Tale 11

The Biggest Boozer of Them All

what do you do when the person who is supposed to be playing drums...

In the corner, behind mj, several giddy revelers sang in a way Fred Waring never would have countenanced. A child would have known the Pennsylvanians' integrity was compromised, the way they sang and acted, as professionally as a nursery school Christmas play.

...'T-'tis you who makes-s my friends and f-fohhhes,...

Every child of God for himself: a Fred Waring nightmare.

...Here you are so near my nohhhse!..

...So tipp-p her upp-p and down she g-gohhhes-s!...

"One of the times Fred sent Poley home–." Bill paused for effect: "And this was a classic. Poley was late for the show." Bill looked at Betty Ann. "I don't know if you were on the show or not, but Tommy Cullen told me this." Bill tried to place the year. "Clyde Sechler was on tour."

"Yeh," she said, "and every one of them were boozers."

"I know it, but you see," Bill turned to mj as if preoccupied with him in some way, "they loved Poley because he was ‘the biggest boozer of them all’. That's what they said."

"Yeh, well," she said, addressing mj like Bill had, seemingly thinking about him in some way, "he could get by with it more too, because he was the buffoon of the show." She spoke of Poley warmly and cutely, because he had served her as a kind of make-believe Dad for years, along with Fred, the two of them trying to help her feel less orphaned and Dad-less.

"Yeh," mj agreed with his sister-in-mischief, only because right now she was just so cute and beautiful and so artistic and funny at once.

And also because, for some reason, she kept aiming her psychoanalysis of Poley straight at mj. "So he didn't have to do anything exactly right," she continued, still looking right at mj.

"R-right," mj said. It made sense: the clown of the show could goof up big and it might seem to be just part of the act. But still, only a few clowns became alcoholics, not all clowns.

She seemed to be through with her psychoanalysis.

"Well, one night," Bill tried again, "Fred is out there and he's really –."

But she wasn't: "That's probably how he became a comic, 'cause he was b-o-m-b-e-d all the time!" ‘Bombed’ got extra droll emphasis.

Bill exploded. Psychoanalysis was hilarious.

Mj didn't laugh. "Well, how –?"

"He didn't play an instrument!" She was acerbic on ‘instrument’, a whiz at hitting the dead nerve needing life, all the while apparently trying to analyze intellectually and coolly, to nail down the cause and consequences of Poley McClintock’s drinking problem, like some kind of amateur shrink; as if that’s what this historic night was supposed to have been about.

And poor mj, sucked in by yet another stage trick, tried again: "How would it have started, I mean –..."

"Huh?" she said.

"...why would he become a heavy drinker?"

"I don't know," she said with sudden indifference, stumped and tired of psychoanalysis that fast.

"Why are so many of them drinkers?" mj lorenzo thought it important to persist in getting to find out, now that they had brought him to this point and virtually made him ask against his will. A man the world thought of as a saint, like Fred Waring, ought to inspire people to higher things, on stage and off, wouldn’t one think?

6 year old mj with his beloved Daddy ‘Rev’ in 1949

both of little mj's parents (Rev and Jo), like little-boy Waring's parents,

were 101% non-drinking ‘teetotalers’ from 105% teetotaling families

Rev’s family were conservative Methodist gentlemen-family-farmers from Winchester, Virginia

and Jo’s were conservative yet urbane Presbyterians from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

"Well, I'll tell you," said Bill, ready to take a shot at this. "Fred's own brother, who you never hear about, one that died when he was very young, got drunk and walked in front of a trolley car and got killed, and they were all friends. Poley was a friend. And from what I hear, Tom Waring put it away pretty well for many years. I don't know about when he died."

What a stupid answer: there were a lot of heavy drinkers around Fred, simply because there were more than you ever heard about, including one who had died because drunk, maybe. Had anyone ever heard of basic human ‘logic’? Answers and questions of this kind could only drag an interviewer further from his fairy tale, but this poor interviewer had given up for the moment. He’d lost control of the interview to those being interviewed, if indeed he had ever had any control for a second. Mostly he had been a puppet in the hands of entertainment pros since before he walked in the door. They were masters of audience manipulation, it was more obvious every second. Worse yet, they had ganged up.

