Mustique April 15 1992

 

Wednesday

April 15 1992 - Mustique

 

 

'There's no time to lose' I heard her say

Catch your dreams before they slip away

(RUBY TUESDAY)

 

Wednesday APRIL 15 1992

It was the 80th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. I was traveling under two names- that’s what tipped them off. I wasn't trying to trick people. Anne McLean was my real name.

Ann Diamond was the name I wrote under.

It never occurred to me that this was a problem. I had never concealed the fact that Ann Diamond was just a pseudonym that sounded better than Anne McLean. Being Canadian I had no idea there was a famous Anne Diamond over in England that everyone had heard of, a daily presence on daytime TV, which I never watched to begin with.

It's in these little details that the devil resides.

So here I was on Bequia, April 14 1992. I had arrived on the ferry from Barbados. So far my first trip to the Caribbean had been effortless and magical, a frangipani coconut dream.

Now the challenging part was about to begin.

Finding a pay phone near the beach in the dark, dialing the number for Basil’s Bar - that part was easy.

Friends in Montreal – musicians -- had given me the number and told me not to worry . “It’s the bar on Mustique he half owns with a guy named Basil. It’s where he gets his mail. Just phone and leave a message that you’re coming.”

They knew the scene having been down at Christmas when Bowie and Mick performed and invited them back to the house for the party. They made it seem like the easiest thing in the world – just show up and join the fun.

So I phoned the number on Mustique thinking I would leave a message for Mick Jagger. Let him know I was coming to his island. If he was really there, which I doubted, he might get it. Likely it would never reach him, and if it did he could just ignore it. Meanwhile I would have done my best to fulfil my mission. It made perfect sense since my mission was to bring him a message from a deceased Tibetan lama who had been yelling at me for weeks to "go to Mustique, go at Easter, he’ll be there..."

Who was I to argue with forces beyond my understanding or control?

“Basil’s Bar – how can I help you?”

When the bartender answered my heart did a flip. I had to say something. I said. "Hi, my name is Ann Diamond. I'd like to leave a message for Mick Jagger."

There was a pause.

"Okay I can't take no message but I'll connect you to his house."

I hear distant ringing. The same tipsy bartender comes back on the line.

"He's refusin to take de call."

Somewhere in the dark out there, on the next island over, Mick Jagger was refusing my call.

"Of course he's refusing! I didn't ask you to connect me! I just asked to leave a message!"

Deep breath as I tell him what to write down:

"Ann Diamond will be at the bar tomorrow between 12 and 2."

"Okay, I'll give him the message."

The waves were crashing like drunken boats down the beach in the moonlight. I felt like going for a naked swim

Stripping to my undies I realized I should have slammed the phone down and not left that message. Just gone bashing about my invisible business in ignorant bliss. But I was on a mission and couldn’t turn back now.

I had a boat to catch in the morning. I had already prepaid the captain with traveller's cheques made out in my real name of Anne McLean.

It’s in these details that the Devil resides in his toll booth, waiting to nab us at the border.

Next day April 15 1992 was the 80th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic and my ship was about to go down in the Grenadines.

***

 

The next day the police got involved.

We landed at the Cottonhouse Hotel beach after a two hour sail in bright sunshine and heavy humidity. Putting down anchor a few meters from shore, we slithered over the side and waded the rest of the way. The first thing I glimpsed among the palms up ahead was a skinny brown haired man in white shorts, descending the steps between the hotel and the sand. He was clutching a cricket bat as if late for a match. He was squinting in my direction and didn’t look happy at all.

Somehow I had imagined our meeting – if it ever were to happen—would be accidental and light-hearted like the time he and Keith gave me a lift in their van and we went for a joy ride before crashing into a stone wall. But that was a dream while here in tropical daylight Mick looked annoyed and alert. As if he had seen his share of bitterness up to now and I was the latest black cat to cross his path.

Arne the tall Danish boat captain was giving me directions to Basil's Bar --

"Cross the little parking lot then turn right on the dirt road. It's about a mile - you can't miss it."

He was facing out to sea, unaware of Mick peering from the embankment.

I kept glancing over his shoulder at the man just meters away lurking behind sunglasses which did nothing to disguise the fact he was very upset about something.

It couldn't be about that phone call last night, could it?

Turning on his heel he stalked over to the area where his white electric jeep was parked. That's when I noticed he was limping slightly.

Since last night's phone debacle I knew he was on the island but I would not be bumping into him. He would naturally avoid the bar during the hours I had mentioned in my message, 12-4 or whatever. 

Yet here he was.

To get to the road I had to walk through the same parking lot he was now circling in his jeep. Coming alongside, he scowled at me through his window. He looked like he'd had a few sleepless nights lately. 

A faint voice in my head said "Hop in!" but it just didn't feel right to grab the door handle and slide into the front seat next to him. Had he smiled i might have but I was confused by his being there at all.

This cannot be happening. I'll just ignore it. Keep walking. Shouldering my bags, I turned onto the road that led to Basil's Bar as the jeep pulled past stirring up a cloud that covered me in fine white dust. In the rear view mirror I glimpsed a face glaring back at me.

I should have just jumped in while I’d had the chance. “First thought, best thought,” as those Tibetans used to say. Too late now. Instead of cruising along in the jeep with Mick I was plodding towards the Bar. 

When I arrived at Basil's it was not lunchtime yet so I ordered an orange juice and sat down near the sea where I could watch the waves hitting the sand of the beach next door.

