Lost in the Funhouse

by Bill Zehme

  The business began—once he had really decided that it was, in fact, a business—by word of mouth. It was a very occasional enterprise at first, starting really in his tenth year. But he was adamant about his own professionalism and showed uncommon poise when he took control of a party, summoning depths of adrenaline to combat all shyness. (Still, he preferred that the adults leave when he began the act.) “At eleven years old, he was a businessman,” his father remembered. “Nobody had ever been doing this. Parents who had birthdays for their five-year-olds just dreaded throwing these parties. When Andy started taking over, they were absolutely thrilled. They actually left their homes with him in charge. And the children idolized him. We got accolades.” The commitment to show business, as such, was fortified so much so that, by age fourteen (Andy’s memory; others claim earlier), he drew up an advertisement for his services and, unbeknownst to his family, paid ten dollars to place it in the Great Neck Penny Saver newspaper—and, suddenly, the calls started coming with impressive regularity. “He began by charging five dollars for two hours of entertainment and worked his way up to twenty-five dollars for one hour,” said Stanley. “Eventually, he was working parties as far as twenty miles from our home. Since I delivered him by car to his jobs, I had to lug the movie projector, which felt like it weighed a hundred pounds. Several years later, I had a hernia repair—and all I could think of was that goddamned projector.”

  These performances would now become the most important part of his life and he worked and worked to think of new things to do. “I was very successful and I kept doing this through junior high and high school and for a year after, when everyone else went to college,” he recalled, ever proud of his initiative. His parents were also proud, if amazed and baffled by what was happening here. They had been raising an unusual boy, they knew, and now they realized that they might have to try harder to respect his eccentricities, which grew exponentially. It was, oftentimes, a most difficult challenge. The clamor from the den below—the thumpings and the rock and roll and the voices and the strange yelpings—took on a certain fevered intensity, bigger, broader, louder. Thank God he could close the door to the room, which he did, always with a solemn sense of purpose. No one dared to enter without invitation. His father would state, “When he closed the door in the den, he closed the door. That was that. It was his inner sanctum.”

  4

  … The madman drove me home to New York.

  Suddenly, I found myself on Times Square … and right in the middle of a rush hour, too, seeing with my innocent road-eyes the absolute madness and fantastic hoorair of New York with its millions and millions hustling forever for a buck among themselves, the mad dream….

  —Jack Kerouac,

  On The Road

  He made himself a freak, which was fine, because everything was always fine; whenever asked how he was, he was fine—um, fine—was how he always was, no more, no less. He was visibly unflappable in his freakishness, unruffled by accompanying torment: ostracism, fine; humiliation, fine; you’re-such-a-freakin’-freak, fine, um, thank you. But he was not meant for peer approval, not until he had peers who were also freakish. That would happen soon enough—the American sixties, psychedelia, peacelove, whatever-turns-you-on, friendly friendlier world—but first, he was made to thoroughly understand his lowly place in the local adolescent firmament. One recollection, for instance: “I have never been an athlete in my life. I was always the worst. As a matter of fact, in gym, when we were kids, like if all the classes got together and played coed sportings events—all the girls and all the boys together—they wouldn’t choose me till last, after all the boys and all the girls were chosen. It was very embarrassing.” It was also very fine; he didn’t dislike it that way; he just accepted it; plus, he always embellished these tales for greater obfuscation of truth; no, really. Nonetheless, he didn’t mind that he threw like a girl. He wasn’t suited for ball sports or team sports, anyway. It never occurred to him to adapt or to change or to be better or to dedicate himself to any popular endeavor that disinterested him. His nonconformity was not meant as a statement, although it would be taken as such. If it was rebellion, it was causeless rebellion, which was, um … fine.