"But!” said Bill: “the funny story: Fred sending home. Now knowing Fred and knowing the great Fred Waring and he's out in Chicago or some town in this big show," Bill couldn't resist a laugh, picturing it. "And he's out there, 'I Hear Muoooo-zick!'" He sang it, shaking with mirth, the beloved perennial Fred Waring theme song, ‘I Hear Music’, which opened and closed every single concert, forever creating waves and waves of sweet, reminiscent, white-honky nostalgia. "And Fred –," Bill shook silently, unable to speak, and the laugh welled up and overflowed, leaking out from his eyes as tears..... "Poley," he said finally, when he calmed enough to talk, "was late for the show, and one of the guys was fillin' in on drums, and Fred hears, 'Hi Fred, Hi Fred, hey Freddie.' Ha hah! And under the grand piano here's Poley crawled out on the stage. Says," Bill cried, literally cried, barely able to speak, "'I sorry I'll late, Fred'!" Bill lost it finally and that served somehow to hit buttons in Bill Blackburn’s reluctant audience this time, finally!

Mj shouted and clapped and made so much hubbub on the couch he started to feel better for a minute. The image of Poley McClintock, drunk under the huge and beautiful, elegantly artistic and shiny, black grand piano, during a snazzy concert by some of the best professional musicians in the land, booze-saturated on the stage floor, apologizing to Fred Waring, with the audience hearing it, had actually cleared his cobwebs.

Betty Ann laughed a good extended solid one like a proper lady, while her hilarious hubby carried on shaking and whimpering, still thinking he was about to deal his next line. But laughter from the unpredictable audience was lasting much longer than anyone expected.

In the end, maybe reacting to his friend, mj, who had finally let go and laughed a good one, Bill caught a breath and let off a huge, long, and very loud grizzly bear laugh of his own that could have cured every sick, reality-denying person drunk in the woods for miles and centuries.

"Did you hear that?" he asked Betty Ann finally when the supernatural tornado of mother nature’s utter glee had passed and he could talk again. They seemed to be performing for each other now, as much as for mj.

"Nohhh," she sang, "but that's gotta be fun-neee!!" She wiped her eyes too.

It was even better than a rehearsed act. They might have done bits and parts of it before, granted, here and there, for friends. For Bill was a compulsive storyteller who had told most of his tales before, many a time, always dramatizing every nuance with masterful accomplishment. And Betty Ann, having ridden the Waring Tour bus for years, would have had little more to do than gossip and trade ever-better-and-better tales on the bus for hours every day, six or seven months of every year, year after year. And she had known the rip-snorting world of live stage performance, of dramatizing emotion when it was called for, of doing little gimmick roles and skits in front of people. She had been performing for live audiences since childhood, when her adoptive parents had demanded she play her accordion for guests in their living room, and then she had been declared Minnesota’s number one child accordionist. At age twelve she had won the National U.S. Accordion Championship already.[1] She’d even had her own regular local TV show in Minnesota during her teens!! Yet, even with all that experience, both of them seemed more spontaneous and convincingly natural than ever before, as if just realizing something wonderful about these old stories they had never noticed before: universal drunk-ness. (!!)

"Dumb old Clyde Sechler," said Bill. "Tommy Cullen. They had me wettin' my PANTS!" He swelled in his chair, damming back pants-wetting uproar so he could replace it with Clyde and Tommy’s juvenile awe and reverence for Fred Waring, who, though pitifully helpless and embarrassingly frustrated with drunk Poley under the piano, yet somehow still seemed to them eminently reverence-worthy. "They said,” (with breathy worship and awe), “'And Fred didn't know how to get him off the stage!' And Fred’s sayin'," Bill pressed the words out through his teeth, side of mouth, "'Get this sonofabitch off-the-stage!' you know, Fred turning –." Bill jerked his head from Poley to chorus and back to Poley. "And all the while Poley's goin' like this:" Bill, as Poley, looked dazed and cross-eyed. "Well he's –:" he repeated the look of dazed and cross-eyed.

