Love has good manners and

 does not pursue selfish advantage.¹

That was how the apostle, Paul, had described selfless love in a letter to a fledgling congregation in first-century Corinth, Greece.

But sometimes it felt to poor ol’ mj lorenzo as if no one in the self-important old U. S. of A. had ever heard about the kind of selfless love that people like Joey’s guru and Jesus had liked spreading wherever they went.

So beats my heart for yoooou!

The Pennsylvanians sang now, just as they had at the concert in Washington, New Jersey, during their medley of love songs.

"You're setting the scene for something," mj reminded his storyteller, encouraging his friend.

But Bill seemed irritated, maybe on purpose, for dramatic effect; for normally it was against his principles to display irritation. "I'm trying to give you an idea what the hell was going on!" he said.

"Yeh," said mj a little more carefully. The poor storyteller had actually managed to upset his own very important self with his story, it appeared. And that was not like Bill at all.

Love is not touchy; it does not keep account of evil or gloat over the wickedness of other people.²

"So now," said Bill, "now comes the time Mark comes in to me, and he says to me –: several times Mark had called me 'Daddy'; and I'd said, 'Well I'm not your Daddy’.

“‘I'd like you to be my Daddy’. This is what he said to me. And I was sitting there. I thought, ‘That's not a bad idea’.”

As beats the o-cean surf u-paaahon the saaaand,...

The entire chorus sang in grand style:

So  beats  my  heaaaahrt  for  yoooooooou.

And the sopranos repeated the words in quick unison:

Soh-bee-tsmy-hah-rtfoh-ryooou...³

"So I went out to the kitchen and I said, 'Listen, Mark just told me he'd like me to be his Daddy-I-was-thinkin'-about-it-would-you-wanna-marry-me’? Or something like that."

Mj stared at Betty Ann!

According to Joey's guru, human beings had not been given life for the purpose of loving anything material at all, and certainly not for the love they felt for their mates. None of these loves was meant to have been the purpose of a human being’s life, according to the guru.⁴

Betty Ann said, "Oh, for gosh –. Bill, you said it nicer than that ! # ! "

"Yeh, but I –. Th-that's j–. I-I don't wanna get embarrassed about it, y'know."

"Yeh," Betty Ann allowed, then got mucky sweet. "OK.... OK. It was really beautiful, the way you asked me to marry you."

Bill acted cute too, copying her musical way of saying this. "Ye-ah. But I'm embarrassed about it."

Or just as con-stant-ly as seeea meets laaaand,...

The chorus was still grand:

So  beats  my  heaaaahrt  for  yoooooou!

So-bea-tsmy-hea-rtfo-ryooou...

"You must have given it some thought independently of Mark,” mj needled on behalf of Betty Ann, who was his best friend too. And it worked.

"Yes, he did," said Betty Ann with deft, dry, irony. "Yeh, it's not fair to shove the whole blame on Mark, Bill!" Her deft understatement always somehow outstripped her husband’s drastic overstatement, just as mj had known it would.

"W'l you alway-," Bill stuttered. "I suppose you alw— ."

"I mean," Betty Ann said with a glance that thanked her pal, mj, for a golden opportunity to clown adroitly for posterity: "You weren't letting a four-year-old decide whether you were gonna marry or not!"

"No." Bill chose, carefully, NOT to break down under this clearly deliberate tormentation from a recently chastised wife. "No. I think the first time he called me 'Daddy' was the first time I ever thought about it, though: one time we were down by the river he called me 'Daddy'.”

But she chose not to react to this. He was dead serious, after all, and not much fun to play with at the moment.

“Well, that's not the important thing,” he clarified, looking for the right kind of strength to go on.

"So, I asked her to marry me. And she said, 'OK'... immediately!"

"I did not!" The knee-jerk reaction was real. And then she tried to make the indignation SEEM actress-y, but it was too late. Her clown husband had finally invited her to play, after all: "I said I would not, I would have to think about it for awhile!" She smiled at her guests.