It wasn’t yet full tourists hoping to catch a glimpse of someone famous -- David Bowie or Christina Onassis or Princess Margaret or even Mick. In fact I was all alone with my two bags including my purse where I had my notebook with empty pages on which to write him a note which I would rip out and hand over to the bartender to give to Mick. I fumbled around for the notebook and couldn't find it. Strange. I knew I had packed it that morning but now it was missing.

When the friendly waiter brought me my drink I asked to borrrow some paper. He gave me two sheets of bright yellow foolscap. “Will that be enough for you, Miss?"

Chewing my Bic I got down to writing. Dear Mick... I'm sorry to have bothered you last night. That was a mistake. I have always loved your music since i first saw you on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1964 as a high school girl age 13.

I ended on an encouraging note. "You still have so much to do. Don't give up music." Or something to that effect. I folded up the letter and slipped it into my purse. By now it was noon but the bar was still almost empty except for a trim looking man about 45 in a red alligator shirt sitting near the toilet.

"Is your name Diamond?"

"Yes it is. Am I in a lot of trouble?"

This was Ken, the chief of Security on Mustique. "Not yet. Why don’t you sit down." He motioned to an empty chair. "Do you mind answering a few questions, Miss Diamond"

"I would love to answer some questions." It was almost a relief to speak, even to a cop.

"Mick is upset."

I nodded.

"He is very upset."

"Yes I noticed that. I didn’t mean to phone his house last night."

"You don't understand, Miss Diamond- I've never seen him this upset."

 "Really. Wow.”

“Yes.”

“But how well do you know him?"

"We’re a close knit community here on this island and I know Mick well.”

“I’m so sorry. The bartender -"

He cut me off.

“So why are you here, Miss Diamond?”

“I was asking myself the same thing.”

“Before we start, would you like something to drink?”

“No, I’m fine. Just here for the afternoon.”

He asks me what I do in life.

“I’m a writer. Back in Canada. You've never heard of me.”

“Mick tells me you've been writing him letters.”

“That’s true. I just wrote him another.”

“I saw you were doing that. Mick says your letters don’t really make sense.”

“That’s because I'm half French Canadian.”

Ken appeared puzzled.

"You're not looking for sex, by any chance, Miss Diamond? A lot of women come here for that."

"Oh no, I have a boyfriend." More like a roommate but he doesn’t need to know that.

He asks me where I’m staying and I say Lower Bay Guesthouse, for a few more days.

One or two extra questions, and Ken stands up to leave.

"And is there anything you'd like me to bring to Mick?"

Well. As a matter of fact…

I run back to my seat and bring him the shopping bag with my novels and the hand written letter.

Ken takes it and thanks me. “I cant promise he’ll read all this…”

“It’s just my life work. He can toss it in the trash.”

He smiles. We shake hands.

"One more thing. Mick wonders why you seem to know some very personal things about him."

"What personal things?"

He hesitates.

"He says you mentioned 'Buddhists' - are you a Buddhist, Miss Diamond?"

"Not really, but I've studied Buddhism. And I'm a friend of Leonard Cohen who would probably say the same."

"I see."

He rumbles away in his electric jeep and I feel faint thinking of Mick holding that bag and reading my letter.

 

Meanwhile back at my table the blond Norwegian captain is throwing a fit. He’s just spent his morning at the cop shop answering questions.

"You’re traveling under two names and phoned Mick Jagger's house last night. “Do you realize I could lose my license?”

He orders more coffee and works himself into a rage. “The last thing celebrities want is tourists coming to this island to gawk at them,” he informs me.

I try to calm him down by being a sympathetic listener. Meanwhile over his shoulder once again I catch sight of Mick who has just walked in the door where he pauses, looks over at me and strikes a pose.

The lunchtime crowd has noticed a rock star and the atmosphere livens up.

The boat captain is still fuming, oblivious to the goings on at the entrance.

No way am I leaving my seat with the captain yelling in my face while Mick goes and hides behind some bamboo.

“People like you just ruin it for everyone.”

I panic. I could still cross the floor and go talk to him but I’m frozen with fear. What if he yells at me and I burst into tears?

The moments are ticking away and with them my chances of meeting Mick, although I'm not sure I want to. After ten minutes he emerges from wherever he's been and pauses again at the exit, flipping his hand once or twice as if to say "Well?"

I stay glued to my chair opposite the captain as the other passengers from this morning start to arrive. They’ve been to the beach where they saw some cool parrots. 

I say “I saw Mick Jagger.”

We reboard the Sunflower and sail back to Bequia, the sun and wind somersaulting on the waves. My mind is so empty and full I cant do anything but lie collapsed against the rail as Mustique disappears in the distance. The captain takes our bags and stores them securely in the cabin, as he did on the way over, to keep them dry.

Back in my room in Lower Bay I find my travel diary, missing earlier, now back in my handbag where i'd packed it that morning. It dawns on me I was the object of a police operation that began with the call to Mick’s house. 

The police called the captain, who went through my purse on the voyage and found my diary.

The cops and Mick must have scanned it for clues.

Now Mick will know I’ve been dreaming about him…

I get into bed and switch off the light as the crickets make music in the dark outside.

That night alone in my bed in the guest house I have the most amazing sex of my lifetime, lasting till dawn. I am awake the whole time until the sun flooded my room.

 

 ****

Later over coffee Arne the boat captain apologizes. "They're paranoid over there. A few weeks ago a kid was caught on the road to Jagger's house. He was carrying weapons."

So they thought a woman phoning the bar might be a terrorist. And woke the boat captain in the middle of the night to question him about a passenger. And found out I had two names.

Surely women must phone all the time and try to leave messages. Maybe not all of them travel under two names or call themselves "Ann Diamond" -- maybe Mick was upset that a British television presenter had turned up so rudely at a very bad time in his marriage.

