Introduction cont’d:

Tale 2

The Origin of Becky

 
“...here came Becky now, charging at him, full speed

right on ritual schedule, barking like the dog-fiend from hell

pretty much her usual self, in other words, mj thought

or maybe a tiny bit more fiendish than usual.”^[1]

If somebody comes when you are drowning in the river, and saves your life, now immediately there is a relationship that's formed. And that relationship is not of a brother, is not of a husband, is not of a sister, is not of a wife. But the relationship is something else. And it is greater than all the relationships that we have formed and we have created.

This is the greatest relationship that ever can be formed. And you call him your Savior. The love you have towards him is greater than you have towards your parents. It's greater than anything. And this relationship is: the Knowledge which is within inside of us has been revealed. And this is the reason why devotees love their Lord so much. Because there has been a relationship formed which is virtually unbreakable.

                                                                                        Guru Garland [2]

The tinny bang of the Bug’s door was Becky’s cue to play her little part in ‘the ritual’ that was about to follow. This many-sided ‘ritual’, as mj thought of it and called it in his head, required that Becky’s part be a bit part; and yet, though brief, it was all too memorable and was absolutely essential, obviously, as proven by the fact that mj had never entered the Blackburn living room from outside without Becky performing her monster act first. The whole ‘ritual’, in fact, of driving down the mountain from Spring Lake, drawing near the Blackburn homestead and pulling into the drive and entering the Blackburn living room, had left such an impression on mj for having come to feel so unusually special to him each and every time, and for having been celebrated so many times by the three of them, that it felt something like a church or religious rite by now, in fact, he couldn’t deny; for it had always been done in the same way as tonight; except that there were a few unexpected but minor additional touches tonight, naturally, since it was such a special night. There were things he had never noticed before and associations he had never made before; connections: everything seemed more connected than ever.

And so, as if to reassure mj that the rest of this long and complicated ritual he had grown to love, the very special ritual in the Blackburn living room that the three of them had invented together without the least bit of discussion or reflection and had enjoyed so many times together before tonight, would not have to change very unsettlingly much on this unusual night, hopefully: here came Becky now, charging at him, full speed, right on ritual schedule, barking like the dog-fiend from hell, pretty much her usual self, in other words, mj thought, or maybe a tiny bit more fiendish than usual. And Bill always seemed to consider it essential to wait, of course, until just the very last split millisecond to call his dog off, as if to make the salvation more magical; for Bill was invariably somewhere very far from the front of the property whenever mj showed up, so how could he see how close the dog was to the kill? Yet it would always be just in the nick of time he would screech her name, ‘BECKY!!’ just before she leapt, lunged, and flew through the air, to chomp the heart right out of poor mj’s heartache-y chest and carry it in her mouth gushing its poor man’s sacred heart blood, back to her disgusting dog hole in back of the house.

A whole darn cockamamie collection of psychological twists pertained to this grueling mental test, including having to stand there at the front drive, next to the VW, as fearlessly as possible while utterly dog-devourable. And this was only the very first of Bill’s many, many BIG, but REALLY BIG contributions to the ritual, you could say. It was no more than an un-discussed little lead-in to the main ritual which, while no one had ever said so explicitly, nevertheless clearly required that a very special guest, in order to gain and maintain his very special status once inside the very special Blackburn living room, must always show utmost fearlessness while first approaching Bill’s castle and demesne from the outside and must always trust implicitly one hundred percent, that lordly protector Bill would always save the special guest’s life from the Hound of Hell at the very last second. If, on the other hand, you sat inside your Bug with the windows up and honked like a Mexican, you could never gain special friendship or ritual status with Bill Blackburn.

There was an endless list of crazy malarkey of this kind, said mj after pondering it be-dazzled by it for many years, and that should have been more than enough warning; it should have served any observer or potential guest possessing even half as much perspicacity as mj lorenzo seemed to possess, as more than sufficient tip-off to the great likelihood that Bill Blackburn was not an ordinary person, and that he did not do things in ‘ordinary’ U.S. American ways. It should have told mj right from the very beginning that the combination of repeated play-acts that he, mj, eventually had come to call ‘the ritual’ was actually not an ordinary event at all, but a special one with a special significance for the three of them that would have to be fully elucidated and interpreted if their complicated but successful – and even celebrated – three-way friendship were ever to be properly appreciated, respected, revered and loved and reveled in, as much as it deserved to be, right down through history and eternity. Yet it didn’t warn him sufficiently; for mj, like so many other poor unwitting human creatures, never fully – or even partly – understood the whole mess of his life until years later.

