291.  how The Remaking was conceived and begotten of such psychic healing power and how it then matured to produce so much more psychic healing power that the author could draw on that power for the rest of his life

The Remaking pundits were the ones who said that mj lorenzo’s first book ‘owed its existence to an irrepressible urge of his, an inability to cease begetting creative offspring’. It was ‘born of biological instinct, an animal-human instinctual drive that was intuitive, visionary and life-loving’. And again: that The Remaking was ‘begotten of psychic power and once begotten went on to produce more psychic power’.

And that power stayed with mj the rest of his life, they said, because he had learned while writing The Remaking how to draw on such power.

And they told stories about that power because they loved the stories, one of which was about his name ‘Lorenzo’.

292.  the story of the Lorenzo family name

No one in the vast extended Lorenzo family in America could remember why a Calvinist French-Huguenot had come to the new English-Catholic colony of Maryland in 1650, and arrived there on a boat out of Bristol, England: with an Italian name. So, to help their understanding, mj ‘psyched out’, or ‘intuited instinctively’ a ‘non-provable explanation’ for that Italian name, partly by drawing from a knowledge of European history and partly by other mj tricks. And the explanation rang quite true. And he accepted it as gospel, and everyone else in the world did too, practically.

And so, as he said, ‘It sure felt like the right explanation to me’, and he would grin the same grin that tickled his followers.

293.  the story of how he answered the question that never was asked

Another example of the Dr.’s psychic power popped up in the 90’s when a group of so-called ‘bi-sexual pundits’ managed to corral Dr. Lorenzo in dead earnest after a conference to ask him a ‘very important question in absolute private’. And before they had asked anything at all; and without his knowing a thing about them, so it was said: while he rattled on he answered their as yet unasked and embarrassing question with the quip: ‘I knew I was straight from the day I was born, MORE OR LESS’.

His magic for ‘seeing’ things was so great, in other words, he could answer a question before it was asked. And in this manner he could cure people’s anxiety and self-consciousness over having to ask embarrassing questions, a greater gift from him to them even still. The proof he had done so in this case, said the pundits, lay in the fact that after a few seconds of his rattling on, the bi-sexual pundits were splitting their sides on the floor, then got up and shocked him by shaking his hand while walking away, saying he had already answered their question.

294.  mj lorenzo’s pre-birth and the laugh and a half conferences

Another story was told that mj had ‘seen’ his life before birth in a kind of vision or dream which was ‘as long as a short book’. He had told Sammy Martinez the details and even given him a copy of the manuscript for safekeeping, when Sammy insisted. But neither would divulge those details – and still had not done so as of 2012.

Practically everyone in the world knew the details, however, of another psychic coup, the ‘laugh and a half’ conferences: how in the spring and summer of 1994 at age 51 Dr. Lorenzo began spreading the story that ever since 1971 he had repeatedly forgotten why he had written The Remaking and was calling his worldwide following together for a series of conferences to help him solve the problem.

His pundit admirers had shown no surprise over Rev Lorenzo having asked once, “Do the words ‘for private use’ in The Remaking’s subtitle mean ‘for toilet paper’?” But when they heard that their very famous hero-author his very own self was relegating his work to oblivion on a regular basis, it did surprise and concern them. They did some homework fast, because overnight the press was on their tails for the story, ready to make them look like banana brains one more excruciatingly embarrassing time.

Yet that was what happened despite their anxiety. Overnight. For it was not until a year after the conferences that mj’s people really comprehended what he had truly been up to right from the very first day, when he had asked them to help him with this ‘terrible memory problem’ of his. And that whole year or so until they finally reached that comprehension, as they realized after the fact, they had been and remained: ‘banana brains indeed’.

295.  the facts of the case of the author’s forgetfulness as gleaned from the Dr. and from Sammy Martinez

Not a pundit could say for certain, at first, why their hero had forgotten The Remaking’s meaning and value. They could hardly judge him for it, as they told press around the world. They knew his character quality too well to hold against him the least wacky or weird thing. Nor would they allow his strange problem to affect their own appreciation of him. For all of the Remaking pundits knew and rarely forgot that their lives had been so radically improved by The Remaking that they could never lose sight of its value. They were diehard stalwarts on this point, year in and year out, to a man and woman. The way their lives had been brightened and made sane and human by The Remaking: this marvel was something that caused a devotion to mj and preserved the devotion, fixing it in place for all time.

So mj’s pundit-supporters were not the ones in doubt about the value of The Remaking, as they clarified for the press. No. The author himself, mj lorenzo, was, surprisingly. And all they could claim to know about this odd state of affairs, after digging information out of him and Sammy Martinez, was that after he had written the last section of his Remaking and sent it off to his parents; once he had completed his Remaking trip, put it out of his mind and gotten back to ‘normal life’, in other words, during the second half of 1971, finally: he had found it increasingly hard to remember down through the months and years that followed what the dickens the whole Remaking ruckus had been about. Or more nicely put, what the point of his book might have been.

‘Inexplicable uncertainty of this kind first struck mj lorenzo during the 70’s, the decade after he wrote The Remaking’, so said the early pundits; who were quoted in the Paris Match (in January of 1994) as having said this to a Milan newspaper. And at about the same time other pundits revealed the same to an Indian daily published in English on the web. And the disconcerting forgetfulness had bothered the poor man in his later years too, apparently; even after he had studied The Remaking for years and years in depth, and even after he had discussed it on TV talk shows with brilliance.

 Many times in his life, truthfully, mj lorenzo had arrived at the very same weird, bewildering point of asking himself about The Remaking’s ‘value’, its possible ‘worth’. And wondering why on earth he had ever written it. What had ever made him do such a ‘radically far-out thing’? And he would think about this for days, weeks or months, or even years, until he thought he had locked the answer into his limbic system INERADICABLY once and for all and finally.

Or was it the medulla oblongata where memory was stored? He could not remember that either, once he had graduated medical school in ’69 and tossed his stupefyingly trying Neurology textbook in a box, then had gone and suffered his Crack-Up of June 20, 1970.

There was a bizarre repetitious pattern to the problem, in a nutshell: such that mj, having one more time, after much maddening brain work, explained The Remaking to himself fully; and finally; just as he had intended to do; and: having done so for maybe the nineteenth time, let’s say, in his life so far: would get caught up one more time, then, in ‘pure unmitigated maya’, as some of the ‘early pundits’ put it to a Newsweek reporter in mid-1994. Meaning: he would get caught up once more in treating a whole psychiatric practice of what had to be, as he said, taking into account the long history of humanity, ‘some of the most heart-damaged and brain-broken humans since Paleolithic Crô Magnon man’. While meantime, too, raising ‘two of the nicest children’, and doing so in cahoots with his brilliant, legendary and life-saving wife. And with his ex-wife too, by the way, being one and the same. And: hanging out with good friends again; taking out the trash; helping everybody move one more time; bailing them out of jail one more time; and living with them through so many other unforgettable scrapes. And: replanting daffodil bulbs and his grandmother’s day lilies; paying debts to his parents again; writing other books quite unlike The Remaking; traveling; and so on.

