Lost in the Funhouse (8 page)

He was a tall gangly cat with a mouthful of braces a-gleam.

The voice was croaking now, puberty stirring and all.

He needed to spill with a little profundity, since the birthday gigs did not afford such freedom. He needed to deal with the outcast stuff, the loner stuff, the why-can’t-the-man-(father)-let-up-on-me stuff. Stanley sometimes drove him to the coffeehouses, picked him up later, sometimes even stayed and listened to the son’s poetry (along with the tolerant/bemused hipsters at tables digging as best they could), shook his head with some small incredulity but liked seeing the boy’s initiative such as it was—but still.

Hereabouts was when two great novels had smacked him in the face, one about living/surviving life in the beautiful dregs, the other about wandering highways in aimless pursuit of sweet truth—Hubert Selby, Jr.’s
Last Exit to Brooklyn
and Jack Kerouac’s
On the Road,
both the godliest of godlyworks. Could he stop reading them? He could not. He read them to tatters, over and over, for years to come. Freak misfit outsider tragic/melancholy/profane books, they inspired him very very madly. He even started noodling with a novel of his own, a feral and violent delirium he would call
The Hollering Mangoo.
But, more urgently, he focused on the short form. And so from October 1963 through May 1964—basically the entire span of ninth grade—he wrote, then performed, thirty-one not-too-terribly-awkward beat poems of desolation, longing, ennui, confusion, and rage. Thus, the epidermal shrugs and
um, fines
unmasked themselves on sheets of innocent notebook paper….

“My hope is like a hollow skull”
was the first line of the debut effort, “A Chosen Few: A Love Poem”—with annotation at bottom,
“That phrase is an idea from the program
Hootenanny.”
(Television, as ever, fed all inspiration.) He dug deep, then deeper. The fifth poem—“Hi”—explored the banal emptiness of obligatory greetings (“…
Here comes one that I know, or knew / Should I say hi to him? / Here comes the one that I just met / Should I say hi to her? /
… I hate the hi”);
the eighth—“The Faggot”—depicted ostracism he may have known (“…
He buttons his top button / And minds his own business / Then the popular ones come / With their high pitched voices / And say, ‘Look at the faggot
!’ …”); the sixteenth—“Damn Them”—responded to aforementioned popular accusers (“…
Damn them! / The ones that ruin my existence / The existence I try to live peacefully….”
); the nineteenth—“’Tis Amusing”—vengefully elaborated on same theme (…
I HATE THOSE DAMNED MORONS! / I will kill them / Kill them all / Let me rise up and / SCREAM / But—/ ’Tis amusing….
). Geek pentameter somehow clarified his world with an acuity that he would never again muster. Bongo-riff-voice was honest in ways that he wasn’t nor would ever wish to be. In “Eidandrofields”—his second poem—he all but shrieked for compassion/notice (“…
I AM A HUMAN BEING….”
) and concluded with this conundrum of revelation (“…
Eidandrofields is my den / My place of escape / Where I keep my flowers—yet am I a flower lover? / Where I keep my records—yet am I a music lover? / Where I keep my writing and poetry—yet am I a writer? / I curse people—yet do I hate them?”
). Did he yearn to belong somewhere outside of his den? He did very much. “Lonely” arrived twenty-fourth in the poetic oeuvre and said all in these opening lines—“
There goes him / There goes her / There they go / I am lonely
….”

The yearnings were suddenly very real.

More than anything else, it seemed, he wanted love.

