Lost in the Funhouse_ The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman - Bill Zehme [39]
Another night, they were returning by car—somebody got one—to Great Neck from the city and cops tried to bust them for pot possession on the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge —where a dirty little face had long ago popped up in Daddy’s rearview mirror, surprise! They beat the rap and repaired to the Kaufman house, where nobody was home, descended to the den to recover from the hassle. “We were bored,” said Sutton. “So Andy did his children’s act for us for the first time. He gave us a little taste. He had us sing ‘The Cow Goes Moo’ and do the ‘Old MacDonald’ lip-synch routine with the phonograph and he did Mighty Mouse, too, and a few other things. It blew my mind. He had us all in stitches. That was the first inkling I had that Andy might have talent. I never realized it before.”
Days before his seventeenth birthday, he vanished. He was gone from Grassfield Road, gone without a trace, did not return home at night, left an ambiguous suggestion on the premises that he would be gone for good. No longer would his father need to criticize him, to yell and yelllllllllll at him for looking/acting LIKE A BUM!!!!! It was over. “I was his enemy,” said Stanley. “All I wanted him to do was to cut his hair!” They did not see eye to eye on much of anything, really. To duly punish his father, the son chose to disappear on the very first day of business for the brand-new Tempo costume jewelry corporation. It was also the first day of the first market week—January 1966—necessarily the most important day of Stanley’s new life and future life. “It was make-or-break time,” he said. Janice called him at the office and he exploded and alerted his new partner, Tom Tessler, and together the two men canvassed all of New York’s train and bus terminals and contacted police and found nothing. “Nothing whatsoever. He was a miserable son of a bitch. He just left us and we didn’t hear anything for more than a week. We finally got a call from one of his friends, who said he was in Boston.” He came home via rail; Stanley waited at the Grace Avenue train stop, fuming inside his car. “He got in the car and, as we were driving home, we got into an argument right away. With the car moving, he opened the door and jumped out and started running away through the park. I got out and chased after him, screaming, ‘You son of a bitch! Get back here!’ I’m cursing, I’m yelling, I’m huffin’ and puffin’ trying to keep up with him. It was like running after the fox that got away. I thought I was gonna have a heart attack.”
They mended. They had to. Grandpa Paul—big bubbly hambone facilitator of magical inspiration, unwitting architect of his eldest grandson’s future career—died that April. Patriarchal umbrella (expansive multicolored beach version) was gone. Paul’s eldest son and Paul’s eldest son’s eldest son needed to achieve reckoning, as Paul would have wished. Andy instigated the only way he could: “It was his inspiration to get us back together,” said Stanley. “We were on completely different wavelengths and I had to get off my kick with the hair and realize there was more to life than that.” Andy handed his father a copy of On the Road and asked him to read it. Stanley read it. One weekend morning he knelt beside his bed, where he liked to read (back problems), and “I got to a particular passage and I started to cry because it was so tremendously moving. It related to the conflict between this father and his son. I now understood why Andy wanted me to read this book. At that moment, he walked into the room and he saw me there and he knelt down next to me and we sort of read it together. And we both cried. And we began to understand each other a little