Lost in the Funhouse

by Bill Zehme

  Gloria called him not long before he left. Now in her eighth month—her stomach bulge still remarkably small thus fairly imperceptible beneath billowy frocks—she knew that she would give birth to this child whose prenatal existence was yet unknown to everyone but her. (She took her diploma onstage at graduation, perfectly concealed beneath ceremonial robes.) She had no notion or desire to have him marry her, knew he could be no kind of responsible husband and father, was unsure that even she could be a care-giving mother, but her belief in God and in life was such that she would have to bring the baby to term and face the consequences. She realized, however, that if there was one person she should tell, it was him. “It was nighttime. He came over to my house and we walked over to the park. We were sitting on the swings and nobody else was there. I said, ‘I have to tell you this. I’m pregnant. I don’t know what else to say.’ His eyes got wide and he looked at me and then he said. ‘What are we going to do?’”

  Tears came as they will in futility. It was, of course, unbelievable as certain momentous true things tend to be. He kissed her and held her and she said that it was good that he was going to California. She said, “Well, I’m glad you’re going away because you shouldn’t be here. My father will kill you when this comes out.” Her parents had always liked him—they were always charmed and amused by his crazy extrapolations, even brought him along on family trips to the Jersey Shore—but this was real life most real and most life shattering and her father most certainly would have killed him or done something awful and it was going to be insane enough without that happening, so she said he should go find what he was looking for and not to worry. He felt terrified and relieved all at once. She sent him on his way; he went. Everything would be, um, fine.

  He told no one, not a single soul. He went west and brought God with him and also his conga drum (maybe he would break into big-time show business while visiting) and saw the sights and goofed around with Sutton and drove Sutton’s roommates crazy when he stayed with them in Beachwood Canyon. “Andy had given up pot and we were all big pot smokers. So he’d say, ‘Can you put that out?’ We’d all be riding somewhere in a Volkswagen and they’d close the windows and start smoking pot, just to torture him. He’d be in the backseat and insist on opening the front window and sticking his head out so that he’d have the last laugh. They couldn’t stand him but Andy was so self-absorbed, he didn’t have the time to notice or to hate somebody back. He didn’t realize when people were bad-vibing him. It was his world and we were all scenery.” Sutton had formed a rhythm-and-blues band called Yes Indeed and Andy went along with them to a private gig at a home in Brentwood at which a woman rode in on an elephant and, at one point during the Yes Indeed set, he elected to wander up onto the stage and became Elvis and he sang “I Feel So Bad” and all of the jaded Hollywood partygoers stopped cold and watched. Said Sutton, “He just stole the show.”

  The daughter arrived just before 6 A.M. on July 19 and she arrived amid hysteria, not the mother’s hysteria, but that of the mother’s parents and also that of the father’s parents, who had been notified of the stunning blessed event by the mother’s parents just after 6 A.M. on July 19. The day before—when nobody knew anything yet—Gloria was out paddleboating with friends and later that night went to a party and, while dancing, realized that her legs were moving farther and farther apart and knew labor had begun and went home and had her parents take her to the emergency room of North Shore Hospital, where the Acres finally learned that their daughter was not only pregnant but about to deliver a baby. The doctors noted Gloria’s size and first thought she was six months pregnant and about to abort until an attendant spotted a head crowning and concluded that an actual birth was under way. It was a girl—“Very white, very tiny, and she had this little fuzzy brown hair,” Gina Acre said—and Gloria decided to call her Laurel (“for victory”). The child was whisked to the nursery—her eighteen-year-old mother was discouraged from holding her, for fear of bonding, for fear of whatever was going to occur next. The Acres immediately and angrily phoned the Kaufmans; Stanley and Janice rushed to the hospital, apoplectic, astonished—“It was a shocker,” Stanley would remember—and pledged all financial assistance with hospital bills et cetera on behalf of their son, whose exact whereabouts they knew not. They visited with Gloria—Janice told her, “Andy can marry you!” and her mother yelped, “Waitaminute! She’s already made one mistake!”—but they did not see the baby. “We were told not to,” said Stanley. “And we didn’t.” And their hearts felt leaden and their blood boiled, so furious were they with Andy and they would apprise him of such in no uncertain terms if and when they heard from him out there on his cockamamie trip. And it was decided that Catholic Charities would oversee adoption procedures, but only after Gloria made sure the child was baptized. And later the next day the phone rang in her hospital room and it was Andy—who had learned of events in no uncertain terms—calling from Disneyland which, said Gloria, “was so appropriate.” “It was like ‘Hi!’ ‘Hi!’ I mean, it was okay. He was terribly sweet.” Two weeks later, she was permitted to see the baby at an interim foster home, was finally allowed to hold her, and shortly thereafter was able to have her baptized—Laurel Rachel Acre, a name the child would not know as her own—at St. Bernard’s Church in Levittown. Laurel wore the same baptismal gown that Gloria and Gina and most everyone in their family had worn. They snapped photographs on the lawn in front of the church and the adoption people took the child immediately afterward and she was gone and on every July 19 for years to come Gloria would plunge into a deep blue wrenching funk. Andy, meanwhile, would wonder on odd occasion what might be happening in the life of this other life to whom he had helped give life. He always wondered—when he wasn’t thinking about other things.