And probably not even then.

Not even partly.

And yet he had passed this critical Becky test – fortunately – without even knowing he had, right from the very first day he had been subjected to it, up there at Spring Lake that day in late summer ’72 when Bill had suddenly shown up for the first time at the empty house next door to mj and Dlune. That was the day mj had been gardening quietly on his newly bought property and had heard Becky’s venomous barking approach for the first time; he had half-glimpsed the chilling vision of her head-on attack for the very first time in an adrenalin-aided side-view mental mirror, and had experienced having his very body and soul saved by Bill for the very first time with a perfectly timed, gut-quaking, blood-curdling yell of

‘BECKY!!’

from somewhere out of sight. And then Bill Blackburn had immediately shown up for the first historic time from behind his newly rented house at Spring Lake, huffing and puffing and red-faced, all that longish white hair flying, and had bestowed upon mj uninvited – it was always important to note – the rather long and detailed uninvited story of how, if poor and rattled-looking mj lorenzo thought ‘Becky’ a fiend of a dog on this particular day, here and now, he should have been around on the day seven years before when Becky had first turned up on the main drag of Delaware Water Gap, and Bill Blackburn had been the only person in the whole uselessly college educated town with its whole useless redneck underside who had possessed even the foggiest notion of how to handle a poor, cornered, lost and potentially lethal canine from a dog breed full of killer wolf blood, a ‘stray’ German shepherd that had turned up for some reason in a town of supposedly sapient hominids it didn’t know.

Anyone about to experience Bill Blackburn and his Fred Waring and other tales for the first time, in other words, had to know this Becky tale first, of how Becky had managed to come into Bill’s life, and he, into hers. And similarly: any outsider hoping to begin to understand the kinds of things that would happen in the Blackburn living room that night, the night of the first interview regarding life with Fred Waring, anyone hoping to keep the whole weird night in perspective, should know the Becky tale first: that was the way mj lorenzo had come to think of the whole megillah, after reflecting on it for years. The rather long, very requisite and altogether uninvited tale about Becky had served as Bill’s odd – almost ritual, you might say, or formalized – way of introducing himself, in other words; and, as one soon discovered, it couldn’t hurt a person one bit to possess such warnings as the tale provided, if one were about to venture upon a friendship as complex and powerful and historic as this relationship would be, with a person as surprisingly complex and powerful as Bill Blackburn would turn out to be. Bill’s co-workers in the Waring ‘Organization’, for example, mj felt quite sure, did not have the kind of real friendship with or real knowledge of Bill that mj enjoyed immediately upon meeting him, probably because they had never had the luck of being put through the Becky test and being told the Becky story so that they could then get to know Bill properly. Betty Ann had not had such luck either, when she had met him. She and Bill had worked for Fred for years, yet barely had said hello to one another for most of those years. She would get to know him incredibly well eventually, of course, in her own way, by falling in love with him and marrying him; but they would fight like most lovers and spouses would, from time to time; whereas Bill and mj would never fight, and mj was sort of proud of that.

Even when there was incredible tension between them, Bill and mj never fought.

So mj lorenzo was glad in retrospect he had possessed the sixth sense to know enough to ‘bend’ towards Bill’s strange world that very first day they had met, enough so as to accept Bill’s crazy charging dog and to listen to Bill’s crazy story about the dog; because as a result, they had become good friends at once. No wasted years, or chances.