And in no time, wouldn’t you know, the doggone answers to his questions about The Remaking would have run off and disappeared all over again, one more time, ‘just like some flighty puppy never allowed to wander in the street before’, as he said.

The condition, he thought, was not unlike the way he had forgotten why in the world he had remained such a neurotically super-devout Christian for such an unforgivably long time. Or why he had bothered to learn the guru's meditation then gone and constantly forgotten to use it. Except that forgetting such things as these never bothered mj terribly during the years after his Remaking trip. Whereas forgetting The Remaking’s raison d’être exasperated him unspeakably. ‘More than anything else in his whole certified crazy life’, as a critical editorial in the Washington Post put it after reaching him by phone at the State Hospital in Pueblo, Colorado, where he was working as a staff psychiatrist in 1994.

For these reasons mj’s good friend, Sammy Martinez, once suggested wisely, being the first in history to hear about the problem, that mj should write down the reasons he had created The Remaking so as to help him remember them. Then put the written reasons in a safe deposit box in the bank or a locked box or safe in the house. All three preferably. But mj said he had done this already and it had never helped. He had done it when he had written The Remaking, in other words, he had to assume. For the book itself had to contain the answers to the questions he was asking, did it not? Since no one in their right mind would write a book that failed to explain itself in some way. Would they?

And he did NOT want to have to re-think or re-write The Remaking, or go through ordeals again like those he had suffered when he first wrote it in ’70-‘71. The notion of ‘remaking The Remaking’, as Dr. Lorenzo dubbed this anathema, even just the thought, or bare mention, of possibly having to repeat the feat, said the pundits, was an invisible albatross that hung around mj lorenzo’s neck lifelong, practically, a curse-like, ache-in-the-head dread that was capable of frying out not just his limbic system, or medulla oblongata, but his whole kundalini nerve tree, ass to pate.

Far more, even, as he mentioned to a Playboy interviewer, than if some cute X-ray technician look-alike had said to him, as he put it, “Please, Dr. Lorenzo, take off the paper robe we’ve lent you now and stand up here nice and cooperative and straight and naked, please, pretty please, with strawberries on it, and facing us, so we can lock you in to this rack-thing for about three weeks, so we can draw and quarter you.”

Because, as Dr. Lorenzo explained eventually, they could never have drawn that out as long as a year, the amount of time it had taken him to take the crazily painful trip described in his crazy book, The Remaking.

Poor mj lorenzo had apparently struggled with The Remaking his whole life in this way. Some even said it might have been a good part of the reason why the thing spent the decade of the 70’s in a box in a closet with dirty socks on it.

296.  how a tiny extremist pundit group proposed a bizarre explanation for the author’s forgetfulness

In September of 94, therefore, a few of the pundits who had grown up in families that believed in the Second Coming of Christ proffered their later notorious hypothesis as to why, probably, Christ had not returned for his ‘Second Coming’ yet.

Christ was, they thought, ‘no doubt still recovering from the trauma of the First Coming’, and besides that, from all of the ‘weird and inappropriate extremist reaction to it’, even more so. For it was one thing to die an excruciating death for your friends, but another to be lost in the fog of your friends’ forgetting. And so Christ was still, no doubt, so stressed and fried out and traumatized, even after two thousand years, from the mess his followers had made of his teaching that, JUST LIKE MJ LORENZO, he had managed to ‘forget’ his mission altogether. Past, present and future. All of it.

This was the only theory the pundits ever produced to explain the difficulty Dr. Lorenzo encountered so often when trying to remember the meaning and value of his Remaking. And no one took it seriously, since it came from a group low in position on the totem pole of pundit respect.

His people failed him miserably. They were stumped absolutely. And it was one of the strangest things in the entire strange history of The Remaking and its aftermath. On any other subject under the sun, these avid Remaking aficionados had always found more than enough to say, and not always so stupidly, either. Yet the only time their hero had ever asked for their help outright, they were useless. And they felt very bad about it too.

These were the days, roughly, when a great many of the ‘culture hero’ pundits came out of hiding to help solve the problem, provoked by this delicious conundrum, after about ten years or so of rejecting their hero thoroughly in a huge hullabaloo over his ‘disappointing and shameful’ second book, Tales of Waring.¹

Mj’s people seemed to feel safer guessing what had NOT caused his problem of forgetting, than what had. They never bought the notion, for example, as implied by the Second Coming pundits, that mj lorenzo might have suffered a psychiatric problem known as ‘Post-traumatic stress disorder’, caused by the many traumatic events which had befallen him during his crazy Remaking year. Mj rejected the theory too, in fact. No one bought it in the end except the ones who had dreamt it up, the handful of so-called Second Coming pundits.

And with respect to the second half of that rejected theory, that Dr. Lorenzo’s ‘forgetting’ might have had something to do with some unspecified ‘weird, extremist reaction’ that might have occurred to The Remaking after the crazy year of mj lorenzo’s re-structuring; i.e., the suggestion that a post-traumatic reaction might have been caused in the author by so many decades of crazy interpreting and misinterpreting (by the pundits themselves, maybe) of the poor man and his complexly layered writing: neither mj nor the pundits could ever address this suggestion. They could not even remember, when alone in their private rat-holes, that some pundits had once suggested that such an explanation might be a possibility. The very thought was absolutely unthinkable, clearly.

But the dismissive part of the press picked up on the Second Coming notion immediately, of course, never thereafter able to cease chuckling over the ‘weird, extremist reaction’ of his very own psychotic pundit following to mj lorenzo and his ‘handbook for psychotics’. For that was what the Remaking pundits themselves, ‘their very own whack-brained selves’, ‘thinking of their very own selves’, had called that ‘monstrosity’, The Remaking, said the New Republic, in ‘their very own words of wackiness’: a ‘handbook for psychotics’.

297.  could mj lorenzo have been wanting The Remaking and all of its pundits to fade into oblivion? some pundits worried

Regardless of the cause of the difficulty, needless to say, meanwhile, somehow and some-why, The Remaking kept wanting to be forgotten or eliminated altogether – by mj specifically, that is. For others tended to feel the opposite.