5

By this time, he had fallen in love once, he said. He tried to convince others of this later, much later. When he got himself famous enough to give interviews, it was sometimes all that he could talk about—this particular love, how it had changed everything for him, he said. He would even phone up the
National Enquirer
—which was something he loved to do, much later—and beg the tabloid to convey this seminal tale of hopeful/hapless heartache, which it did without hesitation. (Headline: ‘
TAXI’ STAR’S SECRET: I’VE BEEN IN LOVE
17
YEARS WITH A GIRL I’VE NEVER MET
!) He found her in seventh grade, he said. He usually recalled her long dark straight hair and her black leotards and always professed that she was the sole reason he had pursued a limelit life. “I fell in love with this girl in junior high school, but I never got to meet her or talk to her because I was incredibly shy…. Every time I would get near her, my knees would shake. But something in my soul felt so close to her soul. I know I’ll never feel that way about anyone again…. They say Capricorns only fall in love once and I think this is the once…. I
made note of what classes she was in so I could pass her in the hall. Every day I’d practice things to say to her, but I never had the guts to go up and talk to her. I even thought about tripping over a trash can in front of her so she’d notice me…. I decided I’d have to become famous before I’d have the confidence to meet her. So everything I’ve done for the past seventeen years has been so that I’m worthy of this girl and can go out with her.” Then she disappeared, he said, variously. He said (to
New York Newsday)
that just when he began to seriously perform birthday party entertainment—so as to start making himself worthy—“The girl I fell in love with left town, before I met her or could even find out her name.” He never knew her name, he said; he knew her name, he said, but was not ready to reveal her name, he said. He said (to the
Enquirer):
“I’m not prepared to name her, but she’s a brunette who attended Great Neck North Junior and Senior High School from the seventh to the tenth grades—from 1961 to about 1964. She’ll know who she is if she reads this.” Which was to say, she knew him, which she never did, he said. She left in 1964, he said, and she left by the end of 1961, he said. He said (to
The Washington Post)
that she moved away after the first semester of seventh grade and he never saw her again. He said (to
The Village Voice)
that once his epic novel-in-progress,
The Huey Williams Story,
was made into a movie, he would dedicate the movie to her, “Then I’m gonna feel worthy enough so that I can actually go out and say her name and put on a real search for her. Then I’ll find her and then who knows what’ll happen?” He hunched over one tape recorder
(Los Angeles Times)
and said to her directly, “If you are reading this now, you should know that everything I did was for you.” Then he added, thinking aloud, “But what if she doesn’t like what I [just] said and when I call her she’ll say [coldly], ‘Oh, hello, Andy, I read what you said and …’ And gosh, what if her father reads it and says [gruffly], ‘Who does he think he is, using my daughter in a …?’ But it’s so romantic, maybe she’ll say, ‘Oh Andy, that’s so-o-o sweet.’”

Anyway, once she disappeared, he knew that he would find her again, if only he knew who she was, since he knew who she was, if
only she had been real, which she was, except she never was, not that there weren’t girls just like her who never noticed him, whom he loved from a self-imposed frozen-out distance. Well, she/they would be sorry, he liked to say.

He was watching Elvis get girls all along. Now
there
was confidence! Elvis was getting Ann-Margret in
Viva Las Vegas
right about the time he finished his thirty-first and final beat poem (unlike the others, four words, four lines, untitled—“
I liv /e /to I /ive
”—tough to perform). He was, he knew, the only beatnik to madly dig godly Elvis, whose sneers and lipcurls over brightwhite tooth enamel (no braces) induced chick paroxysms galore, never mind the leg/hip-swivels. He missed no Elvis film, was ever the repeat box office customer, glued himself to the subsequent television broadcasts of each, studied the execution of all Elvisian conquests
—babybaby-baby meet-me-after-the-show-baby
—mimicked the delivery in mirrors, knowing he could never try this in actual life, but liking that he could do it as well as he could, thinking he could maybe do it somehow somewhere besides the den if circumstances were denlike. In the den, he played Elvis albums—would eventually possess forty-three of them and they in turn would possess him—singing along while pounding/seducing conga in lieu of actual girl, wanting actual girl very badly. Hormones flamed, boy ached.

