Tale 37

The ‘Failed Would-Be Writer’ Trial

Robbie

when the Dr. visited him in Queens, December 2018

(a principal character in Dr. Lorenzo’s Hooked on Cocaland)

a highly civilized cabrón from the country of Colombia's Magdalena/Cauca backwater

(reachable from the outside world only via a long boat ride on rivers)

star back waiter 23 years at the number one hotel in the world

the St. Regis at 55^th and 5^th Ave.

Manhattan

is very probably descended partly from people of Colombia’s ancient Sinú tribe

like Sammy Martinez and like Robbie Rivera (above)

many of the people in mj lorenzo’s books and picture shows

were at least partly of New World indigenous stock

“They [mj lorenzo's readership] wanted a little inspiration and hope, for once, they testified;

they wanted to believe that the human race might find a way

to live peacefully with itself despite everything,

that people around the globe might find ways after all

to tolerate and enjoy other people quite unlike themselves,

who thought in many ways quite unlike themselves.”

Sammy Martinez had much more to say about Tales of Waring over the years, however, than just his official response to the ‘nightmare confession defense’, the one he had issued as a formal statement on the author’s behalf in mid-1982. He also defended mj lorenzo and his Tales of Waring in conferences and speaking engagements of various kinds, down through the years, and in interviews with literary journals and the rest of the media. He had always had the most intimate knowledge of the author as author, having served as an indispensable right hand man to mj as writer, in every helpful way a writer could have dreamt of having help, ever since they had met at the end of mj’s remaking year, in June of ‘71.[1]

Sammy often complained that critics had tended to react to mj’s books over the years as if lorenzo had been writing 'plot fiction' (fiction structured by a plot), or had intended to write, or should have been writing plot fiction. And just as often as they had done this, he, Sammy, or the pundits or Dr. Lorenzo had explained in response, over the years, that mj lorenzo’s books were non-fiction. They were not about fictional characters in fictional situations but were about real events from his own life and the lives of his friends and family, events which he had studied to the nth degree right within his books, commenting on them with the knowledge and experience he had gained living that life with his friends and family; and he had offered these books to the public for their study, hoping that some of the global public, having one real person’s life to study at great depth, along with some of that person’s insights on that life, gained from his own experience of having lived it, might find this helpful in one way or another; but, as Sammy had often said, the most vocal critics of mj’s writing seemed to have never gotten this message at all, even after many years of being reminded. They had gone on criticizing the author’s ‘hopelessly un-novelistic technique’ for years and years, or his ‘lack of dramatic technique’, rather, as they sometimes liked to call it, and had persisted in panning and lambasting him and his books, all of the books, one by one as they were published, as ‘failed novels’, non-fiction though they were and always had been, and always would be: never 'novels'.

Sammy, accordingly, in the late 1980s got into a vicious battle with the press over Tales of Waring after he accused parts of the press in a journal article of ‘deliberately and/or unconscionably’ attempting to ‘dissuade the public from taking mj lorenzo seriously’ by scoffing at him repeatedly as ‘a failed would-be writer’. Whereupon one of these literary critics responded with a bold attack on Sammy’s character, accusing Sammy Martinez, in essence, of allowing his Native American background blind him to the facts. Sammy had always emphasized in conferences and interviews that his mother was Native American Pueblo ‘Indian’ and his father half East Coast Anglo and half New Mexico Hispanic, a triple mix he considered a huge blessing; for it enabled him to tap all three sources for knowledge of himself and understanding of his three peoples, especially the people who had raised him, and thereby help those people, the San Juan Pueblo in New Mexico; and help his patients from all over the U.S. and abroad, who were of many backgrounds, often quite culturally mixed themselves; and help his Española high school reading club students; and help mj lorenzo as writer. He had always laughed and called himself ‘half-redskin’, as Fred Waring would eventually put it in Dr. Lorenzo’s Kenyon paragraphs, when mj got them published in 1995, or ‘half-breed’, as President Nixon would say in the same little ‘fiction’ piece, when Waring and Nixon were discussing Bill Blackburn. Indeed he looked more ‘redskin’ than Bill Blackburn, for example, who was light in color, for even though both were born of the same mix, half Caucasian and half Native American, Sammy had just happened to come out a much more obvious reddish golden-brown than Bill had, as often happened, even within siblings born of that combination. And his facial features were also more Native American than Bill’s.

But Sammy did not fit the put-down picture usually associated in those days with either of the put-down terms ‘half-breed’ and ‘half-redskin’; because he was highly educated, having gone to respected Rocky Mountain and east coast schools both, and now was a recognized professional in an amazing array of fields. His mother’s father had trained him from childhood as a shaman. Then he had studied Jungian psychology endlessly and had been fully credentialed through the Jungians in Santa Fe and Denver as a Jungian psychoanalyst. For years he had been known up and down the Rockies and elsewhere as a past master at teaching group-self-healing techniques in a month-long group format at his summer workshops in Abiquiu, where he had used mj’s ‘remaking steps’ as outline and inspiration for the group-healing process with great success, as ‘graduates’ of the program constantly testified. He was also a professor of anthropology at the University of New Mexico, having degreed in anthro like his Anglo-Hispanic father. And he was probably the most respected of all mj lorenzo ‘Remaking pundits’, due to his deliberate care not to associate himself too closely with any of the loud-mouthed pundit sub-groups, and due to his careful moderation in interpreting mj’s writing, and teaching its meaning; and due, most of all, to his intimate knowledge of the author as man AND writer, BOTH, which everyone agreed was unsurpassed. (They had even lived together at times, e.g., from 1982-84.)

