Tale 4

The Mar-Tee-ni Club

The front steps were rickety, as always.

The red rambler mj had given Bill and Betty Ann as a wedding present draped the little stoop and porch, sweetening the air.

Mj knocked on the screen and smelled spaghetti sauce. Betty Ann's little boy Mark appeared and the door creaked open outward.

"Hi, Mark." Mj stepped back.

Mark’s little blue eyes popped. "It's mj!" he shouted. "It's mj!!!" he shrieked, theatrical like his mother and Bill.

"Yap yap, yipYAP!" Here came 'Docka', Betty Ann's beige Pekinese fur ball, only one twentieth the size of Becky the monster dog but five times as annoying. Her name meant ‘doll’ in Swedish, but it didn't fit. "Yap yap, yipYAPP!"

And here came the bride, following Docka from the kitchen in a beam of light, wiping her hands on a white apron, smearing it with spaghetti sauce, an earth goddess and a muse of music, both, a shapely musical madonna with long rectangular Nordic face softened by round corners, and a chin dimple that changed direction when she laughed.[1]

The earth goddess, Demeter, had pinned her long, glowing blond hair high up on her head, removed from the sauce. An earth vibration was definitely about her at times, mj thought.

"Ehmm-jay," she sang, beaming a huge and gleaming but genuine, if toothpaste-commercial kind of smile that brought out two elongated cheek dimples. It was always impossible to hide a smile after Betty Ann beamed such an all out gorgeous one, so he melted as usual, caved in, and smiled back warmly, despite her man’s lordly presence. The boss didn’t mind, but the madonna’s mascot barked and barked with an irritatingly treble yip-yap, rudely and inappropriately overprotective.

"DOCKA!" Bill shouted, and Dolly clamped her little yip.

Bill Blackburn was busily occupied with something in his worn easy chair in the corner to the right of the front door (as one entered), the easy chair where Bill always reigned, every single evening. And as always when the queen was in residence, home from a road trip with Fred and the Pennsylvanians or other musicians, he ignored mj’s grandly heralded entrance. Whole books had written themselves in mj’s head about this shocking custom, worrying him about its cause at times. But regardless, the main point in the end was the deliberate ignoring, as Dr. Lorenzo said years later.

Even Bill’s boss, as mj tried to reassure himself, the great and world-famous Fred Waring, might have come to visit; and Bill Blackburn would have remained glued to his chair, looking down, busily studying the coffee table before him. Superstar Fred Waring himself might have pulled in the drive and made it past monster Becky plus Mark and Docka, just as mj had done. He might have stood inside the door even, smiling more glowingly than the present guest, even, in fact, and handed Betty Ann his spiffy white golf cap with its navy 'S' for Shawnee, the way mj was handing her his brown rawhide frontier hat at the moment, the one he had bought at the candlelight march in Washington in November ‘69. And Fred Waring himself might have shifted his feet more gracefully than mj, he thought, or more noisily, even, and Bill still would have just kept sitting there sorting Xerox papers, mute until a point in time when he, Chief William S. Blackburn, and no one else, would define the moment.

“Superstar Fred Waring himself might have pulled in the drive

and made it past monster Becky plus Mark and Docka, just as mj had done.

He might have stood inside the door even,

smiling more glowingly than the present guest, even, in fact,

and handed Betty Ann his spiffy white golf cap with its navy 'S' for Shawnee...

and Bill still would have just kept sitting there sorting Xerox papers...”

American cartoonist Milton Caniff’s (damaged) portrait gift to Fred shows him in his Shawnee golf hat

with its logo and ‘S’ for Shawnee

After all, as the silence seemed to imply, it was Bill Blackburn’s Huron longhouse castle the guest entered. And it was his queen squaw and crazy guard dog retinue the guest was being allowed to enjoy the privilege of experiencing up close and personal. And even if the Moses of American song, the former kingpin of the U.S. entertainment industry himself had been so clever and informed as to make it past the scouts and sentinels and seneschals successfully, such a kingpin leader of his lost people should still behave as Bill Blackburn's subject and guest, once inside Bill Blackburn’s longhouse castle; and all the more so, the young Dr. Lorenzo, who – medical doctor or drug chief, Ivy League or Schmivy League, psychoanalyzed in Europe or Tuktoyaktuk, descended from Mayflower and other colonizing ocean-crossing idiots or not, should speak to the big chief Pharaoh of the palace only if, or when, invited.

