[Don Juan] explained that one of the greatest accomplishments of the [indigenous Mexican] seers of the Conquest [of Mexico by Spain] was a construct he called the three-phase progression.  By understanding the nature of man, they were able to reach the incontestable conclusion that if seers can hold their own in facing petty tyrants, they can certainly face the unknown with impunity, and then they can even stand the presence of the unknowable.¹

Betty Ann and Dlune were changing the baby.

Bill paused and sipped a dry martini into which the mandatory three olives had been dropped.

And mj could hear Bing Crosby croonin’ his croonin'est and the Pennsylvanians doin’ their glee club swoonin'est behind him.

It was Fred Waring at his swingin'est and four-four smoothin'est.

The band did its boppin'est.

And the beat – ... The beat..., that slow, ever so slow, slow-dance beat, did its doggone droppin'est.

And the song – by Tom Waring, Fred’s brother – which seemed to describe Tyrone, their middle Appalachian birth town in the heart of central Pennsy’s greenest farmlands – that song – could have served as the birth song of Country Music almost; maybe; maybe, but only if it had come from the southern Appalachians and been sung with less ‘unnecessary’ – as many would have complained – college-educated-type panache.

WaaaaaaaaaaaAY.. BaaaaaaaaaaaACK..

HoooooooooooooooooooOhME.....

Bing crooned his country’s cherished pastoral past, giving the song a quality Decca had considered timeless enough to put on their ‘Best of Fred Waring’ ‘Deluxe 2-Record Set’:

Don't know why I left the home-steeeeeahd,

I reeeal-ly muuuuuuuuuhst con-feeeeeeeehss.

I'm just a wea-ry ex-ile

(thunk) Sing-ing my sooohng of

Loooooooooohne-li-neeeeeehss...²

“Mark calls Fred 'Fickle-Flopper',” Bill said when the baby quit yelling and Betty Ann looked up. “It all started because Fred said,” and Bill sounded like a tape recording on fast-forward, "’Feter-Fifer-flicked-a-fleck-of-fickle-fleppers. Hello, Fickle-fl-flo-f-flo-‘. And Mark would go, ‘Hi, Fickle-Flopperfl-ful-f-f-fl-fluh’."

Betty Ann laughed. The portrayal was unusual. Hard to forget; and it proved her husband an artist; though ‘artist’ sounded foolish since Bill never dressed up in tails like Fred and Poley, to tell his storyteller tales on stage.

But more to Bill’s credit: nobody seemed to refer to Fred neutrally or fairly any more, least of all Bill; and yet: her man was big enough now, at this critical moment, to grant that Fred could be a fun grandfather-type to a five-year-old kid, Mark, if and when he relaxed for a second. And if Bill described a complex man like Fred Waring neutrally; and even accurately, as he did; and did it tellingly, so you never forgot the picture; then an artist of Betty Ann’s caliber owed Bill Blackburn the reward of a laugh – or so thought mj. (And all the more, since she’d gone to the trouble to marry the man).

And moreover, she took Bill’s introduction to mean it was her turn. “W'l anyway,” she said. “Then the time that I went to see Poley in the hospital –. You took care of Mark,” she looked at Bill. “That was when Mark –...”

BUT WHO WAS STORYTELLER HERE? Had the cutesy wootsy second fiddle begged proper permission to take over the first fiddle’s story?

And now: was it too late to undo the damage done to the big Huron chief ’s Special Edition stage performance?

Something like all this could be read in his dramatically raised white bear eyebrows.

Bing’s schmoozing crooning glowed and flowed like a hot croissant dipped in hot melted butter. The whole crooned song was a Bing Crosby star show, in fact; and it robbed the Pennsylvanians of some starlight for a bit; but Fred kept inviting Bing to sing with them year after year, because the combination was perfection. And anyway, Bing was a golfing buddy.

The roads are the dus-ti-est,

The winds are the gus-ti-est,

The gates are the rus-ti-est,

The pies are the crus-ti-est...

“She called me up,” Bill took back the lead, as returned by his wife’s glance and silence.

He honored the gesture: “And she said to me, she said, ‘Listen. I've got to take care of Poley. Will you take care of Mark’?

“So I said, ‘Yuh, ahh... I'll take him up to the office with me. It's the only thing I can do’.

“And she says, ‘Alright’.

“I said, ‘I'll bring him back over’.

“And she says, ‘I'll be back over at my house around four o'clock’.

“Now this is the truth!” Bill reminded. After all, he, William S. Blackburn, had been the first to propose that his tales of Waring be taped for mj’s ‘book about Waring’. Everybody should learn from tales like these! That’s why he had told them to friends, and told them and told them and told them and told them and told them to friends.

