Lost in the Funhouse (7 page)

He needed to see them up close, so Stanley or Grandma Pearl would take Andy and Michael (another fan) out to Commack Arena or Suffolk Forum on Long Island, when pro matches came through the territory. “We saw Wild Red Berry and The Kangaroos, ‘Brute’ Barney Bernard [with his sixty-three-inch chest], Cowboy Bob Ellis, Skull Murphy, and Johnny Valentine,” Michael recalled. “Andy’s favorite was Buddy ‘Nature Boy’ Rogers—the blond pretty boy bad guy. He knew how to piss you off. I hated him. But Andy saw past that. He saw how fantastic it was to have everybody hate him—what theater it was.”

The villainous Nature Boy merely became his newest deity.
(“Oh—he was, in my opinion, the greatest wrestler of all time! He was to wrestling what Muhammad Ali was to boxing, what Elvis Presley was to rock-and-roll music, in my opinion.”)
In 1962, only his second year on the big circuit, Rogers was voted by fans the most unpopular wrestler alive—ahead of the despicable Killer Kowalski and the ruthless Crusher Lisowski. He was also nearly unbeatable, which he flamboyantly made known to all as he preened and posed and strutted (
“He invented the strut!”)
and demeaned and boasted (
“He invented the term ‘I am the greatest!’ He invented ‘I got the brains!’”)
and obliterated all sacred rules of sportsmanship.
(“I once saw Buddy Rogers beat a guy unconscious so they had to carry him off on a stretcher.
Then Buddy kicked the stretcher over. Buddy Rogers knew ways of manipulating a crowd like no one in the world.”)
Andy’s fierce devotion to the blond champion was boundless; he told everyone who would listen, “Any friend of Buddy’s is a friend of mine. Any enemy of his is mine, too.” He saw Nature Boy wrestle in person only once, couldn’t have been more excited, after which he would forever recall the event as “the saddest night of my life.” It was May 17, 1963—he was just completing the eighth grade at Great Neck North Junior High School—and he went to Madison Square Garden in New York, where Rogers was defending his world title against Bruno Sammartino, a towering Italian Goliath. Sammartino pinned Rogers in forty-eight seconds. “It ended with a backbreaker,” Andy would grimly remember. “After that Buddy retired. When he stopped wrestling, I stopped watching it for about ten years.”

He found other extreme diversion.

The city beckoned, as it will.

The city teemed with possibility most, um, fine.

He had seen enough of it to know.

City = Exciting-exciting weirdwonders.

He never looked up at the soaring metropolis majesty. Instead, he looked down at what splayed and churned and bustled before him—on the streets and under the streets and behind the streets and of the streets. Everything and everyone and every smell and every noise was here and here was where one could be whatever/whoever one wanted to be, could become other things and other people and—

Dhrupick …

Dhrupick—the spirit that was Dhrupick—could be loosed here, was born certainly probably to experiment here to discover things here. Manhattan, every stained and pocked crevice of it, every parcel of its soddenspeckled pavement, would be whatever he/they wanted it to be. Here was where he/they would transcend always.

The boil grew and grew on the back of his neck—for a year, he claimed—pulsing at times, festering with pus, and the doctor, when
the doctor finally looked at it, called it a cyst. A cyst! Oh! He liked his cyst quite a lot, was fascinated with it, this purpling yellowing bulb, protruding an inch from under his skin and just as wide in circumference, it was much more substantial than all of his lifetime of pimples, pimples which never stopped rising even now on his grown-man face and his grown-man back, welty kinds of acne pimples, even though he was always good at washing and hygiene and everything, since he’d been seeing dermatologists since he was like thirteen. The doctor wanted to lance the cyst right then right there, but he said no, not yet, and invited the doctor to come to his show at the Improvisation on Melrose Avenue and the doctor did come that appointed night and watched as people were urged to line up and step onto the stage for the privilege of touching the cyst, but only after they submitted to washing their hands in the bowl of alcohol solution which Linda had set up where she was dispensing clean towels and maybe four people actually did it—“Not too hard, now. Just gently. No no no! Just gently. Seriously. Really, don’t squeeze it or don’t touch hard. You can really do damage if you do. Please. Seriously. This is not a joke. Just touch it. Please don’t be funny. Anyone else? That it? Thank you. Um, okay”—but the ones who did touch it were friends and agreed to do it because he wanted them to and everyone in the room including and especially the friends who touched the cyst, not to mention all the viewers who later watched it on television during the program
An Evening at the Improv,
were really kind of nauseous over the whole thing. He was quite proud of himself, however, since it reminded him of old things and certain people he used to know. The doctor removed the cyst on another day.

Best thing the city ever gave him, best thing he ever found there, absolutely, was Hubert’s Museum & Live Flea Circus. He was ten, maybe, when Grandma Pearl first took him. Grandma Pearl lived in the city for a handful of years after Papu Cy died and she liked to show the delicious first grandchild (her Kid McCoy, she called him) secret places and spectacles to further widen his eyes. Even after she
later moved in with her daughter’s family on Grassfield Road—about which Andy was especially delighted, although it meant bunking with Michael—she never stopped taking him to amazements that he wanted to see, such as when the Fabian boy played concerts in New Jersey and the awful wrestling men did their nonsense in tri-state arenas and, years earlier, when he wanted to be in the studio audiences of the little television programs like
Howdy Doody
and
Wonderama
that were made in the city. But then came the day that they explored Times Square and she led him along Forty-second Street to the penny arcade between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. At the rear of this clattering arcade was the staircase that descended to the basement that was the subterranean urban sideshow that was Hubert’s. Opened in 1925 as a dime museum—parlance for the ten-cent admission price paid to view human curiosities therein (although by this time a ticket cost twenty-five cents per)—Hubert’s would rank just a shade below Coney Island as the most important place Andrew Geoffrey Kaufman would ever know. It was a very cheerful sad and strange place—a repository of the forgotten and the vanquished and the phony. It was where old-time acts went to die and the only place where certain godforsaken creatures had a chance to make a living. He loved the sweet spookiness of it all and returned and returned to Hubert’s, where the first thing he always saw was himself—many many versions of himself exaggerated/diminished fat-tall-skinny-dwarfed-etcetera—in funhouse mirror reflection at the foot of the concrete stairwell. He enjoyed that part every time, almost felt part of the program. Beyond the mirrors were decrepit posters of long-gone former attractions—Weird! Unusual! Primitive! Siamese Twins Doomed to Stay Joined Together Till Death! The Homeliest Woman in the World! Londy the Giantess! The Great Waldo (who swallowedwhole live mice and other breathing things)!