This was how the great culture hero, mj lorenzo – for the rest of his life, amazingly – imagined that Bill Blackburn must have felt about it.

A man’s house was his castle, as the colonizers from Ye Olde Albion had said, and Bill favored the custom, obviously; maybe because the English and Irish in him liked it; or maybe because the Huron; or both. He flaunted his constitutional U.S. American privilege to pursue happiness in his own way; in this way in fact, just like a big chief William king; and what uneducated dummy would have been so un-American or ungentlemanly as to want to deny him the right? Fred Waring would never have demanded a hello from Bill, any more than mj did at the moment. Fred would not have wanted a hello, in fact. He would have barely glanced at Bill, most likely, and made a beeline to the kitchen and Betty Ann, to find her alone and with no interference from big Huron Chief Bill; for he had come to see her, not him. He never came to see him, just her.

So the young doctor did not try to get the big Huron chief's attention, but instead checked with marble-eyed Mark about his week in second grade. Then he reviewed the week with Betty Ann. He leaned down to scratch Docka's hot little neck, and stood again to present Betty Ann with his sacred jeans jacket which had been torn at the shoulder by a Washington D.C. goon in a gas mask the very same weekend he had bought the sacred frontier hat: Friday night at Dupont Circle, during the New Mobilization’s anti-Vietnam war rally November 13^th-15^th, Thursday to Saturday, 1969.[2]

She said, "It's been a long time," when it hadn't been. She sang, "How are you?" when she knew perfectly well. The two of them had just talked on the phone. "Do you want a drink?" her blue eyes searched his for an answer, though he had never before refused a drink she had offered him in her house, ever. Yet she worked the line as always: she stretched her chin and tongue-tip to squeeze out those sweet words, just like a Swedish-girl Bibi Anderson in Bergman’s ‘Wild Strawberries’: "Doo-yoo-want-a-mar-dee-nee-ehm-jay?" And that Swedish-teen actressy stunt endeared Betty Ann to mj incredibly, every single time.

It was part of the ritual. All of it. Every little sacred gesture.

And now, the master of ceremonies looked their way just briefly. "Yeh Betty Ann!" He commanded the house too loudly on mj’s behalf: "Give mj one of your famous Mar-Tee-ni's he's had a hard day!"

How did he know?

Hard decade. Hard life.

"Yap yap, yipYAP!"

"Shut up, Docka! Mark, sit down! You're under mj's feet! Becky OUT!

“DOCKA!!... !!!" He scowled at the varmint fur ball until she froze into silence.

Pharaoh's gaze curbed palace riot at once and thoroughly. Becky pushed out through the screen door, letting it BANG. Docka-Dolly scurried to the foot of Betty Ann's empty chair, trembling rump to squished schnoz, and waltzed anxiously in one spot. Calm returned after the clear establishment of who the heck was the alpha male in charge here; and which mammalian species. And the big boss got back to arranging years of Fred Waring illustrated programs, PR releases, and other Waring memorabilia on his golden oak coffee table. He studied the positions of things ever so carefully, redid them once more on the worn oaken surface, then finally sat back with a long loud sigh and looked at his special guest with a surprising degree of weariness.

The backhanded ‘hello’ reassured mj. Their ritual was exactly on beat.

Betty Ann pulled the front screen all the way closed and sacheted, apron and stain and all, back across the living room to the kitchen. And in the sudden silence that resulted, cicadas were heard droning their endless eternity music again. And mj, feeling fully welcomed at last, stopped standing there in shock and headed toward Bill and found his usual soft spot on the middle couch cushion, facing the length of the coffee table and the big horizontal mirror beyond it, which hung on the long wall that stretched from house front to kitchen, from Bill’s chair to Betty Ann’s; while her empty chair by the door to the kitchen awaited her return.

