Ann Diamond – It is the Evening of the Day (1) t/m (3)

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Ann Diamond – Back to What I do Best, Stalking Mick Jagger

It is the Evening of the Day (1)

In 1975 I had moved back to Montreal where cheap apartments were abundant, and served almost as portals to A lifestyle consisting of parties and all kinds of events involving an ever shifting and enthusiastic, sometimes bi lingual crowd. It was like Soho or any other seedy downtown scene and there were geniuses around, like Leonard Cohen or choreographer Edouard Lock and his troupe LaLaLa Human Steps, and numerous painters, poets, singers, bands, A kind of excitement permeated the Main, also A hub for drugs and prostitution, which gave the neighborhood its slightly dangerous edge. I had missed it during my 18 month exile in Southern Ontario and quickly found A very cheap flat behind Barin Byng High School, on the second floor above A store which burned down the following year, the summer of the Olympics. I was away in Vancouver for the fire which consumed my few belongings. Upon my return my mother fell and broke her hip and I moved in with her as her care giver. As she lived across the river in A quiet suburb I felt exiled from my combustible world on the Main which I would often visit, just to stay in touch with all that was magical in my old haunt.

On March 4 and 5, 1977, the Rolling Stones played Toronto’s tight, grungy El Mocambo club. The shows were sneaky and secret, the room was booked for April Wine, who were A great rock ‘n’ roll band but not the World’s Greatest.

I also remember the Jim Jones story making blood curdling headlines, but that was later in November 1978
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonestown#cite_note-off-3

While our First Lady Margaret Trudeau dances with the Stones at nightclubs in Toronto and NY creating A scandal I am living with my mother at her quiet apartment in A Montreal suburb. I am living on sprouts and seeds either have just written or am about to write my first book of poetry which will be called Lil.

It is 12 years since Mick came to our house and proposed marriage. I have no memory of this incident at age 14. None what so ever. My mother has never mentioned it to me either, either because it never happened, Occam’s Razor, or because the psychiatrists have completely erased the memory from my consciousness. The second option is just too far fetched, in March 1977, several months ahead of disturbing news regarding doctors at McGill who knew my father and subjected him and hundreds of others to brain washing experiments.

So Mick Jagger coming to our house in 1965 was an impossibility that could not have occurred and to suggest otherwise is an absurdity that never even crossed my mind even in high school when girls as tall as I was are prone to fantasy.

However after leaving home at age 19 and moving downtown to the Bohemian Luna Park world East of McGill I once heard A distinct message inside my head out of nowhere stating that I was “Meant to Have Married Mick Jagger“. The clarity of the inner voice to my conscious mind gave it more weight than any normal idle thought popping in. It had an effect, I carried it around with me like A private puzzle. Later on I would tell potential suitors “Sorry, but You’re Not Mick Jagger.”

Meanwhile as far as I knew Mick was still married to Bianca, I didn’t care enough to follow his real life and relationships but felt A kind of futile ache when I thought about him sometimes.

It was more than that really, part of me was A little obsessed with him. It was my little secret shared with millions. I would go to A certain neighborhood bar just to gaze at A regular there who resembled him. But I must say my feelings were mixed. Since the first days of witnessing him on the Ed Sullivan Show I was torn between his beautiful, ugly sides, he manifested both and could appear almost repulsive at times, almost negating my first impression of him singing Time Is On My Side, A performance that seared itself into my memory.

However being well into my twenties I had grown jaded and detached from the hopeful amusements of my teens. Rock Music, music in general, having declined into something predictable almost moribund.

1977 Keith Richards had been arrested and charged for heroin possession and was awaiting trial.

In reality Mick Jagger had moved to New York and hangs out at Studio 54. He recently met Jerry.Hall through Brian Ferry. I know this only in retrospect through reading. I had no idea what the Stones were up to back then except when they hit the headlines as in the scandal over Margaret Trudeau dancing in her underwear with them in nightclubs.

I was pursuing my spiritual quest in real life in between taking care of my sick widowed mother.

My friend Charlotte, she who had introduced me to the writings of Tibetan guru, Chogyam Trungpa in the early 70‘s, and had an older sister in Vermont who had studied with the venerated Kalu Rinpoche. now lived on the Main next door to A tomb stone factory. She had recently befriended an odd neighbor named Ken Hertz who inhabited A tiny place whose front door opened onto their shares back alley.
Somehow over the winter I must have run into Ken whose pal Bozo, whom I had briefly dated in 1972, had moved to NY and was busy networking with the film world including Stones‘ producer Robert Stigwood, A name I heard tossed around.

