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By Root 1365 0

my God! She knows what I’m doing!’ And that was it—that sealed the deal.” He sang her Slim Whitman songs. She liked “Rosemarie” best. He told her he was taking something called the Making Love weekend workshop, which was taught by his old TM friend Johnny Gray—who liked to be called John now—and Gray’s wife, Barbara De Angelis, both of whom were psychologists. Kathy Utman, who loved to spread love, had urged him to do it, since maybe there had been so many negative things happening to him that maybe he needed to be reminded about love. He told Lynne about one of the exercises where you have to reveal to the person you’re partnered with, which was Kathy, the worst thing you’ve ever done in your life. He said the worst thing that he had ever done in his life was picking his nose when he was alone in the bathroom. “He was completely serious,” said Lynne. The workshop also taught him that masturbation was not good for relationships because it drained energy and made one less present with other people. He did not like learning this—he had never liked learning this—since he was a frequent enthusiast of the practice. (“That’s one of the reasons he was late sometimes,” said Kathy.) But he did stop for a while and people said his eyes became more present and more clear.

On the seventh day of 1983—which was ten days before his thirty-fourth birthday—he returned to Rockefeller Center, where his banishment from Saturday Night Live still hung thick in the air, and visited the Letterman show to demonstrate his new loving nature. He hugged Letterman and bandleader Paul Shaffer and the producers and audience members and said that he loved each one of them and then he called his parents from backstage and announced, “This is Mommy and Daddy.” And he addressed them—“Mommy and Daddy, I never told you this before, but I just want to say that I love you both very much. And I’m sorry for if—I know I was a hard kid growing up—I gave you hard times. And I’m sorry for all the hard times I gave you…. And I really appreciate you. I’m very grateful to have you both as my parents….” And he hugged them both and Stanley said that they loved him very much, too, and Letterman said, “It’s a little like Queen for a Day out here.” Then they all sat down and Mommy and Daddy told stories about Andy and about how he stood up in the crib and played the records and about how he entertained the little children at birthday parties. Mommy also said she hated the wrestling with women and Andy pointed out that it had embarrassed her so much that she was afraid to go to the beauty parlor for fear of what ladies would say. And Stanley said he was still incensed at Jerry Lawler and then they called Grandma Lillie on the air and Andy said he loved her, too, and the whole family, including Lillie, sang “Row Row Row Your Boat” for all the nice viewers. And if there was a put-on at all during the visit, it was that this was not the first time that Andy had told Mommy and Daddy that he loved them. He said that all the time always. It was just that maybe 195,544 certain people who watched Saturday Night Live might not have known what a lovely fellow he truly was.

He sent the real him onto a television program hosted by a psychologist named Tom Cottle who asked him all about him no really and he told Cottle about the sad little boy who stared out the window when the grandfather died. He told about the boy with the cameras in the wall and the boy in the woods by the playground. He told about the meditating that saved him from becoming a wino in the gutter. He promised that the mean things he said about the women he wrestled were only fooling in fun and that he believed professional wrestling was really real after being thrown on his head three times. Cottle asked him how he felt when Elvis died and he said, “I was sad and, you know, like everybody else, I was a little doubting whether it was true or not, you know? It was a sort of unbelievable thing.” He coughed quite a bit while he did all of his telling.

He was a guest referee at the Chicago Amphitheater when Lawler wrestled