Tale 25

He Married Betty Ann
and
Bought Her a –

Sigmund Freud in 1921 at age 64

creator of psychoanalysis[1]

“Psychotherapy could fix a man who was unhappy at work.

It could fix even Bill Blackburn

if he would just get with the program and let it...”

Psychotherapy could fix a man who was unhappy at work. It could fix even Bill Blackburn if he would just get with the program and let it, if he would just tell mj, his doctor buddy, about his egomaniac boss, and answer all his good buddy’s questions honestly, and completely, then ponder the doctor’s insightful psychoanalytic interpretations based on ‘transference theory’ and other tricks of the trade. After all, through most of the twentieth century, Freudian and Jungian analytic-based psychotherapy, not the Christian religion or any other faith or thought system or philosophy, had been the big thing (other than totalitarian despotism or all out war) used the most by the Western world for trying to ‘improve’ its most intelligent, creative and artistic people. Mj lorenzo, for example, as his ‘psycho pundits’ claimed, had been psychoanalyzed ‘very successfully’ and healed, more or less, as his pundit devotees claimed, of some grave personal problems during the long northern winter of his famous ‘Remaking’ drop-out year. And his very famous and amazing Jungian psychoanalyst had been his own self! – his own untrained, unrestrained, quarter-baked shrink-of-a-self, at the time.

By the early 2000s, of course, things would change; as they were bound to do in a teenagerish American culture in rapid hormonal flux; and so, by the early 2000s hardly anyone would mention psychoanalytic psychotherapy any more, Freudian or Jungian, as a way to solve problems or change people’s lives. But in 1974 the field of psychiatry had not yet suffered the competitive blow it was about to, the sudden invention of dozens of new kinds of therapies and New Age ‘religions’. Most of these ‘alternative’ approaches, these therapies and self-improvement schemes other than Freudian and Jungian that were to become so popular in the U.S. during the last two decades of the twentieth century, were barely known yet in ‘74, or mj might have tried something more hip on Bill. Instead, since psychotherapy based on psychoanalytic theory was still riding high in psychiatric training programs, especially Freudian training programs, and especially in Philadelphia where mj had been exposed to many Freudian psychiatrists (during medical school and after), Freudian psychoanalytic psychotherapy was what poor Bill got socked with, like it or not.

Psychiatrists like Dr. Lorenzo did not try to help patients by turning them to the Bible or church any more, of course. That was barbaric, anathema, philistine, against the rules of the profession. It was considered a mis-use of one’s powerful position as doctor, to take advantage of a patient’s relative weakness and confusion so as to proselytize religion upon her or him; unless, of course, the patient absolutely insisted on such an approach. Jungian psychoanalysis, however, and interestingly, was distinctly different from Freudian in its understanding of the roots of human psychology and mental illness, and often did refer patients gently back to their own inner religious roots in search of deeper and more meaningful Self-understanding, as did a few other New Age therapies that would become common soon.

And as for Native American religion, the field of psychotherapy had only just barely begun to even imagine, as of yet, that any tricks for healing the psyche might be found in such a place. The idea of using shamanic techniques as a kind of psychotherapy had hardly been thought of in ‘74. Interest in shamanism would become a widespread cultural fad in the Western world soon enough, but not yet. Castaneda's books were out by '74, the first famous few. His very first had appeared in the late sixties, but mj would hear nothing of them until after ’75, when he moved to Denver with Dlune and baby Freddie.

Until the night of this interview, therefore, the main ways of responding to ‘tyranny’ in the workplace or tyranny anywhere, to mj’s knowledge, were (1) collective but veiled underground resistance; (2) war; (3) revolution; (4) Christ-like turning of the other cheek; (5) open symbolic nonviolent resistance Ghandi-style; (6) Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy; and (7) psychoanalysis. Certainly no one in ’74 had access to Fire from Within,[2] the book Castaneda would put out ten years later in '84, in which the Yaqui Indian wise man and seer, don Juan, would show UCLA student Carlos how ‘men of knowledge’ could put to good use (with delight and rip-off ‘glee’) a 'petty tyrant' like Fred Waring for incredibly high-speed personal growth. If that brilliant piece of wisdom had been available, mj might have seen Bill Blackburn in a more Native American light at this point in the interview, maybe even in a shamanic light.

