Lost in the Funhouse_ The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman - Bill Zehme [7]
Lots of whiteness, fingers poking down there, he was brave, a little soldier, barely one year old. “We were probably more frightened than he was. He was fine. There was no evidence of his being frightened,” Daddy says. They went inside and fixed him up and he came home from the hospital after a few nights during which he never squawked and right away Mommy took him down to Florida where both grandmas and both grandpas were staying together in a big hotel-what great friends the grandmas and grandpas had become! Daddy put him and Mommy on the train. “I remember saying goodbye to them at the station, and he was absolutely the most beautiful little boy, very handsome, very very handsome, in his beautiful little outfit with a little cap to match.” The tonsils came out next, just months later. “He had a lot of colds. We promised him ice cream.” Ice cream! He liked to mush it so it went down smoothly in his throat, which felt scratchy. Mush and smush it with his spoon. He would always want it just like that. “I wonder if it all started with the tonsils. … His ice cream was a ritual all his life. He never ate the ice cream while it was hard. He took a spoon—it was like making butter. He’d get a tremendous bowl and he’d mix the chocolate with the vanilla. You would hear him stirring and stirring.” Then Mommy went away because there was another baby inside of her and this baby would be his brother, his little brother, and it was the day after New Year’s Day—just before he would turn two—that Michael, Michael Alan Kaufman, came out. Mommy and Daddy and the bundle returned home from the hospital and everybody was happy but he wasn’t very happy, or so it seemed to the grown-ups, and now there was another crib in the room and somebody else in it. “When I was born, he would look out the window,” Michael says. “This is what I was told. He was like normal before I was born, but then he started looking out the window.” Through the living room window, he would stare out at the grass and the trees and into the—where? “When my brother was born,” he would say, because Mommy told him this, “I started standing in the living room and I would stare out the window—just stare—and I would be very sad. Just sad.” He looked and looked for something, out that window. Maybe for Dhrupick to come play with him. Or Papu Cy. Papu made him feel better after Michael came to the family but then Papu stopped coming very much and Mommy said Papu wasn’t feeling well and had to be in the hospital for a while. “I remember he was in the hospital and I would see him less and less. And I would think, Oh! I was getting sad because I wasn’t seeing him.” Papu had stomach cancer which was not good and he didn’t come over anymore at all and then that November Mommy and Grandma Pearl and everybody looked very very sad, which made him even sadder. “When he died, they didn’t tell me-because I didn’t know anything about death. So they told me that he went away. And I said, ‘Well, when’s he coming back?’ And I kept waiting for him to come back and he never did.” He stood and stood in the window watching. “I would just keep asking every once in a while, ‘When’s he coming back, when’s he coming back?’ And they said, ‘Well, he’s never coming back. He went on a long trip and he’s never coming back.’ “Very lost very empty, big tears big eyes, almost three years old, so confusing-how? “When I got older, my mother said that they realized that it was a mistake for them to tell me that. Because I kept saying, ‘Well, why didn’t he take me with him-if he was my friend, you know?’ And then they said that God-who I just thought was this other guy-that God took him away with Him. God wanted him. So I pictured him driving along, that he had gone on a vacation and all of a sudden God lifted him up out of the car and He wasn’t letting him come back. At first, I think I resented the fact that he didn’t take me with him. But when they explained to me about God