Lost in the Funhouse_ The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman - Bill Zehme [112]
he started work late that summer as a part-time busboy at the Posh Bagel on Santa Monica Boulevard. He reported for duty only on Monday nights at eleven, whereupon he donned his apron and began pouring coffee and carting trays until closing. He had not bussed tables since his employment at Chop Meat Charlie’s in Great Neck when he was sixteen—but he had been eager to return to just this sort of solid finite labor. It was, he believed, part of his roots. Plus, he could do funny things in the course of a shift not to be funny no really. The Posh Bagel hired him on the recommendation of this girl Beverly Cholakian who was a part-time hostess there and whom he had met five years earlier in New York when she was a Revlon model before she moved to Los Angeles to become an actress and got cast as one of the incidental high school kids on Welcome Back, Kotter and that was when she began a kind of tortured and volatile affair with Andy, whom she loved deeply (sometimes, per him, a bit too deeply). (He did not want the games of love, just the fruit, and she played the games, which made him yell a lot, and she would call him a big baby and storm off and then they would mend and play until it happened again, and again, and again, but she was very beautiful and he could not stop himself from wanting to be with her, even though his brother Michael had now come to Los Angeles for a long visit and he tried to urge Michael to date her in his stead, but that never quite took, and he did love her, in his way, but that did not stop him from lusting in every other direction, like when he flirted endlessly with a pretty Posh Bagel customer and Beverly interrupted them and said something to ruin his chances and, as Beverly would remember, “Andy went beserk and screamed, ‘How could you do that to me! I could have gotten laid!’ I mean, can you believe that? He had never talked to me like that before. So I ran to the back of the deli and locked myself in a room while he kept screaming. Then we saw him drive off in a rage, swerving and screeching like a madman.” And, of course, they mended again, for a while again, since she wanted to marry him and all.) Anyway, he was what he liked to call an overzealous busboy, in that he liked to remove people’s food before they had finished eating it and often before they had even touched it. “They would get very upset!” said Beverly. “They would want the food replaced. Many times I’d have to say to him, ‘Okay, you’ve done enough tonight—you can leave now.’” And Gregg Sutton would remember dropping by to say hello on a night when the actor Richard Gere was seated in a back booth with a beautiful woman—“And Andy wouldn’t leave them alone. He kept coming by and asking, ‘Would you like more coffee?’ Over and over and over again. Gere said, ‘Quit bugging me!’ But Andy comes over again anyway and starts pouring the coffee while looking away, like somebody had called him, and the coffee starts overflowing all over the table and Richard Gere is flipping out in his Armani suit. If he knows who Andy is, he doesn’t care at this point. He’s screaming, ‘What are you doing, you stupid idiot!’ And Andy’s saying oh-gosh-I’m-sorry and trying to clean up but only making it worse, pushing the coffee all over them. It was hilarious.” And then some reporters found out he was working as a busboy and he would tell them that he did it “because it keeps me in touch with people. Because no matter how famous I may become from show business, I always hope that I could keep my head out of the clouds and remain, you know, just a regular human being. I’m just a human being. And working as a bus-boy reminds me of this.”
August ended and Little Wendy quit because she was sick of being Little, of being diminutive in his eyes, thus patronized, and of having to go along with his weird whims at weird hours and withstand his erratic cruelties, so they had this big eruption in front of a restaurant in Chinatown, and they shoved each other back and forth and she told him to go fuck himself in a new voice that wasn’t at all Little and he told her