Anyway, those ones didn’t work there anymore, but the ones who did got to know the boy very well. These ones, they worked on little elevated stages that lined the long dark occasionally fluorescent occasionally crimson-lit mostly shadowy mildewy expanse. Princess Wago (in her leopard leotards) he loved and also her pythons and boa constrictors
(six-footers) with which she danced and sometimes draped over his shoulders, which was exciting. He struck up happy convoluted chats with Phil Dirks, him with the three eyes and two noses and two mouths, which seemed normal enough to the boy, gave him no pause at all. There was Miss Lydia, who contorted herself pretzelwise, and Susie the Elephant Skin Girl (nice to him always, let him touch her mottled gray flesh) and Professor Heckler and His Trained Fleas (beheld for an extra quarter; fleas juggled and rode a merry-go-round and danced and one kind of kicked this little football and they all fed on the Professor’s forearm—blood!) and Sealo the Seal Boy (a man with tiny flippers instead of arms) and Presto the magician who always said during his tricks, “I don’t really do this. It just looks like it.” (The boy most probably remembered those words always.) One guy who was there not very long sang with a ukelele in a crazy high falsetto voice and was called Larry Love the Human Canary, who later grew curly long hair and called himself Tiny Tim and got famous, which was exciting. Estelline, Refined Sophisticated Lady Sword Swallower, was always pleased to have the boy watch her daintily insert four blades, one after the other, including an antique U.S. Cavalry saber, down her proud gullet, then wipe each with a pristine hanky upon removal. But best of all was a horrid fellow named Hezekiah Trambles who went by the moniker of Congo the Jungle Creep, whose skin was the color of swamp water and whose hair stood/shot upright and who was missing many teeth, who took a special liking to Andy, in his own atrocious way, focusing on him while performing his “African voodoo magic”—trying always to enlist him for onstage decapitation. Congo was a crazy man, seemed so anyway, who leapt vigorously onto sawblades but broke no feet-skin and swallowed lit cigarettes, then swallowed foul liquid which never extinguished the cigarettes which he then spit up still burning. He plucked hair from heads—Andy’s certainly—and put it in a slimy bucket and chanted great gibberish over the bucket and pulled out a phony snake and threw it into the small crowds that gathered, once per hour, to behold such wonder. Afterward, Congo and Andy would talk in their own particular not dissimilar friendly awkward manner.

It was perfect down there. And they were in a basement just like
him in his basement doing things other people didn’t do, which was all very normal and regular really. By the time he was twelve, he began sneaking off into the city on his own or with Jimmy Krieger to visit Hubert’s and excavate other urban delights. “We did the whole Truffaut
Day for Night
thing, where we’d skip a day of school and play hooky. We did it about four times between the ages of twelve and fourteen—and that was just with me. Who knows how often he went alone. But Andy would drag me along to show off his friends [at Hubert’s]. He’d obviously been going there for a while because he had already made friends with some of these freak people. We would stay there for a long time and the snake lady let us touch her snakes and we’d see all the acts and look at the embryo in a bottle that was supposedly a lamb with three heads. We’d also go down to this record shop in the Times Square subway where you could listen to records on headphones. He liked to play the song ‘Louie Louie’ over and over to listen for the secret dirty words, which I always thought was funny. Or else he’d listen to a lot of Elvis Presley. That was my earliest recollection of him getting infatuated with Elvis. Then we would go down to Greenwich Village and walk around and look at the oddities—bikers, girls holding hands, beatniks, that sort of thing. We went to all these coffeehouses where the beatniks read their poetry, the most important of which was Cafe Wha? He would listen to this poetry that would give me a headache. I think we had our first espressos there, too. They sometimes beat bongos when they recited the poetry, which really interested him. He liked those hipsters.”

It was a godly time when words were god. Such godwords—those he heard, those he composed—were cadenced in stacatto thuds, hung on grim ellipses, and were best punctuated with drumskin slaps or fingersnaps or
dig-can-you-digs;
he dug but madly, oh yes. He began to dutifully wear black, like all good Beats; at very least, usually had the little black faux-turtle dickie under his oxford collar. He made the scene, brought the words he had written (often during lunch in the Great Neck North High School cafeteria or during classes that bored him extra madly, a freshman
Ginsberg/Ferlinghetti, mind pointedly pointed elsewhere), brought the bongos, too (not a conga scene), brought the existential questioning therein, brought all to the underground world (down more dark steps) of Cafe Wha? (MacDougal near Bleecker, heart of Village cool), where he insinuated himself onto the afternoon stage—fourteen years of age!—or, more conveniently, to the nearby MacDougal East coffeehouse on Plandome Road in Manhasset, Long Island (suburban scene, not quite as cool but workable).