Valerie Solanas: The Defiant Life of the Woman Who Wrote SCUM (40 page)

Shortly after Andy’s death on February 22, 1987, Ultra Violet, who regarded Valerie as “demented, deranged, brilliant, and ‘a personality in her own right,
’
” decided to track her down. “I wanted to find out what happened to everybody, who died, and that was the real reason I tried to track her down,” Ultra Violet explained. “That was really my motivation. She was the original homeless, so how do you find the homeless? That was serious work. I had to cheat and lie because only her family was allowed to have any kind of information. People said, ‘You’re crazy to even try to find her! She’s so dangerous!’ Well, I did not know twenty years later what state she would be in, and maybe by then she no longer hated men or the world. When you hate men, you hate the world.
”
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Ultra Violet called “all the crazies of the sixties” and found that few remained and “most have blown away.
”
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Those she talked to advised her to keep away from volatile Valerie. Ultra ignored them, writing letters to missing persons bureaus all over the country. She checked the shelters and soup kitchens all over New York and eventually found that there were several variants of Valerie’s name (Solanis, Solaris, and others). Ultra eventually found Valerie’s Social Security and SSI numbers, and using these pieces of information, she slowly tracked her down. First she found her address in Phoenix, and then got a forwarding address to a general mailbox in San Francisco, and then to her first address in San Francisco. Pretending to be Valerie’s sister and that she needed to send Valerie an urgent message, Ultra finally got Valerie’s phone number at the Bristol Hotel from the Social Security office in November 1987.
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Again pretending to be Valerie’s sister, and saying she had news of their mother, Ultra (calling herself Isabelle Gray) called the hotel and convinced the super at the Bristol to retrieve Valerie from her room and to take the call. Valerie picked up the phone and Ultra, recording the call, said, “Is this Valerie Solanas?” “Yeah.” “You mean the famous Valerie Solanas?” “Yeah.” “I was calling to find out if you were interested in having the
SCUM Manifesto
reprinted?” “Well, no I’m not.” “Have you written any other things besides the
Manifesto
?” “No I haven’t.” “How come?” “I’ve got nothing to say.” “What are you doing now?” “Nothing . . . By the way I’m not in this place under Valerie Solanas.” “What name do you use?” “Zno Hol. Z-N-O H-O-L.” “Wow that’s original.” “Yeah it is.” “How did you figure this out?” “Well it’s a long story.” “What does Zno Hol mean?” “It doesn’t mean anything. Are you a publisher?” “Yeah, yeah.” “The thing is, see, I get SSI and I don’t want to mess up my SSI with money.” “You mean if you earn some money they will cut you off?” “Yeah.” “Well there’s probably a way around that.” “I mean, you could have the money sent to your sister.” “Can you live on what they give you?” “Oh yeah.” “How do you spend your days? Are you making any movies or anything?” “I have a project.” “Oh yeah? Can you talk about it?” “No I can’t.”

Valerie’s interest in republishing
SCUM Manifesto
perked up: “Do you have the newspaper edition of the
SCUM Manifesto
?” “No. Where can you find that?” “That’s the one I want printed up.” “Well you must have a copy I hope?” “No I don’t.” “It was also published in a little book, wasn’t it?” “Yeah, but that’s no good. It’s full of mistakes. It’s not the same at all.” “Well someone must have a copy. Don’t you have friends who have a copy?” “Louis Zwiren might have a copy.” “Where is he?” “I don’t know.” “Well how do you locate him?” “I don’t know.” “Wasn’t it copyrighted in Washington or something?” “Oh yeah, I forgot, that’s right! The copyright office might have a copy of that. That’s right. I forgot. I did send them a copy.” “How many were printed?” “I think about five thousand.” “And they sold like hotcakes?” “No they didn’t.” (Ultra, wanting to hang on to her 1967 mimeographed copy, lied and said she did not have a copy. Both prior to and after this call Ultra tried to secure copyright for both
Up Your Ass
and
SCUM Manifesto
so that she could publish them herself.)
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Ultra continued, “Yeah, well, so what are your future plans?” “Well I’ll think about this here, this project here. Publishing the
SCUM Manifesto.
” “How do you spend your time? Do you go to church? What do you do? You believe in God?” “I don’t want to discuss it.”