The songs, the songs the lus-ti-est,

The friends, the friends the trus-ti-est,

WaaaaaaaaaaaAY.. BaaaaaaaaaaaACK..

HoooooooooooooooooooOhME.....

“So: I said, ‘Allright, I'll take him over to the office for awhile and let him goof around at the office, and at three forty-five I'll leave the office and bring him over to you’. To Poley and Yvette's house,” as Bill made clear; for that was where Betty Ann had been living when they had first started to date, as both had said at least once already: above their garage. Bill sighed. “So she brings Mark over and drops him off. And off she goes to the hospital to see Poley.

“So I'm takin' care of Mark.

“Three forty-five I start out and I'm goin' over the hill to Shawnee. Right?” Meaning: get the picture? Can you see me, your buddy, Bill Blackburn, Fred Waring’s right-hand 'man', driving Fred’s old Buick on winding, narrow, grey blacktop Pennsylvania backcountry rural-woodsy-route, from my cottage in Water Gap, crossing Interstate 80, going up the forested hill, down through one-horse Minisink, and down into little Shawnee toward Poley and Yvette’s?  “As I reached right in front of Fred's ‘Shawnee Store’, I'm in Fred's car comin' boppin' over. And here comes Fred this way.

“And as I go by Fred – and you're goin' slow because it's the little village of Shawnee. He stops back here and starts backin' up and I stopped the car. I thought he was gonna tell me somethin'.

“He says –: ‘Hi’!”

Forceful and superior was the tone.

The boys are the wit-ti-est,

The girls are the pret-ti-est...

Joey’s guru could touch on some of the most surprising subjects on the tapes Joey kept sending. “Who are we?” the guru would ask on a tape. “Have we ever looked at ourselves in the mirror?” But he didn’t mean the mirror on the wall. He meant the Mirror of Life. That mirror. Had we ever looked at ourselves in that mirror? To see if our life was really about what we thought it was about, really? Was life really supposed to be about such things as questions about who deserved to win Betty Ann’s attention and her heart most, Fred or Bill? Or wasn’t it supposed to be about something else really?³

“I s's,” Bill said blankly, ‘Hi’.

“Then he said,” and Bill’s Fred Waring sounded suspicious: ‘What's he doin' with ya’?

“I said,” and Bill made himself as professionally polite and respectful and business-like as he could, while still his own man. ‘I'm just takin' 'im over to Betty Ann's’....

"’Why’?

“I said, ‘Well she had to go see Poley today and I've been baby-sitting’....

“And he says –.” Bill did a shockingly authoritative Fred Waring: ‘I'll  take care of 'im’.”

The grins, the grins the fun-ni-est,

The smiles, the smiles the sun-ni-est...

WaaaaaaaaaaaAY.. Baaaaaa-aaaaaACK..

HoooooooooooooooooooOhME.....

The kid guru said that in fact people rarely if ever looked into the true mirror of life. But when they did they discovered that they were just the tiniest speck of dust in the universe, just nothing really.

“I said, ‘Well I don't think that's right. She left him in my charge. I don't think it's right to turn him over to somebody else’.

Fred shouted loudly. He was insulted: "’I'm not just somebody else, god damn it!  She's like one of the family’!"

...The trees are the sap-piest...

Mj laughed at the storyteller’s fool rump of a jackass, Fred Waring. And he plugged this fragile-ego-ed Fred into several soul-searching conceptual frameworks. But he kept his philosophy to himself, unlike previous interviews; because Bill had to shine by himself this time and record the story they all wanted preserved.

And Bill Blackburn was well on his way to his goal at last, his dream of portraying a supposedly ‘great’ U.S. American ‘celebrity’, a man Americans considered star-bedecked and ‘important’, who had in fact lived life so far removed from any spiritual knowledge whatever of the fine art of emotional detachment practiced so attractively and successfully by millions and millions all over the globe for thousand of years, and even by Bill’s own Huron tribe, that by 1972, at 72 years of age, Fred Waring posed a major mental health problem to almost anyone in the world who dealt with him regularly, president or peon, especially those beneath his social status or working for him, which included, in his mind, just about everybody on the planet: "’Now you tell that kid to come over get in my car’!"

