by Bill Zehme
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.’”
The girl he found for himself—not for sex or anything, just to kind of indulge his romantic stirrings, which was a major start—called him from out of nowhere, called looking for him, but she was not looking for him, she was looking for Andy Kaufman, but not him, the other Andy Kaufman of Great Neck, whom he wasn’t (who was this guy?), with whom she had attended camp, who had neglected to give her his phone number, so she was going through the Great Neck Kaufmans in the phone book, lots and lots of them, asking for Andy Kaufman, and the phone rang on Grassfield Road and Andy Kaufman answered and that was how he found her. This was the summer of 1964, before tenth grade. He would fictionalize this kismet the following spring, writing in the school paper, Guide Post, a short story entitled “On the Road Again (Part I),” above which was splashed this self-conceived bio—“About the author: Andy G. Kaufman has traveled around Greenwich Village and San Francisco with such people as Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and a few girls. During the summer, he plans to travel across the country with Jack Kerouac, Dean Moriarty, and a few girls.”
It is funny how things can come up so suddenly. With me, the thing happened on a Sunday afternoon…. I was about to take a bottle of sleeping pills when the phone rang. “Hello.” I heard the sweet little voice of a girl about my age.
“Hello … I’d like to speak to Geoffrey Andrews.”
“Oh, this is he. Who is it?”
“This is Janet Brown.”
“Well, this is Geoffrey Andrews, but I don’t know any Janet Brown.” It turned out she was some girl [not actually named Janet Brown] from Rockville Centre, there was another person named Geoffrey Andrews and she had called me by mistake….
“Well, isn’t this something,” she said. “Would you please tell me about yourself?”
“What—er—uh—yes—um—what—do you want me to tell you?”
… I told her that I wrote poetry, read it in Greenwich Village cafes, and played the bongos in Washington Square Park. That was it. That phone call was God. She dug it, too! She [said she] played her guitar in the Park and she dug poetry. After a few hours of talking we were in the cool…. We talked until the sun burned out, and I dug every minute of it. There was just one hangup: She was too embarrassed to give me her real name, address and telephone number….
As story/satire continues, he never hears from her again and so—because she had lied about her name—he quests on bicycle to Rockville Centre, Long Island, with his own name pinned to his jacket, so as to flush her out of hiding, meeting many characters along the way, but not her. Funny thing that did happen was all of above—the providential telephone mistake begetting hourslong conversation mutually dug—but her name was Marilyn Blumberg, which she did not conceal, from Rockville Centre, who played folk guitar and shared his passions for Kerouac and radio humorist Jean Shepherd and roaming the city affecting hipness (“I thought I was another Joan Baez—dark hair split down the middle, black jeans, black turtleneck, black shoes, very beat, very New York, very very cool.”). Before hanging up, they made plans to meet at the New York World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows beneath the Unisphere globe sculpture (his idea) directly under the tip of South America—under Tierra del Fuego. She told him to have a flower in his teeth in order to recognize him. “He said, ‘I’ll do it!’ He told me it would be a rose. I’ll never forget when I first saw him sitting under there—he had a carnation in his mouth; he said he couldn’t find a rose—and I was surprised that he was this tall and lanky, sweet and cute guy. He was a little abashed initially because it had been much easier to be over the top on the phone. But he loosened up over the course of the day. I just couldn’t believe I was meeting this guy from the phone.”
Once loosened, he led her to the African Pavilion, hearing drums pound as they got nearer, and there amid huts full of antelopes and zebras and birds was Olatunji on congas, representing Nigerian heritage, playing, leaping, suddenly recognizing his pupil —Ahhnndeeee!—which, as per plan, impressed Marilyn (“Andy was very excited to show me that they knew each other.”); they spoke with the great drum master for a while, felt almost as though special blessing had been conferred, knew they would see more of each other. They did; usually they would meet at Penn Station, training into town from opposite ends of Long Island—“Mostly, I snuck off to see him,” she said—then descend upon Greenwich Village to hang out. They explored coffeehouses and folk clubs and bookstores. “We would just enjoy being kooky together, doing little spontaneous playlets on the streets, little Marcel Marceau mime things, performancy things. He was awfully good at it. Or he might imitate people he saw, but never in a nasty way. He was very very intent on people watching. He always made me laugh. Then we would go to Washington Square Park and sometimes I’d bring my guitar and we’d sing, which was cool.” He tried out his Elvisspeak on her, demonstrated for her his ability to lip-synch to the Mighty Mouse theme song (his idea for children’s parties, he explained, was to move his mouth only when the voice of Mighty Mouse declared “Here I come to save the day!”), became many other people for her—sometimes this scared foreign guy with a funny accent—which seemed to be a very big part of just being himself. “He absolutely worked at being very uninhibited that way. But the relationship never got very intense. Mostly, it was about hanging out and talking on the phone. There wasn’t anything like intimacy, but Andy was very shy.”