He was a good-looking boy, no question—although tending more and more toward disheveled presentation. He had also been discovering new physical strength and endurance skills in gym class—finished second in cross-country track race (very proud), excelled at swimming, rope skipping, rope climbing, sit-ups, chin-ups (setting GNN Junior High record with thirty-five), and wrestled with alarming vigor. “For the first time in my life I was considered a good athlete.” Social skills, however, remained out of grasp. He knew not how to make easy conversation with anyone, certainly not females. When conversation occurred at all, he was never a generalist, always a specialist who spoke passionately about his passions, and only those who
shared his passions (if even somewhat) cared to sustain any sort of dialogue with him. “In Great Neck,” he later recalled, “there were three groups of kids—the hoods, beatniks, and ‘poppies’ [as in popular ones]. I was a beatnik, but my parents wanted me to be like the poppies, who were well-adjusted, dressed nicely, and drove nice cars.” Jimmy Krieger, for instance, became a poppy, very clean-cut, adept with girls, so much so that he eventually drifted away from Andy, as goes all teen Darwinism. “Andy was not very cool with girls,” he would remember. “He wore a lot of white T-shirts or sloppy stuff, didn’t care how he looked. To high school girls, he wasn’t attractive. They didn’t want to know him.”

Earlier on, Krieger had orchestrated a couple of innocent prepubescent, prebeatnik “date” nights wherein he and Andy and a friend named Barbara Levy and a girl she knew got dressed up and were parentally ferried to the Copacabana nightclub in the city to see Paul Anka and Frankie Avalon sing. Photographs from such nights evinced painful awkwardness of boy thrust-and-harnessed in suit and tie, hair askew, mouth of metal, eyes agape, uncertain of comportment amid female company, poppy potential nil, but thrilled to be near show business, nonetheless. (Avalon and Anka each posed with him after their shows, slinging an arm around his narrow shoulders.) He seemed to belong elsewhere, on the fringe, which was where he fled and stayed and found fringe friends, lost in ways he was not, slack renegades grinding ambiguous axes, ready for amusement always, as was he, and so he became their amusement—his oddness fascinated them—and they became his audience and things got better and also dangerous and certain girls of existential beatnik bent began to like him precisely for who he wasn’t.

So—here was how he won favor and gained entry into the slim fragment of society that would have him: He went where wind blew him, like Kerouac did with Neal Cassady, usually smack into questionable corners. Already, he was solid with his poetry jaunts to the Village (no kid ever did that), and he had stalked Olatunji there as well, paid the giant West African to give him afternoon conga lessons—where and how to put his hands—there at the famed
Village Gate nightery (got to pound drums
with
Olatunji—ohhh!). Mystique was in place, if only others knew. Wind also blew him via his bicycle to the center of Great Neck, to Frederick’s malt shop, by the train station on Grace Avenue, in front of which—on the sidewalk, on the curb—disenfranchised youth congregated and grumbled and chortled and wearily posed. (Frederick’s was owned by people named Selby, like writer-hero Hubert Selby, Jr., whose first name, Hubert, was like shrinely Hubert’s Museum—making-for-a-godly-coincidental-oh!) He carried with him always a canvas knapsack containing a beaten-up copy of Kerouac’s
On the Road—he
referred to it like a prayer book, evangelically citing passages—and reams of loose handwritten pages comprising his own novel,
The Hollering Mangoo,
which would be completed by his sixteenth year. Whenever he heard Kerouac invoked around the malt shop or in the park across the street, he brandished his copy of
On the Road
and followed with a fan-flourish of crumpled
Mangoo
pages and an open invitation for anyone to read from them. These loiterers and lollygaggers—they were all
attitude
—could not help but fall prey to his peculiar hubris, except for the ones who urged him to scram and elected to smoke in another direction.