Years later – yes – mj lorenzo would discover that don Juan and Bill Blackburn both, though thousands of miles apart and unaware of each other, could, both of them, lay out in great detail a hate-free, nonviolent psychological strategy for handling a ‘petty tyrant’, someone who lorded it over them mercilessly, and abusively. IF mj had picked up on this tiny hint in ‘74, he MIGHT have guessed that the similar views of these two wise men had possibly come from a common source, ancestral Native American oral wisdom, a shared tradition going back thousands of years; AND, he MIGHT have paid more attention to the fact that all of Bill’s colleagues at Decca had warned him about Fred, and that Bill had taken Fred on willfully all the same, convinced that he already knew, unlike them, how to deal with such a ‘petty tyrant’ (Castaneda’s term);[3] AND it MIGHT have occurred to mj that not just a shamanic Yaqui teacher like Castaneda’s don Juan fully trained in personal self-mastery, but even a wise half-Huron like Bill, though cut off from his tribe for most of his adult life, could easily have absorbed from Native American forebears (especially his mother) during childhood large chunks of shamanic knowledge and skill that Western civilization knew little about.

During the second interview, in fact, mj would learn that Bill’s mother had taken him, when he was a kid, to visit his Huron relatives, and done so every summer for many weeks, giving him plenty of exposure to their traditional knowledge. But still, even after the second interview provided him with such information, it was many more years before mj comprehended the significance of such a childhood. Foreign-culture comprehension was a gigantic task, apparently, even for mj lorenzo, back in those days. And as he gained in understanding, over the decades, he would update his Waring/Blackburn writings with additions and corrections.

AND: if he had grasped the significance of all these things in ’74, it MIGHT have occurred to mj that Bill, being not just American Indian, but also quite psychologically hip in ways very strange to the Western world, just like Castaneda’s don Juan, MIGHT well have kept the 'petty tyrant' Fred around on purpose all those years, as long as he had needed him, and selfishly, with delight and ‘glee’, for no reason but his own self-growth and amusement. Had mj known or thought about any of these things, THEN MAYBE, instead of psychoanalyzing his poor friend Bill, without Bill’s knowledge, and trying to psychoanalyze Bill’s boss, Fred, along with him, instead of trying to uncover a hidden sickness or ‘neurosis’ in their relationship, so as to lay out the sick neurotic bugaboo and de-spook it, so that Bill could keep on working for Fred despite it, instead of all that complicated psychoanalytic gobbledygook, he might have suggested to Bill, merely, that he would probably find a ‘petty tyrant’ like Fred useful for a little longer, for a few more years, maybe, and probably could use Fred’s tyranny for his own further self-growth and all out fun.

"Did you find a petty tyrant yourself, don Juan?"

"I was lucky. A king-size one found me. At the time, though, I felt like you; I couldn't consider myself fortunate."[4]

That would have been a simpler approach; funnier; and a way almost perfectly suited to Bill's Bronze-Age-Warlord tastes and fascinations, including his sense of humor, compared with Freudian analytic psychotherapy, which fit him as well as a smelly step-sister’s shoe.

Now: it certainly was also true, as pundits reminded, that mj lorenzo had written The Remaking during his ‘Remaking year’ of 70-71; and it certainly was true as well, that this ‘word-mandala’ of a book that he had called The Remaking had contained goldmines of wisdom and tricks he should have been able to tap into, on this night of the first Blackburn interview, if only he had wanted; and this point was the loudest hue and cry the Remaking pundits raised when they first read Tales of Waring in 1981 and saw that he had done ‘nothing of the sort’. Mj lorenzo, as they complained to each other, and to the press and the author himself, eventually, had been one of the first in the Western world to discover the potential psychotherapeutic benefit of hanging out with a caring shaman friend. He had spent the long winter of 70-71 with a shaman friend to his spiritual and emotional benefit, and had even married the shaman friend’s granddaughter, Dlune. And mj’s internal division into two halves, ‘Jack’ and ‘Mortimer’, during that year, the former rebelling cleverly against the tyrannical latter, had taught him and the world nothing if not a formula for dealing with a ‘petty tyrant’; and thus, in a number of ways, The Remaking had been ahead of its time, as the Remaking pundits clamored; it had been far ahead of Castaneda’s 1984 Fire from Within in the way the Remaking’s ‘Jack’ had ‘psyched out’ his ‘petty tyrant’, ‘Mortimer’, for example, the pundits insisted. So...: why in the world had mj not used his own Remaking-year discoveries to help his friend, Bill, on the night of this interview? It was one more big question the Remaking pundits asked when Tales of Waring first tore through the underground via their elaborate worldwide underground Abercrombie-and-Fitch Hippie-professor-and-student network in 1981.