Most people in the neighborhood would not have done the same, he had often thought. They would have avoided a friendship with Bill Blackburn after an introduction such as the one he had provided young Dr. mj, or so Dr. Lorenzo said in later years. And this was because most U.S. Americans would not have understood, as the Dr. said, that in Bill Blackburn’s mind and world, Becky’s near-lethal attack amounted to a real and genuine and heartfelt, and even very special, first class introduction. For Spring Lake was an upper middle class neighborhood of ‘California style’ houses set on half-acre lots on the near side of a beautiful little blue lake whose right side was a steep, forested hill, and whose left side opened out onto green acres of grassy fields and naturalized nursery plots of multiple rare varieties of iris and day lilies and other bulbs and tubers, beyond all of which, on the fourth and far side, could be seen, from picture windows in all the living rooms of the homes, with little blue Spring Lake sitting front and center, and everything in perfect proportion and geometric balance, THE million-dollar Poconos view of two of the highest and longest Appalachian mountains in the U.S. northeast, coming into the picture from right and left and almost touching but not quite making it, and leaving a big and famous ‘gap’ known as the Delaware Water Gap, through which flowed the Delaware River. Which meant that most U.S. Americans with enough money to have been able to afford to live in such a lovely neighborhood with such a fabulous view, once having struggled up the American social and economic ladder to OWN all that comfort and beauty and distinction, would have been offended by a temporary renter like Bill, and would have seen him as a hick, loose-dog-owning, socially nether intruder, one who would let his ferocious and poorly trained monster of a ‘pet’ run loose just as in any hick hillbilly Appalachian glen, to invade neighboring owners’ properties and worse yet, invade teeth-bared at a flying gallop right when the poor unsuspecting owner was physically present calmly planting roses in that little bit of heaven, so that the gardening homeowner had to suddenly fear LOSS OF LIFE right on his own hard-won little piece-of-heaven property. To this type of effete American ‘neighbor’, and there were more and more in the U.S.A. who acted the part every year, it seemed, it would of course have been considered unforgivable to let a dog run at a next-door neighbor home-owner in that rude and ‘assaultive’, ‘disrespectful’, potentially humiliating and heart-stopping way.

left: former Lorenzo home in foreground; Kittatinny Mtn. in distance
center: ‘gap’ in 'the Blue Ridge’ where Delaware R. passes, called 'Delaware Water Gap'
right: a piece of Spring Lake with Blue Mtn. in the distance

But then, even if such a neighbor had found the heart to forgive all this appearance of living ‘like an Indian’ right next door, and had started to listen to the man’s story about Becky, he would have cut off the longwinded and presumptuous bastard anyway after a solid minute of uninvited saga. The length and detail, ever increasing, would have made him feel dragged down a primrose path pell-mell in chains, especially given the fact that he was having his ears talked off ‘with no regard at all’, never even having been asked his name, or given his neighbor’s name, never even having been asked if he could spare the time to hear a long detailed story from a strange man with strange behavior including the strange behavior of his darn scary dog, neither of whom, man or dog, the neighbor was sure he really did want to know any more, come to think of it. And so he would have interrupted the story and excused himself, saying it had been an honest-to-goodness genuine pleasure to meet his new neighbor, and to please let him know if he could help in any way, but his dinner was ready and waiting inside. Bye.

For: everyone in the U. S. of America, by now, such Americans thought, must have realized that LIVING IN PEACE was MUCH more important than LIVING WITH NEIGHBORS.

And he would have kept a distance from Bill after that first traumatic day Bill had made his first ‘socially gauche’ appearance in the neighborhood of Spring Lake. Nor would the high dudgeon have stopped there. For later he would have complained to the landlord about his renting to such an inappropriate person as Bill. And probably, in addition, another few months later he would have sued Bill and Bill’s landlord, both of them, for permanent and irreversible psychological damage resulting from having been menaced without mercy by an unleashed wolf-dog right on his own private property, his heavenly haven. And since the dog still lived next door and roamed without leash, he would have feared even going out the door of his house to get to his car so as to go to work and would have been TOTALLY disabled by fear therefore, to the point of qualifying for Social Security Disability benefits, and rightly could have sued Bill Blackburn civilly not only for loss of peace but for permanent lifelong loss of professional income as well, and would have done so therefore, of course, on the advice of a ‘good’ attorney.

And that’s how all too many next-door neighbors in the good old U.S.A. would have reacted to Bill Blackburn back in 1972, if they had met him the way mj lorenzo had met him that year. And they never would have gotten to know Bill Blackburn, sadly, therefore. And such a neighbor would have deserved to win such a suit, Dr. Lorenzo always said, because that kind of American had been so dehumanized by cushy modern American life, so cut off from real natural humanity, from real animals and real living, talking, sharing, storytelling people and friends and neighbors and from his own real earthy self therefore, so pampered and stripped of true humanity by luxury, comfort and convenience and TV and movies and later technology in all its nefarious material forms, so psychologically mal-constructed and fragile, in a word, that indeed, meeting Bill Blackburn and being menaced for five seconds by a real live dog for the first time in his life would have left such a poorly put together person totally and incurably damaged forever. That so-called ‘neighbor’ would have won his suit because such neighbors had become the norm in the U.S.A., while people like Bill Blackburn had become the exception, making exceptionally well-balanced-human Bill seem to be the one who was out of line, not the out-of-balance so-called ‘neighbor’.

