A lifetime of traps and set ups
When Chris was working on his memoirs, some of it was focused around music, and a lot of it was focused around relationships, growing up, and processing the eight-year period in which he was living on the streets. He worked on this document off and on between 2010 and 2014, then seemed to stop pretty suddenly around the time of the Napalm Beach article, associated freak outs, and me being kidnapped. I was introducing the idea that nothing had been quite as it seemed, meanwhile everyone else was telling Chris I had gone crazy.
It is a really weird thing, as an older person, to suddenly realize that your entire life was at some level, treated as a farce. That the things you had worked so hard to achieve had never been available to you not because you didn’t try hard enough, and not because you had bad luck, but because of an extensive fraud situation which everyone you loved and trusted was keeping secret. Under the best of circumstances, it would be a lot to process, and these were hardly the best of circumstances. I know that I personally was feeling devasted by the betrayals throughout 2014. This was long before I knew anything about the ongoing medical malfeasance (surveillance, biomedical abuse, and murders), which in a lot of ways is the worst part of this.
Going deeper into the research – also with more information now available online – it occurs to me that our life stories could be told as a series of set ups, some more consequential than others. In both of our cases some of the most consequential set ups revolved around honey traps and music. In Chris case there were also a lot of consequential set ups around drug use (this includes alcohol, obviously).
Damage wrought by the use of honey traps cannot be over-emphasized. These are not James Bond style honey traps who seductively introduce themselves into an adult world of espionage games – I was introduced to honey traps, probably going back at least to 1983 when I was 15 years old. I believe my parents participated in this, knowingly, but I don’t know why. And then, when I was barely 16, I started to go out with Mike Payne who was well over 21. In these early relationships, you’re still learning about the world, and about how to be in a relationship, so they are very formative. So I was very young, being influenced by a honey trap – a man I thought was madly in love with me, wanted to marry me, etc – and the whole time he was involved in trafficking me through medical and surveillance networks, with the intent to betray me. The relationship went on almost five years, but it sounds like he has continued to covertly have influence.
In some ways Chris was even more vulnerable to influence than me, in part because he had an open, suggestible personality, but also because he had been raised in a sheltered evangelical church family where there was no drug or alcohol use. Not being exposed to any kind of alcohol use growing up can make a person more vulnerable to negative influences later on, because there is no measuring stick to understand what normal social drinking looks like. Chris’ first live-in girlfriend, Kim Pettit, seems to have been an alcoholic. Her habits influenced Chris. Also, Chris was exposed to an absolutely insane amount of drug use in the 1970s. I have never in my life met anyone who was exposed to more drugs than he was.
Mike Payne also seemed to be an alcoholic when he lived with me, but somehow immediately became cured after we broke up. The people who were around me at this time, including Mike, seemed to have been part of a plan to separate me from my guitars, from music scenes, from anyone involved in music, and to get me stuck in Minneapolis. My mother was also part of this.
Where I really wanted to be – going back to 1984 – was Seattle or Olympia. I really liked Seattle and the Puget Sound area where my dad had grown up, and where I’d been born.
There was a period of time around 1986-87 where I was living with Mike in Humboldt County and he was getting close to graduating with an art degree, and he was talking about going to graduate school at the University of Washington, which of course I was on board with. Somehow that all fell by the wayside, and I found myself out of work, on the outs with my family, unable to support myself, literally going hungry, with Mike still drinking every night. Being as we were living together, it doesn’t make sense to me now how he could afford to drink when I couldn’t afford to eat.
That’s when I allowed my family to send me to college in St Paul, Minnesota. I asked if I could go to Evergreen State College in Washington and was told I could not, because of out of state tuition costs. With nothing else on the horizon, I allowed my mother to send me to Hamline University. It seems like it all happened fast. I don’t know when the decision was made, but it must have been sometime after June 1987, and I was back in Minnesota by the following August.
The thing that makes this so difficult to comprehend right now is that my family – and Chris’ family – had to know that within the realm in which we were operating – Chris and I belonged together. So why did they try to keep us apart?