But they had forgotten, of course, or were only just beginning to grasp (for they had only just unearthed mj a year before, in 1980), the extent to which mj lorenzo himself, the author of the now world-famous Bible of self-reform, The Remaking, had minimized the importance of that book immediately upon completing it, amazingly. Despite all the psychic trauma that the Remaking trip and book had put him through for that whole ‘remaking year’ of 70-71 – or maybe because of that trauma – and despite the obvious ways it had changed him (not the least having been that he had met and married Dlune) – or maybe because of all these reasons – he had put The Remaking out of mind and forgotten it completely once the trip was over; and then when he and Dlune had moved to the Poconos in June of 72, he had left it in a box in a closet at Spring Lake, where they lived, a box on top of which he would routinely throw his dirty socks; until, on the night of the present interview in ’74, he had practically forgotten The Remaking even existed. Whereas the pundits, in the meantime, having discovered it in ‘71 without his knowledge (thanks to his father’s releasing it underground) and having analyzed it to the nth degree and further spread it underground, were far more aware of its value than mj was: particularly during the 70’s, the one decade of its existence during which history would show eventually that mj lorenzo, its author, had underestimated and forgotten its value most thoroughly. The ‘early Remaking pundits’ were the ones who had been forced to take it upon themselves, therefore, to dig mj out of obscurity in the Poconos and out of his retreat from the realm of his mission and disciples, finally, and reveal to him in 1980 what an atom bomb of a blockbuster he had created in The Remaking; and what a heap of madly devoted followers they themselves were; and only then would he begin to discover its value, finally.

And then Sammy would help him prepare Tales of Waring too for publication, and they would release it in an early version a year later, in ’81.

The three interviews were in 1974, before all of that, and so mj was still in ’74 underestimating himself and his writing; and therefore he had forgotten most if not all of his Remaking discoveries; and on this night of this first interview, at the present point in the proceedings, as a result, he could think of no better method for getting to the bottom of Bill’s sudden and disconcerting change in attitude toward Fred, than his darn old Freudian psychoanalytic psychotherapist shtick; and that was a pretty worn out old cliché of an intellectual system by ’74, sadly. Worse yet, mj was a stupid novice klutz at Freudian psychoanalysis, as the night would show. He had a little less than a year of post-med-school psychiatry training at that point; and that year of internship psych training had revealed some personal problems, as a matter of fact, that might interfere with his practicing the trade. He had suffered a kind of ‘nervous breakdown’ close to the end of that year, and talked to himself on the street in two different voices. He had dropped out and disappeared to northwest Canada for over a year and written the ‘crazy’, as some said, Remaking.

No: sadly for peace on earth and fairy tales, mj was still learning Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis at this point. Worse yet, sophomoric knowledge of the powerful tool had gone to his head. He thought he had power he did not have. He was a sorcerer’s apprentice dressed in friendly, colorful peacenik garb; and he was playing with powers appropriate for only a master of the complex and dangerous art of mental and emotional healing, and not appropriate for a novice to play with.

If poor Bill Blackburn sensed any of this, he said not a word, however, and mj proceeded to ‘psychoanalyze’ his own friend without telling him.

Bill, with the same kind of formal gravity he had shown all night whenever he handed mj one promotional item or another from the Waring Organization office, passed him now a formal 1973 press announcement of his own creating, grammatical errors and all, that had given the artist Fred his due, or tried to, at least.

Fred Who............???

Although no name looms larger than Fred Waring's in the annals of modern musical entertainment, it is often omitted from lists of "big band" leaders. This is not a lack of recognition, nor an oversight. In show business circles Waring is rated as much more than a band leader….

Mj looked up at his patient, hoping he would explain for his doctor, please, as mj had asked him to do, why he would quit working for Fred Waring if Fred had ‘mellowed’; and if Bill had no income. Why quit working for someone who deserved the kind of adulation Bill’s own press announcements showed that Fred deserved? But Bill began again before mj could ask.

"You see," Bill said, "what had happened was, up until a certain point, and I made sure of this," Bill was firm about it: "I made Fred Waring look for me; I didn't go to him; ever."

