by Bill Zehme
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.”
(6) Oct. 26, 1963
HE GETS ILLUSIONS THAT HIS FLY IS ALWAYS OPEN
He gets illusions that his fly is always open.
When he goes to work.
When he goes to school.
To him, people will notice.
To him, people will always be looking at him.
He gets illusions that his fly is always open.
When he walks down the street.
When he goes to a dance.
He gets illusions that his fly is always open.
Who gives a damn.
(7) Oct. 27, 1963
WHAT WILL HAPPEN IF
What will happen if I tell my teacher that I hate her?
She will send me to the office. That is all.
And what will happen if I get bad marks in school?
And do not go to college? And do not get a job? And die in my twenties?
Nothing. I will not feel pain.
What will happen if I get good marks in school?
And get praised by my father? And go to a good college?
And make a billion dollars?
I will be part of the camouflaged unhappy competition.
And what will happen if I get bad marks in school?
And get beaten by my father? And don’t go to college?
And move down to the Village? And be happy?
What will happen if?——What will happen if?——Ask yourself:
What will happen?
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 wor
ds 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).
He was a tall gangly cat with a mouthful of braces a-gleam.
The voice was croaking now, puberty stirring and all.
He needed to spill with a little profundity, since the birthday gigs did not afford such freedom. He needed to deal with the outcast stuff, the loner stuff, the why-can’t-the-man-(father)-let-up-on-me stuff. Stanley sometimes drove him to the coffeehouses, picked him up later, sometimes even stayed and listened to the son’s poetry (along with the tolerant/bemused hipsters at tables digging as best they could), shook his head with some small incredulity but liked seeing the boy’s initiative such as it was—but still.
Hereabouts was when two great novels had smacked him in the face, one about living/surviving life in the beautiful dregs, the other about wandering highways in aimless pursuit of sweet truth—Hubert Selby, Jr.’s Last Exit to Brooklyn and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, both the godliest of godlyworks. Could he stop reading them? He could not. He read them to tatters, over and over, for years to come. Freak misfit outsider tragic/melancholy/profane books, they inspired him very very madly. He even started noodling with a novel of his own, a feral and violent delirium he would call The Hollering Mangoo. But, more urgently, he focused on the short form. And so from October 1963 through May 1964—basically the entire span of ninth grade—he wrote, then performed, thirty-one not-too-terribly-awkward beat poems of desolation, longing, ennui, confusion, and rage. Thus, the epidermal shrugs and um, fines unmasked themselves on sheets of innocent notebook paper….
“My hope is like a hollow skull” was the first line of the debut effort, “A Chosen Few: A Love Poem”—with annotation at bottom, “That phrase is an idea from the program Hootenanny.” (Television, as ever, fed all inspiration.) He dug deep, then deeper. The fifth poem—“Hi”—explored the banal emptiness of obligatory greetings (“… Here comes one that I know, or knew / Should I say hi to him? / Here comes the one that I just met / Should I say hi to her? / … I hate the hi”); the eighth—“The Faggot”—depicted ostracism he may have known (“…He buttons his top button / And minds his own business / Then the popular ones come / With their high pitched voices / And say, ‘Look at the faggot!’ …”); the sixteenth—“Damn Them”—responded to aforementioned popular accusers (“…Damn them! / The ones that ruin my existence / The existence I try to live peacefully….”); the nineteenth—“’Tis Amusing”—vengefully elaborated on same theme (… I HATE THOSE DAMNED MORONS! / I will kill them / Kill them all / Let me rise up and / SCREAM / But—/ ’Tis amusing….). Geek pentameter somehow clarified his world with an acuity that he would never again muster. Bongo-riff-voice was honest in ways that he wasn’t nor would ever wish to be. In “Eidandrofields”—his second poem—he all but shrieked for compassion/notice (“…I AM A HUMAN BEING….”) and concluded with this conundrum of revelation (“…Eidandrofields is my den / My place of escape / Where I keep my flowers—yet am I a flower lover? / Where I keep my records—yet am I a music lover? / Where I keep my writing and poetry—yet am I a writer? / I curse people—yet do I hate them?”). Did he yearn to belong somewhere outside of his den? He did very much. “Lonely” arrived twenty-fourth in the poetic oeuvre and said all in these opening lines—“There goes him / There goes her / There they go / I am lonely….”
The yearnings were suddenly very real.
More than anything else, it seemed, he wanted love.
