Some of the people who followed the guru around the globe, asking him questions, must have been extremely bright. The design of their questions suggested that they remembered their catechism or Hebrew School and wanted to test him like the Pharisees had tested Jesus, to see if he would fall into a trap of their designing, maybe commit blasphemy, or say something to give himself away as a clown or charlatan.

One of them asked, “So you mean to say, then, that the only way God can teach us anything is through a Master?”

And he answered that God was power and light, not a human being that could talk. For God to communicate with human beings, all of that power and light had to be put through a medium, in the same way that electricity had to be channeled through a wire and a light bulb before it could produce light. That was why, he said, it was so hard for us to begin to comprehend what God was like in his true and real raw state.¹

Recalling it, mj obsessed over miserable Fred for reasons he kept to himself. He knew America's song man had flaws. Everybody in the world had suffered enough of self-centered Fred and the wedding at his Gatehouse; but the truth-seeker was after something, it seemed, maybe some way of redeeming the man. “Where was Fred in all this?” he asked. “During the ceremony, I mean.”

Bill didn’t know.

“He just wasn't a part of this?” mj pressed.

“No,” said Dlune. “He never even came upstairs.”

Betty Ann remembered seeing him, though, and she was nostalgic. “He was standing around that ‘round table’ somewhere,” she said like a kind of Guinevere remembering King Arthur when they and the Knights had been fresh and innocent.

Bill’s memory came back too, but he was not nostalgic. “When we walked in,” he said, “I saw friends, and I saw these women crying and everything, and I started –.”

Betty Ann laughed, remembering.

“It started strikin' me funny,” Bill said. “It was women that couldn't stand me, or stand her, standin' there,” Bill looked choked up, just as they had looked, “as we're walking in to get married in the living room, and that really struck me –.”
 

Mj laughed it up.

“It was almost ironic,” said Bill, “that these dumb broads are standin' there goin' like this.” Bill’s face looked terribly choked up again, as he dabbed his eyes daintily.

And a big laughing commotion came from mj.

One person asked Joey’s guru where and how he had learned the ‘Knowledge’ that he taught. If he was going to keep implying that he might be the Master, the one they ought to find to teach them Ultimate Truth, in other words, then they had to know how all that power and light could have picked him as a medium and found its way through him to them, if it had.²

“One woman won't even talk to me till this day,” Bill said, “and she was –.” He did it again, just for mj’s amusement. Bill choked, daintily dabbing imaginary tears.

And mj responded, giving way to romp: “@$#%#!!.X.X!”

“Who was that?” Betty Ann wanted to know, looking at mj in his cataplectic state. But the question was for Bill.

“They got invited 'cause they'd be insulted or something,” Bill explained. “Virginia made little suggestions. Yet she kept screamin' at us to keep the number down.”

“I remember,” said Betty Ann, “Fred sayin' to me, ‘You didn't invite... mmmm-mmm to this wedding, did you’?"

Mj laughed with more uproar, he was in such an interesting state.

“From my Guru,” Joey’s guru answered simply. It made sense, after all. He had just said there was no way to learn it except from a Master. And his Master had been his father, he now explained. His father had been a guru too, and he had given him the Knowledge that he was now teaching. His father had ordered him to give the Knowledge to others, and that was what he was doing now.³

“Oh, that's right!” remembered Bill.

“And I said, ‘I have to’!” Betty Ann said, standing up to Fred Waring for once.

“Yeh,” Bill agreed. “He said, ‘It's alright for... bla-bla, but I don't want mmmm-mmm there’.  And mmmm-mmm's bla-bla's... wife!”

Mj, almost partially recovered, lost it anew: “Chuh-huh haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaghhhh!!”

“He says,” Betty Ann played mean Fred through her teeth: “‘I can't stand the woman. I don't want her there’."

“He says,” Bill corroborated, "’Why in the hell did you invite... bla-bla’!? I said, ‘Because he's singin', he's singin'. We're gonna have this chorus’!"

Fred’s wrath rose, as Bill showed: "’Oh, you're gonna use my chorus. Nobody told me about my chorus bein' used. Who said the Pennsylvanians could be used’? You know, all –.”

“AH CHAH HAH haaah. Ngeooh. Ooooh... Oooohhhh.” Mj moaned in exquisite pain.

