Lost in the Funhouse

by Bill Zehme

  Eventually, Andy beseeched them to return to home turf: “Um, you guys should come out to Great Neck one weekend. You can stay at my house. There’s some hip kids there—you’ll be a big hit. Ohh, they’ll think you’re real bohemian beatniks!” By this time, his circle had widened. A couple of other guys, named Doug DeSoto (who, like Moogie, attended Great Neck South) and Gil Gevins, a fellow North attendee, had embraced him and pulled him into a small roguish hippie clique they would come to call F Troop, borrowed from the popular TV situation comedy about bumbling cavalrymen. Sutton and Barrett showed up in town wearing grievous dispositions and little leather caps—Sutton with his guitar, Barrett with his harmonica, a pair of traveling bluesmen immediately suspected to be out-of-town drug pushers. “We looked like hell,” said Barrett. They were inducted with little hesitation into the fraternity. F Troop would fast become the stuff of lunatic legend in the precincts, with Andy as sole mascot—mirthful marauders who tried everything many times over. “The five of us were the core of F Troop,” said Gevins, “and we were real snobs in a lot of ways. It was a very closed circle, because in our minds we were the hippest, coolest kids who ever lived.”

  Sutton: “We were thick as thieves. We spent weekends together taking group acid trips, going into the city, hanging out in Great Neck at Andy’s house or at Gil’s house, going to the park at night, getting stoned, attempting to get girls. Everyone knew us.”

  Glenn Barrett: “We were the scourge of the town, needless to say.”

  Moogie Klingman: “F Troop was a bunch of fucking assholes. Andy joined F Troop and didn’t bring me with him and they kept me out. I discovered him and brought him on the scene; they formed an exclusionary clique and stole him away. Then, suddenly, they also started stealing our women—they were all gravitating to F Troop. Who gives a fuck about F Troop anyway?”

  They did as they wished.

  They were hooligans of much panache.

  They crashed parties, dropped pants, spilled paint, ruined parties, forged irreputable reputations. They headquartered in Allenwood Park—sometimes Grace Avenue Park—beneath or up in trees, strummed guitars, taunted girls, pawed girls (not Andy; too shy), altered reality.

  They consumed copious amounts of marijuana, flirted with acid, went on four-day hash binges. Andy, according to all, ingested with prudence, great moderation. He would remember differently—“Between the ages of sixteen and nineteen, I was smoking marijuana every day. I was also taking [less regularly] DET, LSD, DMT, Dexedrine, all kindsa things.”

  Gevins would maintain that Andy dropped acid but once, then forced all present to listen to Elvis albums repeatedly. Difficult trip except for one, who played conga in time: “We went nuts. His thing with Elvis was a real pain in the ass.” (He once dragged Barrett to a Harlem movie house to see the new Elvis release, Spinout, the only two white people in the audience.) Another night, he and Barrett got stoned and, on a dare, rode bicycles through town “buck-naked.”

  They drank anything they could find in anyone’s home, but usually had some older guy named Abe buy them bottles of Thunderbird. Andy liked to call it red wine, so as to lend greater dignity to the papersack ferment. He liked his red wine: “I was a heavy drinker and it got heavier and heavier until I was like just getting drunk all the time. I look back and think, Boy, I almost became an alcoholic.”

  Barrett taught him how to smoke cigarettes: “He asked me to show him. He was very proud of that. He always used to introduce me to people as the guy who turned him on to cigarettes. My big claim to fame—now I’m ashamed. But he never really smoked anyway. From day one, Andy was a closet existentialist. He wanted to experiment with everything, wanted to experience all that he could in life.”

  Their sieges upon Manhattan escalated; they nearly destroyed a Bleecker Street spin-art emporium (squirt paint, rotating canvases; acid, havoc); they played inebriate pirates—lots of arrgh matey!—aboard the Staten Island Ferry (promptly ejected at port); they camped out on the remote Point at Central Park Lake; they panhandled in front of the Plaza Hotel, Andy offering tuneless songs for coinage; they slept in a rotting abandoned building on the Lower East Side; they preferred that their nights of rabble never end.

  Doug DeSoto played in a band called Fragment of Love that appeared at Central Park music festivals, where they met a sophisticated fifteen-year-old named Ginger Petrochko, who would go-go dance along onstage and quickly become an F Troop fixture. F Troop once came to a party at her family’s apartment, brought fireworks, burned holes in kitchen linoleum with sparklers, were thrown out.

  Andy always went to Fragment of Love practice jams, never much liked the music, rolled up his jacket like a pillow and took naps on the floor; during breaks, he would awaken, borrow a guitar, and pretend to be Elvis—thankyou thankyouverrrramuch.

  He began making fateful allusions—casually—would say things —When I am famous … I am going to be famous one day, mark my words….

  He told them that Elvis would personally assure his success.

  They never necessarily believed anything he said.

