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AK: Oh, thank you.

FM: I think you are a little shy, a shy little man. A little, scared little man.

AK: What do I have to be scared of?

FM: You’re afraid of being hurt.

AK: Get outta here—go away!

FM: Because deep down inside you have a gentle soul. And that’s why you have to put on thees tough-guy façade. Because you hide your inseeecurity.

AK: [Starting to cry] Really?

FM: You know, when you … come to terms weeth your own deficiencies, then you’ll be able to accept your true self and you won’t have to hide behind thees macho act!

AK: [Crying] Right.

FM: Oh, come on—don’t cry. Meester Kaufman, don’t cry. Oh, eet’s all right…. Leesten, I’ll feenish the show for you, all right?

AK: Okay … thank you, thank you … [Walking away sobbing]

FM: [To camera] Eh, goodbye, everybody. Eh, be good. And I love you veddy much. Bye bye … [Turning to crew person] Okey! Are we off the air? Okay, who wants to wrestle? Come on! Who wants to wrestle! Come on!!

He could not help himself.

He joined Lawler on the pro tour.

They wrestled in Memphis and in Nashville.

They wrestled in Indiana and Florida.

He spent most of July wrestling and bellowing.

He and the heel Jimmy Hart formed a tag team.

They plotted and connived to bring down Lawler.

His choreography improved and he now tucked better.

It was a touring carnival.

He climbed on and off the noisy wagons well into November.

Nobody paid much attention.

He kept on screaming and strutting.

He had disappeared.

Nobody cared.

So as to not be from Hollywood anymore, he gave up on Los Angeles, which he had always hated. After Latka went away forever, he got rid of the place in Laurel Canyon and put his stuff in storage and Linda Mitchell left him to pursue her guitar playing and Kathy Utman handled whatever organizational chores arose which were minimal. He resumed the nomadic life that he liked best. Lynne got a place in San Francisco and mostly he was there except when he wasn’t. He carted Huey Williams with him wherever he went and was by now well into the fourth book of the opus, having scrawled out a thousand pages of the magical inpenetrable adventure thus far. He found a dessert shop in San Francisco called Carson-York where he loved to write day after day while eating chawwwwklit things. He had always liked San Francisco. He used to visit Gloria Acre there because she had married some guy and moved there and got divorced and so they would get together and he would sometimes stay with her and they would lie in bed and wonder about the baby who wasn’t theirs anymore. Because he always did wonder, whenever it occured to him. Anyway, he liked not having to be anywhere and not having to be on time to be anywhere. He liked floating.

On September 22, Letterman said that it had been a long time since he had been on the show. Letterman asked, “What have you been doing since then? What’s going on for you?”

“Nothing,” he replied.

He then recounted that Taxi had been canceled and Saturday Night Live had voted him off the air and the Broadway play closed in one night but he said, “I just like to accept things and go on from there…. But I’m having a very good time, though, with myself.”

He reported that he had been doing some hitchhiking and also that he was in the process of adopting three underprivileged sons whom he invited out onstage and they were three fairly menacing-looking black fellows in their early twenties named George, Herb, and Tony-also-known-as-Tino. Tony explained how Andy came into their lives—“One night I was walking on Broadway, and I was desperate—didn’t have no money. And I see this guy walking down the street. And I said, Well, I’ve been out here all night, and this is the guy that I’m gonna mug.”

Andy beamed proudly and said, “It’s true!”

He had shared the premise with the Letterman producers a week earlier and then cased city parks near Upper West Side housing projects for days until he could find them. He was always meticulous in his planning for the Letterman appearances—since Late Night