  Nevertheless: Another shrink, when he was in sixth grade, he said. “I saw another psychologist when I was in the sixth grade.” If so, it would be forgotten by all else and examinations would have been brief and cursory and not illuminating. (Attention deficiency/imagination, of course.) Janice saw same shrink this time, he said. “My mother did, too.” If so, she wanted to know what was really happening down in that den and how it related to the very poor schoolwork. Gradewise, he flatlined always, a D-minus dunce with a million better notions of what he wanted to learn. Pattern came to be that teachers uniformly gave him 65s on everything, so as not to flunk him, which he often deserved, so as not to get him back the following year, which they felt they did not deserve. Stanley signed his report cards with heavy heart, also with disgust, and would give the boy unholy hell. That he demonstrated an industrious bent in the birthday business did not make up for lack of academic luster. Goddamned door of den sealed off too goddamned much reality (only little Carol or the family dog, a small Yorkshire terrier named Snoopy, were occasionally privy to fantastic obstreperousness within; Michael somewhat, too). Stanley was never home, except for dinner/weekends, gave up on son, refused to give up on son, looked the other way, could not ignore it, bore down upon him when energy permitted, goddamned jewelry business sucked him dry, and this kid with his lousy grades and off-center ideas—well, he tried and tried to impart paternal wisdom, new approaches, to jar the kid into living in the same world all else inhabited. HOUR MAGAZINE: What type of work was your dad involved in? Was it a normal childhood? One of you must know. CAROL: Oh, yeah, it was real normal. MICHAEL: Oh, yeah, it was wonderful. ANDY: Every night he would come home for dinner, and he’d sit down—we’d all sit down at the table and eat. CAROL: And he’d ask us, “What’d you learn today? Let’s review current events.” ANDY: And if we didn’t know, then we couldn’t watch television. You know, he wouldn’t let me watch Soupy Sales if I didn’t know the answers.

  Stanley proudly read The New York Times each day he rode the Long Island Rail Road to work. “When I came home at night and we all sat at the table for dinner, I would try to find out what my children knew about the world and the current events of the day. So I would ask questions—about world politics, national politics, crime, sports, it depended. And the kids did very, very well with their answers. If they didn’t, it was nothing. I would just tell them what was going on. I was the big shot who read The New York Times.

  “But one time—I don’t exactly remember what it was—I had apparently asked a question which required an answer that was correct. No other answer would be satisfactory. And Andy answered this particular question and I said, ‘No, Andy, that’s wrong,’ and he said, ‘No, Dad, it’s right,’ and we started getting into a very heated debate. Maybe I’m known for being stubborn, dogmatic, whatever—but if I know something is right, it’s right! Goddamn it! You don’t disagree with me! We got into a real tussle. Then I made the analogy, ‘Goddamn it, isn’t two and two four?’ And he looks me in the eye and he says, ‘Not necessarily.’ So I just threw my hands up and said, ‘I can’t go any further! That’s it!’ He’s a kid, for crying out loud—eleven, twelve! Later on in life I learned that two and two maybe in Eskimo language doesn’t make four. Two and two can be something else entirely. This was what he was getting at. He had a perception of life that was always questioning everything.”

  Still, punishments were levied for bad grades and slack attitudes. The requisite rumpwhacks or, far far worse, television deprivation—which cut to the bone and severed the lifeline—were enforced by Janice when Stanley worked, which felt like conspiracy, which he ostensibly took just fine, although he simmered and stewed and plotted revenge within. His anger, he learned, was best dealt with on paper, with pen or pencil, which was nicer than his father’s method
s of release. He made sure, however, to let them read or to recite for them exactly what scorn he was feeling.

  Upon the eve of his thirteenth birthday, scratched in longhand, composed in seventeen minutes, presented immediately to assemblage on Grassfield Road—this:

  Jan. 16, 1962 (11:05 P.M.)

  My Last Will and Testament: Andy Geoffrey Kaufman

  I would like all my belongings (including money and possessions) to be divided in this way. (As I am writing this, I do not think much of my mother and father, but I must give them what I am going to give them because what they have given to me has amounted to something. I owe it to them.)

  I would like Grandma Pearl M. Bernstein to be the guardian of my beloved dog, Snoopy. I would like Snoopy to live [the] best life.

  I would like my belongings (possessions) to [be] divided evenly between (if any of the following should die before the will is read, the money is still to be divided between the remaining folks):

  (Mother) Janice T. Kaufman Grandma Lillie

  (Father) Stanley L. Kaufman Grandpa Paul

  (Michael) My Brother [Great] Grandma Rachel

  (Carol) My Sister Grandma Pearl

  Aunt Fran (Maid) Margaret E. English

  Uncle Jackie

  [signed] Andy G. Kaufman (11:22 P.M.)

  [witnessed and signed by:]

  Pearl M. Bernstein

  (Father) Stanley L. Kaufman Jan. 16, 1962 (11:27 P.M.)

