Lost in the Funhouse_ The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman - Bill Zehme [30]
He was a tall gangly cat with a mouthful of braces a-gleam.
The voice was croaking now, puberty stirring and all.
He needed to spill with a little profundity, since the birthday gigs did not afford such freedom. He needed to deal with the outcast stuff, the loner stuff, the why-can’t-the-man-(father)-let-up-on-me stuff. Stanley sometimes drove him to the coffeehouses, picked him up later, sometimes even stayed and listened to the son’s poetry (along with the tolerant/bemused hipsters at tables digging as best they could), shook his head with some small incredulity but liked seeing the boy’s initiative such as it was—but still.
Hereabouts was when two great novels had smacked him in the face, one about living/surviving life in the beautiful dregs, the other about wandering highways in aimless pursuit of sweet truth—Hubert Selby, Jr.’s Last Exit to Brooklyn and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, both the godliest of godlyworks. Could he stop reading them? He could not. He read them to tatters, over and over, for years to come. Freak misfit outsider tragic/melancholy/profane books, they inspired him very very madly. He even started noodling with a novel of his own, a feral and violent delirium he would call The Hollering Mangoo. But, more urgently, he focused on the short form. And so from October 1963 through May 1964—basically the entire span of ninth grade—he wrote, then performed, thirty-one not-too-terribly-awkward beat poems of desolation, longing, ennui, confusion, and rage. Thus, the epidermal shrugs and um, fines unmasked themselves on sheets of innocent notebook paper….
“My hope is like a hollow skull” was the first line of the debut effort, “A Chosen Few: A Love Poem”—with annotation at bottom, “That phrase is an idea from the program Hootenanny.” (Television, as ever, fed all inspiration.) He dug deep, then deeper. The fifth poem—“Hi”—explored the banal emptiness of obligatory greetings (“… Here comes one that I know, or knew / Should I say hi to him? / Here comes the one that I just met / Should I say hi to her? / … I hate the hi”); the eighth—“The Faggot”—depicted ostracism he may have known (“…He buttons his top button / And minds his own business / Then the popular ones come / With their high pitched voices / And say, ‘Look at the faggot!’ …”); the sixteenth—“Damn Them”—responded to aforementioned popular accusers (“…Damn them! / The ones that ruin my existence / The existence I try to live peacefully….”); the nineteenth—“’Tis Amusing”—vengefully elaborated on same theme (… I HATE THOSE DAMNED MORONS! / I will kill them / Kill them all / Let me rise up and / SCREAM / But—/ ’Tis amusing….). Geek pentameter somehow clarified his world with an acuity that he would never again muster. Bongo-riff-voice was honest in ways that he wasn’t nor would ever wish to be. In “Eidandrofields”—his second poem—he all but shrieked for compassion/notice (“…I AM A HUMAN BEING….”) and concluded with this conundrum of revelation (“…Eidandrofields is my den / My place of escape / Where I keep my flowers—yet am I a flower lover? / Where I keep my records—yet am I a music lover? / Where I keep my writing and poetry—yet am I a writer? / I curse people—yet do I hate them?”). Did he yearn to belong somewhere outside of his den? He did very much. “Lonely” arrived twenty-fourth in the poetic oeuvre and said all in these opening lines—“There goes him / There goes her / There they go / I am lonely….”
The yearnings were suddenly very real.
More than anything else, it seemed, he wanted love.
5
Am I in love? I guess I haven’t met the right girl yet, but I will, and I hope it won’t be too long, because I get lonesome sometimes. I get lonesome right in the middle of a crowd. I get a feeling that with her, whoever she may be, I won’t be lonesome anymore.
—Elvis Presley
By this time, he had fallen in love once, he said. He tried to convince others of this later, much later. When he got himself famous