The Vanishing School Girl Affair
Saturday, July 27, 2019
The Vanishing School Girl
I never got a chance to explain - he was just gone. I must have felt judged, abandoned, lost before I even knew what happened. Like the twirling piano stool or the record player turntable - my head was spinning. In some future world I was waking up, but in this one I was spiralling into hell. And nobody saw - it was just me in the basement which was now the whole dark universe and what did I do then? In one world, 50 years away, I woke from a dream that had turned bad and was threatening to get even worse...
Then came the aftermath. There had to be an aftermath. Once Mick drove away in the rental car, the one with the broken mirror (seven years bad luck), maybe en route to the next concert in the next city, which was Ottawa on a sunny day in late April, late afternoon by the way the sun slanted in the photo and made the three Stones squint... or maybe this happened on another day, like the Friday, April 23, the day of the concert, and me home from school. In fact it had to be either Friday or Saturday because I would have needed the weekend to recover from something like that, if I ever recovered...
And the aftermath would have been sitting in shock and then climbing the stairs and going to my room and maybe crying.... and where was my mother? Because the memories are just gone. There are no memories only fragments.
One fragment is of her - inexplicably- telling me with maternal gravity: "You know, you'd attract more flies with honey than you do with vinegar." That old saw. She'd heard from my brother that at Baron Byng High School I was part of an all-girl gang of four who were becoming notorious for our hallway wordplay and general outrageousness... but my mother looked genuinely sad for me. And as usual, faced with criticism, I was silent and groped for a response. Finally seizing on "But Mom - I'm not trying to attract flies!! Who wants flies?"
And with a sigh, she turned away and dropped the subject.
To be perfectly factual I didn't even know any boys. They were all in the Science class and I was in the Latin class, populated by girls, very smart girls mostly from Jewish or Greek families, mature for their age -- there were no boys, just a frightened handful of midgets some with primitive moustaches plus a redhaired giant named Hamish Stewart on whom I once played a practical joke as his locker was next to mine and in retribution he dropped a whole pile of his textbooks on my head nearly knocking me unconscious... that's one thing I do remember happening in Grade 8...
I remember some of our teachers seemed like mental patients and often being confused by what they were teaching us...
But boys whom I would want to attract like flies to honey? It never even came up. For boys, we had the Beatles and Stones and Ilya Kuryakin - that was it. So what was my mother talking about, with that serious look on her face? Meanwhile my dad had told me in no uncertain terms (after the 18 year old son of the organist at church asked me out thinking I was older than my 14 years) "You're NOT going out with boys!"
And that was fine with me- I wasn't menstruating yet, still awaiting boobs - who needed flies?
Nevertheless my mother's remark, coming out of nowhere at the time, revolved in my mind for a long time after. And then it was May, and time for the school production of the Mikado, and somehow after seeing it only that once the music has stayed with me all these years and the songs come back as if I'd memorized them on the spot. My favorites being the one about the Lord High Executioner and my favorite character the hideous rejected Kadisha, whom I found strangely sympathetic...
Sometime that month I also learned I was being transferred to another school in another distant suburb. No more girl gang, no more exciting walks past the chicken slaughter market, no more Baron Byng melting pot, no more wild rides on the 55 bus with my besties -- the future I had embraced was suddenly cancelled and - worse news - our evil authoritarian ex-British military Principal Mr. J.R. Leroy (who for some odd reason had told me he knew my father) was coming with us- following us to our new school and would be glowering at us over his half-glasses for the next three years.
Ours not to reason why. We sucked it up. We soldiered on through tearful goodbyes -
And I also recall a strange medical exam in which they weighed us (naked) and wrote down our height (I was probably 5'8" that year but kept on growing 2 inches a year until i was 6 feet) ... and then they made us run around the gym or something, followed by visits with the school Guidance Counselor who if i recall was a sandy haired man with a moustache who fixed me in his gaze and asked "Having any problems?"
"What kind of problems?" My marks were high. I had lots of friends.
"Problems at home? Emotional problems?"
Well, my mother had just been diagnosed with a crippling illness and two years earlier my dad had been depatterned by the now notorious Dr Ewen Cameron and had to retire from his teaching job due to having his memory wiped -- but no, no problems to speak of.
"Are you sure you dont have problems?"
And then I remembered my dad telling me "They tried to put me in group therapy at that hospital and get us all to talk but I didnt tell them anything."
So I said "My only real problem is that we're always talking about going to war with the Russians and I think that's propaganda. Well, I love Russia and The Man From UNCLE and we should be trying to work together for world peace."
He wrote that down and let me go.
*****
And the next thing I remember from that spring of 1965 was it was June and I was in the kitchen listening to CKGM when Mick's voice blasted out of the radio singing "(I Cant Get No) Satisfaction" and I was transfixed, thinking how much he had changed. And I didnt know if I liked the change. He was angrier- he'd always been angry - but now he was more confident in his anger? Almost like he was on a mission..