  Vegas beckoned. He waited until Elvis got there. To kill time, he went north to San Francisco to visit his second cousin, Rebecca Lawrence, a social worker who lived with her husband, Steve Tobias, in the Mission District. By this time, he was known to all perimeters of the Kaufman family as the most unusual/colorful specimen ever to emerge from their gene pool. At every family Passover seder, for instance, he would famously disappear from the dinner table, run around to the front door, reappear clad in linens and wearing a long false beard, then wordlessly reenter to take the ceremonial seat saved for the Hebrew prophet Elijah, so as to sip Elijah’s unsipped wine and entertain relatives. (Fun with religion!) Thus, Rebecca and Steve anticipated his visit by setting up their brand-new reel-to-reel tape recorder to capture whatever whims he cared to unveil. The first order of business was to read from God, of course, and then he read aloud various surreal dreams that he had transcribed (shrinks had encouraged him to do this—the only professional advice he ever heeded—and, besides, he planned to rewrite some of the dreams as short stories). The last dream that he recited had not been transcribed, however, and he told it extemporaneously and it was a remarkable fear-of-failure dream about a boy named Jack. Very much like him, Jack wished to become a famous entertainer (he had enacted pretend shows near the school playground for imaginary audiences et cetera) and Jack had a well-connected uncle who one day arranges an audition for him with important producers and, on his way to the audition, Jack is corrupted by a gang of guys who pick him up hitchhiking and ply him with drink and dope. Jack finally arrives for the audition in a showroom, three hours late and stoned, and he goes onstage to face the restless crowd that had been waiting and waiting and getting angrier and angrier—whereupon Jack suddenly elects to spew mindless bile toward all present: “I need this like a hole in the head! Fuck all of you, you stupid no-good dirty bastards! I hate all of you—especially you, Uncle! Thanks for nothing!” Then, as he leaves the stage, the audience erupts into enormous cheers and Jack is a big success.

  “Wow,” said Steve Tobias afterward, while the tape spooled forth. “So that’s how you get applause.”

  “Yep,” said Andy, sounding most pleased with himself. “By waiting.”

  Steve and Rebec
ca then began to quiz him about the performances he had been giving at various Boston coffeehouses—really three random spring nights in which he had incongruously taken the stage between folksinging acts and performed as Elvis (wearing the iridescent lime green suit that F Troop member Doug DeSoto had given him, over a gold turtleneck sweater). “When I have the Elvis Presley suit on,” he told them, “I feel like Elvis Presley.” Steve asked: “You mean you really believe you’re Elvis Presley?” Andy: “Yeah, I become Elvis Presley. People probably think I don’t like Elvis Presley or they think I’m goofing on him and stuff, because it’s kind of funny and they laugh when I do it. Like I jump into the audience and touch the girls and they scream sometimes, not all the time. But I like them to. But I don’t do anything to be funny.”

  Not to be funny, he then became Elvis for his second cousin and her husband, borrowing Rebecca’s guitar and turning up the collar of his jacket and slicking back his hair (“This isn’t my costume, so I won’t be able to do it as well as I can”), and he strummed the only four chords he knew as best as he could and sang an impassioned “Blue Suede Shoes” and a mournful “Are You Lonesome Tonight” and then Rebecca requested “Love Me Tender” and, speaking in his Memphian drawl, he said, “Ah’ve been singing ‘Love Me Tender’ ever since Ah wuzz a little boy. And Ah love that song. It means a lot to me. Ah get real serious and hope that Ah cain finish it, because Ah have never been able to. And Ah’d appreciate it if you-all didn’t laugh.” And he began to sing and he sang half of the song at which point he began to weep and he kept singing through loud convulsing sobs until the sobs overtook the words and dissolved into full-on blubbering. Steve and Rebecca applauded and, composing himself instantly, thus alarmingly, he answered, “Thank you, thankyouver-rrmuch.”

