Lost in the Funhouse

by Bill Zehme

  He was mustachioed now, and the mustache winged full across his face and grazed against great Elvisian sideburns which fed a beard of haphazard intent, and the hair on his head was a frazzled bush of mayhem; he looked like rabble, like a war-protest professional, although he protested nothing, had no feelings about political unrest, had no notions toward social awareness. He drifted past keening sit-ins, past picket-bearing peace-and-loveniks (they were very upset, it seemed) from Boston University down the pike, from his own school, from Harvard and everywhere all around him—the world was shrieking with radical ideas and ripping to shreds and numbing itself in cannabis clouds or worse—and, instead of caring along in chorus, he solely concerned himself with self-concern. He felt anxious, knew not why, sensing shadows of destruction threatening large goals that he could not permit to be imperiled. F Troop personnel visited and he and Glenn Barrett jubilantly pretended to kick the shit out of each other in public places and then they all got jumped in front of a dive bar on the wrong side of town and actually had the shit kicked out of them. “I guess this was their bar and these guys just didn’t like the way we looked,” said Barrett. “I was getting bashed badly in the eye and out of my other eye I caught sight of Andy being held by two guys and another guy starting to pummel him. And Andy was very calmly saying, ‘Oh! No, no. I’m gonna get a haircut tomorrow, I promise.’ Like he was quietly reasoning with fucking barbarians. He was just being Andy.” At Walden Pond, they all dropped acid, except Andy, who tried to keep the rest of them from straying toward harm or oncoming traffic or drowning. Soon after, at the apartment of Peter Wassyng, who attended Boston University, he smoked a joint and said it would be his last joint ever and it actually was.

  “That was the last time he ever did any drugs,” said Wassyng.

  [um, oh]

  “The last time I took any drugs of any type was November 20, 1968,” he would later recall, proudly, as is the convert’s wont. “That was fifteen days before I started meditating. Because when you start Transcendental Meditation, you’re asked to refrain from any nonprescription drugs, including marijuana, for fifteen days before you start, so you’ll get the experience, the proper experience, without any external influences in the nervous system. Drugs stay in for about fifteen days, they found. So the drugs ended right then and I began learning about enlightenment in early December. Because I went to college to study to be in television and I said to myself: Now what do I want to do with my life? Do I want to keep getting stoned—which I don’t really enjoy all that much—or do I want to really do something with my life, you know? I want to be on television. I want to be successful at what I do.

  “Now, this meditation, according to what they told me at the meditation center in Boston—what will happen is that it gives you deep rest and it expands your consciousness and gets rid of stress and gets rid of things that are holding you back from accomplishing what you want to accomplish. They didn’t say anything about [stopping] alcohol, but what I found was that, as I meditated every day, as time went on, I wanted alcohol less and less, until I just stopped drinking it entirely.”

  The bliss people, they had caught his eye. They were blissful happy friendlyfriendly people, whereas other people were so angry about war and presidents and things—but the bliss people had innocence was what it was. His own innocence, he had begun to think —that’s what it was exactly!—was not so innocent anymore and, if he was not innocent, then how could people believe him when he said he was just fooling only in fun no really? They would just think he was a jerk but he wasn’t a jerk because of his innocence which was getting less and less innocent. Plus, he did better with girls and with friends when he was innocent. “I always had trouble acting naturally, acting like myself. When I did thrive socially, I was at my most naive and innocent. No one had met anybody like me. I was very innocent and lovable—like a little boy. And when I lost my virginity and started going out with a lot of girls, I lost this side of me. For the next two years I tried to recapture it, but you can’t go back. Every few years my innocence [had] come back naturally, and I would have a great time again. I was very confused. In college I started meditating … and after that, I didn’t have to think about how to act anymore.” The bliss people in their TM Center seemed to blink away all bad things and they smiled so hard and so fast at him when they handed him the pamphlets which he took and read and decided to live life as they lived theirs—except that he was never much of a natural smiler per se. Peace Energy Happiness Maharishi—four words spun in an official halo crest encircling the grizzled benevolent face of His Holiness, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi himself—symbolized and defined the Movement, and it was a movement, quite new and very old and seriously Eastern, whose credo was just like Learning by Doing because it was all about focus. Sit comfortably for fifteen to twenty minutes twice a day with the eyes closed and the Transcendental Meditation technique is easy to learn effortless to practice and does not require specific beliefs behavior or lifestyle and is open to all people of all ages cultures religions and one’s mind settles down and one experiences a unique state of restful alertness that is Transcendental Consciousness when the body gains a unique state of deep rest releasing accumulated stress and revitalizing the entire nervous system resulting in development of the mind’s full creative potential and improvement of health so that one enjoys increasing success and satisfaction in life and exhilaration and bubbling bliss and coherence and positivity.

