Lost in the Funhouse_ The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman - Bill Zehme [37]
Eventually, Andy beseeched them to return to home turf: “Um, you guys should come out to Great Neck one weekend. You can stay at my house. There’s some hip kids there—you’ll be a big hit. Ohh, they’ll think you’re real bohemian beatniks!” By this time, his circle had widened. A couple of other guys, named Doug DeSoto (who, like Moogie, attended Great Neck South) and Gil Gevins, a fellow North attendee, had embraced him and pulled him into a small roguish hippie clique they would come to call F Troop, borrowed from the popular TV situation comedy about bumbling cavalrymen. Sutton and Barrett showed up in town wearing grievous dispositions and little leather caps—Sutton with his guitar, Barrett with his harmonica, a pair of traveling bluesmen immediately suspected to be out-of-town drug pushers. “We looked like hell,” said Barrett. They were inducted with little hesitation into the fraternity. F Troop would fast become the stuff of lunatic legend in the precincts, with Andy as sole mascot—mirthful marauders who tried everything many times over. “The five of us were the core of F Troop,” said Gevins, “and we were real snobs in a lot of ways. It was a very closed circle, because in our minds we were the hippest, coolest kids who ever lived.”
Sutton: “We were thick as thieves. We spent weekends together taking group acid trips, going into the city, hanging out in Great Neck at Andy’s house or at Gil’s house, going to the park at night, getting stoned, attempting to get girls. Everyone knew us.”
Glenn Barrett: “We were the scourge of the town, needless to say.”
Moogie Klingman: “F Troop was a bunch of fucking assholes. Andy joined F Troop and didn’t bring me with him and they kept me out. I discovered him and brought him on the scene; they formed an exclusionary clique and stole him away. Then, suddenly, they also started stealing our women—they were all gravitating to F Troop. Who gives a fuck about F Troop anyway?”
They did as they wished.
They were hooligans of much panache.
They crashed parties, dropped pants, spilled paint, ruined parties, forged irreputable reputations. They headquartered in Allenwood Park—sometimes Grace Avenue Park—beneath or up in trees, strummed guitars, taunted girls, pawed girls (not Andy; too shy), altered reality.
They consumed copious amounts of marijuana, flirted with acid, went on four-day hash binges. Andy, according to all, ingested with prudence, great moderation. He would remember differently—“Between the ages of sixteen and nineteen, I was smoking marijuana every day. I was also taking [less regularly] DET, LSD, DMT, Dexedrine, all kindsa things.”
Gevins would maintain that Andy dropped acid but once, then forced all present to listen to Elvis albums repeatedly. Difficult trip except for one, who played conga in time: “We went nuts. His thing with Elvis was a real pain in the ass.” (He once dragged Barrett to a Harlem movie house to see the new Elvis release, Spinout, the only two white people in the audience.) Another night, he and Barrett got stoned and, on a dare, rode bicycles through town “buck-naked.”
They drank anything they could find in anyone’s home, but usually had some older guy named Abe buy them bottles of Thunderbird. Andy liked to call it red wine, so as to lend greater dignity to the papersack ferment. He liked his red wine: “I was a heavy drinker and it got heavier and heavier until I was like just getting drunk all the time. I look back and think, Boy, I almost became an alcoholic.”
Barrett taught him how to smoke cigarettes: “He asked me to show him. He was very proud of that. He always used to introduce me to people as the guy who turned him on to cigarettes. My big claim to fame—now