Lost in the Funhouse (5 page)

February 13, 1975 (3:04
A.M.
):

He had left the club, loaded his stuff back into his father’s car, driven the quiet Long Island Expressway from town back to Great Neck, back to Grassfield Road. Things had gone well enough—his work with the pitiful F. Man was only getting better and better and more fragile so as to almost crumble like brittle ash but never really. “Laughing at me? Or … laughing weeth me?” Grandma Pearl always told him with with with. Also E. was probably perfect by now, at least for these crowds—voice very strong, legs and hips electric, needed only better costume. Phonograph, drums, songs, fooling, teasing, lying in/for fun—fine so far. Good nights, okay nights, bad nights, just moving forward.
Anyway, Budd and Rick really liked him and always gave him time, and the NBC people were supposed to come to see him work soon, something about some new show that might happen, and he already did that Dean Martin summer thing last year, so it was building and building. Mommy and Daddy were sleeping, of course, and he smushed his ice cream and took it down to his room and opened his sand-colored Pen-Tab Wire Bound Theme Book (90 Sheets; 69 cents) on which he had chicken-scrawled across the cover, as he did with everything he wrote in, “This book belongs to Andy Kaufman.” (He had started this one last May, slowly filling it with short stories and ideas, almost always in the dead of night, because it was quiet and he needed to sleep all day, anyway.) Now he would make notes for the novel, whatever the novel would be whenever he got around to writing it. It would be huge, he knew that, and it would be about a boy who grew up to become the world’s greatest entertainer (himself, he hoped; you have to write what you know plus make-believe things) and it would deal with a mountain and getting over the mountain that no one had ever gotten over before and it would have lots of cataclysmic adventures and amusement park rides. He dated the page, checked the clock, recorded the time, and wrote the word
earthquake
and then filled line after line with other brief notions, scene ideas, diagrammatic plot points like
seeing of beautiful “angel” at foot of mountain
and
occasional meetings w/future self; as star, businessman, bum, intellectual writer, millionaire, etc.
Mainly, the plan here was to flash forward and backward a lot by way of fantasies and he was remembering now about how he first started out, way back at the birthday parties, which would be how this character—who was going to have the name Huey Williams—also started and he wrote:

He was very inspired, of course. But he had to wait wait wait after that first party and better prepare himself for the next one. He knew this was going to be his racket: the birthday parties. He would be a kid entertainer, making amusement amid cake and candles and ice cream and cookies. (Oh!) Grandpa Paul always created big hambone spectacles at his grandchildren’s parties—he would bring new cartoons for the projector and do old magic tricks and tease the kids and make everyone laugh. What Grandpa Paul did, he could do, too. He just needed a little more practice. Carol watched him practice until he was ready.

April 4-9, 1980 (past midnight), Maharishi International University, Fairfield, Iowa:

Seven months into the novel now, actually writing, finally writing, whenever he could; Huey Williams was him, most certainly; he had been departing from his outline notes, taking more and more unplanned flights directly into barely veiled autobiography. To wit: Little Huey was very very shy, played alone behind schoolyard in woods with imaginary friends (some had names—there was Harry,
the nicest guy in the world. Whenever you have a problem, you can just tell him and he’ll listen and try to help you no matter how busy he is;
Eddie, who was
very mean, so if you’re in a bad mood, you can always pick a fight with him, and if you want, you can always win;
and Marcia,
the most beautiful girl in the world and she loves you more than anyone has ever loved anyone and ever will love anyone.)
There was also a sweet Mommy who called Huey her Pussycat; the Daddy had an irrational temper, screamed often; there was a little brother (Waldo) and baby sister (Kate); and there was a Grandpa who was both Cyril Bernstein (profound love connection with grandson) and Paul Kaufman (wonderful fat irrepressible performer). Now—here in this quiet quiet timeless place where he liked to come and stay and learn and settle himself—he would write about Grandpa’s performances at children’s parties and how he taught Huey to follow suit. Grandpa showed cartoons, of course, and did a strange song and dance involving
noodles and wore fangs as he did so. He also had a wind-up phonograph, a Victrola, on which he played funny old-fashioned records, next to which he
stood in place, bobbing his roly-poly body up and down, pointing his finger in the air and wriggling it to and fro in rhythm with the music. In the middle of the song, the record had a scratch … and a phrase kept repeating several times as he just kept bobbing and wriggling his finger, until he smiled to attract the attention to his face
…
He followed with magic tricks which he intentionally messed up which made the children laugh because his face was creased with
utter dismay which he put on for their benefit.
Also he produced a large peculiar musical instrument called the Wamagadoon and he
started banging it in such a silly, untalented way, but with such technique that it fascinated the kids and had them totally entertained.
Later, very movingly, in a private moment, he revealed to Huey
all his tricks and secrets … how to keep up the people’s attention and fascinate them. He showed him the “art” of playing the Victrola so that people would watch, and last but not least, he showed him how to play the Wamagadoon.