Yet everything, said Joey’s guru, every little thing was really, really beautiful. People were tiny, so very tiny it really didn’t even matter how tiny they were. They were so tiny they couldn’t even be measured for size, and yet they were so big and so incredible that a guru would come, just to help that tiny insignificant speck of dust that hardly existed, you! A guru would come for you, and maybe a hundred thousand more, maybe millions. That’s how insignificant and great we were, both, at the same time. And yet when the guru came, of course, we could always ignore him if we wanted to ignore him. Or we could let him save us from the flooded river of cowflop flowing around us constantly, even save us from Bill and Fred fighting over who might possess more right to Betty Ann McCall, fighting and fighting until Bill felt forced to quit working for Fred and suffer poverty as now.⁴

Bill portrayed himself back in 1972 as having gotten a little louder with Fred Waring at this point, while still professionally servant-class and polite: "’I don't think it's right when a woman left – she left him in my charge – to dump him off on you. I just don't think that's a right thing. I don't think it's right for the child –...’

“‘I s-... god damn it, Bill’,” Fred Waring shouted loudly straight through Bill, through the Blackburn living room past mj and across the road to Shawnee: “‘this is ridiculous. Now I told you –. What are you doing anyway? Is it four o'clock yet? Are you supposed to be off work?"

“Y'know. He started all this B.S.”

Bill Blackburn was working for Fred at the time, still. This was back in ’72 when Bill still depended on the man for daily survival, roof and food. The great man and celebrity saint, Fred Waring, in other words, the very close friend of two U.S. American presidents, Eisenhower and Nixon, was willing to threaten an employee’s livelihood and even trample on a critical and highly respected employee’s manhood, meaning dignity, and all that was good and fine about him, and there was a lot, a whole lot in this case, hoping to derive some kind of weird personal gain, whatever that gain might have been in Fred’s twisted, mixed-up mind: maybe he was hoping to gain male ego brownie points with – maybe – or exclusive access to – the holy queen-bee-musician of his life: Betty Ann McCall.   

The days are the nap-pi-est,

The dogs are the yap-pi-est,

The kids are the scrap-pi-est...

“I said,” Bill sounded despairing, ‘Allright.  OK....  O-K’.  I said, ‘Mark, go get in that car’.

Mj lorenzo whimpered with glee at this slow, crazy buildup of plot tension, just the kind he’d been wanting from the start of the first night’s interview with the Blackburns: this story. Finally he was hearing it in excellent form. A bang-up job was what it was, because every bit of Fred’s excellent undying red-blooded American imperialist asshole-ism was going right down into the circling tape machine.

And Joey’s guru said that while you could ignore a guru when one showed up because it was ALWAYS your choice, of course, it was important to realize, too, that a guru could ignore you TOO since you were just a tiny insignificant speck of interplanetary dust. And the fact that the guru did NOT ignore you, though: what should you make of that tiny little wrinkle? How did he find you at all, in fact, considering just how much interplanetary dust was really out there just doing nothing but waiting for him to pay attention to it? Why had he NOT ignored you and your little corner of the globe since you were so insignificant? Just what WERE you to make of that weird banana anyway? How SHOULD you respond now, you dunce rump, to his having found YOU?⁵

“And he says to me,” Bill shouted like his Fred Waring had, so demandingly: ‘Why don't you escort him across the road’?”

Bill looked at his friend, mj. “We're blocking the road. Nothing could possibly hit him.”

Mj looked back at his million dollar storyteller with delight and enough respect to allow him to build tension as he wanted, and at whatever crazy rate he preferred. The interviewer was NOT going to say something inane, and disrupt the rhythm.

“I escorted him.”

Mj laughed.

Betty Ann made a special noise with her tongue.

“He was irate,” said Bill.  “So—,” Bill laughed a little as well, finally. He rarely told a story without laughing a lot more than he was laughing at this one now; and that said something. “Up to the corner I went and turned around and came back to my house, which was in Water Gap back then. And I was seething. I was sitting there sayin' to myself, ‘Why in shit didn't you just outright tell him to go to hell’? I'm boiling. I mean: I WAS SEETHING.”

And Fred’s good Shawnee golfing buddy, Bing Crosby, blessed as he was with practically the smoothest baritone singing voice in Homo sapiens history, just went on naming and naming the many wonderful and natural, heavenly things one got to enjoy in traditional home towns that crouched in humble green rural valleys like Tyrone in Blair County, or Shawnee-on-Delaware in Monroe County, one mile down the road from the teeny-weeny mini-village of Minisink:

The pigs are the snootiest,

The owls are the hootiest,

The plants are the fruitiest,

The stars are the shootiest...

Minisink Hills, Shawnee-on-Delaware, and Spring Lake, thought mj, might have been, all, rural villages just as simple, natural, human and healthy-minded as the one in the song, way back before the Fred Warings of the world had gained inordinate power and turned people in their purview into mental and spiritual cripples, starting with themselves.

