Lost in the Funhouse

by Bill Zehme

  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 wit
h 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”—

  Ohh!

  Right away, he liked this song very very much. It would, in fact, never ever leave his life. It rarely even left his head for very long.

  In this friendly friendly world …

  He heard it as a gentle anthem of kindness …

  With each day so full of joyyyyyy …

  And understanding …

  Why should any heart be lonelyyyy …

  And not making fun of people who were different …

  The world is such a won-der-ful place to wander throuuugh …

  Like reallyreally different …

  When you’ve got someone you love to wander along with youuu …

  Slow haunting corny rhythm put him in the mind of people—all kinds of people—locking arms and swaying back and forth and being very very, well, friendly with one another. It was probably the quietest, most earnest song Fabian would ever sing (so strange), a saccharine message song he had sung in the movie Hound Dog Man (not about Elvis), and it went all the way to number twelve on the radio charts just a few weeks before Christmas 1959. Andy learned the words instantly, played it over and over again, sang along and beat along, very gently, on the twin bongo drums he had asked his father to buy him. (Actually, he wanted a big set of congas, but was encouraged to start small, to which he grudgingly agreed.) He would beat along to most every song he played on his phonograph, which his mother made him move all the way downstairs to the small den, so as to not disturb the house or little Carol’s afternoon naps, especially now with all the drumming. He could not stop the drumming. It didn’t matter which of his records was on the turntable: “I’m Sorry” by Brenda Lee (#15), “That’s Why (I Love You So)” by Jackie Wilson (#20), “Muskrat Ramble” by Freddy Cannon (#26), “The Twist” by Chubby Checker (#31), “Alley Oop” by Dante and the Evergreens (#33), “Theme from A Summer Place” by Percy Faith & Orchestra (#39), “Sink the Bismarck” by Homer and Jethro (#41), “The Chipmunk Song” by David Seville and the Chipmunks (#50). He kept drumming and drumming and then he found Olatunji’s Drums of Passion long-playing album and the drumming got wilder and more fun and he had to get his own conga drum now and his father finally relented (they got it in Greenwich Village) and he would stand in front of the large narrow drum on its three-legged pedestal and pretend he was Olatunji, very tall, very black, a West African possessed of mad new/old rhythms, and he beat along until he knew exactly when to thump hard (palm of hand) and when to thump softly (fingertips) and he would close his eyes while he beat and there was nothing else in the world and he imagined how his thumps could transform people and make them deliriously uninhibited and forgetful of all worries and problems and he just got very very extremely lost.

  He banged on the Wamagadoon and as he did it made him feel happier and happier. The instrument contained some magical quality which made tones, tunes, and sounds that moved through one’s soul with such a joyous carefree quality that one just felt more and more waves of bliss going through his or her body and soul, no matter how young or old, no matter how smart or ignorant. These waves were felt especially by the person perpetrating them; that is, playing the instrument, which in this case was Huey…. He was too shy to sing at first, so he just played, and the children, feeling these unavoidable waves of happiness, got up and danced. After a while, the intensity of the feeling in the room became so high and Huey felt so good that he actually did start singing. “Come on, we’re playing the Wamagadoon,” he said with a carefree air. “Yes, yes, everyone play with me, the Wamagadoon.” … It all worked like a charm and everyone clapped along and loved him, as the adults watched from the doorway and commented, “He’s so good with the children.”

  “… With a C,

  And an O,

  And an N,

  And an F,

  And an I,

  And a D,

  And an ENCE!

  Put ’em all together and what have you got?”

  How the act came together: He learned to play the guitar from a friend named Charlie—the simplest chords, really, so as to be able to strum with minor proficiency—and this helped greatly. Also, Mommy had forced piano lessons on both him and Michael and they drove their teacher crazy, actually once made the poor guy cry, which was fun, but he did pick up the basics of the keyboard. So he would sit at the piano in the living room where Mommy always played and sang her music and he plink-plunked until he came up with a little melody of his own and made it a song about animals and the noises they made, which he could maybe have the young children sing along with him. (“Say! I’ve got an idea! Let’s all sing the song together!”) He could play it on the guitar, too, in case there wasn’t a piano in somebody’s house. Ohhhhhhhh—it began—hhhhhhhhh, the cow goes moo and the dog goes woof and the cat goes meow and the bird goes tweet and the pig goes oink and the lion goes roarrrrr and that’s the way it goes! The idea was to get the kids to make the noises (“This time I’ll sing the name of the animal and you sing what the animal says, okay? Okay? Every time I say okay, everybody say okay, okay?”), since everybody liked doing that with “Old MacDonald Had a Farm,” which he had practiced on the phonograph in the den, using the big orange record with the Humpty Dumpty label that Grandpa Paul had given him long ago. It was a funny old version of the song sung by the ensemble of Billy Williams and his Cowboy Rangers, in which a bunch of western galoots took turns doing the animal sounds as directed by Mr. Billy, who did the chickchick part himself and then Little Tex did the quackquacks and Joe did the gobblegobbles and Eddy did the oinkoinks and Gabe finished off wit
h the moomoos. He practiced all the different parts, which he knew well anyway, then decided that he would be Mr. Billy (moving his lips in perfect synchronization with the record) and have children at parties come up and play the other cowboys while he comically pulled them back and forth as they pantomimed their parts. He nervously tried it out at one party in the neighborhood and it all worked like a charm and everyone clapped along and loved him—and laughed at how silly the whole exercise looked. (The production became even funnier once he began wearing a straw farmer’s hat.) He showed the Little Rascals film (Hide and Shriek) and old cartoons (Thomas Jefferski, about racial tolerance, was a favorite) and scary bits of The Creature from the Black Lagoon for good measure and then got the musical chairs going and pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, too, and did some magic with intentional ineptitude (the Ball Cup and the Mummy Case were always good for bad close-up) so the children could gigglingly try to foil him and deduce his (fumbling) sleight of hand, which was the best part of any trick anyway. Sometimes, for added novelty, he brought along a big reel-to-reel tape recorder (Grandpa Paul got it) on which he would record every kid’s voice, then play it back and make them all happily cringe. He always left his drum at home, however, because the drumming was kind of a private thing that sort of helped him to feel brave and not so shy, which was essential if he was going to be performing in front of people, even such small people.