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By Root 1256 0

é Jimenez,” he would write. “Foreign Man is also a creature suffering from cultural shock, future shock. His attitudes are hopelessly out of synchronization with those common in the time and place in which he has landed. He simply does not understand the American sense of humor, but thinks he does. He is so confident in this regard, in fact, that he’s willing to get up in front of nightclub audiences and try to do what Henny Youngman, Milton Berle, or Bob Hope does.” Indeed, Foreign Man was designed to brim with oblivious bravado. He was both tool and secret weapon, the irresistible career emissary dispatched to do the bidding of Andy Kaufman. He would be the foot in every important doorway. And, one way or another, he would always shove Andy Kaufman across every threshold.

He left Boston and returned home and, by September, the foreign kid began turning up on curbs outside of clubs, starting with clubs on Long Island, and the first sort of club there that permitted him onstage was a strip joint and he fumbled his way through eemetations before introducing the next naked dancing lady, then came back out to complain about his wife’s cooking before another naked lady shimmied forth—and he was not well received but the ladies felt sorry for him and were very nice, which was exciting, but ultimately not very helpful. Then he auditioned for a popular Roslyn music club not adverse to comical acts, called My Father’s Place and, as with Al’s Place, his material glistened from the start and there was a standing ovation after his first set. “I felt like a comedian,” he later said, as though the notion had not previously occurred to him. “It was coming in rhythms, this laughter.” He returned again and again and became a dependable mainstay (give or take more than a few nights of wavering reception, the apogee of which was the night a hurled beer bottle bounced off his forehead) and frequently emceed for songwriter showcase nights. He began to experiment further and to perfect the complete arc of Foreign Man’s transformation into Elvis—“Anytime there was an Elvis Presley movie on television, day or night, he ran to the nearest TV set in the place,” said Eppie Epstein, who owned the club. Whenever possible, he led audiences into old and new coves of whimsy or deceit. At the congas, he would invoke the room to repeat the following nonsensical sounds —oh-wah and ta-ta and foooo and lie-am—and have them keep repeating with him as he quickened the conga beats until everyone realized they were shouting Oh what a fool I am! Richard Hersh, who helped manage My Father’s Place, would recall, “The audience loved it because they were fooled, they played right into his hands—and then he had their attention.” To quell serious stagefright—“He was very nervous before going onstage. It was like being bar mitzvahed every night, okay?” said Hersh—Andy began requesting time to meditate in silence for fifteen-minute periods before and after performing. “It was a very significant part of his theatrical presentation, almost to the point of mystique,” said Epstein. “He would come offstage and become a monk. You [couldn’t] see him—he’d be meditating. [Afterward he’d blankly say], ‘Um, hi … how are you? Oh, thank you …’ Like a different person.”

He made occasional forays into the city, got onstage downtown during amateur nights at the Bitter End, continuing his rounds until late December, when he returned to California for another long advanced-training TM retreat in Santa Barbara. There, he entertained meditators as Elvis and put out word that he was looking for a place to stay for a few weeks afterward down in Los Angeles. A young TM teacher named Linda Mitchell, who aspired to classical guitar virtuosity (which was kind of like show business), offered her parents’ guest house in Encino, where many transient bliss people had been welcome. His two primary orders of business were to see if he could (a) get onstage at a new club on Sunset Boulevard called the Comedy Store, which he’d been hearing much about, and (b) get a chance to appear on the television