Who chimed a mirthful duet in response.

"Yeh," Bill said, "oh yes!" he chuckled so hard he shook....  --.

"So, I'll never forget this. She trained Mark what to say to me to keep me interested."

This scandalized Dlune, "Oh, no!"

Bill had his testy little squaw on the run now, you had to think; but she was well ahead of every little nuance of this game of her mate’s she had studied. They had obviously had a lot of practice at such games. "This is called 'Reverse'," she said.

"W'l no," Bill said, "the important thing –. I'm tryin' to get to the Fred thing, OK?"

A tenor sang:

I'll aaaaaahl-ways be truoooooooooe,

Faaaaaaith-ful to yoooooooooou...

On one of the tapes from Joey, the guru had said over and over again that earthly marital love was so great and fulfilling it forever went to court and got separated.⁵

Betty Ann raised their game – or whatever it was called – to a new degree of challenge. "I didn't wanna get married. You forced me into it, Bill!"

But even the baby knew this was pure Miss Twelve-Year-Old Minnesota Accordion Champ stage camp; and so his parents showed how rollickingly unconvinced they were.

Bill said over the noise, "I think we'd better just forget the whole thing. She's built it up. 'Cause she's lyin' again, right now."

"Yeh," Betty Ann backed off decently, even confessing a lie, and lessening mj’s fear of another interview turning into a nightmare. "Let's get on with this," she said.

Skies have been bluoooooe

Since you came in vieoooooow...

The guru also told stories of love of material things, like the guy who bought a Rolls and threw a party the first day he owned it, but soon reached the point where he felt, "This car is a bunch of junk, sell it!" Because what we all really wanted, as the guru explained, was a kind of love or happiness that would never wear thin. You had to find something to hold on to that was permanent, something that lasted until your very last exhalation of your life’s last breath. And practically anything in this world you could think of was likely to go away, he said, long before your breath went away.⁶

"If there's nothing else,” said mj, “to tell about the courtship, I'd like to get on with the wedding;" for he objected to marital strife during interviews, based on experience.

"No," said Bill. "The wedding thing –. One of the most important things about this wedding, Fred in this wedding, is my asking him. And that's what I'm trying to get to."

"OH!" mj encouraged. "Yes, OK!"

"Yeh!" Betty Ann said. "Get to the point of that day... when you were running around the Inn!"

Bill stiffened, his thunder filched once more, just as during previous interviews. "Now, can I –? No, no, will you... WAIT!?"

Orchestra and chorus went full tilt:

As beats the rhy-thm of a miiii-ghty goaaahng,

So beats my heaahrt for yoooou, Deear...!  .....!#$..!!!.

The crazy song flew off, far and away beyond the confines of any ordinary love song, reaching a Franz Lisztian rhapsodic climax.

Bill stared Betty Ann down as reprimand and summary warning, and the mock stare went on for a while.

"OK,” he said, finally, when he felt back on top safely.

“So,” he said. “Finally when she said, 'OK’, one of the first things she said was –." He sighed and lowered his voice: "'I don't know how we're ever gonna tell Poley. I don't know –. It may kill him’!

“I said –," Bill was louder: “‘ Well then he has to go’!"

A loud cackle trailed into a laughing sob, both of these coming from mj.

"Because I'm not gonna run my life on somebody else. If the man gets a heart attack... –." Bill looked straight at Betty Ann, addressing her directly. "This is true, isn't it? You said, 'That's cruel’!

“I said,” and Bill Blackburn delivered the next line matter-of-factly, without ill will, always, every time he told the story: “'The man has to go, if he's going to have a heart attack'." Bill was not about to give up his love for Betty Ann just because some weird old man he knew and even liked on most days of the week was going to react so much as to have a heart attack. And his perfectly clear and fair position on the point, telling after telling, was meant to serve as a model of stature-ly character, an example for poor waffle-y, waffle-ing Betty Ann to emulate.

