Lost in the Funhouse_ The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman - Bill Zehme [33]
Mangoo, he indicated to the ones intrigued, was a teen angst fantasmagory, a tour de force of rage and horror and self-discovery played in the ominous shadow of an ephemeral bellowing beast that chased main characters throughout various kingdoms and suburbs. It was very very jackkerouackian, he promised. Also, it made no sense in the least whatsoever at all—but he pointed to the good parts, anyway. Like where this girl named Sadie screams the word fuck 103 times and 189 times (presented in seven columns twenty-seven times vertically—nothing else on the page) and also exclaims the word shit at the top of her lungs 127 times; and like where Sadie takes a bludgeon to her mother’s left breast (“Here go your tits, baby!”) and keeps hammering until, finally, it was hanging like an apple on a string and wobbling, and proceeds to tear it off and throw it against the walls, the ceiling, and bounced it on the floor; and like where this boy named Charley is whiplashed unmercifully by his mother until his right eyeball is sliced in half and blood was spurting out of it and she keeps cracking the whip and leaving scars everywhere (“All right, Ma! That’s enough! Fuck you, Mother!”); and like where the mother of the Mangoo beast attacks the narrator boy by pelting him with clumps of dried vomit so I hid in a barrel but it was full of shit so I was in up to my neck while this crazy mother threw vomit at me—what should I do—duck?—it was a problem … but she kept throwing it at me so I ducked and got my face all full of the doody which now I realized was Charley’s and it was his mother who threw the vomit which hit my face. Years later, sheepish upon reflection, he said Mangoo—“the ultimate fantasies of a sixteen-year-old” whose characters combined “different aspects of myself”—was created during “my obscene period.” He had once shown it to his English teacher, he said, and delighted in the memory of almost being expelled as a result.
“I wrote this book,” he said, “so people would vomit.”
Most probably, he wrote it to purge himself, to sublimate a hostility so corrosive (over feeling dismissal from all quarters) that not even his poetry could plumb such depths. The bile could surface no other way. But to share it—kind of artfully, on paper—with others was to clankclatter his cup against cage bars, to get extreme unexpurgated reaction/attention. (He was, in effect, doing all of the hollering, if inwardly—not the mangoo.) Earlier, he had performed TV playlets in school shrubbery for similar purpose. Now, however, he became a curiosity worth noting—and perhaps a tad too frightening to ignore. Among the first of the Frederick’s crowd who paid heed was another beatnik aspirant named Moogie Klingman, who wanted to be Bob Dylan and understood weirdness to be an asset. He saw raw nobility—or was it fine freak madness?—in this popeyed poet with the wild book pages. “His Kerouac fanaticism was Andy’s calling card to the beatnik scene in Great Neck—that and The Hollering Mangoo,” Klingman would recall. “He was kind of an aloof nerdy guy, but people came to be really taken with him because he was so strange. He would pull out these pages, but I don’t think he seriously meant for anyone to actually read them. He just meant to impress us that he was weird.”
They were close for several months, during which Moogie instructed him in rebel