• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“Vait! Vait-vait-vait!

I would like to tell you de story of de three people who was carrying the beegest cannon in the world to Spain! Eet was, eh, two boys and one girl. And they had thees beeeg cannon. You know, eet was feefty feet long! And they carried eet over the mountains and under the valleys. And one day they get to the top of de highest mountain in Spain. So the first boy, he point this cannon toward this castle—you know, to shoot! You know, because he was the boss. You know, so he want to point it. And he turned to the second boy and he say, ‘All right! Hand me the cannonball!’ And, you know, but de second boy, he say—‘Duh, I thought YOU had them!’ So, vait-vait-vait, so, listen, vait! So they both—eh—they both turned to de girl, and she say—‘Don’t look at me!’ You know, because, eh, they forgot to bring the cannonball. You know? They have the cannon, but they have no cannonball! They could not shoot! Do you understand? Tenk you veddy much!”

Lost year began in waiting. He wait-wait-waited. He waited to know what to do but could do nothing much—about dreams, future success, certain fame—without proper ammunition. How to begin? The Troop dispersed to colleges and universities and hospitals—returned home only for occasional weekends and holidays—so he was mostly on his own. Further learning did not intrigue him, what school would have him? He applied to no college at all, despite entreaties of his father. He needed to wait and think and drift, basing himself mostly in the Grassfield basement. Elvis kept him company. He spent more time with Elvis than ever before. “I would stay home most of the time and just play his records and imitate him—I adopted him as a character, combed my hair like him, dressed like him, made believe that I was him. For most of the day, every day, for that one year, I worked on my imitation.” It was something to do. And then there was the foreigner person he liked who had no name, who spoke in funny timid blinking loops—he had introduced him to kids at school, then to kids at birthday parties, then to strangers on the streets of New York when he wanted to not be himself and beg for handouts. Eee-bi-da? Eee-bi-da! (“That’s a language I made up myself to confuse other people, and make them feel I’m really speaking a dialect.”) Being foreign never felt foreign since he sort of was foreign—he knew—but then, too, certain television people he liked often became foreign, like Sid Caesar, and the man on the Steve Allen program, Bill Dana, who became this other foreign man, José Jimenez, who was Spanish or something. His own foreign man, whom he would call Foreign Man, really belonged to no place, kind of like himself. Eee-bi-da.

Lost year required money, so he worked. Previously, he had bussed tables at Chop Meat Charlie’s in the middle of town, jerked soda at Frederick’s. Now he worked for Jones Taxi of Great Neck, driving businessmen to and from the train station; would sit outside the station waiting each night, big-eyed white boy talking to all of the black cabbies, sharing their bags of hooch, absorbing their sad beautiful tales, listening to their jive jokes and jive music. He drove delivery vans for another black man named Grady Corley—the small black population of Great Neck came to know and like Andy very much—carting groceries and butchered meats around town, making drops at homes of illustrious residents such as talk show oddity Professor Irwin Corey (“The World’s Foremost Authority”) and comedian Alan King, who lived most luxuriously (like a show business sultan) bayside on the Sound at King’s Point. He had become friendly with the comedian’s son, Bobby King, a point which Alan King would later not see as coincidental. “To this day, I think Andy Kaufman became friends with my son just so he could get to me. Every once in a while, this crazy kid would come up to deliver meat—and do five minutes. He would insist on seeing me and I’d come down to the kitchen in my underwear. Then he’d start doing takeoffs on movies he had seen