SO  BeEATS  MY  HEAaahRT  FOR  YooooooOU!

There was a drawn-out orchestral climax, but the Pennsylvanians were surprisingly far from the end of their crazy, pompous, repetitive song, this Waring love song.

"And Betty Ann said," Bill softened the tone, ‘Well, what are you going to do about Fred Waring’? She said this to me: ‘Well, Fred Waring is not gonna like it’. I said, ‘I don't give a damn about him either’! She was paranoid about me talking to Poley and Fred. I said, 'You don't have to tell anybody anything. I'll go nose-to-nose with Fred Waring and say, "I'm going to marry Betty Ann." I'm not worried about telling him. And I'll tell Poley’. And we got in this argument. She said, 'That's insensitive’. And I said, 'No it's not. Poley has no right'!"

By this point in the evening Bill seemed truly irked. Normally he loved to play the cool hero in his stories; and some might have said he was ‘typically third-world’ in that respect, a ‘typical’ Huron tribal brave. He thought and acted like a traditional Native American, usually, it was true; and those braves were stoically heroic in their downplayed way of doing things usually, not expressively emotional and protesting like Europeans and U.S. Americans so often tended to be. But Bill was allowing himself to be seen in public as irked, for once. Maybe he was learning to ‘get his anger out’ like Fred and so many other Americans did all of the time. Maybe he had experienced Fred Waring too much.

Or maybe it was a show to get his point across.

"'If Poley wants to marry you’,” he finished, “‘let him divorce Yvette and have him marry you’!" Oh, I was really irate over this whole thing!"

Once again the Pennsylvanians sang in loud unison:

SOH BEE TSMY HAH..., ...RTFOH... RYOOOU!!!!!

Cymbal: Crash!!

And on one tape that mj could recall, Joey’s guru had gone on and on about how sometimes you might get a question in your mind as to whether you were really happy. You might wonder if happiness was having a car or a family or if happiness was writing a famous book maybe. Or, true happiness might be something quite different, in fact. And that was what the guru had been leading up to. Because true happiness was in fact nothing less than your experience of the relationship of selfless love that existed between you and your guru, the same guru who had taught you the essential knowledge of how to meditate on an eternally moving parabolic wave so as to achieve detachment and inner peace. True happiness was just as simple as that, believe it or not.⁷

And mj did believe it. He believed it more and more each day, because it was happening to him faster than he could think, faster than he could think to make it not happen.⁸

He was falling in love with love itself, with selfless love.

And it was actually helping mj lorenzo’s interview, this eventually world-famous interview with the Blackburns.

Meditation and selfless love could produce tangible and positive results in the world, in other words, very, very fast.

So: Joey’s guru bore looking into. That was what it all amounted to.

The kid guru was on to something.⁹

¹  I Corinthians 13:5, J. B. Phillips translation.

²  I Corinthians 13:6.

³  “So Beats My Heart for You,” by Pat Ballard, Charles Henderson and Tom Waring.

⁴  The Living Master, pp. 86, 88; 32; 8.

⁵  Ibid., p. 88.

⁶  Ibid., p. 88; p. 12.

⁷  Ibid., p. 7; 20; 82.

⁸  Dr. Lorenzo often explained to Sammy Martinez in later years how it had become so possible, so conceivable, to believe – at all – an adolescent guru upstart from India when he said things that were virtually unbelievable, about how happy you could be in this life: the explanation for his own credulity, the Dr. always said, was that IT HAD ALREADY HAPPENED inside of him. It was hard to argue with someone who was promising you something extravagant for your near future, when that something had already come to pass just as a result of hearing about the kid guru, listening to his tapes, listening to Joey’s stories about him, and attempting to practice what mj lorenzo thought was the kind of meditation the kid guru taught. And once you realized the guru’s promise was already fulfilled, it was easier to believe anything else the guru might say.