Ultra then asked, “Did you learn that Andy Warhol died?” Valerie paused then replied, “No, I didn’t.” “Would you believe he died last February?” “Oh, really.” “Yeah, you did not know?” “No I didn’t.” “Oh. He’s dead.” “Whatta ya know?” “Actually, he died in a hospital strangely enough.” “What was the trouble?” “He went in for an operation and they operated and he woke up and he died like the next day or two days later.” “Oh.” “Now how do you feel about that?” “I don’t feel anything.” “Well, what did you think of him?” “I don’t want to discuss it. Could you write to the copyright office and get a copy of
SCUM Manifesto
? The newspaper edition of
SCUM Manifesto
.” “The newspaper. That’s the one you like?” “Yeah.” “Did you print that yourself?” “Yeah I did.” “That must have cost you a lot.” “Yeah.” “Well, what happened to all those sixties movement people, what happened to them?” “I don’t know.” “You mean it died out?” “I guess so. Well, I want to hang up now. Write to the copyright office about the
Manifesto
. Maybe you could call me when you get the copy from the copyright office. You can call me back.
”
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Later Ultra wrote about this call: “I’m glad I tracked down Valerie. After I speak to her, I find it hard to get her out of my mind. I keep thinking what a shame it is that she’s mad, utterly mad. For in the beginning, beyond her overheated rhetoric, she had a truly revolutionary vision of a better world run by and for the benefit of women.
”
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Ultra felt sadness and regret about not ever reaching her again, sensing that Valerie had faded off. She did try to call Valerie about a month after the original conversation, as she wanted to ask her for a picture so that she could see what she looked like. “I could not get her on the phone. I thought that was strange. I never spoke to her again. I soon found out why.
”
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By April 25, 1988, no one had seen Valerie for a week and the rent was overdue. The supervisor at the Bristol Hotel, Lev Krayzman, used a pass key to unlock her room. Upon entering, he discovered Valerie “kneeling on the floor of the one room apartment, and her upper torso was facing down on the side of the bed. Her body was covered with maggots and the room appeared orderly.
”
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The police report (misspelling the name as Valerie Solanos) continued, “Krayzman did not touch or move Valerie but opened an unlatched window in the room due to the foul odor.
”
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The coroner’s report gave the cause of death as acute and chronic aspirational bronchopneumonia and centrilobular pulmonary emphysema. The report also noted cachexia and fatty metamorphosis of the liver. Valerie likely died from pneumonia brought on by (incurable and smoking-related) emphysema.

The police report recorded Valerie’s death date as the day Krayzman discovered her body (April 25, 1988), though given its deterioration, Valerie’s actual death likely occurred two to three days prior. Valerie had knelt for days decomposing in her small room. Nevertheless, April 25, 1988, at 4:50 p.m. was given as both her time of death and the time she was found. Her headstone also reads April 25, 1988.
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The news came as quite a shock to family members. Her mother, Dorothy, had her body cremated on May 9, 1988, at the Fernwood Crematory in Mill Valley, California. Valerie’s ashes were then transferred to the Rapp Funeral Service Home in Silver Spring, Maryland. At the request of her mother, Valerie was buried at St. Mary’s Catholic Church Cemetery at 5612 Ox Road in Fairfax Station, Virginia, near her mother’s home.
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The small church and cemetery, also known, poignantly, as Our Lady of Sorrows, situated alongside a small country road in a bucolic setting with rolling hills and plentiful trees, had its own history of strife and conflict. Built originally as a place to bury Irish immigrants who perished while building the railroad in Virginia, during the Civil War years it became a field hospital and burial ground for thousands of wounded and dying soldiers. Clara Barton, struck by the sheer horror of seeing this kind of suffering among the soldiers, decided to found the American Red Cross based on her experiences there.

Wandering the well-kept grounds looking for Valerie’s grave, I found the site an uncommonly peaceful place for Valerie to rest. It was Memorial Day 2012. The sun pressed down, thick humid summer air blew gently, songbirds chirped cheerily, and when I reached down to adjust a set of fake flowers and a cheap American flag placed on Valerie’s grave, a set of black pincher bugs scurried out, angry that I had disturbed their temporary shelter. I have reached the most perfect end of the mythical life of Valerie Solanas.

Following Valerie’s death, her mother destroyed all her belongings because she wanted Valerie to rest in peace. Her sister, Judith, believes “resting in peace” would not have been Valerie’s wish. “She’s out there feisty as ever, raising hell in cyberspace and still offending all self-righteous hypocrites,” she muses.
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In a line Valerie added to her correct edition of
SCUM Manifesto
in 1977, she wrote, “The true artist is every self-confident, healthy female; and in a female society, the only Art, the only Culture, will be conceited, kookie, funkie females grooving on each other, cracking each other up, while cracking open the universe.
”
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