Even a number of people in the world who objected to The Remaking consciously and loudly could remember its salient points perfectly well thank you and always preserved several copies in different versions despite their huge distaste for most of it, people like mj’s parents. And the author’s readership likewise never lost their copies of various versions either, though the author might have wished they had at times.

 Yet he never said out loud he wished his following would lose their copies of The Remaking, or wished they would lose their interest in The Remaking or in him. He never said that. No. Dr. Lorenzo was very consistent throughout the years. He wanted everyone in the world to know, understand deeply and remember his Remaking. And he wished he could understand and remember it himself, most of all.

But by October of 94 a few were proposing that ‘for 23 whole years’ he really had not wanted to understand or remember The Remaking. This theory gained momentum when it leaked out that mj at one time had managed to transfer The Remaking from hardcopy to a computer, and another computer and another, only to allow all three of those computers to crash at once and erase the book from any kind of real existence virtually.

Virtually was the key word. For, as Sammy told the story, the author said he thought he had a back-up diskette somewhere maybe. And he did in fact have, still, one or two holey, insect-eaten paper copies of the original, he was pretty sure, floating around in a moldy barn of his aunt’s in the Poconos, or a banker’s box in his basement in Colorado. They were somewhere in the U.S., maybe, with luck, if luck was needed. He just did not want to have to ask his readership for one of their copies if a TV channel called for an interview. For that would be embarrassing, what with the fame and adoration The Remaking had gained for itself and him.

For all of which he remained ‘eternally grateful’, as he always added.

And mj lorenzo never did try to ditch his following, ‘not that he was aware of, anyway, as The Harvard Lampoon claimed he had said. If he had tried to do so, ‘it must have been unconsciously’. But he was not conscious of having done so even unconsciously, he said, according to the Lampoon in a ‘serious’ editorial.

He had merely asked himself, they claimed, a few probing questions several times regarding possibly having attempted to ‘shrug off or escape his readership’, during several desperate efforts to dig into his ‘inchoate and unhelpful unconscious’, ‘if in fact there was such a thing as an unconscious’, all the time seeking some explanation, any explanation, for this ridiculous problem he had of forgetting why he had written The Remaking.

The Dr.’s poor pundit devotees were crushed by this, even though common sense told them The Lampoon in its history probably never once had meant a ‘serious editorial’ to be ‘serious’. But then the claims turned up in other magazines, and no one, of course, could trace who might have ‘leaked’ such quotes from their hero. So they soon suspected he might have leaked them himself for some reason. And, poor things, they said it felt to them, at first, like they imagined it must have felt to Jesus’ disciples if ever he should have forgotten or just contemplated the possibility of shrugging off those for whom he had allowed himself to be crucified or even WHY he had done so. They were a little bit hurt, at first, that the thought had entered his mind in any form whatsoever, to abandon them. Even if it had entered as no more than an innocuous theoretical question.

But they loved their mj so much after so many years, no amount of human frailty of any kind, probably, could ever have lost him their devotion.

And that may have explained, as well, why so much scorn from press and public never hurt the Remaking pundits enough to make them leave him.

298.  how each and every conference to help the author solve his problem of forgetfulness kicked off with a provocative (to pundits) tale about a day at the beach

And so eventually the day came in 1995 when Dr. Lorenzo would choose to tell again and again the story of his ‘forgetting’ during a series of huge one-day weekend pundit conferences across the U.S. and Europe, including Paris and Moscow. From ’95 to ’97 he traveled the globe holding ‘laugh and a half’ conferences, as they came to be known, seeking help from his following. For he was trying to ‘diagnose’ his problem by determining the cause of his forgetfulness.

He would tell each conference the same thing, that the very first of these notorious and irritating Remaking value crises had laid siege to his nervous system in 1979 during an August beach vacation when Dlune and the kids and grandparents had gone to Atlantic City for the day. It was possibly the first day in many years, he said, when finally he had felt he had enough time alone to just sit and think all day. And so he had done that. On the beach all morning and afternoon a half block from his parents’ summer house in Ocean City.

He had been very busy the decade since writing The Remaking and had put that blessed brainchild out of mind. But for six months he had been feeling a ‘sort of paternal’ guilt or pressure gnawing at his noggin, telling him to decide if he should do something about that messed-up monstrosity of his own creating which was half pastiche, half story and half sacred text.

So he went to the beach and set his mind to ‘thinking’ about it.

“Poor mj,” Dr. Lorenzo would moan to his enormous helper audiences around the world, which by the late nineties could fill big-city convention center auditoriums. “He had no idea whatever, on that day in August ’79, that his father had published The Remaking eight years before, in November of ’71, without his permission, hoping thereby to ‘find’ mj when he thought his son was still ‘lost’.” ‘Young mj’ would not find out about this, as Dr. Lorenzo explained, until a year later, in early 1980.

He was ignorant of his book’s fame, i.e., of the fact that already by the mid-70’s more and more people every day had been reading a photocopied underground version of The Remaking all over the East Coast and Midwest, mainly on college campuses and near those campuses. He was equally clueless that by late ’78 interest had spread long since to cities and campuses along the West Coast and to four European centers of learning at least: London, Paris, Stockholm and Moscow.

And Dr. Lorenzo’s reminding his people of this history, of course, amounted to ‘preaching to the choir’, as they said later. Since the Remaking pundits had always known the scoop of the story better than he had, almost, every detail of it. But he reminded them of these things because he knew that they would enjoy the experience of sitting together as a group with him, hearing all this non-news FROM HIM.

He wanted to rehearse the heartwarming legendary past he and they had helped create together during the many hard years when they had dealt and struggled with that fledgling puppy of a monster as a team, together.

For it was part of his goal to unite them by warming their hearts with memories of their shared ‘spiritual’ origins, very much in the same way that the re-painting of the picture of Pilgrim fathers in warm and sober earth tones each year at Thanksgiving always worked to unite and warm the hearts of the extremist Christians of the U.S., by referring them back, via reminder, to their truest shared spiritual ancestry, the extremist-Protestant Calvinist Puritan Pilgrims of Massachussetts.

299.  but without his monstrosity of a brainchild at the beach to look at, young Dr. mj could not remember why he had created it

“So,” Dr. Lorenzo continued, “Mj was far from his home in Colorado. He had not brought a copy of The Remaking with him to the New Jersey shore, naturally, and he was forced therefore to try to recall the darn thing as best he could from memory, eight and nine years after having written it, trying to overcome the consequences of having put it out of mind for so many years.

“He wanted to figure out if the strange critter might be of some value to the world, amusing or otherwise. But he hardly remembered, at first, what had motivated him to give birth to such a monstrosity. So of course he could find no handle for even remembering the story it told. But he was determined to sort the thing through. So he kept plugging away all day long on the beach, half-mesmerized by crashing and retreating ocean waves.”

