It is the evening 3

Am I that easy to forget?

Before he discovered our MKULTRA 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 $150K - 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..

(Twenty years ago a close friend showed me a video she had made of her uncle then in his 70s and living in hiding on Long Island. In the 1970s 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.)

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 meatpacking 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? Were we all?

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 MKULTRA 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 at least some of his memory-- at least he was not reduced to a vegetable like many of the others -- it was too late to question my father and get his opinion of what they had done to him since he had died in 1974. But in 1963 he had told me “they're not doing anything good down at that hospital.”

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.. I lived those sevens in 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 one of the former children from the Allan Memorial, to find out if she still remembered what had happened there. I didnt.

My two-room flat was on the second floor where Leonard visited me, returning the dowsing rods I had forgotten at his place on my last visit to his place at 28 Vallieres .. 4×7 .. opposite the park.

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 had visited him, Leonard devoted most of their talk to 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 only 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 subproject in 1960, after too many LSD trips, Ken had advanced in the program to the point of mastering some of its techniques. Mind reading, telekinesis, 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 walkup. 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.

***

So, to summarize. In 1977, Kenneth Hertz discovered MKULTRA files on people he knew who were in the Allan as children in the 1950s and 60s. They were still accessible then at the McGill Medical Library. He told me "I read your files. You and your brother were in a genetic experiment from before you were born." He offered to take me to McGill and show me. I refused. He had special authorization as a freelance medical researcher to access those and other files in 1977.

I think the shocking part is, we keep rediscovering the evidence, files, "fascinating links" -- and then we slip back into denial, and play some nice music to feel better.

Just like in 1977 when Ken Hertz was alive and tried to tell us what he had found in the filing cabinets, confirming his own childhood memories-- and almost nobody listened or believed.

In 1961 Ken Hertz was the headliner reading his poetry at the Potpourri, along with an unknown 20 year old folksinger from New York named Bob Dylan. Nobody remembers Kenneth Hertz.

“How many times must a man look up…?”

I guess the answer is blowing in the wind.