5
Am I in love? I guess I haven’t met the right girl yet, but I will, and I hope it won’t be too long, because I get lonesome sometimes. I get lonesome right in the middle of a crowd. I get a feeling that with her, whoever she may be, I won’t be lonesome anymore.
—Elvis Presley
By this time, he had fallen in love once, he said. He tried to convince others of this later, much later. When he got himself famous enough to give interviews, it was sometimes all that he could talk about—this particular love, how it had changed everything for him, he said. He would even phone up the National Enquirer—which was something he loved to do, much later—and beg the tabloid to convey this seminal tale of hopeful/hapless heartache, which it did without hesitation. (Headline: ‘TAXI’ STAR’S SECRET: I’VE BEEN IN LOVE 17 YEARS WITH A GIRL I’VE NEVER MET!) He found her in seventh grade, he said. He usually recalled her long dark straight hair and her black leotards and always professed that she was the sole reason he had pursued a limelit life. “I fell in love with this girl in junior high school, but I never got to meet her or talk to her because I was incredibly shy…. Every time I would get near her, my knees would shake. But something in my soul felt so close to her soul. I know I’ll never feel that way about anyone again…. They say Capricorns only fall in love once and I think this is the once…. I made note of what classes she was in so I could pass her in the hall. Every day I’d practice things to say to her, but I never had the guts to go up and talk to her. I even thought about tripping over a trash can in front of her so she’d notice me…. I decided I’d have to become famous before I’d have the confidence to meet her. So everything I’ve done for the past seventeen years has been so that I’m worthy of this girl and can go out with her.” Then she disappeared, he said, variously. He said (to New York Newsday) that just when he began to seriously perform birthday party entertainment—so as to start making himself worthy—“The girl I fell in love with left town, before I met her or could even find out her name.” He never knew her name, he said; he knew her name, he said, but was not ready to reveal her name, he said. He said (to the Enquirer): “I’m not prepared to name her, but she’s a brunette who attended Great Neck North Junior and Senior High School from the seventh to the tenth grades—from 1961 to about 1964. She’ll know who she is if she reads this.” Which was to say, she knew him, which she never did, he said. She left in 1964, he said, and she left by the end of 1961, he said. He said (to The Washington Post) that she moved away after the first semester of seventh grade and he never saw her again. He said (to The Village Voice) that once his epic novel-in-progress, The Huey Williams Story, was made into a movie, he would dedicate the movie to her, “Then I’m gonna feel worthy enough so that I can actually go out and say her name and put on a real search for her. Then I’ll find her and then who knows what’ll happen?” He hunched over one tape recorder (Los Angeles Times) and said to her directly, “If you are reading this now, you should know that everything I did was for you.” Then he added, thinking aloud, “But what if she doesn’t like what I [just] said and when I call her she’ll say [coldly], ‘Oh, hello, Andy, I read what you said and …’ And gosh, what if her father reads it and says [gruffly], ‘Who does he think he is, using my daughter in a …?’ But it’s so romantic, maybe she’ll say, ‘Oh Andy, that’s so-o-o sweet.’”
Anyway, once she disappeared, he knew that he would find her again, if only he knew who she was, since he knew who she was, if only she had been real, which she was, except she never was, not that there weren’t girls just like her who never noticed him, whom he loved from a self-imposed frozen-out distance. Well, she/they would be sorry, he liked to say.
He was watching Elvis get girls all along. Now there was confidence! Elvis was getting Ann-Margret in Viva Las Vegas right about the time he finished his thirty-first and final beat poem (unlike the others, four words, four lines, untitled—“I liv /e /to I /ive”—tough to perform). He was, he knew, the only beatnik to madly dig godly Elvis, whose sneers and lipcurls over brigh
twhite tooth enamel (no braces) induced chick paroxysms galore, never mind the leg/hip-swivels. He missed no Elvis film, was ever the repeat box office customer, glued himself to the subsequent television broadcasts of each, studied the execution of all Elvisian conquests —babybaby-baby meet-me-after-the-show-baby—mimicked the delivery in mirrors, knowing he could never try this in actual life, but liking that he could do it as well as he could, thinking he could maybe do it somehow somewhere besides the den if circumstances were denlike. In the den, he played Elvis albums—would eventually possess forty-three of them and they in turn would possess him—singing along while pounding/seducing conga in lieu of actual girl, wanting actual girl very badly. Hormones flamed, boy ached.