Well!  Every one of mj lorenzo’s audiences would be in tears by this point. Always. And everybody. No one ever succeeded in explaining it afterward either.

Some observed that Dr. Lorenzo had always met with smaller groups prior to this, and always at their invitation, never his. Others said he had ‘never used such an electrifying format’, whatever that meant. There must have been a host of explanations in combination, and much discussion and disputation circulated for years about it. But almost everyone present believed that a part of the overwhelming emotional reaction they felt must have been this: that they had sensed that they were part of history in the making, they said, maybe in the same way Peter and John and Mary Magdalene must have sensed such a thing at times, bumming around as a group in the company of Jesus. And now mj was reminding them of that feeling and multiplying it within them as never before.

300.  maybe the author forgot what his monstrosity was about because it was about too many things at once

Dr. Lorenzo would stop here for a second, looking at his auditorium full of followers, right in the eyes of one after another, not enough to destroy anyone, but in a way no one could forget, as they would say later.

“Poor young mj,” he would go on, “after a couple of hours on the beach using linear, Western-world-type thinking, was still unable to find any value in his Remaking. Maybe, then, he was not ‘thinking’ ‘rightly’. Or was it because it contained so much meaning in so many forms. Was that why he could not find a handle for remembering the story it told? He had tried writing in that way at times purposely, attempting to say as many meaningful things as possible at once, while using a minimum of words. He had played that game through the years often while writing a variety of things. And usually the trick had failed. But with The Remaking it had succeeded on every page practically, for some reason, sometimes without his being aware until years later.

“Yet, though he had usually felt, back then, that he was comprehending most of his Remaking’s meaning; nevertheless, today on the beach, his thinking circuits seemed to have shut down from overload.”

Well: inevitably, every single one of these loaded words and phrases, too, had its own ‘electrifying’ effect on an audience of this kind, given the intense devotion they felt toward, and the thorough knowledge they carried inside themselves of mj lorenzo and his writing and of so many of its intricate nuances. Within just a few minutes the Dr. had hit them from so many directions at once and churned them up so unspeakably, they were in a state of incomparable emotion by now, a condition adding up to something close to ecstasy, if not ecstasy its very self.

301.  maybe The Remaking was forgettable because nothing of worth was in that crazy book

“Maybe, of course, there was no story of any worth IN that crazy book,” he would always continue, as if he thought they were not riled up enough yet, “nothing that deserved to be told or remembered. Yet it had gripped him so fiercely at the time he had written it, there had to have been at least one thing of very great importance in the book, at one time.”

And this little paragraph of two sentences always brought the roof down. Quietly, that is. His presentation would come to a halt. And he would have to wait and go on after the hushed but electric rustle of commotion died. It was not applause. It was a kind of emotional human-crowd sound that might take several books to describe adequately. Or better, a video tape showing the roof floating slowly downward.

“After all,” he would say, “’young mj’ had walked out of his psych internship to write the crazy thing, and no fool intern had ever insulted the medical profession in that way before. Or since! Either one. And that was another of his firsts. It just was not done. No respectable young doctor ever behaved in that way.

“Worse yet, he had even stolen a car and two boats, been struck by lightning, wrecked his father's beautiful blue Buick and wandered off from the world for a whole year. All just IN ORDER TO WRITE The (stupid freaking) Remaking. He remembered that much about it, he thought, at least. It was hard to forget events of such dimension.

“And so, shouldn’t these few things be enough proof, then, that The Remaking had to contain something of value, and that it deserved to be remembered?”

The pundits always shrieked an ecstatic, deafening, drawn out YEEEES to this rhetorical question, just as the Dr. knew they would.

In fact, if Dr. Lorenzo had only paused enough to let them, as some of them said later, they would have gone ‘ape-shit’ way back at ‘walked out of his psych internship’; because the early pundits had been notorious examples of that hated philosophy which had driven their parents and the whole country beyond nuts when it appeared out of nowhere in the 60’s, that infamous ‘Tune in, turn on, and drop out’ hippie philosophy; and Dr. Lorenzo had exemplified it too, making them all feel ‘normal after all’, as they said. Only he had done the thing RIGHT, as right as right could be. Whereas most were not sure if they could say the same about themselves. Such a fleeting thought was just one of a thousand magic buttons he might have been pushing at any given second during a delivery of such multi-layered power.

It was simple to see from hearing or reading no more than one paragraph of the Dr.’s ‘laugh and a half’ presentation, in fact, exactly how these people could have ended up spending most of their adult lives immersed in mj lorenzo’s The Remaking. His idea-combos drove them wild.

He could have had them at the barricades by now, had he wanted, said a panicky letter to The New Republic which was never included in a printed issue, fortunately. And a second letter, likewise never printed, clarified that: well, maybe he could have, ‘if his nervous system had not been destroyed by lightning’. And if the nervous systems of his admirers had not been fried out by sixties street drugs. And had the nervous systems of their children, ‘Generation X’, who had come along to his legendary presentation this very night to catch a glimpse of their nutty parents’ infamous hero, not been inundated for years by millions of jumping video games, flashing movie videos, blinking websites and changing TV channels, not to mention ecstasy raves on weekends, senior proms in chauffered limos, etc. etc.

This was a defense certain pundits and certain neutral parties had resorted to at several points between 75 and 05, when enemies of mj lorenzo had allegedly wanted to do him in, thinking him a threat to society at large. Mj lorenzo, his dismissive critics would always say, was dangerous only many years ago maybe, back when so many of his ardent followers had belonged to the extremely activist U.S. political left in the 60’s and early 70’s. But by the mid-70’s already that group had become surprisingly non-combative, they claimed. And by the mid-90s? Forget it.

Mj lorenzo’s following among the U.S. ‘left’ was finished and dead forever, said these supposedly ‘neutral’ political analysts. Because the once young leftist activists were no longer young, for one thing. And besides, they still lived in the United States of America, which pampered and spoiled them more and more each year with its cappuccino life-style of ever fancier luxury; with its panoply of human rights and freedoms unheard of in the course of history; with all the opportunity it offered to do whatever they wanted with their lives; and with all the leisure time U.S. Americans had, etc. etc. etc.

The left was ‘finished’, also, they claimed, because year by year, more and more of these ‘former leftist activists’ were getting wise to the fact that illegal Mexican immigrants would do almost anything for them right in their homes for nickels and dimes. Such things explained why theoretically potential leftist revolutionaries of at least these two U.S. generations, from about ‘72 on, would never ‘get up off their asses’ and ‘go to the barricades’.