“Guru,” one person asked, “are you permanently in God-consciousness?”⁴

A cheeky question by anyone’s standards, designed to trap, or so thought the asker. If Guru Garland said yes, he could seem blasphemous. But if he said no, he might not be the Master he kept implying he was.

Betty Ann looked at mj lorenzo finally. “Are you alright?”

She seemed sincere.

Mj tried to gather his senses. “Ohhhh,...  mmmmm... All I remember is that Fred called me 'Mister Loony'.”

“'MISTER LOONY'!  Ah ha-a-a-a!” went Bill.

“I think he meant ‘Mr. Dlune’,” mj confessed. “Dloony and Loony! That's One Thing I Remember.

“And Two: the only opportunity or attempt I ever made in my life to speak to Fred Waring, he was handing me a glass of champagne at the time. And I said, ‘I used to watch you’. I was trying to joke with the man. I thought he must have had a little sense of humor; and I said, ‘When I was a little boy I watched my uncle, Percy Crawford and the "Young People's Church of the Air," on prime time Sunday nights, evangelizing right after your show. And we would always watch your show first. But for me, at that age, and because it was my uncle, I have to admit you were second billing. Until later’. And he turned around and offered champagne to someone else, and after that I never saw anything but his back.”

Betty Ann was surprised. “I didn't know you said tha-at! Oh, that's funnee.”

Mj laughed at his stupidity.

“You really helped me that day, didn't you, mj?” Bill teased.

Mj was regretful: “I'll never have a chance to talk to Fred Waring again.”

Joey’s guru answered the big test question in a most amazing way. Everyone who heard about it was shocked to death at first. He said, “Yes. I am permanently in God-consciousness.”⁵

“I remember when we came walkin' in,” Betty Ann said, “'cause when he saw Dlune, he just lit up.”

Dlune was tickled.

Mj looked surprised.

“When she went through that room?!” Betty Ann emphasized. And she asked Bill with her eyes to take over, for the story wasn’t lady-like. Dirty work was man's work.

And he responded: “Oh, the minute Fred laid eyes on Dlune I thought, 'Oh, mj’s got troubles. Fred’s gonna be chasin' Dlune around the wedding'.”

Mj’s laughter was hesitant this time.

They tried again to trip up the guru. Or maybe they were sincere. Who knew? One person asked him, “Some people say you are a divine incarnation, and some people say other things about you. What's the truth?”⁶

Dlune felt compelled to explain. “Well,” she said, “you know I had never met him, and I walked in to the wedding, and I walked right by him and I heard after me, ‘Who's that’?"

“Ye-ah!” Betty Ann said with affection a bit devilish.

“HA-HA -HA ha ha haagh!” Her husband was entertained.

“I walked right into his house,” Dlune said, “and right by him. I might have recognized him from pictures, but I was preoccupied getting upstairs. We were late and everything. So somebody told him who I was and he yelled after me, ‘Nice to meet you’. And I said, ‘Nice –‘. Just turned around. I was halfway up the stairs.”

“And did he continue to lavish attention upon you?” mj wanted to know.

Betty Ann loved it so much her voice got musical: “Oh-oh, listen to mj!  Thuh-hnn-nn-nn!”

The guru’s answer to this tricky test question was quite different: each one had to realize the truth for his or her own self, he said.⁷

“And then later on –,” Dlune went on, not about to give up the floor....—

“He sure did keep it up. I saw it!” Bill said, kidding and belaboring the tease, as it felt to mj, anyway.

“When I came downstairs to get something,” Dlune said, “somebody introduced me to him.”

“And he said,” Betty Ann grew nanny goat horns, almost: "’Come with me. Let me show you the Oriental bedroom’!"

Dlune laughed up a good one.

It was gang-up-on-mj time.

Bill had found a sensitive spot in his friend, and he was going to poke around at it. “When Fred came over to our house to a party, was it after that? Yeh. The first thing he asked me was, ‘Is Dlune coming’?"

“Yeh,” Betty Ann had to confirm, “and mj and Dlune couldn't make that. They were out of town.”

Mj twisted this nonsense in a new direction: “It's a good thing. He didn't give a hoot about me, that's for sure.”

“Well, why would he, mj?” Bill asked. “He doesn't dig mustaches!”

“You insulted him!” Betty Ann added deftly.

The poor boy was lost, because teasing affection overwhelmed mj lorenzo, almost always.

One of mj’s favorite questions put to the guru by his followers, therefore, not surprisingly, was, “Guru, how can you help us through this game we play on this planet?”⁸