Ann Diamond – It is the Evening (4)
It is the Evening (4)
Bozo in Los Angeles (…) 1996
The story took 19 more years to wrap and reach, not A conclusion but a new plateau of oddness. I lost touch with Bozo, who went on to make several films:
Times Square
The Gun in Miss Betty’s Handbag
Pump up the Volume
Not being much of A film buff, or rather being A snob about which movies I will pay for, I haven’t watched all of them, but I have considerable respect for his achievements, which I know require massive amounts of talent, commitment, charm and funding to pull off.
As for me, I hung close to home. It dawned on me A while back that I have spent half my life within a one mile radius of Baron Byng High School. Even my father taught music there in the 1940‘s. That’s almost eerie, even when you factor in the First Nations village that once existed there on the slopes of Mount Royal, for which I have strong mystical feelings. And then the neighborhood around the Main, formerly A sleazy hangout for all kinds of crime, not all of it petty, became A magnet for artists,
While traveling in Europe and living in Greece, I sometimes looked back at that decade in the mid 70’s when there was A Montreal scene that might truly be called “Underground.” Later I went to California and New Mexico to meet and study with Sasaki Roshi, probaboly the best teacher of Zen in America at the time. However my heart was not in the nunnery and I ended up back in Montreal where some peculiar organizing principle placed me smack next door to Leonard Cohen, where the deep drama that had begun in my childhood went on unfolding in A whole new phase. There were secrets, lots of them, and there was music pouring out of the ramshackle buildings on either end of the back alley I shared with Leonard, A Pogues cover band, and A Senegalese drummer who is now A TV star in Quebec. For years I felt I was living my own heaven on earth.
Then in 1996 A series of disturbing revelations made me leave for Los Angeles, in search of answers. Instead, at the Zen Center on Cimarron, I found more secrets sharing the meditation hall with the black robed monks and nuns lost in their world of No Self and No Space. The Roshi was 89 and also had No Successor, but Leonard was effectively in charge of things. His money kept the center running, so bills got paid both downtown and at Mount Baldy.
I ran into Leonard in the parking lot soon after my LA arrival in May. He was behind the wheel of A giant black SUV, A huge cigar wedged between his teeth. He rolled down the window.
“Hi Annie, how are things in Montreal?”
Things in Montreal were not that good. There were rumors circulating , A lot of people, especially women, were quite upset about something.
“Have you been a good boy, Leonard?”
“Who me?” Big grin. “I‘m the best there is!” He chomped on his stogie and looked me in the eye.
“Well that’s not what I‘ve been hearing (…)”
He drove on.
The rest of my stay, over the summer, was mostly A failed attempt to get an audience for the issue, sexual abuse of A child now grown up. No one wanted to touch that subject, or wanted me there, and no one was willing to say so lest they reveal the big, exciting Secret, that a famous singer was in the process of taking over the community and buying off everyone in it, except perhaps the Roshi who appeared to have lost control of the day to day business.
Once I realised there was nothing to be done, I got to work on my novel, Dead White Males, which was about A rock star named Nick Maggot.
Ar least there were A few friendly Zens. One of them drove me to A computer fair in Pasadena where, in a bargain bin, I found an obscure CD Rom of the 1994 Stones Voodoo Lounge Tour, what were the chance? It had my name in the line notes and A headshot of me from 1992 on Mustique. My body had been altered to appear more voluptuous and was dressed paper doll fashion in A black two piece bikini and bowler hat that I would never be caught dead in. And there I was listed among the dancers as “Miss Diamond.”
This unexpected find kept me euphoric for days although it had to remain my little secret, because explaining how I had ended up in the cast of A Stones CD Rom required A lot of fancy storytelling, it was almost more work than it was worth.
I continued working on my novel, writing long emails when I ran out of plot. Life at the Zen Center was riddled with intrigue. I was A pariah since Leonard had told the head monk I had come to LA to “Ruin him“, yet no one had so much as bothered to ask me what I was doing there. In reality I was practising doing Nothing, day after day. Cycling to the beach in Santa Monica, 15 miles each way, going for walks with my housemate Dianne Lawrence around the mostly black neighborhood, and waiting (…)
So imagine my surprise, late one afternoon August, as I was biking back from the beach up Washington Boulevard, there was Bozo! Standing on the sidewalk outside his building chatting with an elderly black lady who was his neighbor. Bozo whom I hadn’t seen since the Greyhound from New York, 1977. Bozo who was now A successful film maker in LA, late forties, still bald as an egg, still brimming with enthusiasm about everything. Including my being here, on my bike, at his front door as if no time had passed at all since he swandived into the mountain of garbage in NY the last time we met. (…)
anndiamondsubstack.com, 2 feb 2024
https://anndiamond.substack.com/p/it-is-the-evening-4?publication_id=1674550