Rev & Jo with honeymoon Pontiac before her parents' summer shore house in Margate New Jersey 1935 Struck by the Fireworks of Time
V. Further
thoughts on FIREWORKS therapy
The
'fireworks therapy' pundits discovered each other as a group
during the 1975 annual convention of the American Psychiatric
Association when they first met in a workshop and realized
they shared an interest in the implications of electroshock
therapy’1 in
general, and also in Dr. Lorenzo’s claim to have benefited
personally from lightning electrocution, in particular. And
over the years this group would go on, then, to have a rather
‘shocking’ impact on the practice of American psychiatry
overall, due to advocating psychotherapeutic ‘fireworks’
approaches in general. And also due to the way they traveled
throughout the world, using foreign TV to talk up the U.S.
American mental health ‘scandal’, as they had learned from Dr.
Lorenzo to call it. The ‘scandal’ being that the wonderful and
supposedly superior Western world, and especially the very wonderful and very supposedly
superior-because-neo-Calvinist U.S.A., ‘enjoyed’ more
severe mental illness than any other civilization in the
history of the planet.
Once
home again, back in the calmer pundit world, the ‘fireworks
pundits’ liked to remind everyone that all of The
Remaking’s ‘fireworks’ approaches except number eight
had been created and implemented by Jack Lorenzo, specifically
aimed at Mortimer Lorenzo, in hopes of shaking Mortimer
loose from his depression finally once and for all. Whereas
number eight, they said, the ‘drastic-attitude-change
date-fixing’ derived from anticipating northern Canada’s
violent spring ‘Break-Up’ of river- and lake-ice,2 had been,
interestingly enough, Mortimer’s own contribution to the
fireworks idea, which he had unwittingly prescribed for himself while
writing his Fort Smith envelope’s ‘Triptique’ (as we shall
see).
‘Freeze-Up’,
meanwhile, an equally shocking natural event which
most pundits felt belonged in the list too, remained a serious
source of contention among groups of pundits for years. All
they could agree upon, in the end, was to leave it out of the
‘fireworks’ list until they could determine who might have
pre-meditated or planned using the far north’s November
Freeze-Up as ‘fireworks’ in mj’s remaking: Jack; Mortimer; mj;
nature itself; or something or Someone else.
60.
The
whole pundit group, having taken almost ten years to fully
comprehend Jack’s ‘fireworks approach’ to treating the
clinical condition of Mortimer’s very reactionary entrenchment
in ‘massive near-psychotic depression’, finally got around to
asking themselves why Jack had included a ‘fireworks’ sermon in
this particular monthly package. And a consensus was
reached rather easily.
The
naked sermon to clothed Indians was another dazzling display
of fireworks. It was, in fact, not just fireworks but NAKED
fireworks, a kind of fireworks even more shocking than normal
fireworks. It was aimed partly at shaking and shocking Rev and
Jo out of their pastel pastoral suburban rut, of course. And
it was intended partly for Mortimer, too, clearly, who was
almost certainly ‘listening’ and needed AS MANY KINDS OF
SHOCKS AND FIREWORKS to turn his depression around and
‘stay in business’ (the ‘business’ of living healthily as part
of mj lorenzo), AS QUAKER NEEDED OATS to stay in the
oat business.
The content of the
sermon, all pundits agreed, was designed ‘one hundred and one
percent for Mortimer’. Jack was warning him he had
better remake his attitude; or he would have it done for him POW !
NOW !
61. people who forgot bombs
might have been the ones who needed bombs and fireworks more than anyone
Rev
and Jo, like the pundits who came after them, having read
Jack’s missives time and again, eventually gleaned or salvaged
the point from the hoopla, somehow, that their son was trying
to change mj
lorenzo by last-ditch means, even if it meant he had to pull
himself up by his own psychological and theological
bootstraps, yelling scripture at himself; without much help
from outside; relying on just the resources at hand: heaven’s
lightning; his own natural God-given body; the indigenous
North American natives along the Mackenzie; the stolen boats;
the notebooks in the backpack; a few choice books; his writing
materials; the memory of his parents and scripture and Jung;
his intuitive imagination; his anger; and his young energy
fueled by Benzedrine amphetamine ‘bennies’; etc. etc.
Their
mj deserved more credit, maybe, for having had the nerve; the
guts; and the psychological fortitude in general to put
himself through so much, and to do it so
independently, with so little help; with no
psychiatrist, that is, and no family present, AND NO OFFICIAL
CONGREGATION-SANCTIONED FAITH. Maybe it would make him stronger,
they conceded on occasion, mostly when less upset.
But meanwhile, it was hard on
parents, as Jo added sadly.
“And
on parents’ marriages,” reminded Rev.
“He’s
driving himself crazy,”
Jo repeated.
“And us too,” Rev sighed.