In one of our street corner chats which just have been in March, Ken proposed to take me to New York on my birthday, which was A month away in April. This was not just some vague idea that he floated at me, it sounded more like A definite plan with A hidden motive in the background that I was not party to. I was naturally somewhat suspicious of Ken, whom Charlotte had described as A eccentric genius who designed chemistry sets for A living. At 32 he was already half bald with small beady eyes and one of those Alexander Solzhenitsyn type beards that that left his upper lip naked and bare while encircling his jaw with A colorless fringe. Almost like A halo that had slipped down his face. Conversation with him was more of an interrogation, he would fire off questions or lists of names asking if you knew this or that person, most of whom I had never heard of. His face was often expressionless and blank, and if Charlotte had not insisted so much on his having A secret heart of gold, I would probably have avoided him after one or two encounters.

As for going with him to NY on my birthday which was still off in April, I couldn’t see the point of traveling with him to A place I had never been and didn’t know anyone. He said “And That’s Why you Have to Go.”

I pleaded my mother’s injury and slow convalescence and how she would worry. The next time I saw him he upped the ante. “There’s Something Very Important that could Happen for You in NY on Your Birthday. You Have to Come.” His normally emotionless features seemed sharpened by anxiety. What could be waiting for me in NY? “I Cant Tell You,” he said.

A few days later as if under duress or against his own better judgment, the hint got dropped. “If You Come with me to New York You could Meet Mick Jagger.”

This seemed highly unlikely, but it also rhymed with my memory of the voice that spoke in my head years before.

“OK, I‘ll Come.”

(…)

Kenny and I boarded the Greyhound for the 8 hour ride to Port Authority station and a quick visit to Times Square. Maybe we walked the 5 km to Annie’s 5th Floor walkup on East 6th Street or maybe we took the subway to Houston. I remember arriving after dark and someone throwing down the keys, someone greeting us and showing us the room with mattresses on the floor.

The next day it was rainy, cold and foggy but Ken insisted on taking me to the top of the Empire State Building where visibility was almost nil due to the weather. We gazed through A telescope at nearby buildings then took the elevator back down. Ken wore A look of peeved embarrassment. Next on our agenda for the day was A trip to the Met. I wish I could remember more of that experience but the years have washed it away, almost as if none of it happened.

It was the weekend of my birthday and also, I learned later, of A total solar eclipse which I think we somehow missed, probably due to the terrible weather. Kind of A double negative, an eclipse on your birthday and not getting to see it. It was becoming clear that we were not having fun, Ken was tense and distracted, muttering incomprehensible excuses and making phone calls to various numbers in his tiny phone book. Dropping me back at Annie’s he left for A few hours.

What I most remember is sitting in her living room in late afternoon, talking with A teen aged black kid who was also from out of town, and seemed strangely dis oriented, the more we talked the more concerned I became for his welfare. He was in New York for the first time and seemed not to know what he was doing here. It was probably why we bonded so easily. We were both in limbo waiting for instructions, news, an appointment or address to materialize. In my case it came when Kenny showed up with Bozo and I joined them down in the street, I was hungry and we were going to dinner someplace or so I thought or was led to believe.

Bozo seemed happy to see me, enthusiastically taking my hand. His enthusiasm was the most infectious thing about him. How long had it been since I had last seen him? Possibly the last time had been on the set of his second film, The Rubber Gun Show, A film about A crook, shot in Montreal. I had briefly dated him while I was finishing university, and had gone to A party or two at painter Steve Lack’s where people did cocaine and downers sometime in the summer of 1975. It was not my scene at all but I liked him because he seemed genuine. His real name was not Bozo, everyone just called him that, his real name was Allan Moyle and that spring he was raising funds under that name for his next feature film Times Square. “About Two Fucked Up Little Girls Who Run Away from A Mental Hospital,” he told me, as if it were A secret.

We were walking two abreast, with Kenny bringing up the rear while Bozo and I caught up. New York was in the second week of A garbage strike and mountains of black plastic bags were piled on sidewalks making it hard to proceed as A threesome. A stench hung in the air but Bozo acted elated perhaps because he loved playing off Kenny. Come to think of it I had hung out with them not that long ago listening into their intense conversations, they were opposite personalities who completed each other. Ken was the brains, Bozo the all embracing actor, but clearly they were both very calculating, quick to analyze and grab opportunity.