But Sammy decided to sue, not because he had been slandered as a ‘racist’, which was a stickier wicket, but because mj lorenzo had been slandered as a ‘failed would-be writer’, a point easy to disprove, he felt. And he was right. He won in court in 1996 and won mj and his writing an additional truckload of notoriety. Mj and Sammy were awarded jointly $100,000, which Sammy immediately put in a separate bank account for the sole purpose of helping mj with his writing, for he did not trust the Dr., as he told the press, not to spend it all at once, on a wild, months-long trip with young Mexican helpers to Pacific Mexico surfing and tuna fishing beaches. He had some very important work lined up for the famous ‘and successful’ writer at that moment, he said.  

Sammy won his 1996 case in large part on the argument that a good portion of the reading public, for twenty-five straight years, had never been fooled by the critics and had decided on their own, for themselves, that they had liked mj’s books and picture shows. How could anyone claim that a man was a ‘failed writer’ if millions of people around the world read his books? Sammy, accordingly, asked a dozen of his high school helpers to haul into court, just at the right dramatic moment, stacks and stacks of lists from web pages of the names of chat-room chatters on literally thousands of aspects of mj lorenzo’s writing. Meanwhile, thousands of pundits from the U.S. and Europe and elsewhere had emailed Sammy to volunteer to come personally and testify in court; and this additional supporting data Sammy paid his helpers to haul into the courtroom in huge stacks as well. Of course, as he testified to the court, mj lorenzo’s readers knew when they sat down with one of his books that he probably would not knock their socks off with detailed page-by-page physical description of a noble hero’s exciting adventure or make them sweat with anticipation or cringe in terror; but his readers did not read his books looking for such things. They could get the emotional excitement of vivid physical adventure or the special thrill of great suspense watching almost any currently popular movie. By 1996, thanks to cable TV movie channels, there were hundreds of such movies on TV every single day.

Mj’s readers, claimed Sammy, admitted frankly that they went to his books for the opposite of that kind of excitement. They went to his books when they did NOT want to be more wound up than they already were from just living in their own regular, everyday world. And to prove his point, his attorneys brought in a string of typical readers to testify to this effect in court. They were tired of feeling wound up as tight as a drum, they confirmed, and wanted to feel calmer and more settled with themselves and the world. They wanted a little inspiration and hope, for once, they testified; they wanted to believe that the human race might find a way to live peacefully with itself despite everything, that people around the globe might find ways after all to tolerate and enjoy other people quite unlike themselves, who thought in many ways quite unlike themselves. And mj’s books, as Sammy and his many witnesses testified, gave them hope that such dreams were possible and might become reality someday soon. They wanted mj to go right on writing as he had from the beginning, producing books that gave them ‘a different kind of excitement’, something to meditate on quietly while they read them quietly and alone, trying to be better people and make the world a safer, healthier, more truly human place in which to live. They felt comforted knowing that other people wanted the same and were reading his books for the same reasons they, themselves, were reading them. And that was ‘excitement’ enough for them, they said.

Mj’s readers were a rebellious and independent lot from the first, Sammy testified to the court, a group of people that mj’s literary critics preferred to pretend did not exist, a huge group who had stopped listening to mainstream critics and their thinking long since and had created instead their own vast underground network of communication with people like themselves all over the planet, people living in many different countries, both ‘developed’ ‘Western’ countries and ‘developing’ ‘non-Western’ and Western ones, people who, like themselves, fought in their own neighborhoods the creeping forces of dehumanization seen increasingly everywhere in the world, the insidious stripping away from humanity of certain values and qualities of lifestyle it HAD to go on possessing if it were to remain authentically human, people who, like them, were ready for a basic change in the way people treated people around the globe, as soon as possible please, before some cock-sure political or religious extremist did in the human race, inspired by his cock-sure prejudice favoring his own cock-sure, extremist views. And again, Sammy Martinez and his attorneys brought in readers as witnesses to testify that all of this was true.

As far as mj’s readers could tell, explained Sammy, mj lorenzo was the writer who was doing the best job of helping to move the most people toward building a better, safer world. That explained why his readers had ignored what the critics had said about his ‘un-novelistic writing style’ and had kept right on buying and reading his books. And if he failed to come out with a new one for a while, they just read the old ones over and over, like ardent Protestants read the Bible over and over, and were more than content; since, as a core group of mj’s Remaking pundits had put it during a group interview with TIME in 1985, when TIME asked them how they might explain the worldwide mj lorenzo popularity phenomenon: “The world that mj has described so carefully and honestly in his books for people to reflect on, is so all-encompassing and profound, it grants an endless source of pleasure, inspiration and comfort in a real world growing ever more cold, impersonal and heartless, and provides an eternal fountain of things to talk about with friends.”  Whereupon the TIME article and hundreds of other articles from over the years were again piled on tables in front of the judge’s bench as evidence.      

