Beast

But before I forget 

Leaving Rock Dreams I entered the Twilight Zone of Covid quarantines and bans on travel. I holed up in a motel and then a trailer park next door to the Rockies with only tree planters and bears as neighbors.

I continued receiving messages from "Mick Jagger" or his proxies, or people posing as Mick to defraud me of my pension. 

I also got more sincere-sounding personal texts, inviting me to join his extended family

Finally, in frustration, I gave up. I said "You don't understand-- I don't remember you. I can't pretend I do. I don't."

After that, all messages stopped and for months there was an eerie silence. I had punctured the membrane that held our whole world in a soft embrace. I had exposed the truth about myself: that I was a zombie victim of childhood brainwashing. Not exactly crazy, just totally missing from the scene of my whole life.

I had never understood a single word of a single song directed at me, or my mother. Not once had I ever had a clue that I was being sung to, cajoled and criticized, for having ruined my life and wrecked my mother's dream for her only daughter.

Not once had I twigged to the fact that Stupid Girl, Painted Black, 19th Nervous Breakdown, Out of Time and a string of other unflattering songs were about me at 14 - when I was in my premenstrual prime, not even old enough to be jailbait.

I had missed the plot of my own life, like I had once sat through The Maltese Falcon understanding none of the dialogue, lost in a trance of unknowing while still riveted to the spectacle on the screen. My life had been like that. No wonder some people thought I was crazy.

Just like I never went to a single Stones concert until Voodoo Lounge came along and I couldn't ignore the references to my novel, my name, my visit to Mustique -- and even then I didnt believe it. Not really. I thought it was a joke.

So all that effort that went into songs and performing on stage for decades and the whole endurance contest of being Mick Jagger had been in vain because that girl the girl I was, really did belong to yesterday. She was a ghost with her feet in the past and her head in the clouds somewhere. Perhaps that's the definition of a Muse. A repository of feelings looking for a home in someone's imagination.

Finding this out in my 7th decade, realizing that I had been dead all those years, was truly a blow to my shaky self esteem and took my breath away. Especially as there was nothing more to say after that coup de grace. and Mick was gone, probably for good. I had insulted him for the last time and there was no coming back

In the fall, however, I got another message from the scammer "Mick Jagger."

He made me a fabulous offer: as a loyal fan I was eligible to receive a personal gift package: a signed collection of Rolling Stones CDs, an autographed guitar, and a diamond bracelet. All I had to do was email his manager and pay for the shipping.

I refused. Then I got a notice that my container was on its way from Century City CA and would arrive at a storage facility and would be delivered to my door. There was even a notice attached with the dimensions stating it weighed 140 lbs which was Mick's official weight.

What was inside? Drugs or weapons?

A body?

My roommate backed me up in not wanting to find out.

Soon afterwards I had the flashback of being in London in 1963 on a very hot day in June. 

Once unraveled it explained so much about my little tragedy, the crossroads where I met the Devil, the place where I stumbled and lost my way.

Arriving in the baggage compartment of an Air Force cargo plane, probably drugged and kidnapped from an elementary school track and field meet. Picked up in a confused state and delivered to Edith Grove by Andrew Loog Oldham- Stones manager, fixer, handler.

Well, who else could have done it? 

Who else was an Air Force brat with both feet in the London entertainment world and Tavistock? He never mentions Tavistock but how can he not have been in their network that embraced my family and those McGill psychiatrists who spoke to me that year through a speaker in my pillow?

Looking back through the mists of my erased memories, circling back via Kamloops which the Tibetans consider the hub of the Universe, and all those chat room meetings with rock stars when I taught at the college of the Cariboo, I see it all Through the Past Darkly. Remember that album released two years after Andrew left the Stones and was ensconced in Highgate Hospital with an electroshock machine for company?

That's where I disappeared down the rabbit hole I call my life.

My relationship with Andrew goes back decades, all the way to June 1963 when he managed the Stones and produced their first single. He was there the day Mick dropped out of LSE, leaving me with his manager for safe keeping.

Seizing his chance, Andrew came onto a scrawny 12 year old and when I rejected him he shipped me back home with a bad report.  Why should I have a happy life when he had lost his dad in infancy in a bomber shot down over France, while my dad never even flew a plane?

The Air Force doctors at McGill dropped me from their program and threatened my parents.

Meanwhile back in England, Andrew still had the hots for Mick, planned to make a fortune off the Stones and viewed Marianne Faithful as the glamorous choice for girlfriend.

Andrew the Manager. The Svengali. The Mastermind.

While he still had most of his marbles and tricks up his sleeve he preceeded to micromanage the Stones' until 1967 when they fired him and he has a breakdown. He forgot who he was for a few years. We all did.