The wedding gift Dlune had woven with a mix of Canadian Indian sewing yarn and authentic Swedish wool folk-craft yarn hung on the wall beyond that empty chair, all the way to mj’s left, right by the kitchen door as always, a square bright blue patch containing purposely wobbly words of buttercup yellow. It commemorated the four-way friendship among the couples with a line mj had come to cherish, a hallowed line that the minister had prayed during the Blackburns’ wedding ceremony in Fred Waring's living room:

And  FilL  thEm  wiTh  SucH

LovE  anD  JoY

That  They  maY  BuiLd  A  HomE

Where  No  One  is  a  StraNgeR

"Do you want one too, Bee-ill?" Betty Ann twanged from the kitchen. The ritual required that she use a cute southern accent when serving, as if they had forgotten she was really from the opposite end of the world, the state of Minnesota, not Georgia or Alabama.

And with that, the important phase of the ritual that mj called ‘The Martini Act’ went into full swing, with all of its incredibly detailed protocol. He always was given three olives like Bill, for instance, whenever Betty Ann would hand him a fresh cold sweating goblet of martini.

"Three olives is an honor, mj!" she glanced at him while coming at him, then peered at him piercingly, cute to a new degree, penetrating his guard. Her special part in the start-up ritual, for some crazy reason, was always to act like a hot, southern fifteen-year-old, nervously flirting.

But now she added with sultry sarcastic, yet comic, edge, "Because only the big chief of the ranch should have three!" It was a new line for the ritual, a new cheeky twist. It sounded all of sixteen or seventeen, maybe, and it was making her more nervous than heck for a second. She was pushing her luck like everything with the big chief now.

Mj awaited results.

Tension bore down on the hot little room.

The saucy tart didn’t like waiting, though; and so she took off her stained apron right in front of mj as he sat, looking right down on him, dramatizing her impatient wait with comic indignation as if she DARED big chief Bill Blackburn to disallow a tiny amount of flirting and sacheting with her harmless little friend, mj. And she would have denied to high heaven it was a suggestive move, if pressed on the matter later: it had been merely a TV comedy show ‘act’, a spontaneous little twist in the Martini Act.

Mj pressed the freezing cold goblet of gin and vermouth right into his ear, making it ache, maybe because mj lorenzo and Betty Ann McCall Blackburn were far more musical than their mates. The finest music in the world coursed in their veins day and night. They had been born with music talent programmed in, and had recognized each other’s nature the day they met. They had connected in no time on too many levels to count, and they had liked each other quite a bit ever since, of course. To hide the fact would have been boorish. So, instead, they played this little game they loved to play when Bill was around, aimed at winning back power from the almighty lord of the ranchito; and it made them both really very obviously nervous; for they both lacked a certain convincing grace at it, so much so that Bill Blackburn always got a kick out of their dopey act. They were two latency age kids who didn’t know scat from scatter, in his eyes. He loved the pretend sexual high jinks; BUT; and HOWEVER:... this thing just now was a new twist. You never knew for sure WHAT he might do.

They waited.

"Yeh, mj,” Bill said in a calmer voice than when yelling at Docka, “it's an honor." He looked up at last and smiled, finally, applauding the ridiculous new twist in the ritual. His little woman could flirt like hell with mj, said the smile; okay; alright; but only on certain ‘terms’. And he beamed a huge pre-Columbian face at mj, heroic and massive as the carved granite Indian face that nature had carved on Kittatinny Mountain. Everybody knew the ‘terms’ now: tomahawks.

Mj grinned and wiped sweaty hands on jeans, bent on keeping up.

Betty Ann left for the kitchen once more and Bill sorted papers again, never satisfied with the arrangement for some reason. So the Blackburns’ very special guest, left alone once more, gazed into his firewater and fetched three sips. He tried to separate the taste of musky gin from terribly sweet vermouth, and both from bitter olive, and succeeded, amazing himself.

Those three drawn out sips helped him calm a raging nervous system a bit. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply, trying to prepare for hell and high water. Darn Joey was making him nervous with his crazy plant concoction mania and his drug program for landing the Loch Ness monster of fairy tales, the Great Golden Tale of Waring. What if all the tension and pressure snapped the interviewer’s mind like a glass fishing pole, leaving it in a thousand pieces?