But this was a friendship that was in the cards for mj lorenzo and Bill Blackburn, apparently. Mj could be an uncommonly good and attentive listener, even in the case of a stranger, of course, or a hillbilly Appalachian hick, for that matter, which helped explain mj’s interest in working as a psychiatrist with all kinds of people of every social class and ethnic or religious background. And mj had an affinity for animals. And he loved good stories, of course. Mj lorenzo lived in no kind of world at all, when you thought about it, if not in a world of meaningful story. He had been raised on meaning-full stories. His father had preached exciting, character-building stories from the Bible in church, and his mother had amplified on such at home; he had read novels constantly from the age of seven; and his psychiatric patients had cried their personal pathetic stories full of meaning to Dr. M. J. Lorenzo; so that a million rich stories were floating in his head from all he had read and seen: and, we cannot forget: he had even written the story of his own perfectly mixed-up life in The Remaking. And as far as his reaction to Bill’s dog went, his fearlessness while being attacked must have impressed Bill Blackburn more than a little, and offered the budding friendship a good kicking start, too.

So now, on the day of their first meeting, mj was passing some kind of second massive test by simply standing there and listening to the older man’s story patiently and interestedly, letting the man’s canine monster drip probably venomous fiend-slobber over mj’s friendly outstretched palm, while his other hand unconsciously clutched a rose bush he had been about to drop into its new mud hole. His feet were planted wide on the green lawn. He stood there in muddy work boots, muddy blue Sears dungaree bib jeans and a sweaty, dirty and worn red flannel shirt, twenty-five yards from the lake on which the two would soon be fishing away afternoons and evenings together nearly every day of the week after work, for weeks and months until Bill sadly would move to Minisink; and even after that move, many days Bill would come and fish with mj in Spring Lake.

Spring Lake, East Stroudsburg, Monroe Country, Pennsylvania
seen from the lower yard of the old Lorenzo ‘California-style’ split-level

Bill Blackburn’s new young neighbor stood there on the lawn, near the unmarked boundary between the properties, listening respectfully to the whole long and incredibly colorful, detailed, well-developed, and skillfully delivered dramatic tale of physical heroism and psychic strength, a tale which revealed Bill’s unusual connection to the animal world, in fact, an uncommon thing in an ever increasingly de-nature-ized and thus dehumanized U.S. America, and an important item to note when you thought – years later – about the tale’s significance one more time, all over again after many years: for Bill Blackburn apparently possessed some kind of very uncanny connection to a world very foreign to most U.S. Americans any more, raw nature’s very primitive and spooky world of raw animal instinct.

It was a tale mj remembered in detail the rest of his life for many more reasons than this, in fact, some of which were bound to remain unidentified and unidentifiable; for the smoothly working relationship between Dog and Man was a mystery, just as the real and ultimate origin of Becky remained a mystery. Yet the Dr. learned something from the story each time he returned to it or re-wrote it for inclusion in his published presentation of the Waring tales, he said, a number of ‘times’ which he estimated to be in the hundreds at least. He could have written an entire book, he said, on everything he had learned from just this one tale of Bill Blackburn’s, and he hinted he might do as much some day, just to prove how much learning could be gleaned from one really good ‘tiny-weeny origin story’.

And he always called the tiny tale ‘The Origin of Becky’, for the tale fell, he said, into a class of value-instilling tales which had been common among story-telling peoples the world over, for millions of years no doubt, ever since certain hominids had learned to talk and tell stories; i.e., it was a tale which modern anthropologists and mythologists would have classified as an ‘origin tale’ or ‘origin myth’, for it explained not just where Becky had come from, but much more importantly, ‘where Bill Blackburn was coming from’, as they said in sixties and seventies lingo, meaning: how he ‘ticked’ or operated psychologically, and thus the tale even explained Bill’s ‘origin’, in a sense, including his seemingly – at first – offensive and maybe even ‘un-neighborly’ behavior, as some would certainly have called it.