“So suddenly,” said Bill, “Betty Ann was comin' back from the hospital and saw my car in the yard. And it was about five o'clock. So she pulls in. Knock comes on the door. I said, ‘Yes’!

“And she says, ‘Hi. Where's Mark’?

“I says, ‘Don't even say that to me’.

"’Why? What's wrong? Somethin' happen to him’?

“I said, ‘Fred Waring's got him’.

“I told her the story of Fred Waring.

“So she's standin' inside the door.

“This is absolutely the truth. It's hilarious.”

The jokes, the jokes the snap-pi-est,

The folks, the folks the hap-pi-est...

“She's standing inside the door at my cottage in Water Gap and I said, ‘Well come on in for a minute. So Fred Waring's got 'im. Come on in’.

“So she came in and sat down. That's it: sat down.”

Bill lowered his voice: “And we hear this God-awful commotion in the yard. And a knock on the door. And he says –.” Bill used a baby tone: ‘Hi, Mommy’.

“‘Mark’! I says. ‘How did you get here’?!

“And he says, ‘Fickle-Flopper brought me’!

Bill laughed at the incredulous expression on mj's face. Why would Fred bring him back after he had just fought like hell to get possession of the kid?

“This is a true story!” Bill said. “I said, ‘Well where is he now’?

“He says, ‘Out in the car’.

“So I said, ‘Well, just a minute’, and I started out the door. I opened the door to look out there and he was peeling rubber... backwards out of that yard. Slammed the car –. And I'm yelling. I'm goin' like this.” Bill waved and halloed in his Minisink Hills storyteller chair. “And he put the car in drive and off he went roaring down the road.

“Is that true?” Bill asked respectfully, and yet rather insistently, of Betty Ann.

WaaaaaaaaaaaAY.. Baaaaaa-aaaaaACK..

HoooooooooooooooooooOhME.....

And she grunted ‘Yes’ in a way that left no doubt.

And Joey’s guru also said that the only reason a guru WAS a guru was because of YOU. And when YOU came; and when the GURU came; and when EVERYBODY came; and all of you got together you all made the most beautiful garland together. You loved each other! You knew each other. There wasn’t hate any more, but love. Love filled everybody's heart completely, the heart of every single speck of planetary dust that hovered anywhere near the guru.⁶

Dlune was lost in space, though, and she asked, “Well, why was he that mad?”

And it was the question the storyteller had known would be asked; for he had designed the tale to provoke the question. His audience was supposed to not grasp the ridiculous reason for Fred’s intense outrage. Because: there could be no apparent – or sane – or reasonable cause FOR such an outrage. It was irrational, crazy anger; childish, spoiled, tantrum-y anger; insanely jealous anger.

Only, Bill, because he was practiced at telling this story, answered in a much better and very surprising way: “Because he thought I had dumped this child on him. And he was baby-sittin' while I was in there makin' love to Betty Ann!”

The laugh that Dlune let ring was as shrill as a bell.

The old pals the rea-di-est,

The home girls the stea-di-est...

“And the fact is,” said Bill, “she just barely arrived there!”

“It was a Doris Day, Rock Hudson film,” offered Betty Ann, revealing how far from Bill she could get when evaluating Fred. For those silly films had been light romantic comedies, whereas the relationship between Bill and Fred had gotten dark and thoroughly not funny when Bill had started dating Betty Ann, at least as Bill saw the story. Old man Fred’s incomprehensibly intense and bizarre reaction to their dating had infuriated a good and sensible middle-aged man like Bill Blackburn. It had pushed him, in fact, beyond the limit of his famous talent for dealing with difficult people. All of the mellow-headed Huron braves like Bill Blackburn were required by timeless Huron tradition to remain absolutely and resolutely cool, brave and manly in the presence of silly, spoiled, childish white-man brat tyrants like Fred Waring. A Huron man ALWAYS treated an elder with great deference, even a stupid and senile elder Huron. Even an East Coast robber baron's man had to treat his boss with respect, as Bill's paternal grandfather had ALWAYS treated his New York baron boss, Edward Henry Harriman, even after a U.S. President denounced Harriman's business methods in public, as President Teddy Roosevelt did. And so, the result had been a world-quaking build-up of tension inside poor Bill. And Fred had ended up pushing gravely serious buttons in Bill Blackburn that poor Bill had not known were even in him to be pushed, apparently.

And the bride and groom had interpreted Fred differently since the day they had started going together, as it sounded.

“Then I went over to her house two days later, the rooms she rented over Poley and Yvette’s garage,” he said.  “I'm sitting up there in her living room and I hear this car. And who walks upstairs? Fred Waring!