As we hurried along, Bozo talked of how much he loved New York. You could do anything here, he shouted, spreading his arms and leaping off the sidewalk. He landed in his stomach in the middle of A wet mountain of garbage bags.

This took me by surprise. I could barely believe he had done that. There could be broken glass in those bags, I remember thinking, but I laughed out loud as he stood back up. And here my memory of the evening comes to A complete dead end. Whatever came next is A total blank. As if nothing happened. No dinner, to which I‘d been looking forward, having eaten perhaps A hot dog or two with Ken in Times Square. I don’t remember A taxi, either getting in or getting out of one, or entering A restaurant, or club, or even greasy spoon. My first real night on the town in the Big Apple is completely gone, until 2 AM when I find myself lying next to Bozo back at Annie’s, on separate pallets on her floor, with Ken in the next room , Bozo and I are quietly talking and our fingertips are just touching. A powerful tingling force never felt before is flowing through us, we are fully dressed. We both feel ecstatic for some reason, as we keep telling each other. Perhaps we have taken A drug, although I don’t remember any such thing. It feels very pure and light and I ask Bozo if he has ever felt anything like this and he says no. Neither have I.

I don’t see the black kid again. He seems to be gone. This might be his mattress I am lying on, opposite Bozo.

The next afternoon Kenny, Bozo and I board the afternoon Greyhound for Montreal. Its Sunday morning, April 10. Kenny is sullen, silent, angry and I don’t care because I am in love with no one in particular although Bozo has taken charge of me. I dont know why he’s coming back to Montreal with us, he has something to do there. It’s my birthday and I‘ve just turned 26, having spent two days in New York during which nothing happened. For the next 8 hours Bozo and I share A seat, while Kenny grumbles and groans in the seat behind us. I assume he is the loser in some mysterious struggle for my affections, although this makes no sense whatsoever, and is never explained or even mentioned, ever again.

anndiamond.substack.com, January 9, 2024

https://anndiamond.substack.com/p/it-is-the-evening-of-the-day?publication_id=1674550

It is the Evening of Day (2)

Beyond Amnesia

I guess you could say the strange part was, while I didn’t forget the abortive trip to NY on my birthday in 1977, I didn’t re visit it either, otherwise I might have summoned up memories of the Saturday night dinner date with Ken and Bozo, where we went, what we talked about, why Bozo ended up coming back with us and spending the night at Bozo. What actually happened between 7 PM and 2 AM or from the moment when Bozo threw himself onto the pile of garbage bags, and the moment I found myself lying next to him on the floor at Annie’s.

As I have noticed with another situation. where I believe A specific incident got totally wiped, there is A tendency to create a sort of buffer zone around an amnesic space, like A keep off the grass sign that you obey without questioning. Stupid as sounds, you just don’t go there as if in response to A command not to think about it. So in remembering that weekend, I never once asked myself about the missing Saturday night which would have been the high point, the climax of the whole pointless exercise of coming to New York on my birthday.

The other detail I forgot until just recently was the crucial reason, or pretext, that Ken used to get me to agree to the trip which was “You Could Meet Mick Jagger.” Although it could sound like some offhand stroke of silliness – like “You might Get Struck by Lightning” or “You Might Land A Part in A Movie“, it was delivered semi reluctantly and only after three attempts and three refusals. Even then I suspected it was nothing more than A hook dangled insincerely to hypnotize but I still bit on it. Since it never got mentioned afterwards on what turned out to be an incredibly boring New York weekend, I never thought about it afterwards. My disappointment got swallowed by the uncomfortableness with Ken and Bozo, and Ken’s ongoing resentment, never voiced but very apparent to me. If anyone felt let down, it was Ken, but why? Had he taken me to New York in A lame attempt to start an affair with me? Or maybe sell me to A cult?

Yeare later I wondered if it didn’t have something to do with the Lubovitchers who he began talking about around that same time. “Have you heard of Rabbi Schneerson, the Lubavitcher Rebbe?” he asked repeatedly.

In the month after the trip, I met A woman who revealed she was an astrologer and asked my birthdate. She commented on how it coincided with the recent solar eclipse and A birthday eclipse being significant or intense, so I mentioned my weird trip to NY, concentrating on just the weirdness, not even realizing I had somehow “Lost” 7 hours from that weekend.