But it didnt quite explain why he showed up in person twice, on the beach or later at the bar.

Maybe Mick was just a friendly guy who liked meeting people who bothered him. Or maybe it was because I had mentioned Leonard Cohen and Chogyam Trungpa.

None of it quite added up, but I had had fun and learned to snorkel. When I got back to Canada I told my friends of my adventure.

A few months later Mick released a solo album Wandering Spirit... and I heard things in the lyrics that surprised me. They seemed almost like references... vague but nevertheless haunting.

Two years later in 1994 comes the Voodoo Lounge album and the images I left behind on Mustique in a shopping bag stare back at me from the cover.

Inside there was a song about that day in the bar, with Mick imitating Leonard Cohen, and one or two references to things in my notebook.

I try to tell a friend but she thinks I’m crazy. Since nobody believes me I stop talking about it.

****

The dreams are always very intense and realistic but not really sensual or erotic

 

Mostly we traveled around together including across the universe at the speed of light to another galaxy. We met Chogyam Trungpa, who told me he and Mick were very much alike. Sometimes we talked. Mick told me about his life, his children, his marriage, his projects and plans for the future. In one dream he acted out a series of multiple personalities - accumulated over many lifetimes – admitting his inner fragmentation was a source of a lot of suffering as well as creativity.

 

In these dreams he always treated me as a close friend and confidante- almost like a younger sister.

 

Some dreams were funny like the dream where he and Keith picked me up in their brown van and we went for a wild ride -- Mick at the wheel , Keith in the passenger seat, me seated on the gear box between them. Jamming his foot down, Mick lost control and we rammed at full speed into a stone wall. My nose hit the windshield but I was unharmed. Mick and Keith, looking ancient and rugged, laughed as if to say “Stick with us, babe -- we do this all the time."

 

These dreams happened every month or so, and relieved the monotony of my life as a teacher and freelance writer

My next door neighbour, whom I rarely saw, was Leonard Cohen. We were no longer really on speaking terms. There was gang stalking going on in that neighborhood and I often felt surrounded by criminals. But there was music—a Senegalese drummer lived across the alley. An Irish band called the Wastrels practiced in the yard next door. And my upstairs neighbour was Michel Pagliaro, the King of Quebec Rock.

 

I had no reason to think these dreams of the Stones were anything other than dreams until early 1992 when Mick appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair, looking old and wise. The article contained several facts that I knew only from dreams: that he and Keith while touring shared a brown van and drove around in it together. That Mick's young son Jimmy had started playing guitar and was thinking of becoming a singer. That Mick had plans to start making movies. He had shared all these things with me in dreams.

 

It was around that time- early January 1992 - that I began hearing the voice of the late Tibetan guru Chogyam Trungpa in my head, telling me to go find Mick on his island.

"Go! Go in April! He will be there! Buy your ticket!" These instructions were accompanied by stabbing headaches. Miraculously, a royalty cheque arrived in the mail for $1200 - enough for the flight and (if I was frugal) a couple of weeks in a cheap hotel. As soon as I booked my ticket the headaches and voices completely stopped.

 

But I still needed to write to Mick and let him know I was coming. I thought the best way to introduce myself was to mail him a copy of my poetry book, A Nuns Diary, about a group of nuns living in the south of France with God as their psychiatric patient. That ought to grab his interest. But where to send it? I plodded over to McGill University and asked a Librarian who looked up the Rolling Stones Fan Club address in New York. I fired off a letter and the next day I realized it would likely never reach him.

 

That's when coincidence took over in a manner that was so off the charts, I was afraid to talk about it later for fear of being thought crazy. I walked to the corner bakery to buy milk, and standing there was a tall red head with a Glasgow accent, an old acquaintance from the local music scene, whom I hadn't seen in years, who sang in a Celtic band called Borealis. Munching a croissant she asked what I was up to these days and I said "well to be honest, I'm trying to write Mick Jagger."

 

She takes a step back, and says "well just coincidentally, Kirk and I were down on Mustique over Christmas and New Years, playing in the bar, and Mick was there and we all got invited up to David Bowie's house."

 

She takes down my address and says she'll send her husband Kirk around in an hour with all the details on how to write Jagger. And he shows up at my door in the snow -- and tells me the address. "That will definitely reach him." I thanked him and was at my computer minutes later banging out my letter to Mick which I posted that day with A Nuns Diary enclosed.

The clerk at the post office said it would take about eight days to make the journey to the tiny island of Mustique down there in the Grenadines.

Eight days later I vividly dreamed that Mick had received my book, but had a few questions about the author and her story. Of course he never wrote back but I wasn’t deterred.

In early April my French roommate drove me to the airport. While the plane idled on the runway, waiting permission for takeoff, the captain turned on CBC news and there were Mick and Keith, sitting in the Caribbean, talking about the new IMAX film of their Steel Wheels tour.

From takeoff to landing in Barbados, everything seemed effortless, as if I had an escort directing my moves every step of the way, right up until I landed on the beach at Mustique and saw Mick coming down the stairs to meet me.

None of this really explained why Mick was so upset. Or why Ken the police chief told me "I've never seen him so upset. Do you know why, Miss Diamond?"

No, nor would I find out for another 27 years.

 

****

 

Returning to Mustique years later on another catamaran, I take a walk to the beach at the far end of the island. On a road leading down to the sea through a lush growth of palms and flowering trees, I come upon a small table for two, two chairs, two wine glasses, and an empty bottle all laid out and waiting in the middle of nowhere.

On closer inspection the table shows signs of having stood there bleached and deserted for years.

Above on a cliff stands a house, barely visible behind flowering bushes.

