go ahead to:  [subsection 315]

puta – (noun) whore; prostitute

cholo – (noun) a street kid, street tough, often gang-related or gang ‘wannabe’

pero con la otra chaqueta – (phrase) literally ‘but with the other jacket’ (see ‘chaqueta’)

chaqueta – (noun) jacket, coat; foreskin

cholos y jefes – (phrase) street toughs and their higher-ups

jefe – (noun) boss

¡sí mon! – (expletive) Amen bro! alright! bravo! hey dood you’re talkin’ now!

chingada – (adjective) fucking; fucked; helluva

¡olvidalo! – (verb of command) forget it! forget that thought!

¡navaja de doble filo! – (phrase) a double-edged sword; a tricky maneuver that cuts both ways, causing extreme reactions of opposite kinds

chingón – (adjective) big fucking; powerful, impressive; pertaining to a big fucking person or thing

pinche – (adjective) darn; dang

hombre – (noun) man

¡ojala! – (expletive) if only God would allow it! wouldn’t we all wish for just that!

perro chingado – (noun with adjective) a fucked dog; a fucking dog; a dog (or person) with no chance

chingaderas – (noun, plural) anti-social or asocial clown stunts

¡Ai Dios! – (expletive) oh God!

parado or parada – (adjective) used: in Spain to mean stationary, still, or at a standstill; but in the New World to mean ‘standing’, ‘standing up’ or ‘erect’, and thus used also: to describe a man in a state of sexual arousal

ni modo – oh well, nothing can be done about it; there’s no way around it

Please note: The last expression above, ni modo, is not in the Larousse Gran Diccionario: Español-Inglés, so it may not be the best recommendable Castilian Spanish; but then neither are many other entries on this page. In fact, a university-educated young friend of Dr. Lorenzo's from cultured Guadalajara told him in 2013 that the way the Dr. spoke Spanish reflected that he had been living for years in the poor 'backward' state of Michoacán with people whose Spanish still sounded in many ways antiquated (maybe medieval) and/or remote-hill-country, and/or maybe Andalusian, i.e., from southern Spain, not from the proper Castilian-speaking north. The phrase, ni modo, however, the Dr. once learned from a young Colombian friend. And Dr. Lorenzo claimed that much of the Spanish he used he had learned from his young Mexican street pals and their families and associates.

In general, the Dr. had trouble at times with his Spanish usage when in the company of educated or well-bred Spanish-speakers, and occasionally had to explain himself to people who were surprised by his rude expressions. He would tell the story that he had never studied Spanish in school, but rather was self-taught from books and also had learned a lot of his Spanish from Mexican kids in their twenties who were working full time as his constant helpers and had grown up in the streets -- of Chockawhoppin, Morelia, or Sahuayo -- like: The Tin Can, Hechizo El Hechizero, or Cesar of Sahuayo. José, who worked as his helper in 2002-03, tried to teach him better Spanish, but only worked for him a year; and one year was not enough, said the Dr., to cure him of his love of awful Mexican street Spanish. He lived in Mexico nearly full-time from 2001 to 2013, twelve years, and his spoken Spanish steadily 'improved'; but, as he said, it was much harder to learn a new language at 60 than at 6; and besides, maybe also because of his age, he 'just didn't care' that much. He thought it was a bit more fun, he said, to shock and amuse his upper-class Mexican dentist with rude street expressions (for the dentist had hoped for better Spanish from an American doctor), and then beg his pardon and blame his retirement poverty, his need for cheap round-the-clock labor who could help him at home and on trips around Mexico, and the fact that most of the cheap labor he had hired in Mexico had turned out to be young Michoacán addicts, alcoholics, sex-crazed womanizers and/or street toughs, whose language was one of the few areas in which their society allowed them all the power they wanted to have; and Mexican life was about POWER. And he blamed the fact, too, that, since he spent most of his twelve years in Mexico staying in the house and writing, when he did come out of his room to do other things, he was always met first by his helpers, all of whom wanted his friendship; for indeed, had they not wanted to hang out with him as friends, he would never have hired them, and would always get rid of any helper who didn't make good company. So he had ended up spending most of his relaxation time for twelve and a half years not with Mexican dentists and doctors, but with Mexican street-people friends who used powerful and colorful street Spanish.