The only reason they got up off their asses as much as to go see mj lorenzo, in fact, was: (1) they could drive to see him sitting on their asses; and once they had walked to the auditorium, (2) they could sit back down on their asses the whole time, listening to him.

And the only reason they got so riled up at the conferences was (3) they had absolutely nothing else WHAT-EVER in their lives to get worked up about.

In any case, whether his crowds were dangerous politically or not, each special conference of Dr. Lorenzo’s on his ‘forgetting problem’ was even wilder than the preceding one. And the sad truth was that eventually these special conferences got so much wilder than Dr. Lorenzo ever had imagined possible, he had felt forced to call an end to them. He blamed himself at first, for he thought his style had gotten too mob-inciting. Too cultish. Although eventually he suspected some of the responsibility might have lain on their side. For he had traveled all over the globe during this time and yet it almost seemed to him he had been speaking to the exact same audience each time, as if someone had taped his speech from previous conferences and put it on the web word for word, and the next audience had pulled it off the web and studied it before attending the conference, and ‘knew when to throw toast’, so to speak, just as during any midnight show of the cult movie, ‘Rocky Horror’, in any part of the world.

So finally, at the very biggest of these conferences, probably the biggest Remaking function in history up to that point, in 1997, he was reminded so frighteningly of footage in black and white he had seen of Hitler baiting a huge crowd in Nuremberg that he canceled the tour and promised himself he would be more careful in the future with the emotional vulnerability and manipulability of his following.

302.  maybe young Dr. mj should publish The Remaking as first written unless of course it was just written for psychotics by a psychotic

But anyway, sitting on the beach in Ocean City on that end-of-summer afternoon which Dr. Lorenzo loved to describe at these conferences, and eating the ‘Dagwood’ sandwiches his mother had made and packed for him; and having satisfied himself finally, that the book must contain at least one thing of worth, more than just usefulness as outhouse toilet paper, though he still could not remember what that one thing was; mj next asked himself the question: how could The Remaking be conveyed to others?

Maybe, for example, he could present it to the world exactly as first written, assuming he could find a copy when he got home to Colorado; but it was barely understandable in that form, he knew; it was so confusing.

“In fact,” he would say, loving to throw this in to stir up his conference audiences, “I never could have imagined, sitting in the August sun with feet buried in cool New Jersey beach sand, on that hot but breezy, sparkling, psychedelically color-splashed afternoon, that the whole world would eventually marvel at the dedication and persistence of the ‘early 1970’s Remaking pundits’, who already by 1972 had managed somehow to crawl successfully through that tome’s complex web of meaning and stylistic obstacles before anyone else in the world. And had done so without the slightest help from, or knowledge of, its author.

“One could even say quite correctly that at that moment in time, that day when mj sat on the beach, these early pundits understood The Remaking better than mj lorenzo did himself.”

This caused a gut-quaking rafter-splitting reaction, less a hand for themselves than a protest at the undeserved exaggeration. For no one could understand the Remaking as well as their beloved mj, as they saw it. And yet the intensity of the applause and cheering was always something close to frightening, until, of course, such conferences were cancelled due to the momentum of mass hysteria building around the globe.

The cheer was, to some extent, a thank you from the pundits present who had not been around ‘early’, i.e., in the ‘early 70’s’. For these younger ones would invariably stand to applaud those older ones who had been around, the ‘earlies’, who usually remained seated. But there was much more to such an indescribable response, of course, as whole weekend pundit workshops on the question would later try to elucidate.

Dr. Lorenzo always would say to them at this point in his delivery, “Many letters to the editors of magazines like Rolling Stone and High Times, in fact, later insisted that this particularly amazing accomplishment of the ‘early Remaking pundits’, in retrospect, probably constituted an indictment against their sanity.”

These words provoked boos and hilarity but he would go on, for he wanted to imply facetiously yet clearly that he, mj lorenzo, still questioned their early-70’s sanity as well. For after all, who but a ‘crazy person’ could have grasped ‘craziness’ the dimension of mj lorenzo’s? – :

“Because,” explained the Dr., “three different personalities or personality fragments had written the Remaking at different times in different places, and sometimes even, as some claimed, all at once.

“And mj… – ;” Dr. Lorenzo always would try to go on, but never could, having said such mightily sad and profound words and thereby provoked major hoopla from the many pundits and pundit-kids diagnosed over the years with ‘schizophrenia’, or ‘manic-depressive bipolar psychosis’, or ‘severe borderline’ or ‘multiple personality disorder’ or any one of a long list of rotten psychiatric tags. And added to that host of followers, of course, were the huge number who had known someone who had been so designated. A friend. A family member, a neighbor, co-worker, etc. And by 1997 just about everyone in the grand ol’ USA of America knew someone of this kind because mental illness had been rife for decades in that ever stranger and stranger country. And that may have explained why some cried at this point.

It even occurred to the Dr. that many of his following, the pundits in his own country most of all, would have loved him to pieces for this alone, the fact he had once been every bit as whacko as they, but had found a way to turn it to good by writing about it in an all-important book. If their devotion had been the only thing mj had wanted from them, he could have rested with just this one book, The Remaking, he realized. He never would have had to give them any of the other things he gave them over the years. And this made him glad that accumulating a devoted following had never been his primary focus. Devoted followers were as likely a trap as anything else in the world.

“Young Dr. mj of August, ’79,” he would finally resume, smiling at their response, for he loved the group of recovering mentally ill in his following as much as they did him, “sitting on the Ocean City beach, mesmerized by waves rolling in: that particular mj of 1979 had to admit that it was an understatement to say that The Remaking in its original form ‘did not make sense’. The truth was HE HAD GONE CRAZY WRITING HIS REMAKING. For now he remembered! It had made him crazy, if anyone wanted to know the ridiculous truth of the matter.

“Or maybe it was more correct to say he had gone crazy on his OWN account and then had taken the crazy trip it described and written the book AS A CURE. That sounded better. And if this was the right way to see it, then this might be another point in its favor. IF he could make The Remaking presentable.”

303.  but maybe The Remaking was nothing but a waste of precious time

“But was it really worth the effort? Or was he just deluding himself trying to think The Remaking might be a great thing? He could not get past this nagging doubt for more than a second, it seemed, on the beach that day. For mj lorenzo,” the doctor loved to point out, having been raised on such holy wheat, “was like poor old Martin Luther, who tragically and ironically had been unable to permanently reassure himself ever, his entire life, that he really and truly had been ‘saved’ and ‘was going to heaven’. Mj was like Luther in this sense: that mj lorenzo ‘doubted’, i.e. ‘lacked faith’ almost his entire life after writing The Remaking that all of the sweat and tears he had put into it had produced anything of worth.