Someone up there revs up a spectacular sound system. Céline Dion's soaring soprano belts out The Power of Love.

 .....

Had Mick been reading the travel diary of Ann Diamond aka Anne McLean wondering if she was the same little girl he had met in 1956 when he was in a special program developed out of London's Tavistock Institute?

If he remembered little Anne McLean he must also have been thinking about the last time he'd seen her just after she turned 14...

April 23 1965

The day the Rolling Stones played Montreal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hH28_9Bpj0U


 

 

When the war in Iraq began, I moved to Greece. When I arrived on the island of Lemnos, on July 2, 2003, I didn't realize how shipwrecked I was, or what I was searching for. That understanding came only later. The illusory sound and light show some call “End Times” was in full swing.The systems we believed in, on which we had based our lives, were collapsing. On what new ground will we construct a different future? It's one thing to stumble on ancient rock, and something else again to recognize it as the truth. Lemnos was an accident. I didn't know I was headed there until I saw the poster on the wall of the ticket office in Thessalonika, and recognized it as the place I'd seen in a dream that night before. In any case, there was no other boat leaving that day. Landing in blinding sunlight the bleached harbour, I wondered why I'd come. A woman stood on the pier, and offered me not just a room but a whole apartment. It was too expensive but i didnt care, since I wasnt staying long. Arriving here by chance, knowing nothing of the place, I still felt a rare sense of homecoming. A bare, volcanic island in the northern Aegean, it was formerly home to a mystery cult known as the Kabirii. There are fascinating archaeological ruins including an ancient theatre at Hephaistea, as well as the oldest known European settlement, the 6,000-year-old village of Poliochni. A strategic island, shaped like a butterfly, 50 km from the site of ancient Troy, in 1915 Lemnos billeted Canadian, British and Australian soldiers bound for the campaign at nearby Gallipoli. With a long and fascinating history of independence and opposition to Athenian domination, to this day, it challenges visitors with its peculiar, almost lunar beauty. In ancient times it was ruled by Amazons, who famously threw their men off a cliff to punish them for infidelity. The dark red earth of Lemnos was known around the Mediterranean for its medicinal powers. Today, its people stubbornly cling to old traditions while energetically adopting all the modern annoyances. My time on Lemnos was an adventure, a modern fairy tale on the theme of survival in a challenging period of history. As I talked with librarians, animals, rocks, porpoises, pine trees, birds and the ever-present dead, I began to understand how we create our lives out of nothing.

We began building a stone cabin on the slopes of Skourga, the old volcano. We began by collecting stones, which were plentiful. First Alexandros dowsed the area with a metal rod to find a spot not crisscrossed by underground streams. Then we dug a rectangular hole, three metres by five metres, and once it was dug, we began filling it up with rubble, which the Greeks call “robobula,” from the hillside. After that we poured cement and erected a two-by-two inch post at each of the corners, and tied a long string which we would use to line up our walls. Then, using an old red wheelbarrow with a large hole in the bottom, we began collecting larger rocks. Some were veined with quartz, good for repelling electromagnetic signals from the cell phone towers. Others were stamped with the fossilized remains of ancient ferns and foot-long centipedes that had perished in the last eruption, some 10,000 years ago. Every day for months, until it became too hot to work, we moved rocks, piling them up on all four sides. Then it was time to build. Neither of us had ever built a house before, and it turned out I was the one who loved selecting stones, fitting them in place, and adding cement from a plastic bucket with our one and only trowel. The work was slow, sometimes interrupted by bad weather or Alexandros’ insistence on taking naps. I became obsessed with old Greek farmhouses, built by hand out of stone and dirt and thorns, standing in ruins in empty fields that had once supported families. Outdoor ovens fascinated me. I wanted to build one of those, too, and got directions from Dimitraki, a talented builder who came to show us how to make proper corners. One day our dog took me for a walk in the village of Kondias, all the way to the bright green door of Despina Aggera, a village woman who had died a year or two earlier. Inside the abandoned house we found the remnants of her life. Pain medication, letters from her daughter in Australia, photographs and books lay scattered in rooms where pigeons now nested on ceiling beams. Opening a small wooden chest, I found the skeletons of two dead cats. Beginning that night, and for the next week, Despina appeared in my dreams, a bent old crone in a headscarf, and told me about her life, her love of music and writing, and another abandoned house a few metres farther along the path which she thought I should also investigate. “Don’t worry about money!” she said. “Just move to the village, and you’ll see. You’ll have a roof over your head in no time!”

*************************************************************************************

In recent years, the western world has learned great lessons about deception, having seen it enthroned and personified at the highest levels of office. Lies have a short half-life, and believing in them can produce spectacular illusory results, including war – seen as a means of survival in End Times. Without mass media to promote it, war would be impossible. On the other hand, truth is a self-cleansing stream that carries us forward into a world of light. As long as we flow with the stream of our own our clear vision, we cannot be poisoned or harmed because we remain in touch with our own moving current of light. Eternity, like water, is self-renewing in every moment, and cannot be interrupted by commercials for Armageddon. One day the lies run their course and lose their charm. When all our lies have dissolved, what will be left behind? A chorus of schoolchildren shout out the answer: "The Truth!"But what does truth look like? What does a rock have to tell a generation raised on steel and cement? Natural elements may be the only things capable of saving us but can they still speak to us? Can we hear them? Can these elements be brought together into something that adds up to a human life, here in Canada, this nation of ghosts with whom we negotiate illusory agreements? Can we save our society, which was based on theft and may soon be stolen out from under us?

Dawn of the Hippocampus

Healing through connection, reclaiming lost fragments, birthing liquid memories, rebirthing the unconscious, bridging the oceanic, redeeming the brain.

