Thank you, Joao. That video won't play for me. I take that as consent. Watch this space.
Or, as we say in French: "Allons Dancer"...
Now it plays.
So, where was I? Oh yes, Michigan, February of 2013, writing to Mick. "Dear Mick" -- I see I wrote four versions over that week, working on them daily, building the case. The case for what? For my growing suspicion that Leonard was involved in the shooting outside the Dakota Apartments, and that Lennon's death was the tipping point for a generation that grew up believing in Hope and Change that got derailed on that night in Manhattan. I'm not sure which version of the letter I printed and sent -- probably the last although it seems to be missing a conclusion. In fact a third of it seems to be missing, now that I search for it. Which is odd. Maybe I've been hacked?
When I finished the letter I printed it out and put it in an envelope with a return address in London, Ontario, and posted it from Harbor Springs, MI to a bar in the Caribbean.
So, okay I found the letter. It's titled 'leonardcrumbs.rtf" -- it's dated February 25 2013 and only exists as an email attachment I sent to the person who printed it - so I must have deleted it from my hard drive for some odd reason. It's only three single spaced pages, drastically reduced from ten. I'm not going to copy it here. I see earlier drafts which show I began writing it the previous July, i.e. a couple of weeks before the London 2012 Olympics. So it actually took me almost 8 months to get up the courage to wrap this whole thing up and finally drop it in the mailbox. Well.
It takes about 8 days for snail mail letters to reach the Caribbean and exactly 8 days later I got an "answer" in the form of an insane Facebook message from some unknown guy who quickly disappeared again. And that was all. No other response in any form. Nothing. Not that I expected any.
I had almost 'met' Mick several times, beginning in 1987 just after the Tibetan teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche died. One night as I lay in bed overlooking the garden next door to Leonard's house, one hot summer night in downtown Montreal, where you could sometimes here prostitutes entertaining customers in the alley. In fact it was the night of the August 18 1987 'Harmonic Convergence' -- a much anticipated event in New Age circles. And ChogyamTrungpa had died back in the spring and I had attended his open-air cremation in June in a field in Vermont. And now it was August and as I drifted off to sleep I was wondering what would become of me, and whether to quit my low-paid teaching job in the Creative Writing Department at a university. And sometime during the night Chogyam Trungpa (then dead) joined me on the astral plane.
Although I had never met him in real life, after he died he began appearing to me in dreams, as if trying to teach me something or other. So the night of 8/18 was his third or fourth appearance in several weeks. This time was different: we flew to Andromeda. the trip seemed to last for hours. Back on earth, he told me he had to go now. "But there's someone I'd like you to meet. You'll like him. He's just like me." It was Mick Jagger. So I said Oh yes, and Mick and I took off and flew to Andromeda and when we came back I totally agreed he was just like Trungpa, but more so.
After four years of this kind of thing, I finally gave in and bought a ticket for Barbados to go look for Mick. Once the plane took off it was like having the Rolling Stones as my personal escort. For example, the Air Canada flight began with a video of Jagger and Richards being interviewed in Jamaica. After a few drinks, I relaxed and everything just flowed on inevitably until I landed on his island. Those Tibetans! Doors magically opened, phones were answered, catamarans materialized and ferried me straight to Mustique where Jagger showed up as I was wading out of the sea. That's a story in itself. Unfortunately I was terrified and tongue-tied at having found him. Twice, this happened over a few years and both times I was too scared to speak.
When your strange inner world starts shaking hands with the outer, everything can start to shake. This happened to Bodhidharma when he found himself face to face with the Emperor Wu and could no longer remember why he left India for China. A subject for serious students of the dharma, not us ignorant rabble.
The last time I saw Mick was in 2006 at the Montreal Jazz Festival. I had just arrived on the site downtown between acts, and a young passerby was pointing at a skinny figure in beige who was walking in the other direction: "As-tu vu ce mec-la?' (Did you see that guy who walked by just now?) C'etait Mick Jagger!"
When I caught up to him on the steps, I blurted out "Are you Mick?" which caused his female bodyguard to start yelling "Oh NO! Let's get out of here!!" However, Mick was friendly and when I told him my name he stopped to talk, deftly switching from British to a generic American accent as he drawled, "No, actually I'm Keith."
Pausing to think for a moment, he corrected himself: "No, I'm the drummer." I apologized for my mistake and he said: "That's all right -- happens all the time." and gave me the smile, before his girlfriend dragged him away. I had seen her in a documentary talking about what a gentleman he is -- made in Toronto and shown on Canadian TV a few years before...
...
So much for sex, drugs, rock and roll.
Back to the woods, Harbor Springs, Traverse City and the endlessly falling snow of February 2013. I just googled the map forTraverse City (
Traversier means "ferry" in French, and Michigan was first explored by French voyageurs who were opening up the fur trade)
God, maps are interesting! Traverse City is 84 miles or a 7-hour bike ride from Harbor Springs, according to this google map. Anyway, I never went there -- I probably would have, had I known at the time that John Lennon was living under his new identity of Lennon impersonator Mark Staycer. Or at the very least, since my hosts happened to be musicians, I would have grilled them about Staycer and whether they knew someone who knew him.
https://www.google.ca/maps/@45.0357163,-85.8146582,9z
But since Miles Mathis hadn't published his article yet, I was still haunted by the notion, or firm belief, or sneaking suspicion that I had witnessed events pertaining to the death of John Lennon, and could no longer remain silent.
It was sort of like when the Montreal Canadiens skate out onto the ice and a hush falls over the crowd as everyone waits for the puck to drop. There is no other way to describe this feeling, or release all that pent-up emotion -- except, perhaps, in a song ...
http://m.youtube.com/watch?sns=fb&list= ... ZpW2ssbsGM[/youtube]
Brekin, how do I embed this?
Never mind, I just did.