“What if, for example, he, young mj, succeeded in finding a reasonable way to tell his Remaking story, and even succeeded in publishing it, only to one day read it to his grandchildren and be thought ridiculous?

“Sex could be fiercely gripping too, or going to the bathroom, but that did not mean people were dying to hear about it. The world had its own drama. Who wanted yours? Anyway he did not have grandchildren in 1979, just a little son and daughter. And a wife. But she had more important business on her mind by this point than any evaluating of mj’s writing. And he enjoyed a few friendships too. But he felt too embarrassed to pull his fur-feathered monster out of the box and show it to friends.

“Most of mj’s friends had laughed at him when they had heard about The Remaking,” Dr. Lorenzo went on, “maybe because he had not yet found an appropriate nutshell big enough to squeeze that holy griffin into, for describing it to the non-initiate. One friend in the Poconos had howled for hours and hours, and had proceeded to torment him for months and years afterward, mainly whenever he wanted to snap mj out of his brain-dead state after a day of work at the office in Stroudsburg, where the Dr. treated New York City heroin addicts with Methadone. This friend would delight in teasing mj LOUDLY for what he always liked to refer to as ‘THAT CRAZY BOOK ABOUT INDIANS YOU WROTE THEN LEFT IN A BOX IN A CLOSET, MJ’.

“‘THAT’S JUST LIKE YOU, MJ LORENZO’, his good friend, Bill Blackburn, would SHOUT while they were out fishing on a lake in the Poconos, howling so hard he would be chasing away the fish, ‘TO WRITE A BOOK ABOUT INDIANS AND LEAVE IT IN A BOX! HA-HA-HA-HA’!²

“Bill, who was exactly one-half ‘Indian’ himself, would carry on hilariously, rocking the rowboat for fifteen minutes, laughing so hard and loud they heard him in MINISINK and even in SHAWNEE, people claimed in Shawnee, or the fish heard him, at least, they thought. Because the hour of sunset when deer came to feed had otherwise been a good time at all Poconos fishing holes every other day that month, before AND after that date.

“All this raucous hilarity at mj’s expense occurred, of course, before he and his Poconos friend Bill found out that The Remaking had been published and already had a worldwide readership. And meanwhile, he had written other books that were saner and simpler to present, by far. Some pundits eventually said so, anyway. But The Remaking had stayed in that famous box for ten years because nobody had wanted it, not even he.

“One friend only,” said Dr. Lorenzo, “had begged mj to let him read The Remaking, immediately after he had finished writing it, the very day, in fact, that he had come down from the peak named Hungabee. Eventually this friend had pored over the thing at length, with devotion and all-out determination. And he had even liked the idiotic thing in the end actually. He had even believed in it, amazingly. And that was Sammy Martinez.”

This got a huge cheer for Sammy. Always. Which included one for Bill Blackburn too probably. And for everybody and everything else in the whole wonderful world. For by this point in the evening’s presentation Dr. Lorenzo’s audience of pundits had been lifted to such an elevated natural high so successfully and left there dangling for so very long, you could have told them tripe was gold and they would have applauded.

But, as Dr. Lorenzo said later in defense of the conferences: everyone in the world deserved such a nice warm human experience at least once in their lifetime. Didn’t they?

And in further defense of these excitable people: Dr. Lorenzo’s lifelong ‘followers’, most of them truly erudite students of the Remaking, i.e. ‘pundits’ in the original dictionary sense, were not applauding completely brain dead. By the late nineties these brains knew almost as much about mj’s friend, ‘Bill Blackburn’, whom they had not met, as they did about ‘Sammy’, whom they had met. Bill had played a big role in three books of mj’s written in the mid-70’s. And no one, as they knew, could really have blamed Bill for laughing at mj back in 1974. How in the world could anyone think Bill should have treated The Remaking with any seriousness when its author himself left it in a box under stinking underwear, ‘completely oblivious to its value’?

Many pundits claimed that Bill was, after Sammy, one of the most important contributors to the never-ending project kept going by a significant list of mj lorenzo’s best friends his whole life long, the critical lifelong effort of helping mj: to keep his puppy paws on the ground and to keep his eagle eyes from prying too awfully high or long above the clouds. And: to keep him remembering what it was about him and his writing that was worth all the effort. 

“And Sammy was a thought, of course, a very good thought,” Dr. Lorenzo would say to the conferences. “For mj had forgotten, as well, of course, that Sammy might be just the perfect person to help him sort out how to define The Remaking’s value and how to make it presentable.”

304.  how an emptying late afternoon beach triggered non-Christian (if not exactly pagan) lifelong memories of the Jersey summer shore with family

“But now the sun was getting lower,” Dr. Lorenzo would say. The beach was very empty by this late hour and mj’s stomach was empty too. And he knew that as soon as he walked the one block back to his parents’ summer house his mother would have her potato salad freshly made. And his sister would do her freshly-picked South Jersey Silver Queen corn thing. And there would be huge, fresh four-inch slobbering slices of deep red juicy Jersey tomatoes from Duffields’ actual farm near Pitman in stacks on his plate. And best of all, heaps of REAL, FRESH (!!!) SOUTH JERSEY LIMA BEANS, also from Duffields, which he would gladly shell and boil himself in water flavored with pure saintly-virgin Italian olive oil and fresh garlic and herbs, so he would have to count on no one else to throw in exactly the right amount of tarragon and basil to flavor that olive-colored Italian virgin oil, because nobody in his family ever seasoned extra-virgin oil as carefully and properly as he knew how to do.

“And then he and Dlune would take the kids to the amusements on the boardwalk. With Grandmom and Grandpop of course, mj’s parents. For this was a sacred annual ritual that had to be celebrated despite the surprising fact it was NOT church-related. It nevertheless HAD to happen AT LEAST ONE AUGUST SATURDAY NIGHT each summer, for July never counted. It had to be end-of-summer, because it was an inexplicable VERY NON-CHRISTIAN YET SACRED kind of tradition, just to avoid the term PAGAN. It was a tradition for EVERYBODY. Not just for all the very white, very Christian people on the Ocean City boardwalk, not just for the very many extreme right-wing Protestants who always went to Ocean City in those days. But for all the rest too, of whatever creed, color and designation of any kind. It was for every last soul on the East Coast who loved the summer shore beyond words, whether Jew, atheist, non-affiliated addicted gambler, mob man, mainlander, Wildwood Italian or Harvey Cedars Bible Conference nut. All the people in God’s creation who knew the summer Jersey shore and who were anywhere nearby knew they had to get to some Jersey shore boardwalk at least one Saturday night in August.