Bill wanted to describe his kind of 'psychological finesse' for dealing with a dictatorial man like Fred Waring. The McGill (in Montreal) researcher of Huron tribe ethnohistory had called the tribe's astute and tricky, exceedingly manipulative manner of dealing with difficult people: ‘psychological finesse’.[5] And so, as mj would realize years later, Bill, unlike mj’s people, Anglo U.S. American quasi-Calvinist Protestants of northwestern European descent, most of whom lacked much knowledge of the kind, thought he knew how to approach complex and difficult people in a consciously and systematically psychological way. He thought his clever system of working with Fred had worked, up to a certain point in time, and he wanted mj to understand the matter. But it was not the kind of ‘psychological finesse’ mj had grown up around, so he failed to grasp what Bill was getting at; until years later, that is, when his own pundit followers pointed out to him that his very own ‘Jack’ in The Remaking had similarly developed a very astute method of dealing with his own petty tyrant, ‘Mortimer’. And when he read Castaneda’s Fire from Within after its publication in ’84 he understood all of this even better. That was when Dr. Lorenzo finally realized that for years he had been overlooking major pieces of obvious information about Bill’s Huron-shaped character, pieces of information that Bill had been giving him during this first interview, precious pearls of insight Bill had even handed him on a silver platter all night long, about his strategy for dealing with Fred.

Don Juan explained that the mistake average men make in confronting petty tyrants is not to have a strategy to fall back on…[6]

"I tried to remain a mystery to that man," Bill said, "so he didn't know how much money I was worth. And at one point we were downtown and-HAH!-he tried to sell me his building. And I was standing there with twenty bucks in my pocket and," Bill shook, censoring a laugh, "he's talking a hundred thousand dollars: 'It's a good buy, Bill!' And I went along with it. And Paul, his son, was goin'," Bill gestured frantically, "because Fred was really layin' it on me. I remained a mystery to him until," Bill looked at Betty Ann, "she; and I."

Jolted by this, Betty Ann spilled the beans. She jumped ahead of her husband’s story again, past any build-up or suspense Bill might have planned, tromping on any other thought he might have intended to pursue, right to what she assumed was about to be his million-dollar punch line: "And," she said, "after you bought this house, he knew you didn't have a dime!" She laughed unreservedly for once, and more caustically than usual. "A da-hime!" She clutched her glass and showed six intense emotions in succession, glancing sidelong at Bill, while beans spilled and rolled everywhere.

Bill was very kind to his little wifey-poo, even though she trespassed on his sacred precinct of storytelling. Her heart was right, after all. Her caustic edge was for Fred, not Bill, who loved her unspeakably. He scraped the beans together and shoveled them to mj, adding a few: "And,” he said: “the worst thing you can do with Fred… is let him see a chink in your armor, in any way."

....the fatal flaw [don Juan continued] is that average men take themselves too seriously; their actions and feelings, as well as those of the petty tyrants, are all-important.[7]

Betty Ann spilled even more. "If you have a lot of money," she clarified more explicitly than Bill, "you can get by with a lot with Fred."

Mj took to the spill like a starved puppy. "Then do you think you lost ground with Fred – ..."

"Oh!"

"...since you got this house?"

"Oh! Absolutely!" Betty Ann exclaimed.

"Oh my God," Bill added very gravely, "I've gone down in his eyes immensely."

She looked over granny half-rims, tightening blond eyebrows: "When he found out that Bill doesn't have money?!" She actually bit her glass.

"So: now –. Oh; really?" Mj was shocked; skeptical. "He reacts differently to you now?" He juggled this hot potato. He just could not believe it somehow. How could a divine musician be an immature baby of a man about a purely materialistic item such as filthy lucre, MONEY? or see a beautiful warm little loving home as just a house, just a material thing??? Were they distorting, or was it true?

Bill nodded. "Well you know how I operated with Fred? Instead of going to him with an idea, I'd go in the studio with a whole orchestra, send him a tape and say, 'Whuddyou think’? And he's thinkin', 'This sonuvabitch went into a studio and PAID for it’. W'l I didn't pay for it, I had the orchestra at my disposal, y'know?"

What was the psychoanalytic meat of the matter, the Jungian jewel in the cowflop?

Mj said, "You can't put it over on Fred any more, huh?"

"I never even tried to put it over."

