II.  Everybody's ecstasies

266.  despite many misgivings of several kinds however Rev and Jo love their son’s passages glorifying geographic nature

At any rate: when they got to the second page, Rev and Jo ABSOLUTELY LOVED AND ADORED their son’s description of the Yoho scenery as seen from Wiwaxy. Maybe because they had honeymooned there in the thirties and hiked up to the same spot themselves. Who in the world knew what the reason might have been exactly? Everyone was afraid to ask the Reverend or his wife. Either one.

But afterwards a few high-school-age choir members wished the Lorenzos had ‘just said it, then’, if it had been as many of them suspected: “That’s where we made love the first forty-nine times, Lake O’Hara lodge, the most in one week ever!”

Instead of getting, as the choir gals and guys put it, “All out-of-their-p-t-minds, inexplicably ecstatic for ever and ever, over a ‘p-t’ piece of nature description.”

By ‘p-t’ they meant ‘puppy-terd’, as the choir youths explained to Sammy Martinez several years later.

Then the Lorenzos would not have had to give a copy “Of that p-t page from their son’s ‘first cool book’” to every single church member leaving after the Sunday morning service, when they shook the preacher’s and preacher’s wife’s “p-t hands” at the door, Fourth of July, 1971, raising such an excitement it created a bottleneck in the church vestibule for people trying to get past and out the door, and the choir director sprained her ankle, fell in the doorway and got trampled by her own choir members, sadly, and had to live for ‘a whole p-t year’ in a body cast.

And then, as if art had not created life overmuch by now already, so much so that it should have put a whole lot more people in p-t body casts, the poor choir director had ‘written a p-t book’ to lambaste ‘the p-t Lorenzos’, but not their ‘cool son’, and all this had ‘killed decent Sunday morning music for a whole p-t year at Florence Emmanuel Methodist’.

And with that revealing comment, of course, the foul-mouthed ire of the choir boys and gals got its severely overdue explanation. Finally.

267.  Jo is ecstatic with her son’s description of Canadian Rockies scenery

But be that as it been, as it were – (and Jo did feel pretty bad about the poor choir director; but) – Jo Lorenzo simply could not focus on it because, as she demonstrated nine years later during interviews with Sammy, she could not stop raving about this nature piece of mj’s still, even after so many years. She could hardly put it into words.

Maybe it was the way he had likened mountains to flowers. It warmed her heart the way Hungabee’s just-pre-sunset alpenglow was tinted ‘Peace Rose’, she could not deny, ‘Peace Rose’ connoting a soft, gentle blend of yellow and pink. She knew that her son’s love of flowers, and of his favorite rose, the ‘Peace’, had been learned from her, not from his father, who knew very little of flowers or gardening.

And suddenly, in saying this, she was helped to understand, years later when it hit her finally, what ‘Peace Rose’ had meant in ‘all those crazy-banana formulas’, starting with the Triptique. It had meant: ecstasy; delight; mountain high; psychic high; love of Dlune; ‘maybe even love of woman’, Jo thought.

And when Sammy, during an interview, had told her he always took it to mean the natural high you got from natural animal-human ‘love’, for he knew better than to use the word ‘sex’ around Jo, she agreed that this had to be ‘at least a good part of it’. Or, as she said to Sammy in a whisper, leaning over toward him with a cute smirk, ‘maybe’ one might call it: ‘Thunder Medicine’.

In other words: SHE GOT IT!!!

Peace Rose and all its equivalents meant all different forms of ecstasy, including THRILLINGLY GOOD LOVING CARING ADORING boy-am-I-ever-lucky-to-be-able-to-share-human-life-on-the-planet-with-you-type ALL-OUT DELIGHTED SEX, in modern French. A great, genuinely loving lay, in modified U.S.A. college-Calvinist French. And in Mexican French: a non-verbal pulling and pushing of both arms held out forward from both sides, waist high: and the better the loving lay being suggested, the more violently you pushed and pulled.

And maybe some day there would be a pundit school to explore such things as whether an experience of ecstasy could be had just THINKING about those better pushes and pulls, or just READING about them, or howzabout ALL BY ONE’S LITTLE SELF, like Jack naked in Fort Smith. The possible questions for pundit exploration remained legion, still, even after thirty or more whole years of exploration, said some pundits. And all of those questions were bound to be asked one of these days. It gave pundits something to live for.

Needles to say.

And so, as soon as possible after that Sunday, Rev and Jo showed the Wiwaxy passage from ‘our son’s first book’ to everyone they knew, universally beloved as he was. And they always tried, of course, to be more display-avoiding and frivolity-shunning, lest another innocent bystander get trampled.

268.  but mj never turns up and a pagan holiday vision compels Rev to publish The Remaking

Yet all mj’s terribly scandalous ‘Crack-Up’; and all of the never-ending, intellectual, and boring ‘Freeze-Up’, as the Lorenzos described it (seeming to forget the romance they had loved throughout the long wintery sections of the book); and all of the rest of their son's ‘risqué’ yet ‘tame’ ‘Break-Up’, they kept completely to themselves month after month, still waiting for him to show up so they could personally hand him his ‘first attempt at a modernistic novel’ back.

For he ‘might need it some day’, as they said, meaning for fire-starter, they hoped. No doubt.