A Pony Tale

In 1992 i was in a musical at the Montreal Fringe Festival. It was based on a story i had written, a "dance-western", starring Janet Oxley, a dancer and singer-- After the last performance, having just been to a bar and drunk a beer, I was walking home , still in my cowboy outfit, and had my fake gun in my purse ... Up ahead, I happened to see Leonard Cohen approaching in the company of a dark-haired woman about his own age, which at the time was 58 -- and at the corner, where our paths crossed, we stopped to talk -- As I was still a bit drunk, I blurted out that I'd been in a play all week. To prove it, I reached into my purse and pulled out the gun I had fired once in the play. "See, i have a gun now, too, Leonard" -- a reference to the fact that he had been teaching his kids to shoot** in the shared courtyard between our houses on St Dominique Street. (**this had led to a stray bullet passing through my 85-year-old upstairs neighbour's back window, which Leonard had graciously paid to have repaired) Although it was not the friendliest thing to say, I said it with a smile and he looked frightened, then annoyed, then introduced me to the woman he was with: Nancy Southam -- heiress to the Southam newspaper empire. This was a strange coincidence and snapped me back to sobriety. I said, "Oh, hi. I sometimes work for your family.." In fact I had once been a proofreader at one of their papers, and now was a freelance writer for another Southam paper, the Gazette. We exchanged pleasantries, and the two of them walked on down the street while i continued on my way home, with my toy gun in my purse, enjoying the irony. It was not too much later that i began having a few little problems, originating with management, at the Gazette and my editor - who wanted to promote me to a permanent weekly column -- confided that he was getting flack from upstairs, apparently someone up there didn't like me -- and this surprised me as i had no enemies and barely even knew who was "upstairs" -- they were not people I would really want to know -- and eventually things blew up when i wrote an honest, fairly negative review of Robertson Davies' last novel, THE CUNNING MAN, (which I dare anyone to try and read without falling into a coma) -- This minor faux pas led to a full-scale public shaming. A letter from the publisher accused me of being a 'Marxist' -- because in my review I had used the phrase "Canadian ruling class" -- apparently Canada has no ruling class, and never did, and to suggest it does is proof that one is a communist. My review also made mention of 'secret societies' but that went unmentioned at the time, as they are unmentionable. After that debacle I was no longer a Gazette freelancer. I thought "good riddance, those people are evil anyway" - little did i know how correct I was. It felt good to be moving on into the great Unknown -- That, in a way, was the first step of my life as a pony...

So I started writing pieces for other papers and publications, but with the new freelance contracts that were coming out, it became harder to eke out a living -- in early 1996 i join the freelancers' class action lawsuit against the gazette and southam -- which i believe was for $30 million in damages for stolen electronic rights -- late in 1996 i wrote a 'christmas story' for the montreal mirror (entertainment weekly) and it appeared for christmas. it featured conrad black and barbara amiel, their names only slightly changed (to "comrade back" and "barbara amiable") -- and they were getting ready to go to a Christmas ball at Buckingham Palace, where the Queen awaited them, and i made it very clear this was an Illuminati ball and that it was for only the wealthiest and blackest of perverts, and i even mentioned their hobbies, like bestiality and sodomy etc -- and this story got printed -- this was years before EYES WIDE SHUT was released and at the time i thought it was funny, and so did my friends at the Montreal Mirror. meanwhile conrad black had just bought out Southam Inc and was taking over the newspaper industry in canada, throwing hundreds of journalists out of work and into poverty from coast to coast, so i was expressing the feelings of a lot of people in writing this story -- which sealed my fate as a pony What do I mean by "pony"? I'll be getting to that... so. three years later, it's the dawn of the milennium and i am blacklisted from one end of the country to the other, nobody returns my emails, nobody will even read, let alone publish, anything i write and i am squeezing out a living by giving writing workshops -- it extends to every area of my former professional life -- and now and then i hear rumours about myself, that i am "suicidal" and "schizophrenic" although i am anything but -- in certain ways, i'm actually quite happy (thats another story) living quietly in the east end of montreal, seeing almost no one but my neighbour jack -- i have lost all my former friends and contacts in the world of writing and publishing, and i have somehow also been mysteriously banned from the canada council readings program -- a certain gang seems to have engineered this -- but although broke most of the time, i'm still strangely hopeful and spiritually i'm in a good place -- i feel i have left one world for another one, where i will be able to live more authentically, once i find a new way to make a living