But it was best not to think such thoughts, so he looked in front of him and pushed the brand new Sears recording box onto the scratched oak, cramming it between several big black and white Fred Waring glossies, messing up Bill's careful arrangement slightly. And the two mindless tape reels sat motionless, one full and one empty.

So mj hit the RECORD button.

Whaaaaht, a

WONnnn-der-ful

weeeeehd-ding-there-will

beeeee chime chime

chime!                              (What a wonderful wedding there will be)

That was when he began seeing music too, not just hearing it: the hallucinated performance started in the empty tape reels, actually, he thought later, right when they started turning. He actually saw the Pennsylvanians singing their four parts as usual, and he could see old-man drummer Poley McClintock banging chimes with a mallet. The sound seemed to come from behind him, though, somewhere behind him without a doubt; yet he thought he saw them in front of him somehow, like maybe in the tape reels, or somewhere within his physical field of vision.

How could it be? As he'd come in the front door he’d actually imagined that Fred could have come in too, behind him, a minute or so later. But mj had turned to the right then, never looking left into the other less used corner of the living room, which had been very dark, as usual. He had greeted the family in the lighted, lamp-lit area of the living room and had sat down facing the big cherry-frame mirror between the two lace-curtained windows. And this had put Bill on mj’s right, against the front wall of the house, and Betty Ann's lamp-lit chair on the left near the door to the kitchen and the back of the house.

a page from “Fred Waring Presents Year 56”

program for the 1972-73 (fall to spring) countrywide bus tour

which shows among dozens of ‘Credits’:

Publicity Director: Bill Blackburn

Program Preparation: Bill Blackburn

And now: yes; in the big mirror, he realized: beyond his very own brown hair and the mole on his cheek: there was Fred Waring. The man stood perfectly framed in the mirror as if he must have been behind mj in the dark corner, and he looked exactly like the picture on the back cover of the 1973-74 'Fifty Seventh Entertainment Year Program', the very program for Fred’s annual nationwide tour that lay, just then, by the tape recorder on the table, the back cover that said,

T H A N K S   F O R   C O M I N G !

SEE YOU NEXT YEAR !

Smiling! But his eyes were not smiling.

He was posing. You could tell.

Fred’s face was like the great big Omega on the huge street-wide, anti-war, anti-draft ‘RESISTANCE’ banner mj and Joey had helped haul down Pennsylvania Avenue side by side as part of the protest march from the Capitol steps to the Washington Monument, Saturday, November 15^th, 1969, trying as hard as they could to ruin Nixon's day at the White House nearby.[3]

Ω

A Greek 'O', an Omega, it was – Ω – a Greek capital 'O' split at the bottom into feet with little clown's toes pointed up. At the top of the Omega was Fred's big round forehead and wavy white hair. The flat base of the Greek letter was Fred’s very square jaw. And the cleft where the heels of the clown's feet met in the middle was Fred's very Anglo-Saxon chin dimple. For Fred’s uncle in Tyrone had claimed that "'Waring' was the name of an ancient tribe of Angles," and mj would find a book in Fred's hometown library in later weeks that said Fred’s uncle had said just that.[4]

Mj glanced toward Bill, who sucked on his martini and wrinkled a big stone mountain face at his young friend in a way that mj realized later might have meant that the boy lacked, until now, real understanding of what was really going on here, and was grown up enough now, tonight, maybe, to finally handle a real rough and thorough indoctrination. But it was only much later that mj saw Bill’s manner in this way. At the moment he barely paid attention.

"You see," Bill began with a storytelling tone, "for years and years within Fred's trip, the Tour, they've had what they called the Mar-Tee-ni Club."

"Uh huh," mj responded politely. Bill was going to explain their sacred Martini Act ritual, apparently, explain why the Blackburns drank martinis always. He hadn’t heard of this Mar-Tee-ni Club before, however; and the Mar-Tee-ni Club might not lead well to the story he wanted, either. So he looked at Bill, hoping for the best, but paid little attention because if Fred Waring's head was the last letter of the Greek alphabet, omega, he suddenly realized, then Fred Waring’s other end had to be the first letter, alpha. And this seemed very important. It struck mj lorenzo as earthshaking, in fact.

