Lost in the Funhouse_ The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman - Bill Zehme [46]
Gloria Acre, now of the twelfth grade at Great Neck North, came to see her college man in Boston for a long weekend that October. He got a nice hotel room so as to be worldly, kind of. They romped, consumed wine, some dope, each other, having much sex; hereabouts, she later calculated, sperm found egg. Happily reconnected, quite unaware of what was to be, they took cabs around town, creating larks—at his instruction, for driver’s benefit, she became his cold, heartless mistress, said she would not leave her abusive husband for him; he petted her and sobbed and groveled. “You’re not worth my time,” she told him. Cabbie scolded her for this, said, “Lady, you don’t know how good you have it. Obviously, this guy really cares about you.” Cabbie told him, “Buddy, I understand. I’ve seen these kind of women before.” Andy was ecstatic, they laughed; he sputtered with his dreams and fears and she listened and believed. “He wanted to make a name for himself. He just knew he was destined for some sort of fame. He knew what he didn’t want to be and that was to end up in the gutter like a street person. That was a constant fear.” She went home, they stayed in touch, not urgently, not dependently, just nicely.
He was mustachioed now, and the mustache winged full across his face and grazed against great Elvisian sideburns which fed a beard of haphazard intent, and the hair on his head was a frazzled bush of mayhem; he looked like rabble, like a war-protest professional, although he protested nothing, had no feelings about political unrest, had no notions toward social awareness. He drifted past keening sit-ins, past picket-bearing peace-and-loveniks (they were very upset, it seemed) from Boston University down the pike, from his own school, from Harvard and everywhere all around him—the world was shrieking with radical ideas and ripping to shreds and numbing itself in cannabis clouds or worse—and, instead of caring along in chorus, he solely concerned himself with self-concern. He felt anxious, knew not why, sensing shadows of destruction threatening large goals that he could not permit to be imperiled. F Troop personnel visited and he and Glenn Barrett jubilantly pretended to kick the shit out of each other in public places and then they all got jumped in front of a dive bar on the wrong side of town and actually had the shit kicked out of them. “I guess this was their bar and these guys just didn’t like the way we looked,” said Barrett. “I was getting bashed badly in the eye and out of my other eye I caught sight of Andy being held by two guys and another guy starting to pummel him. And Andy was very calmly saying, ‘Oh! No, no. I’m gonna get a haircut tomorrow, I promise.’ Like he was quietly reasoning with fucking barbarians. He was just being Andy.” At Walden Pond, they all dropped acid, except Andy, who tried to keep the rest of them from straying toward harm or oncoming traffic or drowning. Soon after, at the apartment of Peter Wassyng, who attended Boston University, he smoked a joint and said it would be his last joint ever and it actually was.
“That was the last time he ever did any drugs,” said Wassyng.
[um, oh]
“The last time I took any drugs of any type was November 20, 1968,” he would later recall, proudly, as is the convert’s wont. “That was fifteen days before I started meditating. Because when you start Transcendental Meditation, you’re asked to refrain from any nonprescription drugs, including marijuana, for fifteen days before you start, so you’ll get the experience, the proper experience, without any external influences in the nervous system. Drugs stay in for about fifteen days, they found. So the drugs ended right then and I began learning about enlightenment in early December. Because I went to college to