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himself in the head. He said he had always wanted to do that on television. We said, ‘Well, jeez, Andy, let us get back to you on that.’” And it was decided that he wouldn’t shoot himself, but he would panhandle in the audience instead, but that would come with the second appearance—for the first appearance, he would be brought on minutes before the end of the show, as though he had dropped in by surprise, and he looked thoroughly untucked and bedraggled but seemed cheerful enough and announced, “I’m in New York and I’ve been sleeping in doorways, to see what it’s like. It’s true! I haven’t been in a bed or anything for a few weeks now….” And he excitedly launched into a tale about having been chased off an apartment house staircase, whereupon Letterman said there was no time left in the show and that perhaps Andy could come back another day, which he did, looking far worse—hair standing on end, whiskers thicker, eyes glazed imperviously. Above his lip, the makeup girl had smeared Vaseline to approximate drained mucus, for which Letterman proffered a tissue immediately—“You have a little … just a little bit of something here … See, people sometimes eat breakfast while they watch the show …”

He wiped and remained oblivious and humorless; he smiled never once and said that he had quit Taxi and that Saturday Night Live hadn’t asked him to be on the show for a long time and he coughed in virulent spasms and Letterman said, “But things are okay?” and people laughed. Then he went onto the stage and sat on a stool and said that he wanted to talk about his marriage (and people laughed) and said he had met his wife when he was starting out in clubs and she had been a cocktail waitress and they had two children, Mark and Lisa, and then Saturday Night Live discovered him and he then coughed up more phlegm (and people laughed) and he said, “I’d rather … if you don’t laugh, because I’m not trying to be funny right now.” And he said that he went to California and got a manager named George Shapiro, “a wonderful man,” and Taxi came along—“And I kind of felt inhibited by it, that I was just able to do the one character. I wanted to have more freedom, creatively, to do these other things.” So he started wrestling women and received a lot of hate mail and quit the show and had been trying to get a job doing dinner theater in Wisconsin and his wife had finally left him—“She got the kids, the house, she got all my money. Uh, not all my money, but some. Anyway, she got everything…. And I, I don’t really have anything.” And he coughed and coughed. “So, anyway, if anybody could—I know this sounds like a cliché. But if you could … uh … any extra money … I would appreciate it. Don’t throw it—I’ll just come up …” And he staggered up into the bleachers and collected coins and security came to escort him from the studio and the audience made the awwwww noise as he left and Letterman said, “Always a pleasure to have the young talent on the show.”

“We got instant reaction to that show,” Letterman reported not long thereafter. “Phone calls, letters. People were mad at me for having him on, mad at him, sorry for his plight. Other people thought I had not been sympathetic to the needs of this obviously desperate human. [Andy] was real eager to get the hate mail. He made me promise to send it…. Sometimes when you look Andy in the eyes, you get a feeling somebody else is driving.”

Phone call with Kathy Utman, during which he heard no bells but told her about everything that hurt and frightened him, perking up only when he spoke of the Letterman show and how so many people had believed it was really real:

“A lot of people said that was the greatest thing they ever saw me do—people who know me. That and the wrestling thing are both, like, very avant-garde type of off-the-wall humor, you know? And it’s not very popular with people in the business, ’cause they don’t think it’s commercially viable. So I’m having this thing lately … like, there was a time when I could have quit Taxi and I would have been able to just be an artist—like, you know, do my thing