And so, just as the origin of The World, and Man and Woman, had required telling at the beginning of the Torah (and 'Old Testament'), and the genealogical origin of the messiah-king Jesus stood at the beginning of the New Testament, and just as the Koran opened with a prayer and a tracing of the origins of Islam to Allah, to Adam and his wife in the Garden of Eden, and to Abraham – as Dr. Lorenzo liked to explain whenever he lectured on ‘Tales of Waring’ – in order that Jews and Christians and Muslims might understand better all the stories that followed in their respective sacred texts, ‘The Origin of Becky’ had to be told first, before the rest of the sacred story of Bill and Betty Ann and their friendship with mj and Dlune Lorenzo could ever be told, for the same reason. You could no more get into the Blackburn living room and hear the famous ‘Tales of Waring’ and expect to understand even one of those tales without having first heard or read this tale about Becky, than mj lorenzo could have met Bill Blackburn successfully without having first heard the tale, so as to stand in immediate possession of prerequisite keys to understanding and dealing with the overwhelming personality of the man. How was one to deal with Bill Blackburn in Bill’s own living room, for instance, of all places, the primary spot in the world where the man reigned absolutely supreme, if one came to that living room unprepared? How was one to save oneself and one’s good friend, Bill, and save the friendship, from all the embarrassing misguided questions and false underestimating assumptions without the preparation offered in the Becky tale?  

In short, one could see in retrospect that Bill’s telling of ‘The Origin of Becky’ had lent the upcoming friendship a formalized, ritualized introduction that had helped make the friendship feel sacred eventually, even if the other neighbors thought such an idea perverse or crazy. Bill’s way of introducing himself, in sum, showed the potential friendship great respect already, and maybe you could even say: reverence.

One of the first things that might go through your head as you stood on your Spring Lake lawn and heard the tale which this unknown, un-introduced man told, therefore, was that the man must know himself better than most men knew themselves. And the second thing you might think was that he must know other people better than most people knew other people, even from the very first moment he met other people: he knew human nature so well in fact, he was able to tip you off, you specifically, from the very outset as to what you specifically would need to know, if you should ever want to get to know him and/or deal with him. And with these three discoveries made already, less than halfway through the tale, you had saved yourself hundreds of future embarrassing false starts. And so, it wasn’t enough to just ACT like you were listening to ‘The Origin of Becky’ patiently: you had to actually understand the critical tip-offs hidden in Bill’s brilliant tip-off ‘origin tale’ and hidden in the formalized ritual act of telling it, so as to be able to appreciate fully henceforth, with no doubts whatever, Bill Blackburn’s great and natural psychological depth.

Origin tales were of that nature, Dr. Lorenzo liked to point out on the lecture circuit or anywhere, in later years. If you didn’t learn your tribe’s origin tales and comprehend their implications, you were unlikely to be a successful member of your tribe. Anyone without knowledge and full understanding of Genesis and its tale of the origin of the universe and of humankind and of animals, laws and sacred texts, anyone not grasping what the fuss over Jesus Christ was all about, and people with little or no knowledge of Greek myths describing the origin of Greek gods and listing their bizarre character traits and adventures, could hardly have understood or survived well therefore in the Western world or helped Western civilization survive and thrive down through the centuries. Similarly, and more importantly, any one member of the human clan who did not know humanity’s origin tale could hardly succeed as a human or help humanity survive and thrive. Such a woman or man would end up as something less than fully human, in other words, an unfortunate and miserable condition of spirit which Dr. Lorenzo felt was rife among U.S. Americans by the early part of the twenty-first century, unfortunately for everyone on the planet, a feebleness of spirit that was spreading and worsening by the decade. His countrymen no longer saw themselves as part of humanity, he said; for they had developed the shallow belief that they were above the rest of humanity, and of course, therefore, had no idea what humanity’s ‘origin tale’ or its believed, understood and agreed-upon origin might have been; which meant that, while wanting to ‘boss’ and control all of humanity on the globe and elsewhere, as the Dr. put it: ‘U.S. Americans were barely even human themselves’.