  He returned briefly to Los Angeles, where Sutton took him to a costume sale at the MGM lot in Culver City and they bought a hot pink suit which they thought might have been from The Wizard of Oz but probably not, which he would wear to meet Elvis—or to at least get Elvis’s attention. He moved to Uncle Sammy’s house, where he asked to hear as many show business stories as Uncle Sammy could bear to tell, and then he moved to Aunt Esther’s house, where she couldn’t understand why this boy with his farkuckte meditating needed to sit like a lox behind a door and let such nice hot meals that she made for him get so cold. Anyway, it was Aunt Esther who told him to take an all-night bus to Las Vegas so that he shouldn’t have to waste money on a hotel room for an extra night and he followed her advice and carried his pink suit with him on the bus and arrived the next morning at the International Hotel, which was crawling with Elvis fans from everywhere in the world, but not one of them, he believed, was as ardent or as clever as he. A plan was necessary and he had not much money but he did manage to pay to see one of Elvis’s shows unless he didn’t see Elvis perform at all because so many versions of the story would be told that no one, not anyone, would ever know exactly for sure what happened and even he would change things around in tellings and retellings to the point wherein discrepancies would abound so that several variations of actuality could well have been possible. But he had to wait and wait if he was to succeed in confronting Elvis. He had to bide time around the hotel at which he may or may not have ever gotten a room because he was in Las Vegas for four long days or else just over a day, during which time he waited and plotted. It was then, during just such a waiting period, that he stumbled into a lounge late one/that night at the International/someplace else and discovered an entertainer with whom his life and reputation would later become so inextricably intertwined as to bring great confusion/damage to his/their career/careers. The name of the man singing in this lounge was Tony Clifton, but perhaps not—but the name of the man singing in this lounge was Tony Clifton, but perhaps not. Tony Clifton sang like a cement mixer and wore a garish peach embroidered tuxedo and a scrubbrush mustache and gaudy rings on fat fingers and shades that obscured rheumy eyes below which bags hung like hogs in hammocks. He had a way about him—or so Andy Kaufman thought/imagined. “He made quite an impression on me,” he said years hence when it was necessary to become defensive about Tony Clifton. “His first line was, ‘I’m in Vegas—they got a lot of cool chicks here, you know what I mean?’ He was awful. He threw a drink on a girl and tore her date’s jacket, pushed people around. He got into fights with people; he bragged. He was so extreme that it really impressed me.” What he knew then or didn’t know until a short while thereafter was that he would want to imitate Tony Clifton as part of his show business act which he would debut in all of its grandeur sooner than later and then maybe when he got famous enough he could help the real Tony Clifton also become famous and then they could do things together but mostly separately and it would be wonderful/horrible.

  So he put on his pink suit. He had figured out a way to meet Elvis and it was going to happen in the kitchen through which Elvis had to pass before and after performances en route to and from his palatial suite upstairs. In the course of days/hours—maybe, perhaps—he had somewhat befriended a security employee who came to pity/tolerate him and who was impressed that this harmless wide-eyed college boy had written a book about Elvis with such a nice religious title and so—very much on the QT—the security guy explained to him the logistics of Elvis’s movements throughout the hotel. They hatched a plan, after the security guy’s palm had or hadn’t been properly/pathetically greased (twenty dollars or five dollars or nothing at all, per whichever version): During Elvis’s midnight show, he would be allowed to secret himself in a shadowy alcove along the kitchen corridor. There he would have to wait until Elvis and his men came bustling by after the performance and then he could step forward and proffer his greeting. And so he did just as he was instructed. Stashed in the darkened corner where he quavered, while the distant cacophony of Elvis and band and backup vocalists bounced along kitchen tiles, he began to quietly repeat over and over a sacred Buddhist chant that he had been told would make all dreams come true and, if ever there had been a situation to employ such mystical optimism, this was that—

  Namu Myoho Renge Kyo …

  Namu Myoho Renge Kyo …

  Namu Myoho Renge Kyo …

  He said it a hundred times and another hundred times and another and then the music stopped and thunderous applause and hooting wafted down the corridors and then that trailed off and then hurried voices and laughing voices got nearer and clearer and, as the voices were finally almost upon him, he stepped forth, glowing pink, gripping his God, clearing his throat. And Elvis’s men—Joe and Sonny and Red et al.—stopped suddenly and moved toward him and this other voice (OH!) said something like waitaminute waitaminute fellas and the eyes had never been this big ever before and he said something like mister presley i wrote this book about you and it’s called god and—well, time all but stops in such crucibles of dreams—Elvis Presley regarded the oddity before him and what the hell came toward it and looked at the pile of pages in its hands and heard something it said about God impersonating him or some damned thing and his lip curled slyly and he rested his hand on the oddity’s shoulder and said something like well now that’s very good that’s very good and he shook its hand and was precisely heard to remark, Man, this guy’s got a weird mind! And then Elvis Presley strode off and Elvis’s men looked back over their shoulders as they moved on and they were hyuckhyucking and then they were all gone.