Tale 12

Made in the True Image of God

ecstasy,

or being temporarily inhabited by God,

was considered the source of the naked wanton gleeful dancing and singing

of the winegod’s devotees,

those who worshiped the Greek god Dionysus

and to get the ecstasy going they drank
very sweet high-alcohol-content (15-20%) ancient Greek wine[1]

Avid Waring devotees in the corner behind mj were out of their conductor’s control now, spinning, swirling around in their sweaty tux shirts and falling-down concert evening gowns.

...Ha! ha! ha! You and me!...

They shot glances at each other, ready for a kind of Waring Woodstock, a mass sacred nuptial of some sort in the living room.

...Little Brown Jug, don't I love thee!...

Maenads writhed like so many Salomes.

...Ha!...

Goat-men slipped out of their tux coats. They skipped their stiff shirtfronts off the walls, purposely dive-bombing them onto Betty Ann's Cordovox speakers.

...Ha!...

They raved like zealots swept up in religious fervor, building to ritual climax, to an ecstatic ape cry.

...Ha!...

...You and me!!!...

All those Waring faithful down through the years, like mj’s parents and aunts and uncles, and his thousands of Virginia second cousins, stuffed into the country's concert halls like pickles in a jar, year after year, must have longed every year, in a suppressed corner of their hearts, to jump out of their seats and rave madly like the devotees in the far corner were doing now, these most avid of all Fred Waring devotees, the Pennsylvanians.

...Little Brown Jug, don't I love thee!....

Betty Ann spoke finally. "Poley's fallen off the stage like three times and broken his arm."

Bill outdid himself. He beat all laughing records. He seemed to have lost control over his laughing by this point.

Mj said: "I thought it only happened once."

"No," she said, tongue in cheek.

"He really damaged his wrist once," mj allowed, "because Yvette told me about it the night of the concert in Washington, New Jersey."

Wasn’t one broken wrist enough, in order to get their story point across? Why did it have to be THREE messed up wrists?

"Yeh, badly," Bill agreed. "They were gonna cut it off."

"I saw two falls," said Betty Ann.

Bill laughed trying to speak. "You-HOO sa-HAW two-HOO fall-HAW!" He carried on.

The joke went over mj’s head. How could ‘two falls’ be funny?

"Was it part of his stunt to play with the edge of the stage?"

"No-oh!" Betty Ann remained absolutely, all-out, God-forsaken deadpan. She was a natural at it, and the very special guest had appointed himself stupid straight man, so she was going to ride ‘Deadpan’ like a surfer girl who caught a wave so great it had to be given a name. "One," she said, "was after the show when he was packin' up his instruments and he fell from a six foot platform onto a concrete floor," she said.

Deadpan.

"Ohh!" mj recoiled.

"And that's pretty bad for a man of his size." She was riding that wave.

Poley was a huge man. Mj sipped and swallowed hard, then said: "But Yvette was telling me, it was during a performance wasn't it, he fell –..."

"Somewhere in Florida," said Bill.

"...off the stage," mj went on. "She never told me he was drinking though. That's when he really racked up his wrist."

"They were gonna amputate," Bill said, excited. "And Fred flew him to a specialist to save his arm!"

"And the doctor," said Betty Ann calmly, "still didn't put it back together right. That's why it isn't straight."

"But mj –." Bill had an even better story, he thought.

Something was happening between the two storytellers that didn’t meet the eye, however, and mj was at a loss to identify it.

"And you know what, Bill?" Miss Deadpan was straight-faced still. Her hair was coming undone, though, from the time she had really laughed all out. "That time when he fell, that was in Window Rock, Arizona." She seemed dead serious. "It was an Indian reservation that night when he hit the concrete floor."

The dead serious and seemingly neutral comment searched Bill and found the spot it wanted. "Ah ha ha ha Indian reservation ha ha ha hahhhhhhhhhhhh...!...."

The funny bone might have had something to do with Injun Bill and Indian reservations, but who really knew? And it wasn’t in the flow to ask.

"It WAS," she said, barely allowing herself to smirk.

Betty Ann rode Deadpan the Donkey Wave to death now: "It was that big, wonderful, Indian reservation they have down there." Not a smirk.

Bill wiped his eyes with heavy fingers that went to his pants. "Yeh!!!"

"And where were we staying?” she addressed her own memory coldly; and it answered, dry as hell. “San Antonio. Yeh. We had to drive like this rain. I'll never forget."

Bill's hilarity definitely lost normal reason now. "Ah shit!" A bigger, deeper funny bone responded and he trotted off after his wife on a burro named Delirium. Mj, even years later, was still not sure what she had done to drive him to such a pitch. Maybe it was 'hit the concrete floor'. Or, the utter deadpan tone, given the important subject: they had both lived hilarious, yet sometimes painful, lives with Fred and Poley and the rest, and now this life was coming to an end finally. She had left Fred months back already, and now Bill was leaving too and they could let their hair down and celebrate and tell the truth, getting it out in the open with friends (for the whole blinkin’ world to grasp). Maybe that was it: a kind of real, all-out, healing storytelling catharsis. A confessional.

personal gift to Fred Waring from Mexican/American cartoonist Bill de la Torre

and ‘Little Pedro’, one of his comic character creations

"And we went back to the hotel there,” she was still riding Deadpan, which seemed to have changed from a surf board to a slowly ambling Mexican burro now. I remember, 'cause it was such a pretty Spanish hotel and all. And, Bill!!!...  Poley was rooming with Ray then!"