  Well, nothing would happen overnight, of course, and it didn’t, but eventually it did—“Slowly, but surely, I just felt such confidence and so much more strength within me.” Now he had found the tool and would always say the tool had saved his life, had spared him from the gutter, had given him the ability to quash all shyness and step up and get on with it. Plus, he liked it because it was kind of like sleep and sleep was among his favorite activities and so he had started taking his energizing enlightening meditation “naps”—that was how he thought of them, as little naps—twice a day and sometimes he liked them to last way past twenty minutes and sometimes these naps, one or two hours in duration, would drive people crazy because people had to tiptoe around while he took them, which inconvenienced everyone, and oftentimes, much later, the naps made him very late and very tardy for important things and cost other people lots of money and engendered much anger and resentment toward him, which was, um, fine.

  Meanwhile, Elvis came back! Elvis made his first television special ever and it was called Elvis and NBC broadcast it on December 3 at nine o’clock and millions and millions of people tuned in and everyone decided that Elvis was back and would thereafter refer to the program as Elvis’s comeback special and one hippie boy in Boston who would begin to meditate two days later and would never stop until he couldn’t possibly meditate anymore also (and especially) watched the program, watched with a ferocious intensity and felt a bubbling bliss unrivaled, and kept wondering what everyone meant when they called it a comeback special.

  She knew that it was in there and did not believe that it was in there. But her visitor never came, not that month, not the month afterward, and she would get up before school and eat her breakfast which she then promptly vomited, morning after morning, but it could not possibly be true, would not allow herself to think for a moment that it was. She told no one, not her sister, not her best friends, no one, especially not him, because it could not possibly be true. “It was total avoidance,” she said, “until the final moment of truth. I knew in my heart of hearts after a period of time, and I just refused to deal with it. I’d always been really sort of tiny—not petite, but small—and I was getting bigger and bigger. Not that much bigger, but bigger. So I started exercising like a mad person. I vitamined myself to death.” She took to wearing big Mexican wedding blouses—a fashion statement, nothing more, honestly—which obscured the belly enough as long as she kept dieting and denying as well as undressing and dressing in the bathroom with the door locked. “Obviously, I’d gained weight. People commented, including my
parents. In fact, they did try to worm it out of me at one point. They knew something was wrong. I’d just pitch the biggest fit and say, ‘Listen, if you don’t trust me, we can go to the doctor’—which I wish they’d taken me up on—‘and we can deal with this once and for all!’” Her sister Gina would recall, “She got very secretive and really testy. There was a point where I thought I was gonna kill her myself!” But she had studied the art of playacting with a remarkable tutor who was lately closing his eyes and reclaiming lost innocence and also learning remedial television by doing, and so she committed thoroughly to this ruse that was all her own. “I was horseback riding at five months, and camping. The bathing suits had those blousy overtops, so I was covered.” Her senior year of high school continued on as such, marching delicately toward graduation in drastic covert performance.

  The bliss people—why did even they sometimes call themselves bliss-ninnies?—noted his progress and dedication most approvingly. On February 10, 1969, he began at their urging a six-month course in something called Yoga Asanas, which was really a regimen of posture exercises to limber the body to better greet the deep silence that would keep him from ending up in the gutter. Among other skills, asanas helped enable a small mastery of the lotus position, which was the preferred position if one was truly serious about moving toward enlightenment, which, in his case, also meant toward show business fame. His instructor—a mentor, really—in this phase was Prudence Farrow, who had returned to Boston after her rather famous trip to India the previous year. Prudence, whose mother was Jane in the old Tarzan movies (oh!), had gone there, as most people knew, with her younger actress-sister Mia, whose surprising marriage to Frank Sinatra had just broken up, and they had studied and meditated with the Maharishi and all four Beatles atop a mountain. (John Lennon found her devotion to TM training so adorable there that he wrote a song about her, right there, called “Dear Prudence.”) Anyway, she quickly saw something of herself in Andy—“He was kind of spaced out and stuff”—and recognized his need for the meditating life. “He had gone through the sixties, like a lot of us, with those drugs and all the questioning, which created havoc especially in someone so young. He was going through that kind of damage and he didn’t have parameters. He was walking around without checks and balances. He was disconnected. For Andy, meditation began to give him a connection inside—a self-ease—that he desperately needed.”