Warriors, on the other hand, not only have a well-thought-out strategy, but are free from self-importance.[8]

"And I never went up to him and said, 'Can I draw a hundred’? And," Bill sighed wearily, thinking maybe about the times he could have used a loan, but knew that asking for one would ruin everything, "I didn't realize it for a long, long time; but when I started goin' with Bett he saw, when she was livin' with Poley and Yvette, that I didn't have money. Until then, the honest truth is he didn't know."

What restrains their self-importance is that they have understood that reality is an interpretation we make.[9]

Mj asked, "Did he think you did have money?"

"I didn't try to. He must've."

"Mmmm, but you weren't consciously trying to make him think it?"

"No. Not at that time. No."

Bill stood up and headed for the bathroom without excusing himself.

Betty Ann left for the kitchen.

The world famous writer who didn’t know he was world famous and didn’t know how to interview for a book, read more Fred Waring press release gimmicks:

Fred Waring ranks at the top as an innovator, a renaissance man of the music profession. He introduced the chorus to big time vaudeville; he fought traditional conservatism and made radio history with large costly musical broadcasts; he and his Pennsylvanians starred in motion pictures as soon as sound techniques were developed to produce big musicals; he rocked TV with the first musical spectaculars and then deserted television for the concert stage, touring the nation for 24 years (as of 1973), playing before overflow crowds in legitimate theaters and auditoriums, and winning the award of

America's Number One Concert Box Office Draw.

No, not since college days has Waring worn the restrictive mantle of "band leader!"

"Bill," Betty Ann shouted from the kitchen, toward the bathroom, "I could see where a person would get that impression." She clattered glasses and bottles. "You used to come in with all these stories about the restaurant you had and the airplane you had."

"No, but I didn't ever tell Fred that!" came from the bathroom.

Ice trays clanged.

Bill was in the cherry-framed mirror now, his coarse white hair fluffing out, his white shirt and khakis unable to hide the extra weight they covered. "No, that's another thing," he said to mj, standing right behind him now. "I usta fly up here to see Fred, ah heh, with my own plane." He laughed and got to his throne chair with face puffed, as if his blood pressure had risen again. "And Fred saw that, and that's where he got that too."

"Sure!" Betty Ann chimed from somewhere.

Mj gave up juggling their hot potato and bean offerings and solemnly, delicately, respecting his friends and wanting to trust them, he nuzzled this hot potato of theirs into a pile next to the beans Betty Ann had spilled and started noshing on it.

"This is really something," he said, "to think that the fact that you would get married and buy a little house would kill it with Fred."

Impressed with his bovine puppy appetite, Bill offered him seconds. "Well! Ya know what he said!"

Mj said, "That is really strange!"

It was hard to swallow. After all, he had idolized the man since he was six, programmed by his parents and TV at an impressionable age, to see Fred Waring as a culture hero and a culture saint. It was even more strange, because everybody knew – didn’t they? – that money had nothing to do with real personal worth? If anything, it made you less truly human, didn’t it, to be mammon-grubbing? ‘You cannot serve God and mammon,’ Christ had said, but the truth was that mj lorenzo had spent most of his life with simple homespun salt-of-the-earth people thus far, and lacked experience with the ‘filthy rich’.

"You know what he said to people, to show ya, he said, 'He married –‘." Bill lowered his voice. He delivered the line as Fred would have said it to one of his Pennsylvanians, quietly and in measured bites: 'He  married  Betty  Ann,...  and  bought  her...  a  SHACK'!"

Bill frowned and squinted. "I never said a word to him about it then, but when we had a confrontation I threw it up at him. I said, 'That's been irritating me'."

This couldn't be the meat mj was after, could it? It had to be just another hot potato rolling into beans.

Bill sighed. "No, it really shook him that we bought this house. Do you know that even when we were livin' over next to you," Bill eyed Betty Ann as she entered, "y'know, next to mj and Dlune:..."

"Yeh," she said.

"…that was a big enough house and everything," he said, "to still impress him."

Mj studied these seconds which Bill had dumped on his plate, so to speak, still unable to find the meat of the matter. He sniffed and even listened like a trained hound. Not a clue. His life experience had not prepared him for this. He had been raised and educated by – and around – standard, normal, ordinary American citizens, upper middle class at best.”

"Oh, yeh," Betty Ann stood right over mj now, too, smiling right down at him fondly. "He was happy with that one."

It worked: mj picked up the scent again.

"Does he –; does he actually respect you less?"

"Oh yes," said Bill, sipping.

"He treats you with less respect!?"

His bloodhound puppy circuits were on overload.