Scripture reserved alpha for the almighty! "I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, saith the Lord."[5] No mere human could ever be worthy of the appellation, but the notion impressed itself upon mj’s mental world and would not let up on him for some reason! He got so nuts behind the crazy idea he desperately wanted to turn around and see whether Fred's ass was shaped like a symmetrical big alpha ‘Α’ or a lopsided small ‘α’.

But white-haired Fred, handsome and debonair, stood gracefully in the mirror in a white dinner jacket, as if facing his audience, getting ready to conduct, and so must have been facing mj’s back; so that even if mj did turn around and look now, he would not be able to see Fred’s back side, just his front side; and it frustrated him. He was obsessed with the alpha thing: ‘Α’ or ‘α’; even though to turn around and check the dark corner would have looked very bad, probably; paranoid, kind of; and anyway, there wasn’t time because too many strange things were happening at once; and each thing different from the other, in a combination that was far, far less than the least little bit reassuring.

"It goes on the Bus," Bill said, his thatch of prematurely pure white hair flashing to mj’s right.

Mj looked away from the mirror, to the right, to Bill, trying to pay attention to the story. The Mar-Tee-ni Club goes on the bus? Or something else did?

"And one time Fred wanteda be nice to these guys, so he decided to buy them a little BAR, you know. It's a BAG, with glasses in it and mixers and all. Fred musta spent a bundle on it."

It was a pretty dumb story but Bill’s face served well as a focusing point, and that reassured mj. "Uh huh," he said, and his saying it encouraged the dumb story.

"And at that time I guess it was ten, fifteen members in the Mar-Tee-ni Club, the ‘Old-Timers’, like Poley McClintock. And you had to be something special just to get in this Mar-Tee-ni Club: not a new member –, just didn't get IN! And everybody had to buy a bottle periodically, a bottle of gin for the Mar-Tee-ni Club.”

Apparently whenever mentioning the club, you had to land heavily always, in a very, very silly way, on Tee.

"Well," Bill snuffed a chuckle, "con-sequently: you had some of the biggest boozers in the world out there! Y'know." And his chuckle turned into a laugh so loud, so long, and so uninhibited, Virginia Waring's decorative stained glass in Shawnee, down the road a mile, twisted on its suspension threads, mj knew. He had felt it twist, and seen it twist, in fact; to tell the truth.

And as for Bill’s year-in and year-out laugh, as Dr. Lorenzo explained many years later, it was always the biggest, most earth-rattling laugh the Dr. had ever experienced in his life, right up to latest reckoning at age 75 in 2018. It always rattled the entire territory and yet there was never a hint of negative emotion, and the combination of enormity and neutrality made the laugh incredibly healing. Bill never communicated judgment when laughing, only utter and stupendous delight. His laughing represented for him a step toward acceptance, no doubt; and that explained why Bill Blackburn would laugh his way through stories again and again, telling them to different audiences or the same audience a hundred times during a period of months or years, all the time transforming hidden pain, if it existed, into hilarious, entertaining acceptance, notch by notch, telling by telling. The laugh helped hide his pain, in fact, if there was any; since he was not permitted to complain outright. Complaining outright was feminine to the Huron tribe, and against tribal rules of manly comportment.[6]

Mj squirmed to take off his hot sweater and caught a glimpse of Fred Waring again, raising his right hand in the mirror as if to wave goodbye. It was the very picture lying on the oak coffee table. His index finger was almost straight, each finger down to the pinky more curved than the one before it. The endpoints of his fingers, therefore, made a 3-D arc as in old paintings, the way Jesus pointed his right hand back and upward in church windows. And Fred pivoted now like a mechanized Jesus, in fact, just like a mechanized Nutcracker doll wound up too tight, as if something driving him had stuck. And finally, in the mirror, the back of his white dinner jacket was to mj. And his hand stayed up there and caught for a second, like the stuck arm of a broken record player.[7]

Fred Waring and Poley McClintock

the core duo of Fred’s musical enterprise for 62 years:

from 1918 until Poley died 1/6/1980, four years before Fred[8]

"And at that time I guess it was ten, fifteen members in the Mar-Tee-ni Club,

the ‘Old-Timers’, like Poley McClintock.

And you had to be something special just to get in this Mar-Tee-ni Club:

not a new member –, just didn't get IN!