After all, his Remaking had required that he spend the rest of his life with: not aberrant brain-befuddled and depressed 'Mortimer-types', people who lived like he had up until his Remaking trip, but earthy, instinctual, survival-hip, life-intoxicated 'Jack-types' (as in the photo above). By 2013 he did have a Mexican dentist friend in Morelia and a Mexican doctor friend in Manzanillo, but only hung out with them once a year, whereas he 'hung out' with his Mexican Jack-type helpers more or less constantly, i.e., whenever not writing; just as his 'remaking' year had prescribed for him in 1970 as absolutely critical, if he were to maintain good personal balance and mental health for the rest of his life.

Although, as he told Sammy, this last part about the Remaking's 'Jack-types' never got explained to people like American or Mexican doctor- and dentist-friends, probably because these people did not hang out with him in a 'let-it-all-hang-out' way; and so they never got deep enough into mutual confessional story-telling to really hit the nitty-gritty. On the other hand, just as he listened intently to the life stories of Martín, José, Judith and most of all Hechizo, these four heard and listened intently to Dr. Lorenzo's stories about the very most important things he had learned from his writing, his remaking trip, and his life overall; but many other people did not. To these other people he instead told the story that it was all the Tin Can's fault that he spoke such irreverent Spanish.

The Tin Can had worked for the Dr. as a house-helper in Denver, then continued to help him when the Dr. moved to 'Chockawhoppin' (Chacahuapan, Michoacán); and most of his subsequent male helpers in Mexico (Martín, José, Cesar and Hechizo) the Dr. then met through the Tin Can. While living in Denver in the late 90s, the tin can had not had a drug problem, but when he was thrown out of the USA and returned to his mother's house in Chockawhoppin in 2000, age 25, he almost immediately became addicted to crystal methamphetamine, partly because he had grown up in his father's illegal drug subculture, but mainly because meth virtually cured his ADHD-caused distractability and poor concentration, and made him feel so much better in so many different and important ways at once. And since in Mexico it is not always advisable for security reasons to hire strangers to work in your house, the Dr. nearly always adhered to a firm principle in Mexico of hiring people he knew personally. But since he was a shy introvert and was still struggling with Spanish, especially during his first few years in Mexico, and therefore knew mainly people he met through the Tin Can, it ended up that nearly all of his friends and helpers in Mexico from 2001 on were people of whom The Tin Can had approved, people whom he had met through the Tin Can, and also, therefore, were people who, like the tin can, had grown up in the streets with severe family problems and cheap locally produced illegal street drugs everywhere. Each of the Dr.'s male helpers but José and Cesar had a no-good father. Every helper had a saintly do-everything mother or grandmother. All were looking for some decent fathering-type friendship and an opportunity to broaden horizons and maybe improve their life. (Although at the same time, these constant helpers, as the Dr. explained, were fathers and mothers to him; because he was living a third-world life for the very first time and, like a child, needed constant help learning how to do so successfully.)

This was the story the Dr. told his educated Mexican friends who wondered why in the world a man so highly educated and obviously well-raised in a refined country like the USA, would choose to spend his retirement years with poor Mexican addicts and alcoholics in one of the poorest areas of backward third-world Mexico instead of in spiffy Americanized Ajijic, San Miguel, Oaxaca City or at the Mexican beaches, all of these being the fancy cultured places where most retired Americans lived. He told very few casual acquaintances that at age 27 he had written a book and taken a trip which had 'remade' him and laid out a life-long treatment plan for him to follow, a plan which involved his associating primarily for the rest of his life with 'Jack-type' people, i.e., people who did not live in their brainy heads like he had for so many years, but lived instinctually through their bodies and hearts.