He and Michael knew a song, frequently sung by miscreants at summer camp, which went: “Last night I stayed at home and masturbated, it felt so good, I knew it woooould—long strokes, short strokes, knock-it-against-the-wall strokes, slam it, bang it….” Passing each other in the house, one would sing to the other, “Last night I stayed at home,” and the other would sing, “And what’dja dooo and what’dja dooo?” Brothers. They smiled secretly and never sang any further.
Meanwhile …
The rebellion, such as it would become, coincided with other chaos, with desperation no adolescent son—this one especially—might care to fathom. Stanley Kaufman was in trouble. Grandpa Paul had had it with the bauble empire he began. By the middle of 1965, he walked away, exhausted, no longer his big buoyant carnival self, and left Stanley holding the bag and all there was for Stanley to do was to put KARU-ARKÉ—as the once profitable business was now called—out of its sublime misery. At decade’s outset, these girls Audrey Hepburn and Jackie Kennedy—simplicity girls—they had stopped with the elaborate accessorizing, didn’t wear the belts or the earrings or the pins, did not adorn themselves much at all, and women noticed this, as women will, and they followed suit. Mrs. Kennedy’s late husband had already killed the hat industry—the young President never wore them; men noticed; hats were dead overnight—and now the costume jewelry business was similarly plunged into dire spiral. Stanley and his father’s partner, Ruderman, cut future loss by pulling the plug in October. Panic reigned on Grassfield Road everywhere but in the downstairs den where Andrew G. Kaufman of the eleventh grade now hosted various visitors of unseemly dishevelment and intent. Vacant-eyed longhairs came and went down there—usually through the outside rear sliding glass door of the otherwise sealed sanctum—issuing upward sounds of larger commotion, cackles, screams, guitar-twangs, drumbeats, soul music, James Brown music, folk music, Elvis music (always accompanied by a chorus of displeased groans). Upstairs, the irritable head-of-household would occasionally accost his son, berate him for his slovenly appearance, the unkempt facial hair, the sorrowful wardrobe selections, the lack of self-respect and self-discipline, the continuance of academic devastation, and the sudden ongoing presence of questionable youths on the premises. His pipe collection, he noted, had vanished from the house. His liquor cabinet—he may or may not have known—was being plundered as well. Was that burning incense he smelled? Correct responses to all criticisms/allegations were demanded. Only the briefest of yelping excuses were proffered—I thought you wanted me to have friends! et cetera—upon which s
on would walk away, upon which father would howl after him or shake his head defeatedly or howl elsewhere. Janice registered it all as familiar din, became very involved in television soap operas, made the best of all circumstances. She also made late night snacks for Andy and his odd crew, which balanced tensions nicely. Because, adding to the tumult, Stanley had immediately decided to make a new go of it, to start his own jewelry business (the only business he knew), but do it all different, get a new partner, aim for a new youth market, lighten things up, address the new tempo of the new times—they would even call the company Tempo so as to declare themselves mod as mod could be, thus bankable. New pressure therefore gripped him, shook whatever equilibrium he still possessed. “I was wetting my pants,” he would remember. “I was scared stiff.”
The boy had taken to truancy as means of escape.
Whereas previously he could disappear from reality without leaving the room, he had recently learned to disappear—quite physically—into mad shared adventure, into nocturnal unaccountability, into the gloamy parks of Great Neck and the sensual abyss of Manhattan. He perfected sneaking off as minor artform. Told parents he was somewhere he wasn’t and had no intention of being; manufactured alibis and cover-ups and rarely got caught. He was independent, his father remembered, not knowing the half of it. He rode the Long Island Railroad like a veteran of suburbanschlep wars. Gregg Sutton, his first and only ally in Elvis appreciation, had moved after sixth grade with his family to the city’s Upper East Side, to the ninth floor of a building on Sixty-sixth and Third—three floors below his colorful cousin Glenn Barrett, one year older, susceptible to any entreaty of mayhem. One night in 1964, Sutton answered a light knock at the apartment door. There he stood: “Um, do you remember me, Andy Kaufman from Baker Hill Elementary?” “He had been to Hubert’s Museum that night and decided to come over. We had stayed in touch a bit on the phone, so he knew where to find me, but I hadn’t seen him since Great Neck. He was talking about Fellini’s 8½ and had The Hollering Mangoo with him—what a piece of work. I got Glenn to come down, then we went to Central Park that night and sort of fantasized and played. This became a regular thing. We’d go to Central Park, maybe blow a joint or whatever, and just act crazy. You can be anything you want in New York City—it doesn’t matter. You can be any way on the street—which became one of Andy’s credos. We’d be soldiers or rock stars in the band shell. We’d do characters and get into fake fights. He loved the fake fights. He and Glenn would roll around the lawn in mock knife fights—never-ending knife fights—just to see if anyone watching would try to stop them, which they didn’t. It was New York. Johnny Carson would make jokes about how dangerous Central Park was at night. Andy was oblivious. I’d say, ‘Andy, there are people in here who really might stab you.’ ‘Oh, no! They won’t stab me!’ I guess we met the enemy and it was us.”