And last but not least, he always added: any tribe or nation or group of people not in possession of a meaningful, colorful origin tale that was shared, valued and understood by almost all of the group’s members, was doomed to fall apart as a group or tribe. Bill Blackburn had known this instinctively, said Dr. Lorenzo in later years, and so he had told this tale to ‘young Dr. mj’ as his very first tale, as if inviting him to join his tribe if he chose, if he could understand the tip-offs in the tale. And so the Dr. always stressed ‘The Origin of Becky’ whenever he did a series of three lectures on the Waring tales trilogy, the three separate books he had derived over the years from his three separate interviews with the Blackburns; and he never failed to point out such earthshaking references any chance he got. And he would tell his audiences the Becky tale live, in person, at such lectures, even if they protested vociferously from their seats that they had read his story many times before; because ‘meaning-filled books were wonderful and indispensable to modern educated life’, as he would say, ‘but no amusement or pastime in life could beat live storytelling from a real good friend IN PERSON’. And the greatest of all stories to tell a prospective friend were ‘origin tales’ like this one; for telling an origin tale amounted to an invitation to join one’s tribe, since it presented the most essential things you needed to know in order to join successfully.

And so Dr. Lorenzo would tell ‘The Origin of Becky’ to his live audiences and tell it in the following way: 

“‘About seven years ago’, Bill Blackburn began his tale...
 ‘a German shepherd came down from the woods into Delaware Water Gap’...”

“About seven years ago,” Bill Blackburn began his tale, skipping ordinary introductions, never offering his name, ‘Bill’, or asking young mj’s name, or wondering aloud if the kid lived in that house or was a gardener or a thief stealing the owner’s roses, but instead, still huffing and puffing from his emergency salvation-run across the yard, and acting good-natured and lively, “a German shepherd came down from the woods into Delaware Water Gap; do you know Water Gap?” Bill asked in such a forceful yet good-natured and lively way that mj felt he had no choice whatever but to answer as well as possible.

“...on route 611

a bunch of big old white turn-of-the-century Pennsylvania mansion-like houses with spacious porches

lined up on two sides of a wide Pennsylvania country-town main street

a few blocks long.”

the town of Delaware Water Gap, Main St. looking north up 611

(the old route to Pocono Manor and Mount Pocono)

November, 2018

“Yes, I do,” mj exaggerated, not wanting to look stupid so soon regarding a subject the other apparently knew quite well. Mj knew where Water Gap was. He knew what it looked like when you drove through it on route 611, a bunch of big old white turn-of-the-century Pennsylvania mansion-like houses with spacious porches, lined up on two sides of a wide Pennsylvania country-town main street a few blocks long. But he had no idea why he was bothering to answer the man’s question, or why he was getting all caught up in the stranger’s good-natured excitement without even knowing who the heck the strange man was.

And he didn’t know or understand until much later that Water Gap in the nineteen sixties and seventies had been blessed with more than its share of over-educated college freaks and under-educated backwoods hunters; he did not realize that Bill Blackburn was asking, in reality, whether the rose-planting fool knew anything about the kinds of people who lived and worked in Water Gap, not simply how it looked on the surface or where it might be found by driving a car. Mj had no idea yet how deeply psychological and insightful this storyteller could be, in his own way.

 “She had an unusual coat,” the man went on, “a golden color. Most shepherds are gray. That dog strayed into the wrong little burg,” he laughed. And he laughed some more. Way too loudly, didn’t he? – considering he didn’t know mj at all? And finally he even let go a laugh so long and hard and loud and with such an explosion of irrepressible levity that mj had to look at him with a bemused smile.

Bill Blackburn’s laugh: – was infectious almost always and almost without exception, as mj explained to Sammy Martinez a few years later; it was always propelled from the gut, just as a nuclear missile had to be propelled from somewhere and by something, and it was very often unsuccessfully censored after an attempt at censoring, lame or real, and hilariously so in either case, if you were a witness. And it almost always broke free vehemently unleashed, no matter how hard Bill tried canceling it, any time he thought it better to stifle it. And so, whenever mj even thought of Bill’s un-squelch-able explosion of a laugh – hundreds of times in his life after meeting Bill, if not thousands – he smiled at the very least.