And everybody had to buy a bottle periodically,

a bottle of gin for the Mar-Tee-ni Club.

Well," Bill snuffed a chuckle, "con-sequently:

you had some of the biggest boozers in the world out there! Y'know."

 
 But mj forgot to notice whether Fred’s hind end resembled a big alpha, ‘Α’, or a small one, ‘α’, because too much else was happening in his head.

"AND," Bill said, "after the BUS accident the Mar-Tee-ni Club was wiped OUT: the bar'n' everything. And Fred went out 'n bought another BAR for them, y'know, donated the Mar-Tee-ni Club all over. And periodically," Bill sipped martini and settled back in his chair as if he had finished with the senseless story, "two or three times a year when Fred felt maybe he should be nice to these guys, he'd stop in and have a drink with them."

"What accident?" mj asked, very worried suddenly.

"It was a real bus accident," Bill said, getting up from his chair. "And the Mar-Tee-ni Club was devastated." He laughed freely on his way out of the room, leaving his guest to reel in the wind mentally, having no storyteller or concrete story or anything as ballast, just a devastating bus accident. And in the absence and sudden silence, mj heard the eternal sitar drone of cicadas again.

Decca in New York had given Bill a huge studio-size reel-to-reel when he left Decca to work for Fred, and mj figured his host must have gone to the little storage and sound room and turned on the reel-to-reel system, because Waring music began to command his attention now, suddenly, in a way that seemed much more concert-hall-ish.

Right out of Minisink’s omnipresent midsummer evening cicada sitar drone oozed a soft sweet sound, all of a sudden now, of men singing harmoniously: the Waring sound, heaven-certified, candied and smooth like honey, more real than any ordinary home sound system could ever have helped them sound. It gave him chills for a second, the effect was so real and riveting.

And in the mirror he saw past Fred’s white jacketed back, to the seventeen men of the glee club, as if a spotlight had shifted. They stood in a V in dark tuxes on risers, singing with voices impeccably blended a cappella, meaning without any supporting accompaniment of any kind, no band, orchestra, drums or piano; and rubato, because Fred always loved, at intervals, to leave the meter entirely and change rhythm on practically every beat. It was so extremely difficult to accomplish that the end result to a music aficionado appeared superhuman. It required making sixteen or twenty hearts one, but Fred had learned how to do it over the years and had mastered the art of it. He would tear ahead with his two hands, then slow down suddenly within the line, within a word, even, whenever he wanted to, shedding light on every wrinkle of the musical line's guts and his very own guts as well. And this incredible technique made the Pennsylvanians seem almost as superhuman as their conductor. It required of each singer an unthinkably high level of musical discipline, on top of absolute receptivity and rapport with the conductor, so as to always be ready to respond perfectly to his unpredictable guts as a single blended vocal unit. All sixteen or twenty were required to hesitate, for example, on a word or note exactly when and how Fred’s hands and face said ‘hesitate’, in a way that they all would hesitate absolutely perfectly together, merely because Fred Waring wanted like holy hell to zap his audiences straight into the other world with this miracle.

And Bill's huge stereo sound system from Decca could give Waring songs their due, but tonight it sounded better than usual: bass voices; depth of orchestra; clarity of each separate sound; everything. It sounded real life. The Pennsylvanians were a ‘CHORAL Big Band’, Betty Ann had said once. They reminded mj of the singing soundtrack for some tragic thirties or forties Hollywood romance: When spring comes 'raahound a-gainnnn! apple blossoms gone with the wind, chorus oohing and aahing, strings swaying night and day, day and night.

Only: all of it had been perfected beyond belief by Fred Waring.

And how could you even call the Pennsylvanians a ‘Big Band’, when they used strings and sounded classical, almost, or when they inherited a ‘glee-club’ singing tradition from England that went back centuries? A genre unto themselves was what they were. More and more, that was what mj felt about it. 

"And the focal point," Bill sat back down in his big worn easy chair and resumed as if he had never left the room or gone to the storage and sound room at all, as if nothing in the atmosphere had altered whatsoever: "the rally-ing point of the Mar-Tee-ni club, was under Poley McClintock's bus seat, in a travel bag of liquor, mixers and plastic cups."