Then Mick made Child of the Moon with its triple Goddess allusions and crying sense of Doom but the mind control had taken effect and the damage was done. 

I watched him on TV in the early days, later listening to Beggars Banquet and thrilling to Midnight Rambler. An initiation into the Mysteries and without Andrew none of that would ever have happened. He introduced the band to Kenneth Anger and got them to explore Satanism so a whole generation went on a journey that lasted years.

And then just when Mick found true love with a fashion model who bore a very striking resemblance to my mother... just when I took off for Greece and the rest of my life ... in the spring of 2003 Andrew drove through Kamloops of all places at the very time I was leaving. 

He writes about it in his last memoir, STONE FREE. Passing through US-Canada customs and immigration at Niagara Falls, Andrew encounters a quick witted Canadian border guard... who "bore a pleasing resemblance to Val Kilmer and asks the obligatory 

“What brings you to Canada?” 

“I’ve come here to finish the writing of a book,” I deadpanned. 

“What kind of books do you write?” 

“Biographies,” says I tersely. 

“About whom?” 

“About myself,” 

“And what… have you done in your life that has you writing books about it?” He was good, his tone just the right mixture of sarcasm and friendliness...

I answered him straightforwardly. “Early in my career I was fortunate enough to manage and produce a British musical group known as the Rolling Stones.” 

I was now hoping I wouldn’t have to explain that I was responsible for “Satisfaction” but not “Brown Sugar.” 

“So could you say that you discovered them?” he asked, whether with genuine interest or sly sarcasm I couldn’t discern. 

“Yes, you could say that.” The pause that followed was truly priceless.

“And are they grateful?” Oh yes, he was that good. 

“Not recently,” I replied truthfully. 

“Welcome to Canada, Mr. Oldham.” 

********

So that's how we just missed each other, that time. Months later, as Andrew shopped for Canadian desert property, I was deciding to stay on in Greece. That August BC burned and who knows what fun I missed by taking off when I did. 

Sixteen years passed in oblivion as I learned to survive almost without money, thanks to my Greek friend Themis, and some translation work.

In 2019 Andrew must have approached TRU - probably Mick had nothing to do with that. I was fooled into thinking taking Rock Dreams course was bringing me closer to Mick but really it was all Andrew's production.

Interrupted by Covid quarantine and then by summer stuck in a trailer park sending messages in which I insulted Mick for the last time by telling him I didnt remember him.
The final blow and final victory for Andrew. The End. The last shipment: 140 lbs of God Knows What, that never arrived at my door.

Drugs or weapons but definitely not CDs or  a guitar and Diamond bracelet I am sure

At Easter in 2021 someone messages me that Mick has died or ascended. They make a joke about it. "He was a good egg he went over easy at least he wasn't scrambled"

Who else could the joker have been but Andrew? He has my email address. 

Never the wiser I believe it at first thinking Mick is dead and even confiding my fears in a couple of people until Mick shows up at a football game in his baseball cap in London.

Two years later, May 2023,  I stalk Andrew in Glens Falls NY. An anonymous messenger warns me to be careful as an old Rottweiler can be vicious-- 

I leave my phone in the taxi disembarking outside his hotel. I scribble a note and hand it to the teceptionist. An hour later on the Greyhound as high winds nearly blow us off the highway, Andrew leaves me a voicemail message. "My mother told me always to return phone calls."

A few days later we have our first conversation. He has long Covid and is in New York for acupuncture treatment and herbal medicine. And he has been having dreams and flashbacks to his childhood.

I want to ask him something. Does he remember me from London, 1963? Did he take me to Mary Quant and buy me a baby doll dress and send me home to my mother in the cargo hold of an airplane?  But he doesn't let me get a word in.

The following night I have an out of body visitor.

And the next night. And the next.

And ever since we've been "friends." Andrew, I realize, is Andrew. He may be a crook, he may be a brilliant con artist, he may be many things in times and places but we all have learned some sort of lesson in this lifetime.

And we were so naive back then.

Looking back on my losing streak, I remember a few laughs, some tears, and lots of weird innuendo.

Without people like Andrew working the shadows  my life might have been more of a fairy tale but there never would have been a band remotely like the Rolling Stones roaming the planet for three generations.

The world would be even poorer, darker, more infested with hypocrisy and kitsch.

There would never have been a song like Beast of Burden

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuk1NnnMQBA

Or a 14 year old with her ear to the kitchen radio listening to Satisfaction blast out for the first time, wondering what happened to that boy who seemed so sweet and strangely familiar the time she saw him singing "Time is on My Side" on the Ed Sullivan Show.

THE VERY END