“That poor dog...,” said Bill, giggling so uncontrollably now, that the poor man could not say a word for half a minute; but then he still giggled off and on while getting a few more words out in spurts; as if it had finally hit him that his crazy funny bone outweighed any desperate need he might feel to censor that particular funny bone; and so he would have to keep on storytelling anyway, no matter how his laughing damaged delivery, because the story had to be told to this rose-planting fool: “...that dog…” (sputter-sputter) “growled at the wrong man…” (sputter-giggle); “the man was in army fatigues… and an orange hunting vest…; a hunter;... that man reached in his pickup, grabbed his shotgun and aimed it between the dog’s eyes. I was working at Waring Enterprises in my office up on the second floor. I heard barking. A dog in the street was furious. It went on… and on, and I finally went to the window to look; and I saw all this!!”

“‘I was working at Waring Enterprises

 in my office up on the second floor of the old Castle Inn.

I heard barking. A dog in the street was furious.

It went on… and on, and I finally went to the window to look;

and I saw all this!!’”

unlike the Waring St. in his hometown of Tyrone, Pa.

(named for an ancestor)

this ‘Waring Drive’

(which Fred used on a regular basis to sneak around to the back of the old Castle Inn

and eavesdrop on rehearsals)

is named for Fred

Down on the sidewalk the hunter was pointing his shotgun and cursing. The meaner he growled at the dog, the more furious the dog became and the worse its future looked.

“’Waring Enterprises’?” young Dr. mj interrupted.

“Yeh.”

“You mean, Fred Waring?”

“Yeh.”

He hadn’t heard the barest mention of Fred Waring in years: the Great White Father of American TV back in the 50’s.

And so he wanted to hear about Fred Waring, not the stupid dog, but he bided time because the man was really rolling along with his story. He was really stacking up storytelling steam. 

The barking was drawing out the whole town, as Bill could see from his second floor office window, he explained very excitedly: maybe twenty five people, as mj estimated in his head. He could picture all twenty five of them standing out on U.S. 611 under big old trees around the redneck hillbilly hunter’s pickup, right across the street from the huge old summer resort now used by Waring Enterprises, the old Castle Inn, all of the townspeople at a safe distance from the dog while shouting advice at the redneck hunter. But they ran out of ideas fast enough and thought, most of them, that there had to be nothing left but to pull the trigger. The dog was about to be blown up before their eyes, and yet they were helpless to do anything about it. Every single one of them was helpless and useless! All of those college people with all of that education! And all of those hunters who supposedly knew something about animals!

Meanwhile, Bill was hustling down two flights of steps; and now he huffed across U.S. 611 straight to the scene, probably the way he'd huffed and puffed across the lawn at Spring Lake to tell mj this story: wide-eyed; red-faced; and huffing and puffing like a retired lion trainer with a blood pressure problem and one of his lions on the loose.

And Bill didn’t introduce himself to the helpless-looking people of Water Gap any more than he had introduced himself to mj. Nobody knew his name; nor he theirs. Instead he surprised them and addressed THE DOG by name, if you please, immediately shouting a name at it in a crazy white-mop-hair frenzy:

"Angie! Abbie! Uh, Bonnie!" And he waited a little after each name to see if the golden shepherd showed any kind of response.

But the hopeless dog, which Bill had noted at once to be female, only barked and barked with more furious frustration.

The hunter in fatigues relaxed his shoulders and sought a better aim now that the pressure was off him and the sweat was out of his eyes.

And the dog kept dripping desperate froth and slobber just as Becky had done a minute before on mj’s hand and lawn.

Bill tried a dozen more names. "Betsy! Uh, Becky!"

And on 'Becky' she shut up and licked the slobber, pricked up her ears, and trotted off behind Bill to the applause of the ‘whole town’ of Delaware Water Gap, maybe twenty-six or -seven people by now, who just stood there watching the two walk away down the street and up onto the sidewalk.

And the gunman was standing there in green army fatigues still, his still aimed shotgun all frustrated it hadn’t done anything noble for its burg. That was the way Bill had put it.

And Becky trailed Bill like a purchased bride, wagging her golden tail the whole several blocks of cracked concrete sidewalk to the very first rundown shack Bill had rented in the Poconos. For this was years before, way back when he had first gotten serious enough about working for Fred Waring to have actually packed up and left Manhattan and moved up to the Poconos.

“And Becky trailed Bill like a purchased bride

wagging her golden tail the whole several blocks of cracked concrete sidewalk

to the very first rundown shack Bill had rented in the Poconos.”