  Boy had no fear of death, saw it as kind of romantic, really. Nothing much scared him back then. And the things that actually did scare him he liked because being scared was fun and fun never scared him. Things grotesque generally pleased him—also, physical, mental, behavioral ugliness; the reviled, the aberrant. Certainly, as with most boys, he loved monsters. But he loved real ones as well as unreal ones. Per the latter, he never missed the classic black-and-white horror films shown late every Saturday night on local New York television—specifically Shock Theater as hosted by the comical pasty-faced ghoul Zacherle (pronounced, with ominous emphasis, Zacker-LEEE!), who emerged from a coffin each week to introduce the movies. Stanley and Janice would often socialize on these nights with another Great Neck couple whose son was roughly Andy’s age, and so Jimmy Krieger, a rather straight-arrow kid, quick and self-assured, became Andy’s regular partner in various macabre and offbeat predilections.

  “We did this almost every Saturday night between the ages of ten and fourteen,” Krieger would recall. “Our parents would put us together, either at their house or at ours, and we’d stay up way past midnight watching these movies. We were both fascinated by them. We used to act out Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man—that was the biggie. Andy was absolutely frightened stiff of Lon Chaney, Jr., as the Wolf Man, the only monster that really bothered him. So I would be the Wolf Man and wear the fangs and stand behind a door to scare him. His parents hated that. He wasn’t thrilled, either. It’s ironic to think that Andy would later be thought of as the Boy Who Cried Wolf—and he was petrified over the Wolf Man. We also saw The Mummy maybe a thousand times on his sixteen-millimeter projector. Andy used to wrap himself in toilet paper and did that shuffling Mummy walk with the dangling hand. Sometimes it would be the Wolf Man versus the Mummy and we’d argue technically over who would win.”

  By sheer force, it was usually Jimmy Krieger who won—a dynamic that had marked their relationship since early childhood. Stanley used to seethe whenever he caught Jimmy happily pouncing on and clobbering his impassive son: “Andy wouldn’t fight back. I got so mad once, I said, ‘Goddamn it, Andy, why don’t you hit him back?’” Krieger would remember the horseplay more lightheartedly: “Even though I was a year older than Andy, he was bigger than me. And he was a wimp, so what did that make me? Although I did beat up on him, it was all theatrical—nothing to really hurt him—just playing out what we saw on TV. A parent wouldn’t necessarily see it that way, though, I suppose.”

  Still, the boys collaborated in hatching many superb schemes: “Our greatest accomplishment happened when Zacherle very creepily started asking viewers what ever became of Alan Freed, the disc jockey who coined the term rock and roll. [Freed was famously fired for accepting record company payola in 1959, after which he seemed to just disappear.] Andy and I wrote in to Zacherle in the guise of a pseudo-Alan Freed Fan Club and sent along what we claimed were Alan Freed’s gruesome remains—just a bunch of iodine-dyed twine which we said was his nervous system. Zacherle read the letter and showed the guts on the air. It was a major triumph.”

  Before this and throughout their youthful companionship, there was always TV wrestling—of course, the wrestling! the fights! the matches! oh!—Saturday night grappling cards broadcast from Sunnyside Gardens and beyond, thunderfleshed hulks snarling and bellowing, slamming sweat-slicked torsos against ropes and onto canvas, hair-pulling face-biting blood-spurting throat-stomping eye-gouging jeer-spewing thespianic guys with remarkable coifs and dumb names. And it was—had to be, couldn’t be anything else—a big lie, a phony deal, fabulous fakery probably kind of all-made-up. They were only fooling—in fun—probably. Anyway, this was stuff very very extremely thrilling to behold—loud, bellicose, prancing, giant assholes in heaving combat! It was the only sport that remotely held any appeal for him, so he clung to it proudly and defiantly: “Wrestling is the finest and oldest sport known to man,” he declared many years later. “It’s been around since the caveman, before the ball and the wheel were invented!” Stanley, on son: “He went bananas for wrestling as a kid.” As kid grew, he remained bananas for such. Jimmy Krieger: “We loved to watch Killer Kowalski and Haystack Calhoun—they were the two biggies for a while. Kowalski was just vicious; he once ripped a guy’s ear off, according to legend. [Truth! He stepped on it and off it tore. Kowalski demurred, ‘It was so cauliflowered, it would have fallen off by itself if it had a chance to.’] Haystack Calhoun was the only guy who could beat him, because he was so big and fat that he would just fall on The Killer.” (Haystack, weighing in at six hundred pounds, would happily exult from every ring he trod, “There are going to be a lot of human pancakes around here before I get finished!”) “The meaner they were, the more Andy liked ’em,” said Krieger.