“And, just as no one ever went to church or Seder saying, ‘I’ll skip the bread and wine because I just ate’, so, likewise, no one ever cared a whit what kind of an extravaganza of a Jersey garden summer they had just stuffed themselves to overflowing with at Grandmom’s summer house. They still had to sample everything on the boardwalk too. Because it was a very special August Saturday night and everybody else on the boardwalk was doing the same thing and nobody in the crowd would get another chance to participate in this wonderful, healthy, spirit-lifting, very uniting human ritual for another whole year.

“And there would be real New York style pizza by the slice, like you could hardly find in Colorado in 1979. And Belgian waffles. And caramel popcorn by the arm-hugging tub-load that you had to nibble as you walked weaving through the thousands of shoulder-to-shoulder handsome and beautiful, freshly rosily suntanned, radiantly human Saturday-night throng, all the way up and down ten long blocks of the boardwalk, with ocean waves breaking beautifully on one side and familiar little stores on the other. And there would be bags of salted cashews and boxes and boxes of Shrivers’ salt water taffy to take back to Colorado for friends and co-workers and nibble along the way. Because mj and Dlune and the kids were flying home to Colorado the very next afternoon.

“So mj, still hungry at the beach, gave up thinking about The Remaking any more and vowed to get Sammy’s opinion about it as soon as he got back to Denver.” 

305.  how mj had himself a laugh and a half

“But then mj;” continued the Dr., first waiting willingly upon, and showing appreciation for all high-spirited audience rowdiness of whatever persuasion, “the same mj who by now was the last human being in sight on his block-long stretch of Jersey shore sand; right as he was folding his aluminum and green plastic chair and packing suntan lotion bottles and sand-covered beach things in a beach bag: for the first time ever, it must have been, in all those years since he had first started creating that seriously crazy monstrosity which he always had taken so god-awfully seriously; mj, the author of The Remaking, was knocked off center by a funny concept. That his sacred Remaking was a laugh and a half. A stunt. A prank. MAYBE.

“Maybe it COULD or SHOULD be looked at in this way, actually, he realized, after all. If one made the effort and just stopped taking it so seriously.

“It rang a bell with him, this uproarious idea. Could it be? That this might be a workable handle for getting The Remaking across to people? Maybe? That he, mj lorenzo, was a buffoon? a dunce? An irreligious one, like Coyote? And his tricks could turn the world on its head, as Coyote's had?

“Not in a way that would win mj worship, so much. But in a way the tribe might never forget, at least. And to his shock he was left trying to absorb this whole big thought. He was tempted to ignore it, actually, for it seemed a little nonsensical. But it was the only thought that had really sunk its teeth into his nervous system all day long at the beach.

“And he always said that his laugh and a half at the beach was the single thing that had MADE his August ’79 vacation, even more than the dinner that night or the wondrous multi-generation Saturday evening on the boardwalk.”

But the pundits, happy and high and united up until now, would suddenly break into childish spatting in their convention center seats when the Dr. would say this. They would punch each other, and not always so playfully. It shocked outsiders, but the truth was that most of mj’s following were willing to entertain the notion that The Remaking could be comical. While a forceful minority adamantly took The Remaking just as seriously as any kindly but puritanical Mrs. Elizabeth Q. Breadbaker ever took her little Sunday School children and God’s Word, The Holy Bible. And Dr. Lorenzo, of course, was trying to honor both sides of the reaction for the moment. Since he apparently had been the one who had caused such a bizarre split in his following somehow; when actually he had spent his life trying to unify people in this world, not split them.

306.  how Sammy Martinez wholeheartedly agreed with the author that he must resist the serious pull of The Remaking’s immensely powerful gravity by always and constantly perceiving himself as a kind of sacred-nature healing clown performing the supercharged balancing dance of a mercurially uncertain and improbable electron at about half the speed of light around the nucleus of a great dense and weighty matter or in other words lighten up

Dr. Lorenzo continued, after the floor fighting, to explain that back in ’79 he had sat on this nonsensical notion all the way home to Colorado on the plane. And once home, he had called Sammy immediately. He could not wait to bounce it off him, because Sammy knew the character of Coyote in an expert way as a result of being part Pueblo Indian.

And in fact, Sammy’s Spanish and Anglo grandparents were less than half his heritage because his San Juan Pueblo mother and her father had raised him in San Juan Pueblo since birth. He had absorbed southwest Native American culture more than any other system and embraced it with the heart of a healer, which meant a heart bigger and more sensitive than the average person’s. While, true, his mainstream education would get him degrees from Penn and UNM eventually, and also credentials as a Jungian analyst. But despite that he had matured essentially Native American, San Juan Pueblo by generosity, if not by genes entirely. And his people had taught him about Coyote. And more to the point, his shaman grandfather had immersed him from childhood in the training that made a boy a San Juan shaman, once he had seen that his grandson was made for that and wanted it.

And that's how it had come about, finally, as the Dr. would explain to his pundits at the conferences, that in early 1980 mj and Sammy agreed together, having let the notion settle into mj for six months first, that this might be as good a handle as any for mj’s remembering and telling his Remaking, whether this week to himself, or next week to someone else in the world: to always remember – even if the author had to kick himself in the shin ninety times an hour to remember – that mj lorenzo was a sort of white man's ‘Coyote’, the infamous, fox-like picaro, the bumbling antihero so beloved by tribes in the U.S. southwest. The Don Quixote of an animal idiot fool who accomplished so many hilariously outrageous and revolutionary things BY SHEER ACCIDENT, as it seemed, sheer baboon clown gut instinct.

307.  how Sammy offered to help poor forgetful Dr. Lorenzo with his first and second revisions of The Remaking but did most of the work in the end

Sammy was still so infatuated with The Remaking, in fact, as he admitted to mj the day they made this decision, that he would help mj re-write the crazy thing if mj wanted. But he would not accept any credit on cover or title page. That was a must. And mj did want help. Please. Because he was just so worn out already even thinking about it. And indeed, in the end, Sammy Martinez did most of the work.

Truth be told, when the whole rigmarole of revision repeated itself years later, in 1994, for the ‘second’ revision, and mj wanted to remember ‘one last time’ why in the falling-apart world he had ever produced such a ‘prodigiosity’ as The Remaking, Sammy promised mj he would start work right away on a ‘second revision’ into which he would insert knock-out in-text reader aids designed first and foremost ‘TO HELP THE AUTHOR, MJ LORENZO, REMEMBER WHY HE HAD WRITTEN THE DAMN THING,’ and only secondarily to help the readership understand it. And this time, as Sammy offered, he would do all the work, proscribing credit as ever.

