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that someone in the control booth was saying funny things into his headset and Douglas scolded him and Goulet started singing again and the shrieking also started again as viewers now watched the boom operator convulse in seizures, then sprawl across the stage gasping idiotically, ruining the song, forcing a commercial break, pleasing everyone except Robert Goulet fans and four hockey wives. Certain redemption came in the final segment of the show, however, which had Douglas and guests—Goulet and the blind guitarist José Feliciano and David Brenner—perched on a line of stools and there, on the farthest stool, was Laughing Man. Douglas and Feliciano and Goulet casually sang a couple of songs and everyone swayed to the music and then Douglas said, “We’re gonna hear from Andy Kaufman, who was our Laugher earlier in the show—Andy, what are you going to do?” And Foreign Man said he would eemetate, ehh, de Elveece Presley, then got up with back to cameras, combed hair, sneered over shoulder, turned and performed “Jailhouse Rock” while Feliciano sang backup and Goulet’s jaw dropped and Brenner snapped fingers proudly (knowing what he already knew) and Douglas sputtered at finish, “That’s incredible!” And it had been as though no one else was really there except him, as though these actual famous entertainer people who writhed happily on stools were invisible to him. It had been as though he was playing to old bedroom walls where only the cameras really mattered.

Deep silence was necessary before what was to come and that summer he went to Switzerland, to a tiny resort town called Thyon-sur-Sion, and he would meditate there for two months with the others, then wander parts of Bavaria with Dennis Raimondi before what was to come. Maharishi would not be in attendance until later, which was fine, because there would be endless hours to pass with good bliss buddies Dennis and Phil Goldberg and Dean Sluyter, who would listen to him talk about his passions in his inimitably innocent way. They heard about wrestling—Elayne would send him wrestling magazines so as to keep him informed—and about his Huey Williams book, which was still forming itself in notes and drafts. “His favorite topics,” Sluyter said, however, “were how many Swiss chocolate candy bars he’d eaten each day and how many times he had masturbated. In both cases, if he was to be believed, it counted out to be about a dozen.” Then Maharishi finally showed up and Andy—who had been hearing a great deal about the value of celibacy and how expending sexual energy outside of marriage was depleting to good meditators, which was alarming since he liked sex very extremely much—decided to go to the microphone and ask His Holiness once and for all, in no uncertain terms, if this was true. And he used words like semen and sperm and spilling and penis and ejaculation and Maharishi had previously preferred to skirt this indelicate issue and he tried now to change the subject but Andy did not relent. Said Goldberg, “No one had ever been impertinent enough to persist in this line of questioning, but Andy was truly curious and meant no harm. And he was forcing Maharishi into a yes-or-no circumstance. A lot of people were muttering for him to stop and others of us thought, Go ahead! Someone’s finally got the balls to ask about it!” And so Maharishi sighed lengthily and, as there was no way out, traversed the subject more didactically than he had ever before and basically said that, yes, once the energy in the semen was wasted it was gone forever, which was not great news for Andy, who knew he would have to make up for such drainage in other ways. But everyone would remember this exchange every bit as vividly as the crazyman inquisition. And Foreign Man, meanwhile, took daily walks to the village, where he taught little Swiss children the language of Caspiar and he would lead them around in their lederhosen and they would chant eee-bi-da eee-bi-da yak-ta-bay eee-bi-da and sing “Aba-Dabbi.” Then they would all eat chocolate. And when it was time to fly home, his suitcase was too heavy, which