In fact, Sammy’s attorneys had him say in conclusion: the destruction of the Huron tribe, as mj had presented it at the end of Tales of Waring, was as good an example as any, of the kinds of very interesting subjects mj lorenzo’s books had given readers around the world to ‘talk about’ with each other. For purposes of influencing his readership with that little piece of history, Sammy told the court, the use of real quotes from real, authentic and competent research, had had a much more devastating impact on readership than the use of mj’s own words ever could have had. And this time Sammy had his helpers haul into court more reams of lists of names from website chat pages as proof. And the attorneys brought in live witnesses, to boot. This gruesomely detailed, historically accurate description of the end of the Huron tribe as a functioning tribe, presented as it was in the cold, stark language of highest-quality ethnohistory research, Sammy explained, interspersed with live conversation between mj and Bill Blackburn, had shocked mj lorenzo’s ‘Remaking pundits’ and the rest of the world too; and it had sparked widespread debate on the web and elsewhere, on the subject of the Western world’s longstanding historical difficulty understanding and accepting as equals the peoples of other cultures it had dealt with throughout its history, a great many peoples of the world, almost all of the peoples of the world, in fact. Most of the peoples of the world had been mistreated at some point by ‘Western Civilization’, Sammy pointed out; but the fact was rarely discussed openly by either side. Maybe for that reason, very few people had ever heard of this particular event, an event which was just one small example, but a vivid one, of that historic difficulty. Very few people had ever heard of anything like it, even though an entire continent of dozens of such tribes had been wiped out by white ‘Christian’ Europeans to colonize the territory and create for themselves the nations of the U.S.A. and Canada. Mj’s inclusion of the material on the destruction of the Huron in Tales of Waring, Sammy explained, had helped drive home a point that mj had been wanting to make perhaps as much as any in his writing: that Western Civilization had always had a problem with accepting ‘outsiders’ or non-Christian, non-European peoples as being ‘at least as human as themselves’, meaning just as valid in human terms as themselves; and had solved the problem by arrogantly declaring themselves as ‘chosen by God’; or ‘more spirit than flesh’, and thus 'above' the rest of humanity. And they had solved the problem, too, by finding after careful ‘scientific’ ‘study’ that other peoples were less important and valuable to the course of world history because not Christian enough, not ‘elect enough’ or ‘chosen enough’ or equipped enough with the Christian know-how of non-fleshly spirit, in order to subdue the ‘evil’ of the ‘fleshly body’, as Christians were supposedly equipped. (‘As if anyone would wish to be so equipped’, Sammy threw in to attorney-objection from the other side.) And non-Christian, non-Western peoples were therefore relatively more expendable than themselves in any conflict over territory. All of which, Sammy explained, had been pure unadulterated, imagined, conveniently self-aggrandizing hogwash, of course, as the very popular and successful writer, mj lorenzo, was wanting the world to please understand, before it was too late.

And that was just one of the many reasons mj lorenzo had been so successful as a writer as to be read and discussed worldwide as much as “THIS,” Sammy ended, placing his hand on a paper stack of web page print-out proof of mj lorenzo’s success as a writer, specifically the stack of names of people who had been discussing in chat rooms just one of thousands of topics discussed in all media, and inspired by mj’s books, namely, ‘the destruction of the Huron’.

Mj’s use of the Huron material continued for years and years to shock and provoke certain kinds of literary buffs, however, as Sammy explained after the trial was over, at a later conference sponsored by the political science department of Washington University in St. Louis on that specific subject. Such ‘literary buffs’ continued to criticize mj’s writing style even after the widely publicized trial. They continued to question whether anyone could rightfully be called a writer who ‘merely’ ‘pasted together’ ‘scraps’ of other people’s books with scraps of oral storytelling and conversations and ‘choir songs’; especially if the writer did his pasting as ‘unskillfully and un-artfully’ as lorenzo had pasted things together (as it seemed to them); and who then simply called the resulting ‘collage mish-mosh’ ‘a book’ of ‘non-fiction’, trying to justify its 'pastiche' format by saying he had seen something in his mind in just such a way; he had seen something playing intermittently like flashes from a movie, and therefore had ‘written’ his ‘book’ in just such a way, with brief inserted ‘flashes’ of the Huron final disaster; which were, in truth, they claimed, ‘not a visionary's vision at all, but rather, nothing but a garbage load of sentences yanked from someone else’s research’.

“They wanted mj to go right on writing as he had from the beginning,

producing books that gave them ‘a different kind of excitement’,

something to meditate on quietly while they read them quietly and alone,

trying to be better people and make the world a safer,

healthier, more truly human place in which to live.”

one of the Dr.’s writing hangouts after he 'retired' (from Psychiatry) to Mexico in 2001:

16^th of September St., Ajijic, Jalisco, Mexico

where almost all of the native-born Mexicans still in 2019

remained heavily New World indigenous in ethnic origin