And they waited and waited. Until they were so worried, after four whole summer and fall months of 1971 hearing nothing, that Rev felt compelled, and made a decision on Halloween of ’71, when he saw the scraggly black and orange trick-or-treaters with their empty plastic grocery bags. And poor little mj, Rev’s little eight-year-old boy, with his dark little eight-year-old Indian girlfriend, never even came to the door with palms out asking for candy, neither of them. Dressed or not dressed would have been okay, both of them. That was how Rev thought about mj all Halloween night. And who in the world could say why?

But it changed the world for not a few people. So who could knock it? Because: when little eight-year-old mj never showed up with palm out, Rev decided to finally let the cat out of the bag that offspring of his and Jo’s was ‘half-psycho-bananas’ on the loose, probably starving and living with some Indian cutie, stretching meager means further, for she had walked out of her nurse’s training like he had walked out of his doctor’s, ‘just to make two of a kind’.

Rev swallowed his pride, NEVER SAYING ANY OF THESE WORDS TO A LIVING SOUL but Jo. And he went and handed out The Remaking all over God’s creation AND the smoggy Delaware Valley – mainly the latter, though it ended up everywhere in creation – finally inured to the disgrace and humbly asking many different kinds of real human-animal people in that world, many of whom he would never know or want to know, to please help him find his poor lost son.

269.  THEN mj lorenzo comes home to Mommy and Daddy at last

And one week later: fully clothed, for once, in spiffy, spanking new, leg-hugging western jeans; and a cream-colored western shirt with maroon rope trim; a stunningly handsome black cowboy hat; and shiny tan alligator cowboy boots; one week after the last copy of The Remaking was handed away personally by Rev in Philly and two weeks before Christmas his son showed up, squaw on arm, looking none the worse.

Not half bad, either one of them.

Actually better than before, Jo thought. Yes. Definitely. His face was ‘sweet as ever’ but a touch more manly somehow. And he was almost as dark as she, ‘that Indian wife of his’.

And Rev, well: he bit his tongue; gave his son three hundred dollars in fifties; and shot six rounds of eight ball with mj in the basement, the ladies in the kitchen washing dishes and considering meatloaf recipes and first trimesters.

And she, the new foreign wife: she actually spoke perfect and even rather intelligent American-sounding English.

270.  opening passages of Lake O’Hara

Harlequin: ‘I am high on o-two’.

Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary, Second Edition, 1956:

Columbine…  the saucy, adroit sweetheart of Harlequin in old Italian popular comedy, in pantomime, etc.

Dlune  =  Peace River  =  Peace Rose  =  Rose Window  =  Window of My Soul  =  Hungabee

mj (as Thunder Man):  Dlune. I want you to wait here for me. According to your people’s legend, as you tell it, I should have made this trip alone to start with. Maybe that sounds patronizing. I don’t mean it to. I just want to do it myself this time.

Before dawn tomorrow, down there in the camp, we’ll crawl out of the sleeping bag and you’ll see me off. I’d like you to come along the lake shore with me but from there I’ll go it alone. I’ll be back by dark.

In case you have to come for me, I intend to reach the Divide just south of Hungabee and Wenkchemna (he points south, to each landmark again, for the third time in an hour), at Wenkchemna Pass; via Opabin Plateau; and Opabin Pass. But we talked with the park guard, remember, and I don’t expect trouble. Except for scree, and glacier, the trails are marked, and even the ice has footprints in it, unless it snows overnight, and it won’t.

Don’t cry!

In the morning I may weaken and let you come up with me as far as the plateau.

Dlune (as Mink Woman, i.e., sobbing): Oh, mj.

271.  Jo Lorenzo’s favorite part of The Remaking

Dlune and mj are sitting high above Lake O’Hara, in Wiwaxy Gap. A local tribe called it that for eons because ‘Wiwaxy’ meant ‘windy’ in their language. The gap is a wind funnel. At the moment wind is sweeping southward up Cataract Valley, up the north side of Wiwaxy Peaks, and funneling through the gap like a dry typhoon, carrying their voices away with it, down into the shaded emerald green lake far below at their feet and south up the other side, up to the Opabin Plateau, then concentrating and accelerating again, whistling through Opabin Pass southeastward past the peak the local Indians called ‘Hungabee’ because it meant ‘Chief’. It looks like a chief, has the grandeur and presence of a chief.

Midsummer late-evening sun lights the timeless Hungabee grandeur from the northwest. The shadow of Wiwaxy is cast across the lake in front of the two and up the enormous, un-vegetated, un-iced mound of primeval brown mountain immediately on the opposite shore of the lake, leaving its pyramid top un-shaded and golden brown still, lit up by lowering sun. Flanking this mound or mass, beyond it on left and right are two higher, more severely ice-carved, knife-sharp peaks, grey hulks of exposed pre-Cambrian strata that dominate the region with their height; and Hungabee is the one on the left. Between them forested Opabin Plateau has already fallen into darkness.

The peak on the right is closer to the two hikers than Hungabee is, and farther away than the dark mass in the center foreground.

It all looks arranged in the old Japanese way, like the flowers and parts of an ancient, classical-era Ikebana: center, right, left; foreground to background: dark and heavy at the bottom, light and airy at the top.

The two flanking peaks are partly snow-covered. And Hungabee’s raised and glimmering butcher-knife-tip of grey rock and white snow still glows Peace Rose, warmly, in the slowly setting sun.

The background is a blue satin sky fitted with a half-moon.