And then I think I went downstairs and sat in the basement on my piano stool and twirled.
I had the whole summer ahead of me, but that too is a blank. A year went by. Still no boys. Just a close encounter on a bus one afternoon with a French boy with electric blue eyes who couldn't seem to look away, and then he got off and I never saw him again.
I visited a record store and bought the Stones Aftermath which had just come out. Not that I knew that- I just wanted something by the Stones and decided to take a chance. And as it turned out, after initially not liking it, and being offended by its shocking misogyny, I listened to Aftermath for months - sometimes skipping Stupid Girl but gradually overcoming my aversion to Under My Thumb which you could really dance to.
The track I probably listened to the most was the long and in my opinion underrated Goin Home which I soon noticed had a harmonica solo that gradually degenerated into sex - at least for me it was like eavesdropping on a guy having sex with his absent girlfriend three thousand miles away and I was very interested in hearing what that was like, up close. I was still a virgin obviously but this was the next best thing and I would play it over and over, all by myself, and somehow it made up for some of the other tracks about failed relationships, not that I knew what a relationship was ... but I would put myself in Mick's position and then in the girlfriend's shoes and try to decide who was right or wrong.
And that was how I spent my summer. I do remember one overnight pyjama party with my three best girlfriends where we stayed up all night and vowed to be friends forever, but little came of that --
And the mystery remains of what really happened that caused my mother to worry about my success with boys at an age when the only boy I really liked was Mick Jagger. And Ilya Kuryakin - who was just a fictional character, considerably older but still fascinating as he was "Russian". On the other hand Jagger was a real person, albeit a pop star, and the only pop star whom I ever desired with a deep, sublimated passion... a passion so sublime it turned into a nagging feeling that I knew him from Somewhere...
Somewhere that even predated the first time I laid eyes on him on the Ed Sullivan Show, October 25, 1964.... an unshakeable sense that we had met in the past but of course that was impossible...
And as for what happened in the afternoon or late morning of April 24 (or 23) 1965, a very clear memory recently surfaced of our brief encounter, but everything after is a blank, and by the following Monday it was gone - it had to be - because quite clearly I couldn't have remembered a lethal event like Mick Jagger visiting and not talked about it to my girlfriends- and their reaction would have been sheer disbelief followed by (possibly) ridicule or (possibly) jealousy and doubts followed by a consensus that I was totally crazy and no longer allowed in the club. And my summer would have been ruined and possibly my confidence and even my future...
And so I think it's possible that (and possibly with parental consent) the pshrinks at the Allan Memorial who had wiped my dad's memory, also wiped mine. Using the methods of the time: drugs, hypnosis and electroshock.
Thereby killing two or three birds with one stone. Oops - I'll stop for now.
Then came the aftermath. There had to be an aftermath. Once Mick drove away in the rental car, the one with the broken mirror (seven years bad luck), maybe en route to the next concert in the next city, which was Ottawa on a sunny day in late April, late afternoon by the way the sun slanted in the photo and made the three Stones squint... or maybe this happened on another day, like the Friday, April 23, the day of the concert, and me home from school. In fact it had to be either Friday or Saturday because I would have needed the weekend to recover from something like that, if I ever recovered...
And the aftermath would have been sitting in shock and then climbing the stairs and going to my room and maybe crying.... and where was my mother? Because the memories are just gone. There are no memories only fragments.
One fragment is of her - inexplicably- telling me with maternal gravity: "You know, you'd attract more flies with honey than you do with vinegar." That old saw. She'd heard from my brother that at Baron Byng High School I was part of an all-girl gang of four who were becoming notorious for our hallway wordplay and general outrageousness... but my mother looked genuinely sad for me. And as usual, faced with criticism, I was silent and groped for a response. Finally seizing on "But Mom - I'm not trying to attract flies!! Who wants flies?"
And with a sigh, she turned away and dropped the subject.
To be perfectly factual I didn't even know any boys. They were all in the Science class and I was in the Latin class, populated by girls, very smart girls mostly from Jewish or Greek families, mature for their age -- there were no boys, just a frightened handful of midgets some with primitive moustaches plus a redhaired giant named Hamish Stewart on whom I once played a practical joke as his locker was next to mine and in retribution he dropped a whole pile of his textbooks on my head nearly knocking me unconscious... that's one thing I do remember happening in Grade 8...
I remember some of our teachers seemed like mental patients and often being confused by what they were teaching us...
But boys whom I would want to attract like flies to honey? It never even came up. For boys, we had the Beatles and Stones and Ilya Kuryakin - that was it. So what was my mother talking about, with that serious look on her face? Meanwhile my dad had told me in no uncertain terms (after the 18 year old son of the organist at church asked me out thinking I was older than my 14 years) "You're NOT going out with boys!"
And that was fine with me- I wasn't menstruating yet, still awaiting boobs - who needed flies?