All of it was pretty much the way it really happened, except the part about the Wamagadoon. But this stuff wasn’t supposed to be completely true, anyway.

Ponpongaba, ponpongaba. Now came the thumping, and with the thumping came the rest of everything. Babatunde Olatunji, enormously tall, draped in dashiki, flamed of fingertips, mystical Nigerian—he appeared like a miracle, unprecendented, without warning, performing for school assembly in the auditorium of Baker Hill Elementary
(most unusual booking)
in the spring of 1959. It was, maybe, a divine intervention. Virtuoso of West African percussion, first and most famous exporter of such, Olatunji had just made his best-selling debut album,
Drums of Passion,
for Columbia Records—an awakening sound, all new, deeply ancient—whose liner notes explained inexplicable primitive beliefs: “The drum, like many exotic articles, is charged with evocative power … [it is] not only a musical
instrument, [but] also a sacred object … endowed with a mysterious power, a sort of life-force which has been incomprehensible to many missionaries and early travelers, who ordered its suppression by forbidding its use.” And so Olatunji brought his forbidden drums to school that day—drums of hollowed trees and stretched ramskins, congas large and small, over which he leapt and pounced, danced and chanted, beating his rhythms of
gangan
and
dundun
and
bembe
and whatever else they were called. Grades one through six beheld the exhibition, some of whom endured squirmingly, others most certainly rendered agog.

One member of the fourth grade, in particular, could not believe his eyes or ears. “That was definitely an epiphany moment,” said Gregg Sutton, a very new friend who would become much more. “I was sitting right next to Andy and we were both completely entranced, mesmerized. If we had been bored for a second, we would have started doing stupid shit. We never even looked at each other—except to say ‘This is pretty great!’ We had never seen a black guy like that. The only black people in Great Neck we had contact with were domestics that worked for our parents and grandparents or else the occasional cab driver. So here all of a sudden was this giant black man with a different vibe—and his music was wild! That’s when Andy probably went,
Hey, I could do that!”

Olatunji’s thrall engulfed him entirely. Those sounds—he couldn’t get them out of his head, maybe they had always been there. He knew this much—that he would chase down Olatunji, hound him relentlessly, beg private lessons from him, become his special friend, one day do him proud. Gregg Sutton would bear witness to this, to almost everything pertinent, as years unspooled. In Sutton, meanwhile, he had recognized with happy alarm (oh!) a new sort of kindred spirit—an eccentric kid, temperamental, musical, rebellious, dangerously smart. Sutton came from garment industry money imperceptible; he was, in fact, a well-bred but scraggly fellow with a most erratic demeanor. He earned Andy’s unending admiration during a classroom party by smashing a pineapple upside-down cake on the head of a boy nobody much liked. “It
started a riot. The teacher had a nervous breakdown right there—she had to lay down on her desk—and we never saw her again. I was psychotic that day. Andy loved it. He never let me forget about it.”

Their bond was forged in other ways, too: Sutton had been friends with another Andy Kaufman at school (there were, astonishingly, two of them at Baker Hill, although a Kaufman in Great Neck would be as rare as a Smith or Johnson anywhere else). The other Andy Kaufman (regular kid) either moved away like Alfred Samuels before him or sought the need for individuating anonymity. In any case, Sutton found dark amusement in switching over to this new Andy, the one with the eyes. Much more important, however, was the fact that they would share an increasingly unpopular fondness for Elvis Presley. They could endlessly debate merits of each Presley single and its flipside, their first nexus being thus: “We both thought ‘Fame and Fortune’ was bullshit and that ‘Stuck on You’ was okay, but not nearly as good as the other stuff. It just came up one day out of nowhere. Then we realized that we were the only two kids who even cared. Nobody we knew ever talked about Presley. We looked at each other and went,
Wow!”