That did it.

"Ray HAY Schroe-HOH-der HER HAH HAH!" Bill went.

Dr. Lorenzo in later years often said that to get that laugh of Bill’s by reading about it on a page you had to hear it as if Bill had been a pipe organ with every one of its stops open and the swell pedal pressed to the floor. All through these first stories, he said, every time he thought he had heard the biggest and loudest and most uninhibited Bill Blackburn laugh possible, a grander one would come up a few minutes later. Everybody was healed now from the curse of over-seriousness within a hundred miles at least, not just ten.

Betty Ann waited for the swell pedal to return home, and the grand diapason to subside. "Yeh: that was his roommate," she said, still deadpan, pretending throughout all this that she never had intended her lines to be funny. She didn’t even smirk, and it took extra disciplined skill to maintain such a solid front with friends and family especially, people who might easily crack her deadpan facade knowing her most crackable points from intimate experience.

Bill found a breath: "Yeh!" He really knew how to help her break all existing records riding Deadpan.

"And I think,” she said; “y'know: Fred had arranged that purposely, to make sure –."

"Straighten him out," mj said. That much he got.

She nodded toward mj. "And all the time, here's this poor man. Well, can you imagine falling like that on a floor?” She looked worried. “They go, 'You've got to've done something!' And that poor man was in really misery. And Ray kept giving him religious papers to read."

"AH HA HA," went Bill. "Ray's a Christian Scientist."

She said, "And kept denying it." She still showed not the tiniest portion of a smirk.

"AH HA," Bill carried on at such length he must have frayed two or three intestines at the least. "This –, this doesn't exist heh heh HAHH, eh ha-ha."

"Had he broken anything?" mj asked, like the stupid straight man he should have been paid to be, instead of the shrink he thought he was, or the writer he’d flopped at becoming. Because he was perfect for her act and deserved kudos for her tremendous success as a comedienne during the whole interview, as a matter of fact.

Betty Ann's voice was high. "Ye-es, he'd broken his a-arm. His wrist!" She tottered between grief and faint wry bemusement.

"And Ray," mj said, "wouldn't let him go to the doctor?" He was almost starting to get it.

"No," said Betty Ann, "for a week after he did this."

"AH HA HA Haaaghhh, ha; eh heh heh heh." Bill was an appreciative audience of this little piece of the clown show.

"Tee hee," was all mj could offer.

Bill was still laughing at her last deadpan line when she hit the limit, whining painfully, and cuter still: "I think the bone was beginning to poke through the ski-in."

Bill went ecstatic.

Mj groaned in amazed pain.

Bill managed to somehow de-escalate himself gradually, and he tried to speak. "Mj –."

But the stupid ass Monroe County alcohol chief whom Bill addressed as ‘mj’ had only partially gotten the point as yet. He was still working on it and asked: "Was he playing the drum all this time? I hope not."

"YE-EAH!" Betty Ann cried, finally adding a smirk.

"Yeah ha ha," went Bill. "Ray says eh-, 'You didn't break it. You're made in the true image of God'!" Bill looked at his wife and sighed, drained of hilarity.

Which God? What freakin’ image?

"Has Ray ever gotten sick?" Mj lorenzo knew immediately he should NOT have asked the question, but it was too late.

Where was his golden story?

"Bill!! This is when Poley started –."

"Oh-ho, she'll tell you that story when he got a –..."

"Bill!!"

"…a boil." Bill laughed, looking at mj because he, Bill, was setting up his little wifey-poo once more.

"BILL!!"

He looked at her.

"This is when Poley started his great affection for me; because that was my first year there. And Vicki Whelan and her big bust was my roommate. And she and I really felt sorry for this cute little old man who was in this pain."

"Hheeaghhhh ha ha haagghh."

"And we would go and get his dinner…."

Mj finally laughed at the whole Waring circus troop menagerie in one lump, and inhaled gin.

"…and take it on a tray to his room. And we just sort of pampered him. We felt aw-ful for him." Betty Ann was adept at mixing pain and humor, ironist that she was.

"And he ate it up!" said Bill without laughing, knowing from painful experience that Poley ate up those big busts, and Bill did not find it funny just now. Because once upon a time, his present wife's bust had been an object of Poley's weird admiration.

"And that's what started that!" she said to mj, meaning, 'You can add THAT to your Poley McClintock Weird Shit Psycho file.' For she knew mj had witnessed Poley's unshakeable ‘very’ ‘fatherly’ ‘deep affection’ for her, right through the wedding and all. It was part of the funny story he wanted in his book, an obstacle Fred and Poley had found they could throw in Bill’s way when he tried to marry Betty Ann; but this was not the way he wanted to approach it, for Pete’s sake.

...The rose is redd, my nose is tooo....

Poley McClintock, elder Silenus of satyrs, sang and rattled his tambourine in the mirror.

...The violet's blooue and so are yoou...

Silenus whispered and croaked, staring at Betty Ann.

...And yet I guesss, before I stoppp...

His frog voice and a view of his own billy goat parts in the mirror intoxicated him.

...I'd better take... another dropp-pp-pp!...

It was witless winegod music, good for every kind of earthy worship at once.

Silenus liked big glasses and a flick of Seven-Up.

Dlune’s brothers liked forty buttons.

And the comic cosmic kamikaze hymn-sing wasn't over yet, you could just tell.