• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1242 0

called “Dear Prudence.”) Anyway, she quickly saw something of herself in Andy—“He was kind of spaced out and stuff”—and recognized his need for the meditating life. “He had gone through the sixties, like a lot of us, with those drugs and all the questioning, which created havoc especially in someone so young. He was going through that kind of damage and he didn’t have parameters. He was walking around without checks and balances. He was disconnected. For Andy, meditation began to give him a connection inside—a self-ease—that he desperately needed.”

She gave him his course booklet of exercise illustrations and told him that the Maharishi himself would want him to practice the asanas once per day, figuring that this would get his attention, which it did. Her association with the Beatles, meanwhile, piqued no interest in him because he cared nothing about the Beatles, but he had just received a very very important piece of information and he scribbled the information on the inside cover of the asanas booklet—“Elvis Presley, 3764 Highway 51 South, Memphis, Tennessee 38116.” He had found Graceland. He knew that it was only a matter of time before he also found the god who dwelt therein. His various pieties were now coalescing in his impressionable brainfloat and so he began to write his second novel—God, he titled it, although sometimes he called it G*d, and later, Gosh—which was nothing if not a Presleyan iconography, an homage laced with biblical subtext, Zen teachings, beat rhythms, and more amusement park rides. Also, its 147 pages were best not to be read—utter nonsense to the eye—but to be performed, quite elaborately, in recitation (lots of sound effects and dialects), which only he could and would attempt.

God—he later believed it might have made a “nice little cartoon”—showcased the divine ascent of a beer-guzzling truck driver named Larry Prescott who was very much Elvis Presley. Larry gets himself famous by going on national television and performing “Hound Dog” while gyrating uncontrollably—AH JUS’ CAIN’T HE’P IT! AH JUS’ GOTTA MOVE!!!!! And the knees just started a-wiggling. And the hips started wiggling. Round and round went his knees, and he moved, and baby, I mean he really moved! And through the sweat of his brow, a contented smile broke out all across his face as he sang: WEEEEEEEELLLLLLLL THEY SAID A-YOU WERE HAH CLACE BUT DAT WAS JUST A LAH…. (TV censors, of course, immediately insist that the cameras pan no lower than his waist.) Larry’s star soars and he invests in a theme park called Heaven, built once the Atlantic Ocean has been drained to make room for it, none of which seems to thrill God Himself who later angrily performs “Hound Dog” as well—“You ain’t heard nothin’ yet!”—despite lower back pain. Other featured characters include a floating boy named Tinctured Puncture and a floating girl named Gina, who giggles throughout (Tee-hee-hee Tee-hee-hee), and Queen Silga and King Fluke of Alegadonia (the King likes to declare, as had Nature Boy Buddy Rogers, “I am The Greatest!”) and Larry’s manager Manny Mackelblatt, whose moxie bears some resemblance to that of Elvis impresario Colonel Tom Parker. The author, meanwhile, practiced his dramatizations of God for bemused cohorts and patient Grahm faculty members over months and months to come—during which several events of note transpired—finally debuting the work on December 1 in the living room of a women’s dormitory at neighboring Simmons College. Four days later, The Simmons News school paper published a review—his first one ever!—under the rather reserved headline ANDY KAUFMAN PERFORMS “GOD” WITH EXPRESSIVE DELIVERY. Among observations therein: “[This] non-literal novel is comparable to an abstract expressionist painting…. Kaufman [has] created a fragmented funhouse fantasy…. [His] versatile improvisations carried the audience through incoherent passages until parallel events became interwoven. His expressive delivery complete with sound effects and gestures did not lag during the two-hour reading; nor did his voice crack under the strain of five-minute