  He needed to see them up close, so Stanley or Grandma Pearl would take Andy and Michael (another fan) out to Commack Arena or Suffolk Forum on Long Island, when pro matches came through the territory. “We saw Wild Red Berry and The Kangaroos, ‘Brute’ Barney Bernard [with his sixty-three-inch chest], Cowboy Bob Ellis, Skull Murphy, and Johnny Valentine,” Michael recalled. “Andy’s favorite was Buddy ‘Nature Boy’ Rogers—the blond pretty boy bad guy. He knew how to piss you off. I hated him. But Andy saw past that. He saw how fantastic it was to have everybody hate him—what theater it was.”

  The villainous Nature Boy merely became his newest deity. (“Oh—he was, in my opinion, the greatest wrestler of all time! He was to wrestling what Muhammad Ali was to boxing, what Elvis Presley was to rock-and-roll music, in my opinion.”) In 1962, only his second year on the big circuit, Rogers was voted by fans the most unpopular wrestler alive—ahead of the despicable Killer Kowalski and the ruthless Crusher Lisowski. He was also nearly unbeatable, which he flamboyantly made known to all as he preened and posed and strutted (“He invented the strut!”) and demeaned and boasted (“He invented the term ‘I am the greatest!’ He invented ‘I got the brains!’”) and obliterated all sacred rules of sportsmanship. (“I once saw Buddy Rogers beat a guy unconscious so they had to carry him off on a stretcher. Then Buddy kicked the stretcher over. Buddy Rogers knew ways of manipulating a crowd like no one in the world.”) Andy’s fierce devotion to the blond champion was boundless; he told everyone who would listen, “Any friend of Buddy’s is a friend of mine. Any enemy of his is mine, too.” He saw Nature Boy wrestle in person only once, couldn’t have been more excited, after which he would forever recall the event as “the saddest night of my life.” It was May 17, 1963—he was just completing the eighth grade at Great Neck North Junior Hig
h School—and he went to Madison Square Garden in New York, where Rogers was defending his world title against Bruno Sammartino, a towering Italian Goliath. Sammartino pinned Rogers in forty-eight seconds. “It ended with a backbreaker,” Andy would grimly remember. “After that Buddy retired. When he stopped wrestling, I stopped watching it for about ten years.”

  He found other extreme diversion.

  The city beckoned, as it will.

  The city teemed with possibility most, um, fine.

  He had seen enough of it to know.

  City = Exciting-exciting weirdwonders.

  He never looked up at the soaring metropolis majesty. Instead, he looked down at what splayed and churned and bustled before him—on the streets and under the streets and behind the streets and of the streets. Everything and everyone and every smell and every noise was here and here was where one could be whatever/whoever one wanted to be, could become other things and other people and—

  Dhrupick …

  Dhrupick—the spirit that was Dhrupick—could be loosed here, was born certainly probably to experiment here to discover things here. Manhattan, every stained and pocked crevice of it, every parcel of its soddenspeckled pavement, would be whatever he/they wanted it to be. Here was where he/they would transcend always.

  The boil grew and grew on the back of his neck—for a year, he claimed—pulsing at times, festering with pus, and the doctor, when the doctor finally looked at it, called it a cyst. A cyst! Oh! He liked his cyst quite a lot, was fascinated with it, this purpling yellowing bulb, protruding an inch from under his skin and just as wide in circumference, it was much more substantial than all of his lifetime of pimples, pimples which never stopped rising even now on his grown-man face and his grown-man back, welty kinds of acne pimples, even though he was always good at washing and hygiene and everything, since he’d been seeing dermatologists since he was like thirteen. The doctor wanted to lance the cyst right then right there, but he said no, not yet, and invited the doctor to come to his show at the Improvisation on Melrose Avenue and the doctor did come that appointed night and watched as people were urged to line up and step onto the stage for the privilege of touching the cyst, but only after they submitted to washing their hands in the bowl of alcohol solution which Linda had set up where she was dispensing clean towels and maybe four people actually did it—“Not too hard, now. Just gently. No no no! Just gently. Seriously. Really, don’t squeeze it or don’t touch hard. You can really do damage if you do. Please. Seriously. This is not a joke. Just touch it. Please don’t be funny. Anyone else? That it? Thank you. Um, okay”—but the ones who did touch it were friends and agreed to do it because he wanted them to and everyone in the room including and especially the friends who touched the cyst, not to mention all the viewers who later watched it on television during the program An Evening at the Improv, were really kind of nauseous over the whole thing. He was quite proud of himself, however, since it reminded him of old things and certain people he used to know. The doctor removed the cyst on another day.