Poley McClintock, the drummer and percussionist for the Pennsylvanians, the old man mj had ‘seen’ banging the chimes, came up constantly in Bill’s tales about Fred Waring, because Poley had been Fred's clown sidekick right from Poley's birth, and still tended to turn up everywhere Fred went, even though they were – both of them – at least 74.

Best friends for 74 years.

And Bill Blackburn, as Dr. Lorenzo explained once at a summer storytellers’ conference in Truro, Mass., right while Bill told such a story as this, would jump around from thought to thought, right out loud, until he found the perfect expression for a situation, as he did here, for example, when he finally nailed down the boozing supplies under Poley’s seat not as the Mar-Tee-ni club’s ‘focal point’, but as their ‘rally-ing point’, a term which defined the focal point of the nationwide bus tour with far more devastating exactness, wry humor and even sad irony. And then he would tell the story using that phrase forever after: ‘rally-ing point’. Because Bill Blackburn’s storytelling was always a kind of ‘art in progress’; yet he usually retained audience attention, for he made even his word-searching fascinating to watch.

And now Fred drew in the women singers. There were six warbling sopranos standing in a smaller v within the men's big V, humming

Mmmmmm! ! !

Maenads they were:[9] fanatical women devotees of Fred Waring, with soft trembling necks and bodies to match, as Fred well knew. He had personally hand-picked every single one, after all, sometimes even discreetly squeezing and tasting one or two as if testing grapes for winemaking readiness, or acidity, or whatever.

Mj folded his sweater and laid it beside him on the couch, but he was still hot, so he opened up the top of his red flannel shirt.

A Waring harp plucked its harp-plucked way up an ancient Greek hillside:

Blip!  Blip!!!

And somehow, in the bizarre mirror in front of him (or in his head) (?) (as so many said), a goat broke away and escaped sacrifice to the wine god Dionysus. And in the window next to the mirror a fire flickered, even though Bill and Betty Ann could claim to have no fireplace in their Minisink house; and it was still light outside. The sun was setting ever so slowly over the Poconos, even still, on this super-extenuated, longest day of the year, the summer solstice, going down so drawn out and carefully that it was almost disorienting. Dizzying.

And grass is greeeen u-pon the graaaahound,

a-gainnnnnMmmmmm...                         (And grass is green upon the ground again)

Dig it!

Daaaaaah-rling thennnnn...                          (Darling then)

I'll  COME  TO  YOOooooooou!

The high soprano went really high:

Aaaah-ooOOooo...

Blip!  Blip!!!            (harp plucking)

In the cherry-frame mirror the high tenor dreamed of apple-blossom time. Three rows of men in tuxes clung to Fred's hands, mouths molded, crooning in harmony. And harp and piano strung long juicy arpeggios across the room like long vines of ripe, luscious grapes.

A silent pause stirred mj to chills again, poor guy.

Then softly:

...with yoooooooooooooooou...

A clear chime rang! and it was Poley McClintock again, hitting a chime with timing and delicate force that was perfect. Even Waring clowns were perfect.

AMEN!!!

High sopranos warbled a rich hum in harmony pianissimo, very softly:

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

A major basket case was what poor ol’ mj lorenzo must have been, the world agreed when ‘Tales of Waring’ first appeared underground in 1981 and the public discovered so many paragraphs like these: a hopeless, absolutely incurable victim of Fred Waring’s music and for that reason alone, if no other, a ‘certified madman of an antiquarian DOPE when it came to music’.

“How can he stand himself?” asked the Rolling Stone in a review not terribly critical, for the most part, of the book itself – however; and oddly – but just of mj lorenzo for being so ridiculously gone on what the Stone called ‘revoltingly passé Fred, f---king, Waring’.

And worse yet, mj lorenzo had lost control of his interview already, others said: “Something was making the interviewer’s mind go in circles,” said one: “He lost control of the proceedings as soon as they started.” Because, as many thought: “Good journalists who know their stuff ask questions from the opening moment and stay in charge through thick and thin. Whereas peyote-ized and shroom-ized pothead mj lorenzo was on Planet 99. He had asked only one stupid insignificant question so far. So Bill Blackburn, naturally, had moved in and filled the power void.”[10]