308.  how pundits judged in retrospect the ‘real’ purpose of the conferences

Fortunately this horselaugh of a gimmick about ‘a revision to help the author remember why he had written the damn Remaking’, always tickled the crowd to distraction and reunited the warring factions thereby, doing so via hilarity at the expense of their poor hero.

In fact a few years later when conference hysteria had waned, the poor pundits realized that they had been HAD by mj lorenzo, completely and utterly, one more time. For, once the emotion had cleared and they had been able to use their precious heads again, they had realized mj’s goal for the two years of ‘special conferences’, from ‘95 to ’97, had never been to get their help in understanding his bad memory at all.

He might have had a ‘memory problem’, maybe, and apparently, but that had not been the ‘problem’ on his mind. He had used a memory problem as an excuse to bring his people together, because he had grown concerned that they were split on the issue of hilarious-versus-serious, and he had wanted to find some way to unite them and give them a shot in the arm as a united group.

He hardly could have been that forgetful about the Remaking, when they really thought about it after a while. He must have exaggerated playfully, hoping to get every one of his following to come to the conferences. As they had done.

And the trick would only endear him to them more, in the end, of course, even though he had lied and acted desperate for fraudulent reasons.

Opinion on the matter was universal. They never asked the Dr. to confirm the conviction because each passing year strengthened it.

And of course they forgave him one more time because he had only played games with them in order to heal the split in his following. 

309.  Dr. Lorenzo’s concluding jokes at the laugh and a half conferences and his freaking fantastic f--t of a final fine allez and final finale finally

To this end Dr. Lorenzo would add as many jokes about himself as it took right at this particular juncture, even if it took fifteen or thirty minutes and made him look like a whale of a white wigged-out walrus and wacko jokesmith (if indeed not also a joke’s myth maker and a son of a joke).

And then he would lead into his close.

“Anyway,” he would say, “as every Remaking pundit in the world knows, Sammy Martinez, right from the beginning – instead of presenting mj's salvation story as Jesus had his, in sober parables, or as Mohammed had his, in grand and glorious visions – was forever using mj lorenzo’s Remaking as inspirational course material for his months-long healing workshops in Abiquiu, New Mexico.”

And Dr. Lorenzo loved to cap this nonsense with the masterful close he had designed. He would separate the next few words oratorically, i.e., dramatically, giving them the right ritardando pace, slowing the pace gradually, then suddenly holding up his pace altogether, ritenuto, on the last…; three…; words.

He would say, “And Sammy would tell The Remaking story as a sort of long, but very long, even peri-patetic, and admittedly very, but very, pa-thetic-, -ally, sad;… sad;… joke.”    

Dr. Lorenzo, by this next-to-the-very-last sentence of his presentation, had invariably found a way to leave his intrepid supporters thick as pea soup, since that had been his disguised goal from the beginning. By this penultimate point in the evening he would have led up to ‘sad; sad; joke’ artfully, having experimented along the way with one tease after another until he had found the magic combination. Each and every tease and joke would have been offered at the expense of mj’s sacred text, The Remaking; of its sacred author, sacred mj lorenzo; and of its sacred admirers them-very-own-sacred-selves, The Remaking world of sacred punditry. And he would have done it for no reason but to get them to lose it with him one more time, all splitting their sides together, hopefully not for the last time during their sojourn here on earth together. If nothing else worked he would crack dud jokes and laugh at them his own silly self; and laugh hard; and laugh endlessly, until they had to laugh too at such a clown failure of a human being standing before them.

But, whatever it took, by this penultimate sentence mj would have persisted at multiplying hilarity until his most laugh-resistant group, the Sunday School pundits and any like them – like the culture hero crew, maybe – had let go of their puritan seriousness completely and accepted fully (as shown by unmitigated laughing) that the sacred Remaking; and their own laughable selves; and ridiculous mj lorenzo most of all: could be laughed at, and in fact SHOULD be laughed at frequently, heartily and unabashedly.

For after all, had they not just snickered at everything and anything the least bit amusing about The Remaking again and again, and done so all night long, three hundred and forty-nine times straight? How, then, could the straight-laced Sunday-School and culture-hero crowds not give in to mj’s wish and leave their feeble snickering in the dust and get caught up fully and unreservedly in everybody else’s gut-splitting, howling, booming-guffaw uproar?

That was how utterly he wanted them to lose it. Okay. ON THE FLOOR AND ROLLING WITH LAUGHTER, Sunday Schoolers and culture-hero heroes, every one of you, right now.

And he always got what he wanted. That was the very most amazing thing, said the pundit crowd, out of a whole raft of amazing things that took place during the legendary conferences all around the globe. And even the Sunday Schoolers agreed with the consensus in the end, that Dr. Lorenzo invariably – by whatever means needed – would conquer the most hard-assed, humorless, spiritually-egotistical, genetically-damaged-by-Calvinist-Puritanism hold-outs. And once he had gotten them rolling in the aisles literally, jiggling in circles like penguin-packs of Keystone cops on laughing gas, inebriated by their own natural nervous system endorphins enough to satisfy him, himself, mj lorenzo, anyway, then he would finally quit egging them on, tickling their funny bones, and would do his penultimate ‘sad; sad; joke’ line, and just stand there and let the commotion he had caused roll on and on for a good long while.

As it always did. Partly because he had tricked them, as well, into thinking his presentation was over.

Finally, however, they would see from his lingering demeanor that he was not hanging out just to soak up nineteen days of applause and uproar, but was caring enough about them to share another word or two. And the whole huge convention center auditorium of mj lorenzo admirers would finally shut up as one person.

And this time he would leave them in the throes of ultimate uproar by adding, with ultimate thunder:

“AND...  THE  HEALING  IMPACT  OF  SAMMY’S  REMAKING  WORKSHOPS  WAS  LEGENDARY.”

And he would shoot that madhouse of his own remaking – ‘the madhouse that Jack rebuilt’, as nursery rhyme pundits claimed Dr. Lorenzo had once, in their joking presence, dubbed the whole lalapaloozing bunch of world-wide mj lorenzo devotees – one final winsome smile. And he would duck out backstage under cover of pandemonium, making a clean, un-fan-hindered getaway.

And the next day, reading the papers, millions of apparently nice, decent and respectable people throughout the world would whisper to each other not to worry about all the hullabaloo and cockatoo too. Because mj lorenzo and his pack of wacky goose-puppies were certified loony. The Remaking was a handbook for psychotics. They were too nuts to be anything, ever, except tinkling brass and sound and fury. And soon Divine Authority would whisk them away like so much broken glass on the floor with a broom and then;… finally;… the elect would live in peace and quiet again.

Finally!

–       THE END   –