The second one got a laugh from Betty Ann, finally, just to encourage him for trying so hard. He looked like all his natural God-given brains must have been used to plaster the living room wall.

The brain-plaster face got no encouragement from mj, however.

"People are pilin' into the show and roarin'. They think it's part of the show and Fred is saying," Bill did a godlike booming Fred Waring coming over P.A., "'POLEY, YOU'RE DRUNK AND UNDER’ –, you know, playin' it up like he's –..."

Now that was funny: Fred trying to make it look like part of the show.

"...drunk, and sayin'," over the booming mike, " 'NOW, POLEY, go sleep it OFF'. People are laughing and he can't get him off the stage. Poley says –." Bill did a besotted old Silenus so well, his pointed ears almost twitched. An enraptured old goat whispered raspily, "'I'm one of the shtars of the shohhw, Frred, I can't le-eave!' And in the review they said, 'The best bit pulled was Poley McClintock's drunk bit'."

"Tuh," said Betty Ann.

"And Poley stayed under the piano for the first half. They could not get him off the stage until the curtains closed, and when the curtain closed Fred sent him home."

"Tsk!" mj protested. "Ptuh!" He couldn’t laugh at the scene a second time. He was too shocked and drained all over again.

"Fred called him and said –," Bill was tender but a little exasperated, "'Poley, that's just too much, Poley,’ as sincere and heartfelt, and even caring, as Bill ever portrayed Fred or anyone.

"Poley said –," sounding truly repentant, "'I don't know why I do those things, Fred.'" It was a giant elf with sorry smile and flattened ears, croaking: "'I won't do it again, Fred'."

"'I know you won't! Cause you're goin' home!’ And the reason he took Yvette out on the road was because he couldn't control Poley and needed somebody to watch him!"

"Geeez!" Mj felt mowed down, trampled and thoroughly stunted in a sad new way.

...When I go toil-ing to my fahhhrm...

The rest of the satyrs rocked unbalanced now.

...I take lit-tle brown jug un-der my ahhhrm,

Place him un-der a sha-dy treeee....

The satyrs’ fourteen-part noise trampled the grapes of someone's careful choral arrangement.

...Lit-tle Brown JUG-G-g, 'tis you and m-MEeeeEEeeee-ee-Mee....

Mj was far too discombobulated to share aloud how Bill’s view of things differed from his Fred Waring, the Fred who had come right into his little hometown of Florence every week via Sunday evening television. His mom had warned in prophetic tones it would be the end of Florence Methodist Church, if not worldwide Methodism itself; it was going to be, basically, curtains for good Christian life; and the ‘end times’ had to be ‘close’, because Fred Waring’s blockbuster TV show came on Sunday night every single Sunday, and everybody in the church wanted to stay home and watch Fred Waring, not go to Sunday night church. That, as she said, was a ‘very bad sign’ for the future of Christ’s Kingdom and His Wonderful Plan for Humanity’s Salvation. But Rev had been a raving fan of Waring and his bands since way back in his teenage years and he scolded her at the dinner table, mj and his big sister present, and taking in every complex bit, word for word. If nobody went to Sunday night church, said Rev, if the whole Florence Methodist congregation stayed home and watched Fred Waring on TV, they would STILL be better Christians because Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians were some of the finest examples of what Christ could do for you!

Fifty four years later Dr. Lorenzo wrote Sammy Martinez: ‘Mom looks right as usual’. She was all too often more right than Rev, sadly, wrote the Dr., but Rev would shut her up when she got too smart for him.

Doc Shisler had the only TV in Florence at first. It was spring of ‘49, Fred’s first TV season. Mj was six. But Rev saved up and within a year Fred was coming into their own home every Sunday night on a shiny glass screen glued inside a big dark box that sat right in little mj lorenzo’s living room, straight ahead as you came in the front door.

