Lost in the Funhouse_ The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman - Bill Zehme [19]
All of it was pretty much the way it really happened, except the part about the Wamagadoon. But this stuff wasn’t supposed to be completely true, anyway.
Ponpongaba, ponpongaba. Now came the thumping, and with the thumping came the rest of everything. Babatunde Olatunji, enormously tall, draped in dashiki, flamed of fingertips, mystical Nigerian—he appeared like a miracle, unprecendented, without warning, performing for school assembly in the auditorium of Baker Hill Elementary (most unusual booking) in the spring of 1959. It was, maybe, a divine intervention. Virtuoso of West African percussion, first and most famous exporter of such, Olatunji had just made his best-selling debut album, Drums of Passion, for Columbia Records—an awakening sound, all new, deeply ancient—whose liner notes explained inexplicable primitive beliefs: “The drum, like many exotic articles, is charged with evocative power … [it is] not only a musical instrument, [but] also a sacred object … endowed with a mysterious power, a sort of life-force which has been incomprehensible to many missionaries and early travelers, who ordered its suppression by forbidding its use.” And so Olatunji brought his forbidden drums to school that day—drums of hollowed trees and stretched ramskins, congas large and small, over which he leapt and pounced, danced and chanted, beating his rhythms of gangan and dundun and bembe and whatever else they were called. Grades one through six beheld the exhibition, some of whom endured squirmingly, others most certainly rendered agog.
One member of the fourth grade, in particular, could not believe his eyes or ears. “That was definitely an epiphany moment,” said Gregg Sutton, a very new friend who would become much more. “I was sitting right next to Andy and we were both completely entranced, mesmerized. If we had been bored for a second, we would have started doing stupid shit. We never even looked at each other—except to say ‘This is pretty great!’ We had never seen a black guy like that. The only black people in Great Neck we had contact with were domestics that worked for our parents and grandparents or else the occasional cab driver. So here all of a sudden was this giant black man with a different vibe—and his music was wild! That’s when Andy probably went, Hey, I could do that!”
Olatunji’s thrall engulfed him entirely. Those sounds—he couldn’t get them out of his head, maybe they had always been there. He knew this much—that he would chase down Olatunji, hound him relentlessly, beg private lessons from him, become his special friend, one day do him proud. Gregg Sutton would bear witness to this, to almost everything pertinent, as years unspooled. In Sutton, meanwhile, he had recognized with happy alarm (oh!) a new sort of kindred spirit—an eccentric kid, temperamental, musical, rebellious, dangerously smart. Sutton came from garment industry money imperceptible; he was, in fact, a well-bred but scraggly fellow with a most erratic demeanor. He earned Andy’s unending admiration during a classroom party by smashing a pineapple upside-down cake on the head of a boy nobody much liked. “It started a riot. The teacher had a nervous breakdown right there—she had to lay down on her desk—and we never saw her again. I was psychotic that day. Andy loved it. He never let me forget about it.”
Their bond was forged in other ways, too: Sutton had been friends with another Andy Kaufman at school (there were, astonishingly, two of them at Baker Hill, although a Kaufman in Great Neck would be as rare as a Smith or Johnson anywhere else). The other Andy Kaufman (regular kid) either moved away like Alfred Samuels before him or sought the need for individuating anonymity. In any case, Sutton found dark amusement in switching over to this new Andy, the one with the eyes. Much more important, however, was the fact that they would share an increasingly unpopular fondness for Elvis Presley. They could endlessly debate merits of each Presley single and its flipside,