Nevertheless my mother's remark, coming out of nowhere at the time, revolved in my mind for a long time after. And then it was May, and time for the school production of the Mikado, and somehow after seeing it only that once the music has stayed with me all these years and the songs come back as if I'd memorized them on the spot. My favorites being the one about the Lord High Executioner and my favorite character the hideous rejected Kadisha, whom I found strangely sympathetic...
Sometime that month I also learned I was being transferred to another school in another distant suburb. No more girl gang, no more exciting walks past the chicken slaughter market, no more Baron Byng melting pot, no more wild rides on the 55 bus with my besties -- the future I had embraced was suddenly cancelled and - worse news - our evil authoritarian ex-British military Principal Mr. J.R. Leroy (who for some odd reason had told me he knew my father) was coming with us- following us to our new school and would be glowering at us over his half-glasses for the next three years.
Ours not to reason why. We sucked it up. We soldiered on through tearful goodbyes -
And I also recall a strange medical exam in which they weighed us (naked) and wrote down our height (I was probably 5'8" that year but kept on growing 2 inches a year until i was 6 feet) ... and then they made us run around the gym or something, followed by visits with the school Guidance Counselor who if i recall was a sandy haired man with a moustache who fixed me in his gaze and asked "Having any problems?"
"What kind of problems?" My marks were high. I had lots of friends.
"Problems at home? Emotional problems?"
Well, my mother had just been diagnosed with a crippling illness and two years earlier my dad had been depatterned by the now notorious Dr Ewen Cameron and had to retire from his teaching job due to having his memory wiped -- but no, no problems to speak of.
"Are you sure you dont have problems?"
And then I remembered my dad telling me "They tried to put me in group therapy at that hospital and get us all to talk but I didnt tell them anything."
So I said "My only real problem is that we're always talking about going to war with the Russians and I think that's propaganda. Well, I love Russia and The Man From UNCLE and we should be trying to work together for world peace."
He wrote that down and let me go.
*****
And the next thing I remember from that spring of 1965 was it was June and I was in the kitchen listening to CKGM when Mick's voice blasted out of the radio singing "(I Cant Get No) Satisfaction" and I was transfixed, thinking how much he had changed. And I didnt know if I liked the change. He was angrier- he'd always been angry - but now he was more confident in his anger? Almost like he was on a mission..
And then I think I went downstairs and sat in the basement on my piano stool and twirled.
I had the whole summer ahead of me, but that too is a blank. A year went by. Still no boys. Just a close encounter on a bus one afternoon with a French boy with electric blue eyes who couldn't seem to look away, and then he got off and I never saw him again.
I visited a record store and bought the Stones Aftermath which had just come out. Not that I knew that- I just wanted something by the Stones and decided to take a chance. And as it turned out, after initially not liking it, and being offended by its shocking misogyny, I listened to Aftermath for months - sometimes skipping Stupid Girl but gradually overcoming my aversion to Under My Thumb which you could really dance to.
The track I probably listened to the most was the long and in my opinion underrated Goin Home which I soon noticed had a harmonica solo that gradually degenerated into sex - at least for me it was like eavesdropping on a guy having sex with his absent girlfriend three thousand miles away and I was very interested in hearing what that was like, up close. I was still a virgin obviously but this was the next best thing and I would play it over and over, all by myself, and somehow it made up for some of the other tracks about failed relationships, not that I knew what a relationship was ... but I would put myself in Mick's position and then in the girlfriend's shoes and try to decide who was right or wrong.
And that was how I spent my summer. I do remember one overnight pyjama party with my three best girlfriends where we stayed up all night and vowed to be friends forever, but little came of that --
And the mystery remains of what really happened that caused my mother to worry about my success with boys at an age when the only boy I really liked was Mick Jagger. And Ilya Kuryakin - who was just a fictional character, considerably older but still fascinating as he was "Russian". On the other hand Jagger was a real person, albeit a pop star, and the only pop star whom I ever desired with a deep, sublimated passion... a passion so sublime it turned into a nagging feeling that I knew him from Somewhere...
Somewhere that even predated the first time I laid eyes on him on the Ed Sullivan Show, October 25, 1964.... an unshakeable sense that we had met in the past but of course that was impossible...
And as for what happened in the afternoon or late morning of April 24 (or 23) 1965, a very clear memory recently surfaced of our brief encounter, but everything after is a blank, and by the following Monday it was gone - it had to be - because quite clearly I couldn't have remembered a lethal event like Mick Jagger visiting and not talked about it to my girlfriends- and their reaction would have been sheer disbelief followed by (possibly) ridicule or (possibly) jealousy and doubts followed by a consensus that I was totally crazy and no longer allowed in the club. And my summer would have been ruined and possibly my confidence and even my future...
And so I think it's possible that (and possibly with parental consent) the pshrinks at the Allan Memorial who had wiped my dad's memory, also wiped mine. Using the methods of the time: drugs, hypnosis and electroshock.
Thereby killing two or three birds with one stone. Oops - I'll stop for now.
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