i had a boyfriend in frankfurt, germany, and i go there for christmas of 1999 and begin considering even moving to germany -- until he reveals that he and some of his friends are involved with sado-masochism, and tells me he has a fantasy of me walking on him in high-heeled shoes -- this turns me off for some reason that i can't really explain to him -- i'm back in montreal and it's - 25C below zero and one night in january 2000, the milennium parties have come and gone and because i finally have unlimited internet I decide one night to go on line and explore the world of extreme pornography in order to write about it -- but i'm not really ready for what i find -- for two nights in a row i am swallowed by this unbelievable, inexhaustible stream of violent and degrading images of women being raped, humiliated, and worse -- i don't need to describe it to you -- most of it is new to me, in a way, as i never really had imagined the sheer scale and ugliness of it -- and i'm stunned and shocked but also fascinated as i find myself even being drawn in -- certain kinds of porn are triggering some deeply buried emotions that seem to go back to my childhood world, and very strange memories i have always had of being in an underground base where little children are being sexually tortured - and i had once written a story about that, called 'Snakebite'not that i'm looking at child pornography, it's all adult stuff -- but it's triggering those memories from my childhood -- which i am semi-conscious of in january 2000 as i'm exploring, just for that weekend, i don't yet connect my childhood torture memories to MKULTRA -- i wouldnt learn about MKULTRA until the winter of 2002-3 -- at the time of this exploration, i think of these memories as some sort of vivid fantasy from my early childhood, unconnected to anything else in my life, which was normal on the surface. so as i surf i'm being drawn in particular to BDSM sites -- bondage, domination, sado-masochism -- and i'm not sure why, maybe because the german boyfriend had recently brought it up -- it's an unfamiliar world to me and one i have never felt the slightest interest in but probably for deeper, more personal reasons it suddenly starts to rope me in -- i've seen enough, and it's late at night, and i've had enough of exploring this depraved world -- i'm about to shut down my computer when i happen across a website owned by a man called Hans -- and i start reading what he has to say about bondage, domination, and sado-masochism, and looking at images, and at 2 am i find myself writing him an email. -- it's as if i already know him, and he is going to help me figure out my life it doesn't take long before i get a response -- a very friendly one at that -- he's not so scary after all, in fact he's delighted to hear from me and we email back and forth and i get that unusual twinge that comes with feeling weirdly attracted to a total stranger -- it turns out he is an aries, our birthdays are a day or two apart, although he's a couple of years (i think) younger, and he has had a very intense life, having been at one point a "commando" -- among other jobs he has done for the Israeli military involving electronics and computers -- and now in his late forties he's settled down to being a bondage master and online trainer of human sex slaves, based in the Netherlands where he is married to a woman who is the daughter of nazis -- and he shows me photos of their apartment and ultra-modern living room with a huge red leather couch, where they practice their life-style -- his wife is a submissive slave and there seems to be a lot of whipping on weekends-- ABSOLUTELY NONE OF THIS APPEALS TO ME, it's completely sick and over the top as far as i'm concerned, in fact it's repulsive and i would never even consider living in such decadence -- and he admits it's often stressful, for both of them to keep up the excitement and not get bogged down in the petty routines and pressures of family and earning a living...

Hans believes that humans need to be enslaved, that the strong should trample the weak, that this is where the world is now heading and he's all for a society of masters and slaves -- I absolutely don't believe a single word of that garbage and i tell him so -- while he taunts me that one day i will wake up and surrender to my deep emotional need to be controlled and dominated --, no, none of this is for me, but in the midst of my total rejection of hans' values and beliefs, which we debate back and forth for about a week, getting nowhere -- one thing he says hits the target and makes me pause for a moment: he says i suffer from a "subconscious addiction to power" and implies this controls my life in negative ways because i'm in denial of it. this is hard to dismiss or shake off, because he has dragged my 'subconscious' into it -- and it strikes me as a kind of poetic bomb, encircling a hard kernel of truth that i can't quite wrap my mind around, but part of me can secretly embrace it... As far as being thrilled by images of women in bondage, i think my horrified fascination was mitigated by the experience of corresponding with Hans, who seemed to take a deep interest in me as a person... from then on, there was this strange sense of a collar snapping shut around my neck, and of there being a subtle chain, or current of energy linking me to him. this chain is emanating from my throat chakra, where I experience a real blockage -- in real life my writing career has been taken from me by unseen enemies, of both sexes, and I can no longer express myself freely -- i'm a slave to a certain gang or cabal that controls my world

but now hans is holding the leash which attached to the collar that is choking me -- exactly how or why, i don't know -- but i feel that i can tell him the truth of what i have been going through, these past several years, with the southams and the gazette and the sense I have of being locked inside a prison that keeps getting darker and more constricted-- i can't put these feelings into words, but our emails keep going back and forth and it quickly gets boring arguing from opposite sides of the political spectrum -- so in the second week when he brags that he can train and condition any woman to become a slave, i decide i will prove him wrong, and i enroll in his online training program for human pony slaves -- for which i pay 40 euros, with my credit card -- my first online purchase ever -- entitling me to my first month of daily lessons intended to turn me into a submissive human pony slave, a process that could take a while -- but in my case, hans is optimistic because, after our intensive chat, and having administered a test in which i am asked to choose images which appeal to me, images which define the kind of slave i truly want to be, he is convinced that i have a deep latent aptitude for slavery -- and my choice of "human pony" is just perfect, in his opinion, and shows that i am well on my way to becoming the submissive i was always meant to be.

and then, to encourage me further, he sends me some private photos he took the previous summer, of a german woman he had trained as a "deep sub" -- in the photos she appeared, naked, with a bit in her mouth, chained to a cart which she was pulling -- and most thrillingly, to me at the time, there was a large metal ring through her clitoris, visible in one photo where she is pawing at the air and (presumably) whinnying in ecstasy.-- completely at one with her deep pony slave persona. i don't know why, but those photos broke down the last of my resistance, and although i never asked for details about her, i considered her a kind of model - perhaps of what i should try to be careful not to become...

in june Hans informed me that he had found a situation where I could continue my pony training in the real world. i would soon be invited to a party at the house of a couple in a wealthy part of town who were very interested in meeting me... of course their names had to remain confidential, but Hans assured me they were not anyone I knew in setting me up with this couple, he said, i would be leaving my world of fantasy and putting myself on the path to my true destiny, which was to be a sex slave. - in my mind at the time, this was all an exotic joke -- something that i thought would make a good pornographic novel that i might even sell to keep myself afloat so i could write the holocaust novel i was really working on – no date had yet been set for this party, except that it would be sometime in july. an email from Hans would arrive with the date – in the meantime. I needed to collect certain accessories in a small box: a silk scarf, nipple clamps and a wooden dildo which Hans instructed me to make from a piece of doweling from the hardware store. Also, two small glass bottles filled with walnut and almond oil. And then I should wait to hear from him when the day came there would be a phone call and a taxi would arrive at my door -- i would not be told the address but the driver would know it. i was dying to know who the couple were, so out of curiosity i pretended to be interested. i told a friend about the mysterious invitation and she said "don't even think about it -- you won't come out of there alive." although that idea had already occurred to me, hearing her say it had more of an impact than just me thinking it.