Rev could be a good businessman sometimes. He sized up the competition. After a few months of frustration over missing Fred and the Pennsylvanians on Sunday nights more than he cared to, and counting dwindling church attendance, he canceled the weekly Sunday evening service over his wife’s protests, blaming it on low attendance and high church utilities costs. From then on, Sundays after supper, Fred glowed on magic boxes everywhere in town, including the Lorenzo living room. Even Jo Lorenzo, the Florence, New Jersey, Methodist preacher’s wife, had to admit she liked Fred Waring an awful lot. (She didn’t want to say ‘better than Sunday evening Church’, which made you feel you and your religion were dying.) Jo knew her music and she knew Fred was much better than good. And he looked so easily into the camera at her, right into her, in fact. He was convincing and reverend and classy, something like Rev in his black gown, and just as slippery and exciting.

In that distinguished white dinner jacket of his, Fred charmed practically every American family who had a TV, performing their country’s best, most cherished songs for them. Elaborate stage tableaux portrayed graphically, and stamped on mj’s impressionable little nervous system – right in the heart of his home, right in his living room, Mom and Dad and Big Sis alongside, no ‘generation gap’ in the way, all of them feeling what he felt – excitement over remembering exactly what things in life they revered and believed in. Little boy mj’s country had been made by God to clean up the world. It had cleaned up a lot of it already and now its alabaster cities were more blessed than Old Testament Israel's Jerusalem. His people were the first in history who could do no wrong. The results of the Second World War had finally proven the point. His people were the hand of God, the light of the world. Why else did they say thanks at Thanksgiving? They had created America not so much for their own sake, but for the world’s sake, and they thanked God for the wonderful fact. Even mj’s mom admitted Fred and the Pennsylvanians were right about all of this. For mj, it added up to a very special belief. It actually went so far as to explain to him why he had been born, a question that would obsess him all his life, from that point on. He had to understand why he had been born into the world, his being in the world seemed to him so incomprehensible and incredible, too shocking and incredible to imagine possible, unless there could be found a special explanation. And Fred and the Pennsylvanians explained it all through music, his parents helping to clarify.

Then something hit the country that was vastly more shocking in a thousand and one ways, something called ‘the sixties’. Mj went to college, and med school after that; and these preoccupations plus the Vietnam War stole his attention so much that he forgot about Fred Waring and his country's mission to be the light of the world. And anyway, how could one group of humans be better than another group? asked sixties radical thinkers. Americans were just people too, like Russians or Vietnamese or Mexicans. It was time to quit ramming Calvinist Christian government ‘of, by, and for the people’, down the world's throats, said the sixties radicals; it was time to get back to basics, like hair. And how about sex too: hair and sex, whenever, wherever and with whomsoever you wanted. Rock and folk music spoke to such truths. And there should be absolutely nothing in the world except peace and love and brotherhood. And drugs to alter you mind whenever you needed or wanted them to. All the big sixties radical thinkers agreed on these points. Who wouldn’t want to agree to that? If Americans shared beliefs like these instead of acting superior to others, the countries and peoples of the world might be able to get along for once. And mj agreed. It all made perfect sense to him in the late sixties and early seventies.

But by the time he got to June of 1974 and the age of thirty one, and was sitting in the Blackburn living room, just recently married like the Blackburns, and even about to be a father himself, mj lorenzo had somewhere along the way developed a kind of strange sick longing again to be more than just another person from just another country. The radical sixties approach hadn’t done much for peace and love and brotherhood by this point anyway, it seemed to him, and he longed to feel special again. Mj, the poor crazy sucker, wanted his Fred Waring fairy tale back. He had been thinking that Bill Blackburn must have come into his life for that purpose, to take mj back to his original specialness.

Fred Waring had been the High Priest of Special, to little boy mj.

And Poley McClintock, ‘the biggest boozer of them all’, was supposed to have been Special right along with him. But instead, he was starting to obscure Fred's Christian saintly glow and jeopardize the book mj had planned to write about that glow; and mj needed enough glow to come back to the scene, please, so as to just barely salvage his harmless plan to publish some kind of (?a lie of?) a fairy tale.

...is in such a disgraceful drunken mess he’s besotted under the piano

as the curtain opens and the concert begins?[2]

“People are pilin' into the show and roarin'.

They think it's part of the show and Fred is saying,”

Bill did a booming godlike Fred Waring coming over the P.A.,

“‘POLEY,  YOU'RE  DRUNK  AND  UNDER—’ –,
you know, playin' it up like he's –...”