Delaware Water Gap, November 2018

Main St. looking south down 611, the old U.S. highway to the Lehigh Valley and Philly

But in her bare new living room now with its ancient natural wood floor, the wolf dog barked and barked and would not let up.

"Becky!" Bill called her name.

No luck.

He yelled it louder: "Becky!"

But she barked like holy hell, disturbing the peace; Bill’s peace and quiet, most importantly. And so, since Bill Blackburn was not about to allow a disrespectful ruckus in his home, no sir, he grabbed that big uneducated dog orphan by the scruff of the neck and screaming

‘BECKY!!’

slammed her to the floor like Hercules in a lion skin, rattling the clapboard walls and foundations and every other house for a mile and a half.

And after that, forever after, explained Bill calmly, without the slightest flinch of repentance for treating a dog in such a way, if he just screamed "BECKY!" with all out holy fury exactly as he had done when slamming that female dog to the floor that one, single, first and last time, if he just threatened her with this kind of blood-curdling scream from anywhere around the house, she would turn from a growling, snapping, frothing wolf dog into a properly schooled receptionist, and walk any frightened person braving the property perimeter, right up to Bill’s front door with utmost tail-wagging civility.

“That’s why I’m telling you the story,” Bill wrapped up, giving way to his own uproar one last time (giggle-giggle), “so if she ever charges you again, you won’t have to turn GREEN,” as mj must have turned, apparently, “because Bill Blackburn will always be there to yell "BECKY!".

All out, unstifled giggle.

Bill Blackburn.

Hercules in a lion skin.

“I’m mj lorenzo.” Mj finally dropped the rose bush that had frozen to his left hand and wiped his venom-covered right hand on the dry leg of his bib jeans so he could extend a welcoming hand to Bill Blackburn. “They brought me up here to Stroudsburg from Philly to create a drug and alcohol treatment program for the county.”

Hercules didn’t seem to care to reflect on the Greatest Nation in History’s having a rampant drug and alcohol problem. He said not a thing to this frequently excellent conversation-starter, for some strange reason.

"Waring Enterprises?" mj asked.

Bill nodded.

"‘Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians'? Is he still alive?"

"Oh hoh, you wouldn't believe!" shouted Bill Blackburn, raising bushy white eyebrows as if to mean, decidedly, 'Alive as the devil! And then some!

Mj hadn't heard mention of Fred Waring since before Vietnam. You would have thought the man had died very quietly, or certainly mj would have heard something about such a famous celebrity during all of those ten years of drastic cultural revolution; but no; because American life had changed so terrifyingly drastically, and so disarmingly fast, no one of Fred’s ilk who had been popular before Vietnam and the 60s revolution in values was the least bit popular any more, or was even remembered or heard of any more, now, via the media. That’s how much American life had changed in just ten years’ time.

"What ever happened to Fred?" he asked, since Bill seemed like such a friendly, good-natured guy.

The answer amazed him and they became friends in no time, for it was summer and warm and they liked to work outside in their yards and ran into each other a lot as neighbors from that day on, maybe on purpose; and each time they did, mj would ask probing questions about Bill’s strange and amazing out-of-date job working for Fred Waring and would get to listen sometimes for hours, to amusing, highly enlightened – and very enlightening – well-designed stories about the legendary Fred Waring, every single one of which Bill delivered with masterful storytelling art and perfect timing, and every crazy last one of which mj lorenzo soon came to love like mad.

Cerberus, the three-headed hound dog monster, from a hell of a head space called Hades[3]

“...he grabbed that big uneducated dog orphan by the scruff of the neck

and screaming

‘BECKY!’

slammed her to the floor

like Hercules in a lion skin

rattling the clapboard walls and foundations

and every other house for a mile and a half.”

“Anyone without knowledge and full understanding of Genesis

and its tales of the origin of the universe and of man and woman and of animals

sacred laws, texts, traditions and heroes

anyone not grasping what the world-changing fuss over Jesus Christ was about

and people with little or no knowledge of Greek myths

describing the origin of Greek gods and listing their bizarre character traits and adventures

could hardly have understood or survived well therefore in the Western world

or helped Western civilization survive and thrive down through the centuries.”

having tricked and tamed the monster, Hercules hauls away Cerberus

the three-headed dog that guards Hades from forbidden entry and exit[4]