  She gave him his course booklet of exercise illustrations and told him that the Maharishi himself would want him to practice the asanas once per day, figuring that this would get his attention, which it did. Her association with the Beatles, meanwhile, piqued no interest in him because he cared nothing about the Beatles, but he had just received a very very important piece of information and he scribbled the information on the inside cover of the asanas booklet—“Elvis Presley, 3764 Highway 51 South, Memphis, Tennessee 38116.” He had found Graceland. He knew that it was only a matter of time before he also found the god who dwelt therein. His various pieties were now coalescing in his impressionable brainfloat and so he began to write his second novel—God, he titled it, although sometimes he called it G*d, and later, Gosh—which was nothing if not a Presleyan iconography, an homage laced with biblical subtext, Zen teachings, beat rhythms, and more amusement park rides. Also, its 147 pages were best not to be read—utter nonsense to the eye—but to be performed, quite elaborately, in recitation (lots of sound effects and dialects), which only he could and would attempt.

  God—he later believed it might have made a “nice little cartoon”—showcased the divine ascent of a beer-guzzling truck driver named Larry Prescott who was very much Elvis Presley. Larry gets himself famous by going on national television and performing “Hound Dog” while gyrating uncontrollably—AH JUS’ CAIN’T HE’P IT! AH JUS’ GOTTA MOVE!!!!! And the knees just started a-wiggling. And the hips started wiggling. Round and round went his knees, and he moved, and baby, I mean he really moved! And through the sweat of his brow, a contented smile broke out all across his face as he sang: WEEEEEEEELLLLLLLL THEY SAID A-YOU WERE HAH CLACE BUT DAT WAS JUST A LAH…. (TV censors, of course, immediately insist that the cameras pan no lower than his waist.) Larry’s star soars and he invests in a theme park called Heaven, built once the Atlantic Ocean has been drained to make room for it, none of which seems to thrill God Himself who later angrily performs “Hound Dog” as well—“You ain’t heard nothin’ yet!”—despite lower back pain. Other featured characters include a floating boy named Tinctured Puncture and a floating girl named Gina, who giggles throughout (Tee-hee-hee Tee-hee-hee), and Queen Silga and King Fluke of Alegadonia (the King likes to declare, as had Nature Boy Buddy Rogers, “I am The Greatest!”) and Larry’s manager Manny Mackelblatt, whose moxie bears some resemblance to that of Elvis impresario Colonel Tom Parker. The author, meanwhile, practiced his dramatizations of God for bemused cohorts and patient Grahm faculty members over months and months to come—during which several events of note transpired—finally debuting the work on December 1 in the living room of a women’s dormitory at neighboring Simmons College. Four days later, The Simmons News school paper published a review—his first one ever!—under the rather reserved headline ANDY KAUFMAN PERFORMS “GOD” WITH EXPRESSIVE DELIVERY. Among observations therein: “[This] non-literal novel is comparable to an abstract expressionist painting…. Kaufman [has] created a fragmented funhouse fantasy…. [His] versatile improvisations carried the audience through incoherent passages until parallel events became interwoven. His expressive delivery complete with sound effects and gestures did not lag during the two-hour reading; nor did his voice crack under the strain of five-minute tee-heeing and hummmmmming. Kaufman’s vitality controlled the event and the myriad assortment of voices talking, gurgling and singing.”

  Of course, he had reached that moment after traversing a road paved with varying triumphs and fateful turns. In his Grahm class-work, he had been putting forth fine and broad performances before cameras and microphones (all real, none imaginary), for which at times he could not believe such a thing could be happening to him although he knew it was going to happen in constant continuum once he was famous no really. Radio held little intrigue for him, but he took a requisite course in which, among other tasks, he wrote and recorded commercials for products, legitimate and fake, suited to his own unique obsessions. (For the Elvis film Speedway—“Yessir, Elvis really socks it to ’em in his newest role, as Chad Taylor! He sings, he swings! See him sneer, see him fight, see him kiss the girls!” For the acne salve Blem-Stik—“Now, everybody, take your Blem-Stik and smear it on your face! Yessir, now look at your face! Or feel your face, or something like that! And how do you like that?! The pimples are all gone!”) He became a stalwart among TV thespians in the innovative live-tape class productions conceived by Don Erickson, climbing into whichever personas were requested of him—he would somberly sing Jacques Brel dirges or issue grandiloquent soliloquies or pantomime street loon histrionics in sync to Top Forty hits. He inhabited several deceased lamenters who populated the ghostly town of Spoon River, Illinois, in Spoon River Anthology—a failed Broadway show based on a collection of woebegone poems by Edgar Lee Masters, which Erickson adapted for a class television project. He played a dead laughing guy and some dead old guys and a dead mystical guy and one dead extremely angry guy who spouted scorn through pursed and smacking lips that flapped and pouted under his thick-droop mustache (this was a very good look for a mean bastard, he thought)—“You saw me as only a rundown man with matted hair and a beard and ragged clothing!” he bitterly groused. “Sometimes a man’s life turns into a cancer—after being bruised and continually bruised until it swells into a purplish mass like growths on stalks of corn!!”