Betty Ann nodded and sat down sipping.

The meat of the matter stank. He said, "That takes the cake, of all the stories you've told me!" How could Fred Waring respect Bill Blackburn less over a house? Wasn’t Bill one of the most respect-worthy men in the world?

Betty Ann now rolled her pal mj a whole skinned raw shank as reward for all of his surprise and disbelief. He was asking for it, wasn’t he?

"Well I think that a big part of it too, Bill,” she said, “is that after we started goin' together, you became more mysterious, in a different way." Her bright eyes brightened more and she sat up, arranging pleats in her dark jumper skirt. "And I've seen him do this with other couples." She took a sip and her eyes sparked, then darkened. "No matter how much he likes either one or both, they go down in his eyes if they get married and they're in his group. That's it!"

Oh no!

The first course of reality, the spilled beans about Fred’s caring whether Bill ‘had a dime’, had shocked mj; the next course, the hot potato that Fred actually respected Bill less for ‘not having a dime’, had thrown him for a loop; and then the meat of the matter, Fred’s condemning their cozy, love-filled home as ‘a shack’, had really been too shameful to absorb. But this raw shank from Betty Ann about Fred’s resenting all couples who fell in love and married while employed by him unhinged the interviewer to the point that he lost all appetite for any of the morsels of Fred Waring truth still left in the world to be tasted or sniffed. His heart pounded.

Hercules and the stately earth goddess could haze him into their rebel cult any way they wanted, from now on. He had no defense for the man.

How could the young shrink Dr. Lorenzo want to talk Bill into working for Fred now? He wouldn’t work for Fred himself. He couldn’t defend the man for five minutes, let alone all night. Fred’s defense was doomed.

He searched the press release knowing it could never help him defend the ‘renaissance man of the music profession’, Fred Waring, against the allied Huron-and-Swedish-orphan onslaught. It was heartbreaking, almost.

It's hard to pin down a man with so many talents. People who've attended his Music Workshop at Delaware Water Gap know him as an inspiring teacher and a driving perfectionist; young hopefuls who aspire to professional careers and audition for him discover a wise and sympathetic listener albeit a stern disciplinarian, intent on helping them develop into competent performers. Dozens of former Pennsylvanians have moved on to heights of individual stardom. One wonders how much they owe to that consummate craftsman named Waring!

Betty Ann frowned, smiling. "I don't know what that does to him. He just can't stand it!" She darkened.

And then she remembered something. "Once he told me!" She sat up again, ready to own this line, one hundred percent. "He said,” and she portrayed Fred as playful, but hurt, “‘because –…: then it's two against one; and that's not fair’!”

"Ah hah that's not FAIR," Bill choked on it laughing. "That's not fair ha-hahhhhhhh!"

She mocked with the dignified playful restraint with which Fred Waring had said those very oedipal[10] words to her. She eyed Bill and ended up looking at mj. "Yeh: that's why he doesn't like it."

Mj groaned at the sickening dinner table of leftovers reflecting so badly on Fred, and now at this statement of Fred’s which sounded so childish and ‘oedipal’ in Freudian terms. He wanted to vomit every morsel of Fred Waring fairy tale, and reality, both, that he had ever been stupid enough to swallow.

He needed serious relief from crazy Blackburn family therapy.

A quote from a New York music critic provides the most appropriate classification of the Head Pennsylvanian. The review appeared the morning after a 50th Anniversary concert[11] at the Ziegfeld Theatre. It said:

Waring Is Still The Best.

Fred Malcolm Waring, still standing behind mj, had remained silent through all of this disgusting multiple-course banquet, all of these bull-dog-chow revelations about him, the great Fred Waring, offered to that poor puppified bull-cow, mj lorenzo.

Mj’s tail was frozen between his legs. How must such an oedipally out-of-control Fred Waring have treated his mother and father when he was little?! How had his mother and father treated him?! The interviewer’e gut churned contemplating the possibilities, and out of his mouth popped another item regrettable for the foundering, virtually hopeless Waring defense and golden tale. He said with drama unusual for him, "He must have been some child!!!!”

"He was nothing in comparison to the real monsters that the new seers faced during the [Spanish] Conquest [of Mexico, don Juan continued, still explaining to Carlos the benefit of having a ‘petty tyrant’]. By all indications those seers enjoyed themselves blue dealing with them. They proved that even the worst tyrants can bring delight, provided, of course, that one is a warrior."[12]