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These were now heady times, headier than ever, flush with the empowerment of conquest after conquest, such as they were, which were uniquely compliant to his vision, such as it was. He was gotten, was what he was. The right people understood him or believed they understood him—or at least pretended to, so as to impress their sophistication upon others. He kept hearing that word genius and also brilliant and George would hug him hard and Bob would hug him hard and everyone was rather giddy and he knew there was nothing that he could not do. Drain the Atlantic Ocean? But of course. One day, for certain; it was something he had always wanted to oversee. Or play Carnegie Hall? Um … yes! Maybe George could make some calls. They were all likening him to these other people named Pirandello and Ernie Kovacs (“I never saw Ernie Kovacs, but I understand that’s a compliment”) and Ionesco and something called Dada (“People keep mentioning that name to me…. I’ve been told my work is Dada and I don’t want to know that it is”) and, meanwhile, George kept saying the word exciting and everything truly was exciting and the ice cream was always cold and the chocolate was always thick and the roller coasters were always fast and the women were —well …

He wrestled one on his last birthday at the surprise party that Little Wendy threw at his apartment. (He had moved to La Cienega Towers, a high-rise just below Sunset where he rode the elevators with Elliott Gould, and Kathy Utman had become his mostly platonic roommate/housekeeper and Wendy had become his personal assistant, whose duties included ordering subscriptions to every female-wrestling magazine in existence, plus all other professional wrestling publications.) Bob, meanwhile, had arranged the birthday wrestling match because it was something Andy had always wanted to do. (Zmuda had seen his private collection of eight-millimeter films featuring bikini-clad women tangling with one another—the sheer sexual electricity of which—oh!) So it was that Gail Slobodkin—late of Has-Been Corner—and her singer friend Marilyn Rubin (on whom Andy nursed a deep crush) were called upon to wrestle each other in swimwear at the January party and he would then wrestle the victor who was Marilyn and it was all very playful except that he was very very excited by all of the rubbing between his body and hers and she stayed after the others went home that night and then he wrestled her soon thereafter onstage at an Improv event in front of people like Bette Midler and Raquel Welch and others who were appalled, none more than Marilyn herself, who lost (just barely). “A lot of people thought it was self-indulgent and terrible and everything,” he said. “But I didn’t care. It was a fantasy come true.”

Which was to say, he believed that with all new hubris came entitlement—and, most of all, he believed that he was entitled to disregard. So he would now aim to seize any opportunity to disregard structure, expectation, rules. It would be part of his art—the disregarding—and it would be calculated always, never done in slipshod fashion, never executed without purpose or means to an end. And he would make all effort to become known for it—since, if he was known for it, then George would have less mess to clean up afterward. George could just shrug and say, “Well, that’s Andy,” and that would always be enough. And Zmuda had this credo that he kept imposing—“Kaufman,” he would urge, “the system was made to bend, the system was made to bend, the system was made to bend”—and Andy knew that anyway because he had been bending it all along. But he and Bob together expanded his playground exponentially, removed any boundaries that might forestall whatever delicious theater-of-life escapades they elected to hatch. They would scheme always now, the two of them. Nothing much would remain very extremely sacred. Of this renegade partnership, not that it was ever to be an equal one, George had patiently observed, “Their mental age is somewhere between twelve and fifteen. When they are really sophisticated,