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By Root 1205 0

was more special, more interesting—whenever he gave her train fare to and from Manhattan or bought her espresso coffee ice cream, she blithely joked about how he was paying her for services rendered. Then he once made a similar crack to her, only a little less playful, not to be mean, not really, which truly made her feel like a prostitute —he dreamt of prostitutes, couldn’t believe such a wonderful thing could exist, and this Carol was able to sort of make him feel like he was paying her for their sex, only in fun, just fooling, but still, oh!—which she didn’t think was funny and she stormed away and he felt like an asshole, then figured he was an asshole, and just went ahead and acted like an asshole, and his grades went deeper into the toilet than ever before and he told his father that he wanted to drop out, but his father convinced him he would be less than nothing without a high school diploma, so he stayed on and dedicated himself, just barely, to the twelfth grade and graduated, just barely, from Great Neck North, 419th in a class of 461 (due to a final 70.6 grade point average, thankfully not the utter basin of D-ness) on June 23, 1967, thereby setting forth in a world he mistakenly thought he knew well, equipped with an IQ of 114 and an inscrutable malevolent novel and the ability to entertain children and drug-dazed friends and no exact idea of just how he would become famous other than knowing that he would and then everyone who ever doubted him would feel foolish, very very foolish, please mark his words.

Of course, shrinks had returned to his life. In the last stages of high school, as he traipsed again into fated nadir, they were back, one in Great Neck, another (a black doctor, kind of exotic) in Brooklyn. Same routine. Now they were giving him new sorts of reality tests and he shared his reality as he knew it and it was a reality unsettling to psychological purview. His father, his mother, they saw him smile, just like always, as he left the offices, or as he returned home from such inquests, having given new recitations of conjured otherness, extemporaneously executed—no, really. There was a war on—did he know this? What exactly did he know of Vietnam? Wasn’t it like some restaurant? Did he believe in his country? His invisible twin brother was Japanese, so he was conflicted, of course. He could never be angry at somebody Asian/Oriental, unless maybe the chow mein in the restaurant didn’t taste right, but these things happen, don’t they? It’s not their fault, maybe the stoves weren’t working the way they should, everybody makes mistakes and stuff, right? He got his letter, just as all scions of Great Neck upward mobility aimed to get theirs. It was a breeze, for him. The doctor wrote to strenuously suggest that his patient be kept from military service at all costs. “He said I was in a fantasy world since preschool days and I was in a little bubble and I couldn’t be broken out of it and if I was in the Army my fantasies would get the better of me and I’d completely lose my mind.”

He cherished his 4-F status, thought it quite funny, showed off the doctor’s letter to the guys. “I remember it pretty well because it was hilarious,” said Gil Gevins. “Everybody wanted to get out of the Vietnam War with a 4-F, which was a permanent deferment, and Andy was so proud to have gotten his. The letter stated something to the effect of the standard thing, ‘paranoid schizophrenic with psychotic tendencies.’ Then it went on to describe how every teacher from the first grade on had noticed that Andy was kind of strange and detached from the situation. And that he had scored zero on every reality test ever given him, that he lived in a complete fantasy world. And all of this was basically true. That was the funny thing about the letter. That was Andy. He did live in a fantasy world, but at the same time he knew what was going on! He really was out of his mind, but was always exactly aware of it. He was aware that it was all this kind of game that he played. He knew what he was doing—not all the time, but a lot of the time.