Mangoo,
he indicated to the ones intrigued, was a teen angst fantasmagory, a tour de force of rage and horror and self-discovery played in the ominous shadow of an ephemeral bellowing beast that chased main characters throughout various kingdoms and suburbs. It was very very jackkerouackian, he promised. Also, it made no sense in the least whatsoever at all—but he pointed to the good parts, anyway. Like where this girl named Sadie screams the word
fuck
103 times and 189 times (presented in seven columns twenty-seven times vertically—nothing else on the page) and also exclaims the word
shit
at the top of her lungs 127 times; and like where Sadie takes a bludgeon to her mother’s left breast (“
Here go your tits, baby!
”) and keeps hammering
until, finally, it was hanging like an apple on a string and wobbling
, and proceeds to tear it off and throw it
against the walls, the ceiling, and bounced it on the floor
; and like where this boy named Charley is whiplashed
unmercifully by his mother until his right eyeball is sliced in half and
blood was spurting out of it
and she keeps cracking the whip and leaving scars everywhere (“
All right, Ma! That’s enough! Fuck you, Mother!
”); and like where the mother of the Mangoo beast attacks the narrator boy by pelting him with clumps of dried vomit
so I hid in a barrel but it was
full of shit
so I was in up to my neck while this crazy mother threw vomit at me—what should I do—duck?—it was a problem … but she kept throwing it at me so I ducked and got my face all full of the doody which now I realized was Charley’s and it was
his
mother who threw the vomit which hit my face.
Years later, sheepish upon reflection, he said
Mangoo
—“the ultimate fantasies of a sixteen-year-old” whose characters combined “different aspects of myself”—was created during “my obscene period.” He had once shown it to his English teacher, he said, and delighted in the memory of almost being expelled as a result.

“I wrote this book,” he said, “so people would vomit.”

Most probably, he wrote it to purge himself, to sublimate a hostility so corrosive (over feeling dismissal from all quarters) that not even his poetry could plumb such depths. The bile could surface no other way. But to share it—kind of artfully, on paper—with others was to clankclatter his cup against cage bars, to get extreme unexpurgated reaction/attention. (He was, in effect, doing all of the hollering, if inwardly—not the mangoo.) Earlier, he had performed TV playlets in school shrubbery for similar purpose. Now, however, he became a curiosity worth noting—and perhaps a tad too frightening to ignore. Among the first of the Frederick’s crowd who paid heed was another beatnik aspirant named Moogie Klingman, who wanted to be Bob Dylan and understood weirdness to be an asset. He saw raw nobility—or was it fine freak madness?—in this popeyed poet with the wild book pages. “His Kerouac fanaticism was Andy’s calling card to the beatnik scene in Great Neck—that and
The Hollering Mangoo,”
Klingman would recall. “He was kind of an aloof nerdy guy, but people came to be really taken with him because he was so strange. He would pull out these pages, but I don’t think he seriously meant for anyone to actually read them. He just meant to impress us that he was weird.”

They were close for several months, during which Moogie instructed him in rebel ways—on how to defy parents (“He’d say, ‘I’ve got to be home by six,’ and I’d tell him, ‘Andy, today you’re going to stay and hang out and you’re not going home till midnight!’ But he’d just say, ‘I can’t,’ and he jumped on his bike and rode home.”); on how to develop proper scornful attitudes (“He never said anything bad about anybody, never even talked about anybody, was always being very nice and polite, never jealous or competitive. He was just in his own world.”); and, most crucially, on how to make it with girls. They spoke of sex frequently, as in what-will-it-be-like? And as in I-will-have-sex-all-the-time-once-I-ever-actually-have-sex. Finally, it was Moogie who first lured a female into the arena, somewhat, which Andy thought was fine. “I got this girlfriend, a kind of foxy hippie girl named Liz, and we would show Andy how to kiss by kissing in front of him. Tongue kisses, a little petting. He would watch closely and study. I would feel her up and he would stand there taking notes in his mind and say with extreme politeness, ‘Oh! Very good, this is how you kiss? Oh, could I see that again? Oh, that’s very interesting.’”