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By Root 1309 0

her baptized—Laurel Rachel Acre, a name the child would not know as her own—at St. Bernard’s Church in Levittown. Laurel wore the same baptismal gown that Gloria and Gina and most everyone in their family had worn. They snapped photographs on the lawn in front of the church and the adoption people took the child immediately afterward and she was gone and on every July 19 for years to come Gloria would plunge into a deep blue wrenching funk. Andy, meanwhile, would wonder on odd occasion what might be happening in the life of this other life to whom he had helped give life. He always wondered—when he wasn’t thinking about other things.

Vegas beckoned. He waited until Elvis got there. To kill time, he went north to San Francisco to visit his second cousin, Rebecca Lawrence, a social worker who lived with her husband, Steve Tobias, in the Mission District. By this time, he was known to all perimeters of the Kaufman family as the most unusual/colorful specimen ever to emerge from their gene pool. At every family Passover seder, for instance, he would famously disappear from the dinner table, run around to the front door, reappear clad in linens and wearing a long false beard, then wordlessly reenter to take the ceremonial seat saved for the Hebrew prophet Elijah, so as to sip Elijah’s unsipped wine and entertain relatives. (Fun with religion!) Thus, Rebecca and Steve anticipated his visit by setting up their brand-new reel-to-reel tape recorder to capture whatever whims he cared to unveil. The first order of business was to read from God, of course, and then he read aloud various surreal dreams that he had transcribed (shrinks had encouraged him to do this—the only professional advice he ever heeded—and, besides, he planned to rewrite some of the dreams as short stories). The last dream that he recited had not been transcribed, however, and he told it extemporaneously and it was a remarkable fear-of-failure dream about a boy named Jack. Very much like him, Jack wished to become a famous entertainer (he had enacted pretend shows near the school playground for imaginary audiences et cetera) and Jack had a well-connected uncle who one day arranges an audition for him with important producers and, on his way to the audition, Jack is corrupted by a gang of guys who pick him up hitchhiking and ply him with drink and dope. Jack finally arrives for the audition in a showroom, three hours late and stoned, and he goes onstage to face the restless crowd that had been waiting and waiting and getting angrier and angrier—whereupon Jack suddenly elects to spew mindless bile toward all present: “I need this like a hole in the head! Fuck all of you, you stupid no-good dirty bastards! I hate all of you—especially you, Uncle! Thanks for nothing!” Then, as he leaves the stage, the audience erupts into enormous cheers and Jack is a big success.

“Wow,” said Steve Tobias afterward, while the tape spooled forth. “So that’s how you get applause.”

“Yep,” said Andy, sounding most pleased with himself. “By waiting.”

Steve and Rebecca then began to quiz him about the performances he had been giving at various Boston coffeehouses—really three random spring nights in which he had incongruously taken the stage between folksinging acts and performed as Elvis (wearing the iridescent lime green suit that F Troop member Doug DeSoto had given him, over a gold turtleneck sweater). “When I have the Elvis Presley suit on,” he told them, “I feel like Elvis Presley.” Steve asked: “You mean you really believe you’re Elvis Presley?” Andy: “Yeah, I become Elvis Presley. People probably think I don’t like Elvis Presley or they think I’m goofing on him and stuff, because it’s kind of funny and they laugh when I do it. Like I jump into the audience and touch the girls and they scream sometimes, not all the time. But I like them to. But I don’t do anything to be funny.”

Not to be funny, he then became Elvis for his second cousin and her husband, borrowing Rebecca’s guitar and turning up the collar of his jacket and slicking back his hair (“This isn’t my costume, so I