weather patterns was a way to detach from the misery lurking at home.

I dreamed of a great white whale that had somehow beached itself on the grass in our backyard.

That spring, 1964, just after Dr Cameron left Montreal for Albany, I read my diary -- after a year it was still mostly empty, but the few written entries were deeply embarrassing. I wanted to slough off that girl - whoever she was -- so naive, immature, and also evasive. Over the winter I had written that I didnt want to be a woman, because women like my mother were just passive victims and I wanted to be in control of my future. Over that year I had skipped over all the important events, yet the blanks in the narrative were a reminder of how many things in my life were unspeakable or out of control. My mother's trips to the doctors for her developing case of "galloping arthritis" and the painkillers she needed to get through her day. My dad's impenetrable silences. My twin brother's withdrawal which paralleled my own retreat into my room where I spent my time reading. My lack of a life blared at me from the pages. So I got matches from the kitchen and set a little fire in my metal wastebasket. Once the flimsy record of my disappearing childhood had gone up in smoke, maybe I could live and become my own person. Or
so I hoped at age 13.

For my birthday that year I asked for a typewriter. My dad obliged, presenting me with a grey Underwood portable, with the large pica type reporters used to file their stories. He also showed me how to estimate the word count by multiplying the number of words in a line by the number of lines, instead of just counting them one by one. My first introduction to journalism.

Some time later he borrowed my typewriter, saying he planned to write a novel.

My idols, the Beach Boys, had appeared on Ed Sullivan a month earlier, on September 27, wearing matching striped shirts reminiscent of concentration camp prisoner uniforms. 

That was my little world on the idiot box watching the bands go by on parade, and talking about them the next day in school with my girlfrinds. Until Mick showed up. After Mick there was no one else, at least until Bob Dylan came along.

Boys singing to girls is what life is actually about. But the Stones were a far cry from the squeaky clean beefcake surfer bands like the stripe-shirted Wilson brothers and their imitators like Jan and Dean.

It was a huge leap from those beefy California boys with the whiny, high pitched voices - to the grungy hypersexual Rolling Stones a month later.

The first time I saw the Rolling Stones was on October 25 1964, the Ed Sullivan Show. I didn't think I had heard of them until then. I'd never heard a single song of theirs and knew nothing of their brand of rhythm and blues. 

I am sure my alters were watching that night and taking copious notes on the boy in the grey sweatshirt, who seemed to be searching for someone off camera. I remember a sense of shock and thinking "But he seems so familiar." As if I knew him from somewhere, a place far away, across an ocean or a lifetime, before everything sank under the waves.

 

Looking at that video of the Stones on Ed Sullivan I can't take my eyes off Mick's grey sweatshirt. Could it be the one I left at Edith Grove when I landed, fresh from the track and field meet at Shawbridge Boys' Farm in June of 1963? We were almost the same height - at age 12 I stood 5'7" or 8" --

At 14 when he knocked on our door I was 5'10".

The other four Stones are neatly dressed in vests or suit jackets. Only Mick stands out as scruffy, almost as if he'd just stepped out of some luggage compartments en route to America.