“When I was five years old my parents took us to Tennessee. When we were there, my dad took us to a theater. A man was doing an act which involved singing and shaking his hips a lot. When I got home from my trip, I jumped around as if I were that guy. I practiced my singing and after a while I started to sound like him. Then, in 1960, I saw Elvis for the first time and I couldn’t believe it. Elvis was doing the same thing I was doing and the same thing that guy in Tennessee was doing. I never knew that guy’s name, but he was my inspiration, not Elvis.”

As with so much treasure, Grandpa Paul brought Elvis to him.

This, of course, was the presumptive wont of Paul Kaufman. He was the uncommon senior—sixty-five the year of Presley’s emergence—who
embraced all newness with unnerving zeal. He could not help but help himself—and his loved ones—to whatever suddenly struck his epic fancy.
Was it so wrong to enjoy? To enjoy spreading enjoyment?
He believed in living in, and of, the moment and saw no reward in acting his age, whatever that meant. Among friends and acquaintances, for instance, he would be the first owner of a color television set, gleefully paying upwards of $3,500 for the distinction. He proudly drove a 1957 Chrysler Imperial outfitted with its own dashboard phonograph which spun specially designed records that he blared through rolled-down windows so as to remind neighbors of his youthful abandon. “You know what record he played most?” Stanley would say. “‘Davy Crockett’ from the Walt Disney program! My father was a big kid.”

And so now the youngsters were making the new music, especially the southern boy with the guitar who did the wiggling with the waist. He thought that his eldest grandson should have this buoyant noise in his ears. And so he brought “Hound Dog” and “Don’t Be Cruel” and “Blue Suede Shoes” and “Tutti Frutti” and, well, Andy was indifferent and disinterested—did not get it at all—and Michael danced and jumped and made the records his own. Michael took to Elvis first, along with a generation (slightly older) and much of the free-thinking world, while Andy patiently waited for … Fabian. He waited for Fabian Forte of Philadelphia, teen prettyboy with street-punk voice and glandular energy, whose frenetic sounds would spill from radios nearly three years thereafter. Anyway, when the time came, without even being asked, Grandpa Paul brought Fabian to him as well.

Fabian’s would be the first rock-and-roll music that mattered to him—perhaps because it was executed by an adolescent only six years his senior, eight years Elvis Presley’s junior. He could, would, see himself doing likewise, if a little differently, as soon as possible. So he remained loyal whenever pressed: “Fabian was my favorite singer, and then Elvis,” he averred. “I chose Fabian over Elvis because he was the first guy I ever heard.” Which was to say, he may have listened to Elvis but did not
hear
him until he was ready. Truth
was ever negotiable, though, and he would conjure other legends to serve him when necessary, such as the one about an early life-altering trip to Memphis with his family where he saw a mystery man shake hips. (“Did not happen,” said Stanley.) “See, when Elvis went into the Army, Fabian came on the scene, and that was when I really got into liking rock and roll. Fabian became my idol.” He would most clearly remember the summer of 1959 when his grandfather presented him with three pivotal singles: “Got the Feeling” by Fabian, “Mary Lou” by Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, and “I Need Your Love Tonight” by Elvis. This was the first morsel of Presley that truly resonated—bouncy, plaintive, leghappy
—“Oh! Oh! I love you so! Uh-oh! I can’t let you go!”
He would know it intimately. But Fabian took greater hold and, in short order, the entire Fabian singles discography would be entered (sides A and B together) in the coveted top thirteen positions of Andy’s first real record collection—a stout plastic box of fifty 45s, meticulously inventoried in quavering penmanship on two separate insert sheets. There were, in an order of his own devising, “I’m a Man” (#1), “Lilly Lou” (#2), “Turn Me Loose” (#3), “Tiger” (#4), “Got the Feeling” (#5), “Hound Dog Man” (#6), the flip side of which was “This Friendly World”—