The other possible - or even probable - scenario is, of course: that I was being used as unwitting bait in a blackmail plot.
Think Jeffrey Epstein. Then think back to when Jeffrey Epstein was a little boy whose future mentors and business associates were running a drug and sex trafficking operation that already spanned countries and continents, using the already well established grooves dug during the war.
This would be obvious to anyone familiar with the working of the music business - and the reason I didnt bring it up before is because I was the fourteen-year-old daughter of decent, loving parents who would not have exposed me to that kind of nefarious operation had they known about it. But sadly they caught on only too late, or were being controlled and had no choice.
So on we go.
What I most remember about being 14 are the other 14 year old girls who surrounded me that year, my most enchanted, the one I spent at Baron Byng High School, a stone's throw from the Allan Memorial Institute on the mountain. Baron Byng was in the old neighborhood - Montreal's postwar Jewish ghetto, magnet for refugees of all kinds.
It was 1965 and I still living with my parents in the suburbs, but bussing downtown to Baron Byng because it was the closest English Protestant high school. Entering its doors for the first time was a major culture shock. Swarming its halls were children of holocaust survivors, or of working class Jews, crammed behind desks side by side with kids of Greek immigrants and French speaking refugees from Algeria and Morocco - and over our heads the Protestant School Board of Greater Montreal, controlled by a clique of Masons with military backgrounds.
All this was at the height of the British invasion via newly energized rock and roll. So not only did we have the Beatles and Stones and the less erotically riveting bands like the Dave Clark Five, but wafting through the basement lunch room there were also Ye-Ye strains of Adamo, Francoise Hardy and Sylvie Vartan, Christof and Johnny Halliday. The fashions mainly affected the girls who ironed their hair to perfection and wore it swinging over their tunics - we all wore standard issue navy knee length tunics - and black tights. But somehow the French girls' tunics looked more like miniskirts or maybe it was how they fitted into them.
Not that we, on the English side, could hear their music or understand its understated sex appeal. There were a few interesting French boys in leather jackets lurking behind firedoors but my crowd of girls - not the prettiest - were too awkward and borderline hysterical to rate a glance while the sphynx-faced French girls undulated among them like courtesans on the set of Cleopatra. And anyway we could not speak their language as they were cordoned off in a separate wing of the building with their own teachers and curriculum which was all in French.
In my class were Greek and Jewish girls, loudly talkative and friendly, always laughing, gossiping and observing. Daughters of bustling matriarchs, from tight close families that had survived much to get to Canada, psychology and fortune telling came naturally to them - they could read your mind at one quick glance - and several adopted me as their sister- I'd never had a sister just a twin brother who was also in our class, still a shy boy but quite good looking and maybe it was him they were really interested in.
My brother and I and a few others had been parachuted in to this downtown melting pot from our suburb - we were exotic - and I'm sure we would have melted in eventually but someone had other plans for us.
In the meantime we were there to learn about life. And those girls taught me plenty - much of it about being a girl which was a mystery in my household. Rock and roll first and foremost was how we found out about boys which meant absorbing, dissecting and analyzing their psychological profiles: how Paul McCartney differed from John Lennon and what that would mean in, you know, bed. I was interested in what the other girls thought about these matters. Apparently we all thought about them a lot back then.
In my class I was the tallest, and also skinniest, and girls would tell me "If you fixed yourself up a bit you'd almost be stunning" - but I had other business on my mind. I was reading The Communist Manifesto and a biography of Lenin, having decided to learn Russian so I could converse in my fantasy career as the female counterpart of Ilya Kuryakin on The Man From U.N.C.L.E. I knew it would take time to master a language I had never heard spoken, so for my 14th birthday I asked for and received a set of Russian language records and that same day started memorizing the alphabet and a few useful phrases:
этот стул белый :This chair is white.
красный Крест: Red Cross
No wonder my mother believed I would one day have a career with the United Nations.
Little did she know I had my sights set on Siberia. Or that the British invasion was more than a passing fad and penetrated much deeper than the Ed Sullivan Show.
******
Something about that neighborhood never left me. A decade later I would move back there, renting a half-rotted flat across the street from my old school and just around the corner from Leonard Cohen, who never went to Baron Byng as he was a Westmount boy, but saw an opportunity to invest a few dollars of his first million in rundown properties on St. Dominique, two streets east and one block north of old Baron Byng.
Was that an accident? Not exactly, since Leonard was moving back to the scene of the Freedman Clothing Company, his father Lyon Cohen's men's wear business, still located at 423 Mayor Street while Leonard was a kid growing up.
My flat above the abandoned store burned in a fire in 1976 while I was away for the summer. Landlord lightning, they called it.
Leonard and I would not meet until 1977 when what seemed a string of coincidences brought us together in early November just as revelations of CIA brainwashing experiments on unwitting Montrealers were filling the front pages.
In 1983 I would find myself sharing a back yard fence with him on St. Dominique- I nearly mistyped it as St Demonique - street of two and three storey brick buildings without front yards or spaces between them. In Montreal's endless game of musical apartments, cheap places were shared and traded among friends and a friend offered me his $75 a month pied a terre, unaware Leonard lived right next door. By then of course I had met and gone out with Leonard and broken up with him for good, so moving in next door seemed like the next best thing to never seeing him again as long as I lived.
The universe arranged these coincidences on our behalf or so it seemed, and in a sense I never moved forward- I just circled the block for years.
*****
