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By Root 1355 0

didn’t mind. Andy, who had been this benign artistic presence and had happily done two or three minutes at a time on the early shows, now wanted to do six or seven minutes. The feeling around Saturday Night—particularly as the cast’s popularity heated up, and particularly with John Belushi—was, Why was he still considered untouchable? It wasn’t that anybody—John included, and maybe even John most of all—ever questioned him while it was still in this innocent thing, for lack of a better word. But it got a little slick, a little more West Coast, a little more show business. It was now less innocent and I was surprised.”

And then he toured again and his touring life, especially on college hustings, had now become a cockeyed caravan bent on fleshly pursuit and serial idiocy. He missed planes constantly and would only step on a plane with right foot first (superstition) and, once on the plane, he and Bob improvised altitudinous hijinks—he would weep uncontrollably or feign panic attacks and Bob would slap him loudly or chastise him loudly and it was great fun for an audience of two, meaning themselves and/or each other. He liked to carry a toy gun in his suitcase and, on March 14, American Airlines caught sight of it in the X-ray detector and guards pounced on him and he tried to explain that he always carried his toy gun, for ten years he had carried his toy gun, and they roughed him up anyway and he missed that plane as well. And Bob, of course, found him to be a complete pain in the ass on the road, no matter that he loved him like a brother, and came to abhor playing the role of caretaker, shepherding him to engagements, feeding him phony rehearsal times and phony departure times (two or more hours earlier than they were actual, because he would always be at least two hours late for such irritants), then keeping him company at asinine day-parts and night-parts and dawn-parts, having to check under his hotel beds and peek into his hotel closets to make sure that the boogeyman was not lurking therein, and never being able to go get properly loaded, since “Koughman”—as Bob liked to call him—would not indulge in anything stronger than chocolate. And so Bob learned ways to ditch him, to shove him off on other poor bastards and this was most easily achieved in college scenarios because there was always some kid in charge of getting them to and from wherever the hell they were supposed to go.

Best/worst/standard example in ditch-Koughman history: March 21, 1979; York College; York, Pennsylvania; poor bastard—kid named Terry Cooney, age twenty, soon-to-be-amazed. The show went well; Andy wrestled mannish girl, won, not his type, wanted other options; back to Ramada Inn, Cooney driving Andy, Bob, in his own Ford Pinto; at Ramada, Bob handed Cooney twenty dollars and said, “Take Andy out to get something to eat.” (Ditch was thus completed.) They drove, Cooney, Andy, no Bob, to three places, in each of which Andy questioned management as to whether the fish was fried or broiled; he wanted broiled; it was always fried; he settled for a Bob’s Big Boy; ordered himself fried fish and two chocolate shakes (Cooney: “I’ll never forget that he had two chocolate shakes”); he accidentally-no-really spit some shake on their waitress (“The woman was horrified, she was fuming”); then it was okay because somebody recognized him as Latka; back in Pinto, Cooney asked, “Back to Ramada?” Andy said no; said, “Let’s do something”—as in females. They drove to another nearby college, to Lancaster F&M, to a frat party Cooney knew of; on the way, Andy rifled through Cooney’s glove box; Cooney worked college security, kept handcuffs stashed in box, just in case (“I couldn’t see what he’s doing and the next thing I know I heard click-click”); and now they were handcuffed (“I said, ‘Oh God, Andy! I don’t have the key! It’s back in York, thirty minutes away, on my dresser!”). They went to the frat party handcuffed; they danced with women handcuffed; women threw themselves at Andy and they felt up the women handcuffed (“Wherever Andy’s hand went, my hand followed.