  But his crowning achievement came when Erickson instructed each student to invent a dramatic interpretation of the exquisitely tortured pop aria “MacArthur Park” that had been a major radio hit for the actor Richard Harris. Erickson would recall, “Each of the students would go alone into the studi
o with two cameras and a couple of spotlights on them, and the rest of the class and I were in the control room, where we would tape this stuff. Everyone had given a very good dramatic reading of the song, but no one was prepared for what Andy would bring. He sat down and buried his head in his hands, leaned over forward, and when he came up he was an anguished eighty-year-old Jewish man dripping Yiddish dialect.” Someone left their cake out in the rain? Oyyy, I don’t think that I can take it … Cuz it took so lawwnnnngggg to bake it? “We were laughing so hard—I actually fell on the floor and was gasping for air. I had him repeat it just so I could see it again all the way through. It was just so fucking funny. For that alone I gave him an A in the course. I mean, the boy was incredible.”

  He had plans that summer. He went back to Great Neck and showed his family “MacArthur Park”—only after demonstrating how the other kids had done their flowery renditions—and Stanley and Janice and Michael and Carol convulsed accordingly and Stanley and Janice could not get over the excellent grades he brought home with him and he beamed because they beamed and his father declared, half-jokingly, most encouragingly, over and over again, because it was a credo from his own days at school, “You shall be heard!” Also, Andy reported to them about his meditating and about how it had made him a better person and he urged them all to try learning and Carol and Michael and Janice began giving it some serious thought and Stanley rolled his eyes. Meanwhile, right away, he busied himself driving his limousine into the city (he had discovered a lucrative ploy of waiting outside the swank Four Seasons restaurant and grabbing big spenders who emerged after dinner and required a semiplush lift to destinations various) and sometimes he stuck his head into this unique kind of nightclub called The Improvisation (just to see what it was like) where people went onstage and got no pay and started breaking into show business (singers and comedians mostly; six years earlier, he had walked in and offered to do his birthday routine and was chased off before he could display his talent and told to come back once he had reached legal age) and he also worked again delivering for Grady and also did a little cab driving around Great Neck, so he tucked away money throughout June because he had big plans. He had an uncle in Hollywood who wasn’t a blood uncle but was best friends with Daddy’s brother Jackie—Uncle Jackie was his only real uncle—and so Sam Denoff, who grew up five doors down from the Kaufmans in Brooklyn and went on to become a tremendously successful comedy writer, had long been known around the family as Uncle Sammy. Among many great jobs in his wonderful career, Uncle Sammy wrote for Steve Allen’s program in the early sixties—even back then Andy would call and ask him questions galore (who was this José Jimenez?)—and then, with his partner Bill Persky, he wrote some of the most famous episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show and, by this time, all the great comedians knew exactly who Uncle Sammy was. Anyway, Andy had decided that this was the summer he would go see what Hollywood was all about and he would go stay with Uncle Sammy and also with Uncle Sammy’s mother, Aunt Esther, who was best friends with Grandma Lillie and then also there was Gregg Sutton, who now lived in Los Angeles and attended UCLA and was trying to get started in the music business—so there were plenty of places to sleep. He would go west for several weeks starting in July and this was the plan because, at the very end of July, Elvis Presley—who hadn’t really performed any live concerts since the 1950s—would open a monthlong engagement, two shows a night, at the International Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada—which was not very far from Los Angeles (a mere bus ride or easy hitchhike, he figured)—and the penultimate plan, of course, was to go find Elvis and to show Elvis the novel he wrote about him and there really was no sense in trying to deter him from this goal because it would happen because it had to happen.