Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [4]
“What?! Is he dead then?”
Andy started to laugh. Her mother corrected her own surrealism (Burroughs had just been saying on the phonograph, “Trak news service. … We don’t report the news we write it”): “No, he's just in the hospital in critical condition.” I went back into the living room and wrote on the paper slipcover from inside my Burroughs album: “June 3, 1968—Day Andy Warhol was assassinated.” It looked better that way than if I’d wrote “Day Andy Warhol was shot.”
Maybe I should be more concerned. Warhol used to be one of my heroes. Of course, I didn’t know a damn thing about him, hadn’t seen any of his movies or very many of his paintings, but I’d seen a TV show on him with the Velvet Underground playing that blew my mind, and I read what I could here and there in the magazines. Somewhere along in there I bought a giant poster with his face and sunglasses on it, and kept the thing up for months. It's not much to look at, or rather it wasn’t, it's dead now…. I mean it wasn’t one of these psychedelic-rococo things you can stare at for hours. As a matter of fact it was ugly, downright, and after a while the only reason I kept it up was that I wanted pictures on my wall and it was big. Back when I first got it I kept it right across from my bed and at night in the darkness I would stare at the face, trying to simulate perceptual drug experience, until it changed. But the changes never had much definition, not much showed in that face, it was just a famous face, incredibly blank and perhaps that was its claim to fame. Without the sunglasses he looked like a typical fey faggot, but with shades he achieved this rubbery cement look, a cement wall. Gradually over the months I began to find out that Warhol had little or nothing to do with the movies under his name. Roger met Warhol (or an imposter, as has been rumored since) and Paul Morrissey, who seems to be the real man responsible for the films, when they came to lecture at San Diego State. I wasn’t there, but again Warhol came across as a catatonic if anything. When I moved to Broadway the poster went up in the living room there, and one night when they were all on acid and all equally bum-tripped, Jerry Luck fastened his paranoia on the Warhol poster: “I can’t stand that guy, he's always looking at me! Ugh, that face!”
“The cat hassling you?” I sympathized.
“Man, I can’t stand it! I’d like to rip that fucker into a million pieces! All the time I feel him staring at me, every motherfucking time I look around I see him staring at me like that, an’ I hate the fucker, I hate ‘im!”
I was in a very ironic/sarcastic mood that night, so I said: “Well, man, if he bothers you that much, rip the shit out of him! The poster belongs to me and I don’t mind. Go ahead … fuck ‘im up!”
“Really? I can?”
“Shore, go right ahead, have a ball!”
Everybody else made noises of disgust or told Luck to cool it. For a brief moment there was an odd suspenseful lull, and then he sprang at the poster and ripped it off the wall with a gurgling cry. Flopping about on the floor like a beached octopus, he tore it into a scattered litter of small pieces, snarling. Then he sat up, scratching his head, and looked around the room dazedly. I looked at him curiously. The others had made even more disgusted noises. Someone told him to clean up the mess, and he grumbled just like he did the night that he and Dan and Roger stole a chicken from some neighbor and he cleaned and plucked it on our kitchen floor, taking a bite from its bloody crotch to prove his Class.
But to get back to the assassination; when I got home that night my mother met me at the door with the news. She said he had been shot by his “girlfriend.” Later Roger came over, and was predictably shocked when I dropped the bomb, gasping wide-eyed and staggering around the room a moment with his hand to his head. I don’t think this was so much an indication that Warhol held some dear place deep in his heart,