Lost in the Funhouse_ The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman - Bill Zehme [178]
Andy, also as per custom, recorded the festivities on tape.
When his turn came, he said, “Should I read my poetry or do my routine?” Michael said, “Whatever you think better exemplifies your talent.” Andy said, “Okay, well, my poetry’s from when I was fourteen, so we won’t do that.” So he elected to perform “Cash for the Merchandise” sans conga and he was spectacular, if a little breathless, and when he finished he was gasping for air. And Stanley teased, “I wanna tell you something—you are so outta condition, it’s pathetic! You are really out of condition! Feel his heart. I bet it’s pounding!” Andy checked and, still winded, said, “Heart isn’t pounding. It’s hardly even pounding.” Stanley said, “How come you’re out of breath? You used to do something like this without even … But wow!”
“I gotta jump rope more, right?” he said.
But they were all flabbergasted by his virtuosity.
Lynne said it had also been hypnotic with the conga weeks earlier.
Stanley said it was too damned good for the Letterman show.
Janice could only smile proudly.
He had repeated coughing fits that night.
Maybe, he said, he was coming down with something.
Needed vitamins.
Whenever he left rooms that were meaningful, he would always tell the rooms goodbye. He never left the house on Grassfield Road without wandering into every room to say, Goodbye, room, and he would give the room a little goodbye wave. He went downstairs before leaving again for California. He waved goodbye to his den just as he always had. Goodbye, den, he said.
Lynne returned to San Francisco and he returned to Los Angeles and to Linda’s apartment and he kept coughing. Linda said he had to go to the doctor, which he had known for weeks but for some reason hadn’t done it. Hypochondria had never been a stranger to him. But he usually believed that his holistic-macrobiotic-bean-weed-mulch-vitamin-meditation-sleep regimen (chocolate notwithstanding) sufficiently warded away all dark things. Plus, he had gotten a clean bill checkup six months earlier.
He had been waiting for the cancer.
He saw something oddly romantic about it.
He was going to use cancer to save his career.
Cancer was how he would fake his death, he told them.
“He had a very strong mind,” Lynne would say. “Sometimes I wonder if he just talked himself into it. Because he used to always think he was gonna get cancer. I remember saying one time that I had known a lot of people who died of cancer, and he said, ‘Yeah, you just wait and see—I’m going to, too.’ I said, ‘Well, don’t say that! That’s terrible!’ And every time he went to the doctor he’d say, ‘Well, do I have cancer?’ He was just determined that he was going to get it.”
Second week in December: Linda drove him to see Dr. Rubins. Dr. Steven Rubins had an office in Beverly Hills. He had been Linda’s doctor and then, when the hepatitis hit him after the Huntington Hartford, Dr. Rubins became Andy’s doctor as well. He told Dr. Rubins about the cough and said his left arm hurt, too. “We did a chest X ray,” Rubins would recall. “And we saw a lesion in the left lung on the left-heart border. And that was suspicious.” And Rubins knew what it was and sent him and his X rays to lung specialist Dr. William Young, who also knew what it was—“It was just a question of confirming the diagnosis,” said Young. They stuck a camera down this throat—an endoscopy of his trachea and bronchial tubes—and the camera saw the tumor and they sent a needle down his throat to remove a tiny piece of the tumor and they looked at the tiny piece and knew precisely what it was. “Unfortunately, it came back large-cell carcinoma,” said Rubins, “which is a fairly highly virulent cancer of the lung that can occur, sporadically, in nonsmokers.” In patients under forty, Young would see it approximately once every two years. The tumor was blocking a bronchial tube, which had caused pneumonia,