“And it was like this constantly for WEEKS.”

"....But I had the proper equipment to deal with him" [don Juan said;] I had control, discipline, forbearance, and timing. It turned out as my benefactor had planned it. My control made me fulfill the man's most asinine demands. What usually exhausts us in a situation like that is the wear and tear on our self-importance. Any man who has an iota of pride is ripped apart by being made to feel worthless.⁷

The love, the love the liveliest,

The life, the life the loveliest

WaaaaaaaaaaaAY.. Baaaaaa-aaaaaACK..

HoooooooooooooooooooOhME.....

And Guru Garland said on one of his tapes, that people would probably find it hard to believe that such a world could possibly exist as the one a guru could create around him among his devotees. But it could exist, he said, he knew from experience; because he had grown up in his father’s house, and his father had been a guru. In fact his father had been Guru Garland’s guru, until the incredible man had died, designating him his successor. And so he knew it could happen. But it could only happen if a person made an effort to MAKE it happen. And once you made the effort, THE MOST INCREDIBLE THING IN THE UNIVERSE WOULD HAPPEN TO YOU, he said, the insignificant speck would merge with everything. That speck of dust would fulfill its destiny. It would become one with infinity, merging with the most unbelievable and impossible to describe thing that there was.⁸

And Bill Blackburn’s ‘Fickle-Flopper’ story served the purpose of introducing mj and Dlune (and the rest of the world) to the theme of Fred Waring’s rude and totalitarian tyranny over Bill, a theme Bill intended to develop until it reached a climax and resolution in the story mj liked to call ‘Mrs. Nixon’s Legs’.

Bill had said a number of times that Fred had treated him, by and large, with business-like respect over the many years he had worked for Fred; but only until the day when Bill had fallen in love with Betty Ann, and started seeing her and taking her out. Then Fred had turned on him, using his position of boss as a weapon of irrational adolescent tyranny.

¹  Castaneda, Carlos, The Fire from Within, New York: Washington Square Press, 1984, p. 19. The author, mj lorenzo, with this first Castaneda quote, began here a new thread of thought, namely that Bill Blackburn was somehow in tune with the kind of knowledge which the most advanced seers and shamans of the New World practiced at the time of the Conquest of Mexico by Spain (the 1500s). Dr. Lorenzo’s emphasis, whenever pursuing this thread of understanding, was upon the great usefulness that the experience of being tormented by a ‘petty tyrant’ could serve a wise man for his self-development; meaning, usefulness for building and developing inner control, self-discipline and other marks of real and manly yet non-violent character. Castaneda elucidated this kind of learning process in his seventh book, The Fire from Within, particularly in the chapter entitled, “Petty Tyrants.” Bill had never heard of Castaneda and he never discussed or taught the techniques which he, Bill, employed for dealing with the petty tyrant, Fred. Bill’s modus operandi was storytelling, not lecturing. One had to listen to his stories and think about his approach in order to arrive at an understanding of his techniques. The techniques were there, but they were not named or taught directly, as they were in Castaneda’s books. They were simply demonstrated and modeled via behaviors in real life and in the behavior Bill showed in his stories about himself; and Dr. Lorenzo tried to show this as Bill’s story developed in this and subsequent chapters.

²  The song is “Way Back Home,” by Al Lewis and Tom Waring. It may be found, for example, on Decca’s 2-record collection, “The Best of Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians.”

³  The Living Master: quotes from Guru Maharaj Ji, pp. 78, 80.

⁴  Op. cit.  From a satsang delivered by Guru Maharaji in London, England, March 5, 1978.

⁵  Ibid., p. 81.

⁶  Ibid., pp. 81, 82.

⁷  Castaneda, op. cit., p. 26. Carlos Castaneda’s teacher, don Juan, is describing his own training experience, the time when his own teacher, the nagual, Julian, helped him set up a situation where he was tormented by a ‘petty tyrant’ and learned to use the experience to develop the strong character traits of a psychological warrior. The story that don Juan is telling is a parallel to the story that Bill is telling, and for this reason mj lorenzo has included it here in the collage, the strange new kind of tapestry of ideas and themes he is weaving into the present chapter and book. (A ‘nagual’ was a trained, expert, experienced, qualified teacher of higher knowledge in traditional tribal Mexico.)

⁸  The Living Master, p. 82; 25, 26: “’Guru Maharaj Ji, where did you receive this Knowledge?’ ‘From my Guru. It’s not like an apple that comes out of a tree. I received it from my Guru. He was my father, and he gave me this Knowledge. He gave me this Knowledge, and he ordered me to give it to other people, which is what I am doing now’.”