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And he instructed her to speak with him just as they did when they had been reunited and he asked her questions about her adopted family and about what she thought of his wrestling (“I hated it”) and they sang a song called “The Muleskinner Blues” and then she retreated and he performed an anguished dramatic monologue from a play that he made up in his head while he spoke and was heckled by a plant throughout and it all exploded into a mess and he conga-cried and then left the stage with his laundry as the theme from Fellini’s 8 1/2 echoed through the club.

On the first night that he came to Linda’s, they decided that he would split her monthly rent so that he had a place to stay when he had jobs in Los Angeles. They had gone to dinner at Inaka, his favorite vegetarian restaurant on La Brea Boulevard, and apropos of nothing she asked, “What would you do if you had six months to live?” And he said, “Go somewhere and finish my book. What would you do?” She said she didn’t know.

“Within a week,” she would recall, “he was coughing. He’d always coughed. But this was a really bad cough.”

It would have been a good time and an important time for him to go gather deep silences and he felt it, he felt the real need for it, and there came word of a teacher-training course that had been abruptly scheduled for December and he had just sent a five-hundred-dollar donation and was looking forward to going and he was at Linda’s when he heard that they didn’t want him to come. This had happened before, even though he was a TM governor, because sometimes bliss people didn’t understand that what he did when he performed was only fooling in fun, and someone in the movement would then make a call on his behalf to someone else and he would get to go. But now he learned, vaguely, that a new and powerful woman administrator—who had long hated the wrestling-with-women business—declared that his was not the behavior of a teacher and that his presence was not welcome at this particular course. And he called and called his influential peers in the movement and none of them could do much to reverse the decision. He even called his friend Jerry Jarvis, who had up until recently presided over the entire American TM hierarchy because he knew that Jarvis appreciated his dedication as few others could—“Andy had a more profound understanding of Maharishi’s teachings than many people I had ever come in contact with,” Jarvis would recall. And Jarvis now spoke with him at length and calmed him and told him that it was a misunderstanding and it would eventually be cleared up by the time of the next training course. But there was nothing to be done about this one. And so he felt hurt and the hurt touched his spirit, which had always been sustained by meditation. He felt betrayed inside his secret soul. “Who are they to tell me how to run my career?” he said over and over. Linda was there while he digested the hurt. “He didn’t smash anything or throw anything,” she said. “He was angry and then very sad. But he didn’t stop meditating.”

He and Lynne went back to New York for the one-night-only showing and/or premiere of My Breakfast with Blassie at the art theater the Thalia. (Variety deemed it an “effective no-budget conversational comedy” with limited home video potential.) A few nights later, on November 17, he reported to David Letterman that the Thalia audience was “rolling in the aisles.” He then showed a clip from the film The Big Chill, because, he said, “I saw it yesterday and I liked it.” Later, his three sons reemerged to display newly acquired trade skills. Andy said, “The adoption papers are now actually legal.”

Thanksgiving on Grassfield Road during which, as per custom, everyone around the table performed for their supper—

Lynne, as a newcomer, observed, “It was a Kaufman family tradition at Thanksgiving. And they were very serious about it. Everyone had practiced their little routines for days.” So, with trepidation, she would sing her special version of “I’m a Little