And so
they re-united against him, finally, one more time, several
conflict-filled weeks after receiving Jack’s
Which
ended, by the way, exactly as it had begun:
from the muddy
side
of the otherwise
green Mackenzie
never out of sight
of the
shall I meet
force with force?
shall I build a
Wrigley rocket launcher
and rain verbal
bombs of burning
na-
PALM-ON-O-MA-HA
TUS-CA-LOO-SA-AND
SPO-KANE-WASH-ING-TON
and then watch
the television playback
horror-struck
by the results
but
righteously
inured to the necessity of my message?
Jack
And once again, as usual, after
having read Jack’s pile of papers from Fort Simpson for the umpteenth time, Rev
and Jo kicked
themselves for forgetting one more ‘dang stupid time’,
all the way through the whole dang packet of papers, right
up to the words ‘verbal
BOMBS’: that their very own son had sent them an
incendiary bomb made with gasoline, wrapped in the very
pages they were holding in their hands right now! all of it
enclosed in a boot-box-sized air mail package from Canada,
delivered right to the door, swishing gasoline and all.
And they had forgotten too, as
usual, that Rev had been forced to risk his life taking it
apart in the back yard wearing a thick yellow floor-length
rubber raincoat. And that he had been forced to risk a life sentence at Alcatraz trying
to hide his illegal activity from
Just
as if he truly remained in denial that it was a bomb at all.
And
yet the Lorenzos agreed that there had been no other choice. For
it was clearly the
Lord’s grace that postal authorities of neither country had
heard or smelled Canadian motor canoe gasoline
swish-swashing in the Fort Simpson package all the way across
the huge North American continent and pressed charges against
their poor bat-brained son.
Whom,
by now, his parents considered a 60s leftist-radical ‘crazy’.
The
saddest thing of all, though, was that Rev and Jo were so
disarmed by Jack’s all-consuming, incomprehensible anger, and
by all of the accusations and insinuations which left them
feeling he blamed them somehow for all his rage, that even many weeks after
receiving this hostile package from Fort Simpson, they were still in shock and denial
he had sent them the rare and unusual gift of an ignitable
gasoline bomb in the mail. And they still barely knew what to
do with themselves. They had tried like the dickens to
tell themselves the dang thing was a loving prank, but the
self-deception had failed. They had not convinced themselves.
Because,
as they would explain to the world years later when Sammy
Martinez finally interviewed them thoroughly and formally:
they just did not think it was fiction any more, in the end.6 For, nothing so crazy and so real, nothing capable
of upsetting them
so much, could have been just fiction. Such a
thing was impossible, as anyone could see. And that was how
they had settled the question and made up, finally, one more time.
At least for the time being.
...................................
And
starting in about the mid-70s, and increasingly thereafter,
all those apparently nice, very religious people who would
always show mj lorenzo so much brotherly love by thinking
about him all the time so creatively, would come to be quoted
in various forms of underground communication repeatedly as
having said that they would have been only too glad to have
helped him with a ‘voluntary sacrificial death like Christ’s
to make his point’ if only he had asked
them for help.
They would
have been ever so glad many years back to set a second
gasoline bomb to blow up and knock him out of his canoe and
into the wide Mackenzie still naked and preaching and floating
to the Arctic to be nibbled by sharks until undiscoverable,
him and his whole ‘cuckoo canoe crew’, so that the people God
liked best could finally start their reign of
peace and quiet; without him and his hardly compos mentis
comrades.
And they
were more impatient every year, they warned – and would be
only too happy – to make up
NOW! POW!
for their having missed their chance
at giving him this kind of loving help right when he had needed
it most, in September of 1970.
And all
just because: he had been too shy to ask for it!
1 In
later years the psychiatry profession preferred to call shock
therapy ‘Electroconvulsive Therapy’ or ‘ECT’ because the
clinically monitored electric shock actually produced a physical
convulsion or seizure, a ‘tonic-clonic fit’ in the patient; and
also because the growing public knowledge that supposedly caring
psychiatrists practiced 'shock' 'therapy' on their poor miserable
depressed or psychotic patients had given the profession a
barbaric radiance that frightened away business.
2
4 See subsection #22.
5
See subsection #31.
6 Sammy Martinez liked to tell the story that one of the chief reasons he had felt compelled to interview the Lorenzos was that many people, even many of the Remaking pundits, doubted Rev’s claim that he and Jo had received a gasoline incendiary bomb in the mail from their son. The fireman friend of Rev’s in question, as Sammy added, was a World War II vet and the closest thing to an explosives expert Florence possessed in 1970; and Rev, concealing who had sent it, had asked his bowling partner to dig it out of the church trash can and look at it and confirm that it was indeed a bomb. He did so; and Rev promised his friend that, rather than leave it where it could burn down his church, he would ‘hurl it into the Delaware River’ from one of Florence’s high riverside bluffs in exchange for the friend’s not reporting the incident. Sammy then withheld this last detail until the 1994 Second Revision of The Remaking, by which time Rev and the fireman were both ‘safe from government prosecution’, as Sammy put it, meaning deceased.
