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minutes. He said they had been the worst audience he had encountered since he and Little Wendy played for those doctors at the Cedars-Sinai benefit at the Beverly Hilton and Carl Reiner wanted to hide under the table. Anyway, later that night he found a hostile note tacked to his door and various audience members accosted the family in the corridors and Sutton and Zmuda fled in a rental car to go get loaded and Zmuda deliberately drove off the road and through a fence while lecturing to Sutton, “See! The system was made to bend!” And Sutton knew that Andy was in trouble, even if Andy didn’t know he was in trouble—“He was already on his way down.” As they left the resort the next day, Andy rolled down the back window of the limousine in which he sat and hollered to no one in particular, “It’s people like you who give Jews a bad name!”

Simka Dahblitz would be played by Carol Kane and Simka was to be Latka’s rib and eventually his wife and they would come together for the first time in the fortieth episode of Taxi, which was called “Guess Who’s Coming for Brefnish?” to be filmed December 14. Because Simka had recently emigrated from Latka’s country, Carol Kane required lessons in dialect known only to Foreign Man and so Andy agreed to help and invited her to his house in Laurel Canyon, where he presented her with various avenues of pursuit—“He said maybe we should go someplace for dinner where no one knew either of us so we could just speak in the language and people would believe that’s how we spoke,” she said. “He thought we should go to Mexico. It seemed like a big thing, but he stated it as though it made simple logical sense. I figured since he’s willing to do this with me, I should just agree to go.” Which she did, if a bit warily. Then he said, “I know! I’ve got another idea! A really good way to get to know each other fast is to wrestle together!” She said Mexico was one thing, but wrestling was another, and said she would rather not, but he said oh-come-on-please-it’s-really-fun and explained how it broke down inhibitions and he showed her his wrestling room with the rubber mats on the floor, but she still said no and he sulked “like a disappointed kid” and disappeared into the kitchen to make a phone call, which turned into a very long phone call and she finally got aggravated and went in to say, “You know, Andy, I’m thinking it’s getting a little late for dinner if we’re going to go to Mexico.” And he looked at her as though she was crazy and said, “Mexico? We’re not going to Mexico. I was just kidding you. You thought we were going to Mexico?” But she took no umbrage and began to better understand his reality such as it was and they went out for Chinese and spoke only in gibberish except for when he translated her dinner order for the waiter and she thought it was an ingenious exercise because the normalcy of a public situation forced a naturalness upon their dithering nonsensical conversation—“You had to make it sound as real as you could.” But she never did wrestle with him, never would, about which she was most happy.

He went on Merv Griffin’s show and Merv kept asking him about Tony Clifton. He told Merv in no uncertain terms that he wasn’t Clifton. He told Merv to invite Clifton on the show sometime so that Merv could see that it wasn’t him. He said he would even come on the show with Clifton to prove it. Merv said, “How come you never blink?” He said, “I don’t know.” Then he wrestled.

“When I win this, I think it would be nice if all you ladies out there get in the kitchen and cook a little meal for your man!” he said before the match on December 22, when he wrestled the finalist on Saturday Night Live. She was Dianna Peckham, whose father was an Olympic wrestling coach, and she wrestled him to a draw and it was mostly boring even though his boyhood hero who had started all of this with the strutting and the I-got-the-brains-bad-guy business—“Nature Boy” Buddy Rogers—was standing right there on the stage and had informed the world that he was now Andy’s wrestling manager and it was Buddy who held Andy