Something must have happened during those seven missing hours to make Bozo suddenly “Take Charge” of me , treating me like A princess for no known reason, was how I thought of it. Shepherding me around the following day, reversing his plan to stay in NY, squeezing in next to me on the Greyhound home, being all attentive and flattering while Ken was visibly annoyed and held that grudge for months. (…)

All this only dawned on me many years later, and even then I failed to get it.

In the meantime, partly thanks to the post humous intervention of Chogyam Trungpa who, it turned out, really did know Jaggerd, I had what seemed like A very vivid recovered memory, of being with him on A bed in New York, possibly in A hotel. We are both fully clothed. He is dressed head to foot in green leather, has shoulder length hair, as he wore it in 1977, and although stoned, he talks A blue streak. He is so funny, I can’t stop laughing. I laugh so hard I cant breathe and end up rolling off the bed onto the floor. It seems like A pre arranged sexual encounter that flopped. He was expecting A prostitute who turned out to be me, and we are both incredibly embarrassed and laugh ourselves silly. And then my handlers take me back to Annie’s and Ken, A trained hypnotist with tele kinetic abilities, which I ought to have mentioned earlier, erases the memory and the next thing I know, I am sprawled next to Bozo and A powerful energy transfer takes place, or perhaps replaces my memory of the embarrassing rock star encounter.

It’s mostly annoying for Ken who has planned all this for at least A month and even paid my bus fare to NY, with nothing to show for all that effort. What made them do it? What made them think there was the slightest chance that Jagger and I could meet and hit it off?

Another 19 years go by before part of the answer arrives. It’s the summer of 1996. I‘m in Los Angeles staying at Cimarron Zen Center. I get around mostly by bike, sometimes cycling from downtown to Santa Monica or Venice Beach. One day I‘m cycling up Washington Boulevard when I see Bozo on the sidewalk chatting with his neighbor, an elderly black lady. I haven’t seen him since (…) since..

That night we go out to the Academy of Motion Picture Art and Design and bump into Wim Wenders, among other people. We go out again A couple more times. Bozo is now A well known director and tells me A story about NY in the mid seventies when he used to visit Mick Jagger while hustling to get Times Square produced.

So he knew Jagger. To A certain extent at least.

So how did I enter the picture? I see two possibilities. One, Jagger remembered me and asked Bozo if he knew me.

Or two, Bozo and Ken remembered us both from Subproject 68 at McGill, and thought it was high time we were re united.

And then there’s the third possibility, which involves A cult, and must remain off the record.

anndiamond.substack.com, 10 jan 2024

https://anndiamond.substack.com/p/it-is-the-evening-2?publication_id=1674550

It is the Evening of Day (3)

Am I that Easy to Forget?

Before he discovered our MK ULTRA files at McGill, Ken used to take photo booth pictures of himself with various women, he had A collection of us in his wallet, we thought it was to boost his ego but maybe he had business on his mind. Maybe he was building his reputation as A ladies’ man.

He had inherited $ 150 K, A small fortune in 1976, from his mother who had been A patient of Dr Cameron and was schizophrenic. His father had been A businessman and had died some years earlier. His mother had taped their sex life over years and left the tapes to Ken and his brother, Alan, who lived in Ottawa and was on the Privy Council.

In 1976 Jeffrey Epstein started working for Edgar Bronfman as his personal business assistant. Epstein had A little known connection to Montreal where at 17 he got his first taste of night life and the joys of illegal sex and drugs, Montreal, Joie de Vivre, the Paris of North America where everything goes as they used to say. See Paris and die, as they used to say (…)

Epstein, Bronfman, A fateful combo in 1976 which was also the year Ken and Bozo’s friend Annie moved back to her parents in NY, her personal life at A low ebb. The year she started working at Everything for Everybody, A shelter for homeless drug addicts and runaways in lower Manhattan’s meat packing district. Kenny told me about this, unable to repress A laugh of disbelief at what he considered her amazing innocence. Was she really that naive and gullible?

Twenty years ago A close friend showed me A video she had made of her uncle then in his 70’s and living in hiding on Long Island. In the 1970’s he had driven truck for Edgar Bronfman dumping corpses of black kids kidnapped from Harlem. When she last saw him he feared for his life and allowed his niece, my friend, to record his confession.