****

I began wondering how I would wriggle out of this invitation, but I couldn’t see a way to do it without abruptly ending my relationship with Hans, who knew my street address. if they were serious, they could have someone wait outside and kidnap me anytime. Not that they would -- but I pondered ways of attending the party safely – e.g. by borrowing a cellphone, alerting friends, leaving instructions to call the police if I went missing – while letting the host couple know that I had done all this in advance of coming to their house – It was the apparent deepening plot that now enthralled me – or maybe it was the slave conditioning that caused me to hesitate, and paw the ground in indecision. or was i just reluctant to admit I had wasted the last four months involved in something really stupid?

*****

since enrolling in his online school for aspiring submissives (there was a separate site and entrance for Doms for which the slaves were denied the password), I had learned a lot about bondage, domination, and sado-masochism. from the sub’s s point of view.It was mainly about focusing all your attention on your Master: a daunting devotional task at which a human could only fail. Failure to focus, and be a perfect sub, led to punishment – a never-ending cycle of striving to please and falling short. It was heaven and hell in a harness but it appeared to make life exciting for those with the stamina to endure the extreme emotions that went with the highs and lows of total power exchange. Maybe I was jaded but i wasn’t really interested in fetishes like whips and leather, only the emotions attached, and also the intense but disembodied sex that I had experienced during the initial shock of encountering Hans.

in real life we had little in common. The less we knew about each other, the better for our online Master-slave dynamic, because in certain ways I was just stringing Hans along, pretending to be an eager pony when in fact I was mostly taking advantage of his diet and exercise program: lots of raw vegetables and fruits, a 2 km run every morning, a daily regime of masturbation. i was still living alone, exchanging daily texts with him as he deployed the gamut of behaviour modification techniques to get me to surrender and obey him in my daily life: breaking me in, he called it, leading me by the nose, keeping me subdued and corralled, extracting compliance. I rarely resisted seeing as I felt that would defeat the whole purpose. Also resistance quickly led to punishment, usually psychological. for insubordination, once, he made me stay up all night, emailing him every hour. For one whole week, I was not allowed to wear clothes in my apartment, or walk upright, and had to eat my meals from a bowl on the floor. I could have faked it of course, but I needed to explore the feelings. So I could write about them, later, when all this was over.

Meanwhile Hans was conditioning me, using phrases like “accept my fate” and “learn to settle” for life as a pony. I did feel more relaxed and less anxious at the thought of just existing like a household pet. Some of my nervous energy dissipated and as I relaxed, I also felt more compassionate, more willing to let go of my point of view. Every so often, I got little glimpses of “subspace” – the mythic realm where ponies drift when they’re feeling totally at one with their slavery. I didn’t feel more dependent, or moody but I had more energy due to being forced to focus on sex, which I wasn’t getting except in fantasy, but then, sex is mainly in the mind. It was the forcing, the discipline, that added a whole new level of enjoyment. There was the pain of crouching naked in the morning by my bed on curled toes, to recite the pony prayer which begins: 1. I am a slave, I am nothing, but only what my owner wants

me to be. Above all else my primary focus shall be to please

my owner, hoping that he finds me pleasing in all that I do,

whether I am in his presence or not.

I was doing the exercises, adopting the abnormal mindset, and saving all our chats in a special file -- which i was going to use when it came time to write my book exposing the international human trafficking network that preyed on women like me, and others, who fell into the trap of internet porn.

******

Early on i had guessed Hans was involved in slave trafficking. Back in February, while I was still aglow from our first chat, I dreamed I got on a plane and flew to Paris, where he met me at the airport, walked me to his parked car, and opened the door. Once I had my seatbelt on, he opened my shirt and fastened handcuffs to my wrists. In no time he had me locked in a cage with a chain around my neck. I told him this dream in an email the following morning. Was it accurate? ‘Well, yes,”he typed "that sometime happens” with the smileyface emoticon he always used in our correspondence. “Being locked in a cage can be therapeutic, allowing a woman to explore deep emotions, or even relive past lives.”

One side of him was a sweet, sensitive type, with what appeared to be some deep insights that would have served him well as a therapist. Over the months he devoted so many hours to chatting with me, I thought he must like me. Otherwise why bother? We used up the 40 euro fee in the first month, so he must see something in me, something to justify all this overflowing attention. male attention was something i craved at the time since i had been mainly celibate and living alone for most of my life, and now i was 49. given my circumstances, my failed love affairs, and a general feeling that marriage and long-term relationships were not for me, being alone was just the price I paid for my “freedom.” in certain ways, Hans was superior to all other boyfriends. He was the first to point out that i had many traits and behaviours of someone who had been sexually abused as a child – what he probably meant was that I dissociated easily, like many who have been exposed to major trauma, and forgotten it.

****

I was saved from my quandary (of whether or not to attend the party) by a deus ex machina. one day in late June as I was sanding my dowel-dildo, the phone rang. my neighbour Jack had found an ad for a writer-in-residence position in british columbia for which i applied and got hired, bam, just like that. It was a two-year contract meaning there was no longer any question of my entering into a fake relationship with some perverted couple in order to write about them… there was no time to write the exposé about the international trade in human ponies... all that was out the window now as I had to start packing up my apartment, say goodbye to my friends – mostly the women in my writing workshops – hire a moving truck and fly west with my cat to become a college professor..