And the Dr. did not tell most people that there was another reason he liked these friendships with street people, namely, that they were expert at obtaining illegal drugs. Getting intoxicated with friends became an important part of the Dr.'s Mexican 'retirement' from practicing psychiatry for several reasons, he told Sammy. He 'virtually never' used substances with the primary purpose of zoning out, as some of his young friends did at times. To the Dr. the shared drug use was a way to ritualize and thereby make more sacred their experience of life together in this world. Dr. Lorenzo was a writer and could not write about meaningful or important things unless he knew life. And life was a huge challenge to everyone given it; and it was likely to be a lot harder to live successfully if you tried to do it alone. You could play soccer together, but that did not lead to much conversation either. So, for people who never shared a major religious practice together, never went to church or synagogue together, let's say, then the down-home rituals of talking, story-telling, eating, partying, and drinking and doing drugs together were a way to ritualize or make more sacred their shared experience of LIFE! Smoking pot or crystal meth in particular required long, highly knowledgeable, drawn-out ritual-like preparation. The atmosphere of shared ritual celebration-of-friendship (and potentially ever-better friendship) helped people loosen up and let down guard, and talk about important things. You got to know each other more deeply. Ritual intoxication was especially helpful to a shy introvert like the Dr., or to people who lacked self-confidence and were reluctant to talk with a friend for that reason. Partying, eating together and Intoxication all livened conversation. People felt less cautious. They told more revealing stories. Life became richer. Of course alcohol and drugs were risky ventures, just like all friendships and relationships and everything about life, in fact, even eating. You could eat too much, or the wrong things. Food poisoning could kill you. And with substances you could talk too much or get 'stupid drunk' or obnoxious drunk; you could smoke so much pot you became groggy and uncommunicative; you could smoke so much crystal meth 'ice' that when it ran out you became panicked and desperate; and so on. But, just as you had to know how to ride a bike without getting giddy from the height, falling off and breaking your head; then similarly, you had to know HOW to use substances intelligently and carefully, without falling off and breaking your head, so to speak; and the Dr.'s young friends did know how, all of them; though they all had trouble at times and would suffer occasional accidents. Olympic athletes had accidents too, though, and even died from their accidents at times. In general the Dr., who came from self-disciplined people, stayed on top of the risks much better than his young helpers, some of whom ended up in rehab (addiction treatment centers) (the Tin Can) or AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) (Martin), in jail (the Tin Can, Cesar, Hechizo), or tragically dead at a young age (Cesar and Hechizo).

And so, it was in such an atmosphere that the Dr.'s education into street Spanish happened over a period of many years. And since he loved every one of his helpers deeply after all of their years of shared life time together, living their lives together in this crazy but beautiful world, he loved their colorful and powerful street lingo just as much as he loved them, and came to use it pretty fluently, though never as well as his teachers.

Some of the Dr.'s best and most persistent memories of 24-year-old Hechizo, for example, who was killed in a late Saturday night street brawl in September of 2012, just a few blocks from where the Dr. was sleeping unaware of his helper's plight, were of favorite phrases the kid had loved to repeat, stories he had told, and spells he had cast using language. His nickname, Hechizo, meant 'magic trick' or 'magical spell'. Another kid in town had given it to him when he was seven, and it had stuck. One night when he and the Dr. were smoking pot together and talking, roughly around the chronological midpoint of the hundreds of occasions on which they got stoned together and talked (during their two-year friendship), he sat listening to Hechizo's flowing thoughts and language and felt high and elated, floating ecstatically with the language and with the fact that he was in love with the man as much for the beautiful way he used speech as for anything else about him, even though there were plenty of things to commend him. His use of language could ascend to stupefying levels. The Dr. knew he was right and objective about this assessment, he said, because it was something he had never experienced with his other helpers or Spanish-speaking friends, not even when they were intoxicated together. José, by comparison, used Spanish properly and intelligently, though with a little color at times. And The Tin Can hated to talk, maybe because he had an obvious speech defect that made him sound retarded to other Spanish-speakers; and the Dr. could barely understand him, even after thirteen years living together as close friends. While Martín used language with clever clown skill to manipulate the police when they stopped him and accused him of driving with an illegal souped-up engine. He was an effective people-mover in any kind of critical life situation, just as in that one when he pretended to be drunk and suffering from husband-abuse so as to throw them off the trail and distract them from the illegal engine. But Hechizo's language was in a different class. It was creative and original. Hechizo could talk about a wide variety of subjects with savvy ken and colorful, creative art. That night it was like listening to a composer making world-changing music on the spur of the moment, just by improvising. Like Charlie Parker on sax, or Miles Davis doing his trumpet thing, or like Bach or Messiaen improvising on a church organ. Hechizo's lexicon seemed endless. Like any great artist he was a skilled technician. He knew the language so well he made up flowery sub-languages and playful word systems, which he talked his friends into using along with him, just for the fun and excitement; as Messiaen made up mind-zonking musical scales and got people to accept them as valid despite centuries and centuries of enslavement to the same old scales which everyone had thought immutable, even accomplishing this in Holy Trinity church in central Paris, on the right bank where Parisians were more conservative. The interesting difference being that Messiaen analyzed what he was doing; whereas Hechizo's art was less thought out and more instinctual, even animal. Messiaen's art celebrated sacred life in an intellectual, self-reflective and ecstatically mystical church context; while Hechizo's art celebrated sacred life in an ecstatic, unreflecting, earthy partying context, like a wolf howling at the moon.

So it is to Hechizo's short life and long ear for language that this page is dedicated, especially these paragraphs about the Dr.'s love of Mexican street Spanish, as he requested.