In 1976 the Montreal Olympics brought together business leaders, athletes and sex traffickers from around the globe.

A year to remember, 1976 was also the year Bozo moved to NY and, to Ken’s delight, started losing his hair, he had developed Alopecia Partialis while hustling for funding to make the film Times Square, eventually released in 1980 to A mixed reception. It was the story of two girls who run away from A psychiatric hospital and end up in NY’s punk rock music scene where they are an overnight sensation.

After my very forgettable, yet weirdly memorable, trip to New York, I wrote my first book, A cowboy romance.

My mother opined “I Always Hoped You would Marry A Cowboy” and I think writing Lil , shortened from Diamond Lil was my response. It’s A long narrative poem featuring A Messianic figure on horseback who is shot the moment he rides into town, by his nemesis in black, Mr Slade. It revolves around the memories, and amnesia, of the woman he loved, A prostitute named Lil.

Writing it took up most of my summer. In the fall I showed it to Michael Harris, of Vehicule Press‘ poetry imprint, DC Books. He offered to publish it the following spring.

That autumn, 1977, was A turning point in Montreal. A Pandora’s Box cracked open following publication of John Marks’ The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, with its shocking and dark revelations about the MK ULTRA mind control experiments at McGill. I had known about them, vaguely, because my father was a brainwashing victim of the late Dr Ewen Cameron, who headed the secret program and would become world famous or rather notorious that fall, ten years after his death in A mountain climbing accident.

A steady stream of articles on Cameron’s victims in the Montreal Gazette served to reassure me that my dad had got off lucky having retained some of his memor,- at least he was not reduced to A vegetable like many of the others, it was too late to question him since he had died in 1974.

Meanwhile, I was seeing double rainbows, portents of change and expanding consciousness. In September I left my mother in the care of workers from the CLSC, and moved back to my old neighborhood. My two room apartment was at 4900 Clark, 7 × 7 (…) 1977. On November 7 my phone rang, it was Leonard Cohen. He said he had just been reading two poems of mine in A new anthology, and wanted to meet me. I wasted no time getting to his place.

In retrospect, he had probably been assigned to me one of the children from the Allan Memorial, to find out if she still remembered what had happened there. I didnt.

This was when I was living at N° 4, 4900 Clark, A two room flat on the second floor where Leonard visited me, returning the dowsing rods I had forgotten at his place on my past visit.

Soon after I began getting visits from Ken Hertz. He seemed upset by the fact that I had become friendly with Leonard, and tried to disparage our relationship. Leonard was not to be trusted, he said, and told me stories of their interactions. “I Used to See him at the Allan and When he Lived on Pine Avenue,” said Ken. “He was Always Very Fake, Very Posed.” When Ken visited him, Leonard told him how much each item in the new place had cost.

Ken tried telling me about the Gifted Kids, program at McGill, saying I had been in it, which I refused to believe. I had no memory of the doctors or the programming which Ken could describe in detail. But then I had been 5 in 1956, while Ken was 11 and had already had A poem published in The New Yorker at age 8. A child prodigy who flunked out of the McGill sub project in 1960, after too many LSD trips, Ken had advanced in the program to the point of mastering some of its techniques. Mind reading, tele kinesis, hypnotism (…)

He told me about the time, not long before, he and Bozo took their friend Tammy to the Laurentians, where they tied her up and terrorized her all weekend, saying they planned to kill her. The fascinating part was that later she had total amnesia for these events and remained on affectionate terms with both of them.

He laughed, it amazed him, why did he tell me? To see if I would connect it to NY? But I only felt sorry for Tammy. I was blinded to my own amnesia for most of that lost weekend.

Only Bozo knows what really happened that night he swandived onto A stack of garbage bags in the West Village down the street from Annie’s. By then someone named Tony was living at her 5th floor walk up. Annie tells me she probably was working at Everything for Everybody that weekend but I have A vague recollection of meeting her on that birthday weekend visit to New York, April, 1977.

¶

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anndiamond.substack.com, January 24, 2024

https://anndiamond.substack.com/p/it-is-the-evening-3?publication_id=1674550

The Imagination Podcast – (S3E31) Ann Diamond, ‘My Cold War‘ Exposing MK Ultra, Encountering Leonard Cohen, and Healing Trauma

It is the Evening of the Day (1)

It is the Evening of Day (2)

Beyond Amnesia

It is the Evening of Day (3)

Am I that Easy to Forget?

¶

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