I strongly felt that my dear Master Hans had helped me by presenting me with a humiliating alternative fate that made me boomerang in the opposite direction. Thanks to the pressure, I had recovered my lost sexuality and also my true destiny: to be an intellectual, not just a pony but when I told Hans the exciting news he was very upset and tried to dissuade me from leaving montreal naturally i was surprised. what did it matter if i didn’t attend that silly party, for which no date had even been set? Westmount was a snobby neighbourhood and based on past experience, I would not have got along with the man and woman though Hans insisted they were very fondly looking forward to bringing me into their kinky relationship. Deep down, I had no interest in pursuing sex slavery with total strangers and to be honest, I was a bit bored with Hans and his snickering sadistic jokes which I had overlooked, back in February when I first hooked up with him. my early enthusiasm had been based on what I imagined were his “shamanic” powers as we soared through space, like Santa and his reindeer on some stellar voyage through the blackness. Back then, to me, with his shaggy beard and plump cheeks Hans was like some dark Norse god. Odin or Thor. So I felt a bit guilty, skipping out on him at the last minute, just when he’d set me up with the mystery couple, who I suspected were likely white collar crooks involved in some sleazy international scam like money-laundering. So in august i flew to kamloops leaving Hans in the lurch in Holland. Now I was living in cowboy country with real horses and ponies, but i continued to chat with Hans. I didn’t want be ungrateful. it never occurred to me, then, that he might have been paid a finder's fee for delivering me intact, that he now had to repay. he was tight-lipped about the details but when in an email he ordered me to quit my job and come to Holland immediately and be his slave for real, I laughed it off with a toss of my tail. I was a palomino now.

from time to time, I still chatted with Hans and also with other invisible men who responded to my "human pony" profile which he had insisted i set up. so i came to know quite a lot about that scene, which i was not interested in entering for real – some of the people involved in it are quite interesting to talk to, because they're in touch with a whole underworld that includes bikers and prostitutes and people in the music business -- and since i was stuck in kamloops for two years, where not much goes on after 5 pm, i was happy to have people to chat with when i got home from my teaching job in the evenings in kamloops i was the single woman from out of town who got invited to Christmas dinner out of pity, etc – this had never happened in montreal where you didn’t need to be married to have a life – and I found my status at the college awkward, at times, but since I was teaching Creative Writing nobody expected me to be very grounded.

one married woman I got to know in kamloops was somewhat psychic -- she phoned me up about a dream she had had: "it's a very good thing you left montreal when you did because there was a couple there who were planning to kill you." a couple of years later another friend, also very intuitive, told me the exact same thing I decided they must be talking about Hans' mystery couple.- a fascinating possibility that could never be verified or even investigated without returning to montreal – which I had been warned against by the third psychic before I left Kamloops. she had me pull cards that were overwhelmingly negative about my life back in montreal – “don’t ever go back there,” she said. “as far as montreal is concerned, you’re already a dead woman.” So I moved to Greece, although my first choice was a town in BC called Horsefly... but that's another story.

**********

Years later later, i found out who the couple were. The man was from old Montreal money, and his wife was from Washington and rumoured to have worked for the CIA. It was more than a rumour, I’ve been told. Their mansion, which they have now sold, once belonged to Canadian diplomat and politician Pierre Sevigny, who was implicated in a sex scandal back in the 1950s, when he had an affair with an east German spy called Gerda Munsinger. This scandal brought down the Canadian government at the time. When they took over the property, back in the early 80s, the N's already had their intelligence connections. They were also involved in the world of journalism and their home became the meeting place for a globalist “think tank” with links to McGill University and the Allan Memorial and CIA psychiatry and the people who had electro-shocked my father back in the fifties when I was a child in Dr Cameron’s LSD experiments…

I learned who the Guests of Honour were at that party I never attended – one of the after-hours parties after most of the guests had gone home, while those who arrived late came wearing masks Their names appear on the Wednesday Night Club website for all to see: the famous newspaper baron and his dominatrix wife, who had bought the Southam empire a few years earlier – good old conrad "richelieu" and lovely wife barbara "antoinette" – pictured here at the fancy dress ball they attended in London on July 10 2000, about ten days before they attended the party in Montreal --

all this was on the website for the Wednesday Night Club which ran weekly without interruption for thirty years. It must cost a lot to entertain that often. The house sits on a property that cuts across a whole block. A covered passage, possibly a greenhouse, links the house to a separate garage that opens onto the next street, making it ideal for smuggling bodies in and out. I’ve learned through the grapevine that at these parties, barbara amiable brings her own butcher knife. But that's another story, and I may never know for sure because my Christmas story in the Montreal Mirror, and my worst nightmare, never came to life. When I visited the house one winter day in 2011,it was being renovated for the new owners. I circled the block, taking pictures that I posted at my blog. I wasn’t prepared for the weird energy of the neigh-bourhood – a woman leered at me from her driveway. A zombie-like couple on psych drugs trudged past me just as the neigh-bours' garage door lifted and a supernatural male voice boomed out: “AND NOW HE IS HERE!” – it was a CBC radio drama playing from the open window of an SUV that was backing out. In my photos of the house, a Wotan-like figure with a long beard and pointed hat appears in one of the windows. I think I went on a Wednesday, Wotan's Day. Wotan, or Odin, was a Norse God whose cults still operate especially in Europe.

The CIA is said to be involved in setting up Odin cults that practice sex magic and ritual sacrifice. Odin’s special totem animal is the Horse. Of course these are just notes for a story i'm writing -- only the beginning of a LONG RIDE.