• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1318 0

ways—on how to defy parents (“He’d say, ‘I’ve got to be home by six,’ and I’d tell him, ‘Andy, today you’re going to stay and hang out and you’re not going home till midnight!’ But he’d just say, ‘I can’t,’ and he jumped on his bike and rode home.”); on how to develop proper scornful attitudes (“He never said anything bad about anybody, never even talked about anybody, was always being very nice and polite, never jealous or competitive. He was just in his own world.”); and, most crucially, on how to make it with girls. They spoke of sex frequently, as in what-will-it-be-like? And as in I-will-have-sex-all-the-time-once-I-ever-actually-have-sex. Finally, it was Moogie who first lured a female into the arena, somewhat, which Andy thought was fine. “I got this girlfriend, a kind of foxy hippie girl named Liz, and we would show Andy how to kiss by kissing in front of him. Tongue kisses, a little petting. He would watch closely and study. I would feel her up and he would stand there taking notes in his mind and say with extreme politeness, ‘Oh! Very good, this is how you kiss? Oh, could I see that again? Oh, that’s very interesting.’”

The girl he found for himself—not for sex or anything, just to kind of indulge his romantic stirrings, which was a major start—called him from out of nowhere, called looking for him, but she was not looking for him, she was looking for Andy Kaufman, but not him, the other Andy Kaufman of Great Neck, whom he wasn’t (who was this guy?), with whom she had attended camp, who had neglected to give her his phone number, so she was going through the Great Neck Kaufmans in the phone book, lots and lots of them, asking for Andy Kaufman, and the phone rang on Grassfield Road and Andy Kaufman answered and that was how he found her. This was the summer of 1964, before tenth grade. He would fictionalize this kismet the following spring, writing in the school paper, Guide Post, a short story entitled “On the Road Again (Part I),” above which was splashed this self-conceived bio—“About the author: Andy G. Kaufman has traveled around Greenwich Village and San Francisco with such people as Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and a few girls. During the summer, he plans to travel across the country with Jack Kerouac, Dean Moriarty, and a few girls.”

It is funny how things can come up so suddenly. With me, the thing happened on a Sunday afternoon…. I was about to take a bottle of sleeping pills when the phone rang. “Hello.” I heard the sweet little voice of a girl about my age.

“Hello … I’d like to speak to Geoffrey Andrews.”

“Oh, this is he. Who is it?”

“This is Janet Brown.”

“Well, this is Geoffrey Andrews, but I don’t know any Janet Brown.” It turned out she was some girl [not actually named Janet Brown] from Rockville Centre, there was another person named Geoffrey Andrews and she had called me by mistake….

“Well, isn’t this something,” she said. “Would you please tell me about yourself?”

“What—er—uh—yes—um—what—do you want me to tell you?”

… I told her that I wrote poetry, read it in Greenwich Village cafes, and played the bongos in Washington Square Park. That was it. That phone call was God. She dug it, too! She [said she] played her guitar in the Park and she dug poetry. After a few hours of talking we were in the cool…. We talked until the sun burned out, and I dug every minute of it. There was just one hangup: She was too embarrassed to give me her real name, address and telephone number….

As story/satire continues, he never hears from her again and so—because she had lied about her name—he quests on bicycle to Rockville Centre, Long Island, with his own name pinned to his jacket, so as to flush her out of hiding, meeting many characters along the way, but not her. Funny thing that did happen was all of above—the providential telephone mistake begetting hourslong conversation mutually dug—but her name was Marilyn Blumberg, which she did not conceal, from Rockville Centre, who played folk guitar and shared his passions for Kerouac and radio humorist Jean Shepherd and roaming the city affecting hipness