enough to give interviews, it was sometimes all that he could talk about—this particular love, how it had changed everything for him, he said. He would even phone up the National Enquirer—which was something he loved to do, much later—and beg the tabloid to convey this seminal tale of hopeful/hapless heartache, which it did without hesitation. (Headline: ‘TAXI’ STAR’S SECRET: I’VE BEEN IN LOVE 17 YEARS WITH A GIRL I’VE NEVER MET!) He found her in seventh grade, he said. He usually recalled her long dark straight hair and her black leotards and always professed that she was the sole reason he had pursued a limelit life. “I fell in love with this girl in junior high school, but I never got to meet her or talk to her because I was incredibly shy…. Every time I would get near her, my knees would shake. But something in my soul felt so close to her soul. I know I’ll never feel that way about anyone again…. They say Capricorns only fall in love once and I think this is the once…. I made note of what classes she was in so I could pass her in the hall. Every day I’d practice things to say to her, but I never had the guts to go up and talk to her. I even thought about tripping over a trash can in front of her so she’d notice me…. I decided I’d have to become famous before I’d have the confidence to meet her. So everything I’ve done for the past seventeen years has been so that I’m worthy of this girl and can go out with her.” Then she disappeared, he said, variously. He said (to New York Newsday) that just when he began to seriously perform birthday party entertainment—so as to start making himself worthy—“The girl I fell in love with left town, before I met her or could even find out her name.” He never knew her name, he said; he knew her name, he said, but was not ready to reveal her name, he said. He said (to the Enquirer): “I’m not prepared to name her, but she’s a brunette who attended Great Neck North Junior and Senior High School from the seventh to the tenth grades—from 1961 to about 1964. She’ll know who she is if she reads this.” Which was to say, she knew him, which she never did, he said. She left in 1964, he said, and she left by the end of 1961, he said. He said (to The Washington Post) that she moved away after the first semester of seventh grade and he never saw her again. He said (to The Village Voice) that once his epic novel-in-progress, The Huey Williams Story, was made into a movie, he would dedicate the movie to her, “Then I’m gonna feel worthy enough so that I can actually go out and say her name and put on a real search for her. Then I’ll find her and then who knows what’ll happen?” He hunched over one tape recorder (Los Angeles Times) and said to her directly, “If you are reading this now, you should know that everything I did was for you.” Then he added, thinking aloud, “But what if she doesn’t like what I [just] said and when I call her she’ll say [coldly], ‘Oh, hello, Andy, I read what you said and …’ And gosh, what if her father reads it and says [gruffly], ‘Who does he think he is, using my daughter in a …?’ But it’s so romantic, maybe she’ll say, ‘Oh Andy, that’s so-o-o sweet.’”
Anyway, once she disappeared, he knew that he would find her again, if only he knew who she was, since he knew who she was, if only she had been real, which she was, except she never was, not that there weren’t girls just like her who never noticed him, whom he loved from a self-imposed frozen-out distance. Well, she/they would be sorry, he liked to say.
He was watching Elvis get girls all along. Now there was confidence! Elvis was getting Ann-Margret in Viva Las Vegas right about the time he finished his thirty-first and final beat poem (unlike the others, four words, four lines, untitled—“I liv /e /to I /ive”—tough to perform). He was, he knew, the only beatnik to madly dig godly Elvis, whose sneers and lipcurls over brightwhite tooth enamel (no braces) induced chick paroxysms galore, never mind the leg/hip-swivels. He missed no Elvis film, was ever the repeat box office customer, glued himself to the subsequent television