  They razzed him about the Elvis hit, “In the Ghetto”—would relentlessly mock the word ghet-tohhhhhh. He took umbrage always, would contend, “He’s not so bad!” On the other hand, he thrilled to any one of them going off on a temper tantrum. Sutton and Gevins, mostly. He thought it hilarious.

  Members preferred not to be alone with him, since he never said much, preferred having somebody else there to cover the silences, which were sometimes elephantine and, well, a little dull.

  They all loved his eyes, theorized as to what might be behind them.

  He wanted them all to think he was crazier than he was; they knew he wasn’t as crazy as he wanted them to think; they thought he would either become famous or become a dead wino.

  Great Neck police came to know all of them on a first-name basis. Hassling F Troop was de riguer for local law—they were instructed at every turn to empty the contents of their pockets, usually on the hood of a patrol car. Andy would always go last. He would begin methodically—“We’d all stand there thinking, Please, please, don’t have any marijuana in your pockets!” said Barrett—and continue slowly, reaching, digging deep, front and back, jacket and pants, searching, extracting papers, snot rags, cards, string, gum, comb, keys, coins, dollars, tissue, Elvis pocket calendar, stuffed wallet, copy of On the Road, lint as well. “Everything would come out. Even we were amazed at the amount of junk he would have in there. But that was Andy—he’d say, ‘Oh, wait a minute, I have one more thing,’ then again, ‘Oh! Here’s something else.’ He wasn’t even a wiseass about it. The cops thought they were being put on. If they were, he never told us.”

  One night, F Troop gave an impromptu “concert” at the Great Neck home of ancillary member Peter Wassyng, whose parents were out of town. Twenty revelers paid for the privilege of witnessing the haphazard spectacle (such was their lure). Andy opened the show, staging a fight with Barrett that began on the roof of the Wassyng house, continued on and down an adjacent tree, from which they rappelled in full tussle to the ground, where Barrett feigned collapse, Andy feigned victory, upon which he picked up a guitar and began playing and singing an exaggerated version of the Animals’ hit dirge, “The House of the Rising Sun”—There izzzz a house in New Orleans…. Then, at the end of the song, he pretended to die—and die—and die. “He died for fifteen minutes,” said Gevins. “Like he’d been shot in one place, goes down, gets to his knees, he’s shot in another place, he gets up, he’s writhing on the ground again, he gets up, goes down … then up … then down—for fifteen minutes! F Troop is in complete hysterics and everybody who paid admission is getting more and more pissed off. It was like a precursor to Andy’s whole career in microcosm. It was also the first time—outside of kids’ parties—that he’d done anything so crazy in front of an audience.”

  Another night, they were returning by car—somebody got one—to Great Neck from the city and cops tried to bust them for pot poss
ession on the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge —where a dirty little face had long ago popped up in Daddy’s rearview mirror, surprise! They beat the rap and repaired to the Kaufman house, where nobody was home, descended to the den to recover from the hassle. “We were bored,” said Sutton. “So Andy did his children’s act for us for the first time. He gave us a little taste. He had us sing ‘The Cow Goes Moo’ and do the ‘Old MacDonald’ lip-synch routine with the phonograph and he did Mighty Mouse, too, and a few other things. It blew my mind. He had us all in stitches. That was the first inkling I had that Andy might have talent. I never realized it before.”

  Days before his seventeenth birthday, he vanished. He was gone from Grassfield Road, gone without a trace, did not return home at night, left an ambiguous suggestion on the premises that he would be gone for good. No longer would his father need to criticize him, to yell and yelllllllllll at him for looking/acting LIKE A BUM!!!!! It was over. “I was his enemy,” said Stanley. “All I wanted him to do was to cut his hair!” They did not see eye to eye on much of anything, really. To duly punish his father, the son chose to disappear on the very first day of business for the brand-new Tempo costume jewelry corporation. It was also the first day of the first market week—January 1966—necessarily the most important day of Stanley’s new life and future life. “It was make-or-break time,” he said. Janice called him at the office and he exploded and alerted his new partner, Tom Tessler, and together the two men canvassed all of New York’s train and bus terminals and contacted police and found nothing. “Nothing whatsoever. He was a miserable son of a bitch. He just left us and we didn’t hear anything for more than a week. We finally got a call from one of his friends, who said he was in Boston.” He came home via rail; Stanley waited at the Grace Avenue train stop, fuming inside his car. “He got in the car and, as we were driving home, we got into an argument right away. With the car moving, he opened the door and jumped out and started running away through the park. I got out and chased after him, screaming, ‘You son of a bitch! Get back here!’ I’m cursing, I’m yelling, I’m huffin’ and puffin’ trying to keep up with him. It was like running after the fox that got away. I thought I was gonna have a heart attack.”

  They mended. They had to. Grandpa Paul—big bubbly hambone facilitator of magical inspiration, unwitting architect of his eldest grandson’s future career—died that April. Patriarchal umbrella (expansive multicolored beach version) was gone. Paul’s eldest son and Paul’s eldest son’s eldest son needed to achieve reckoning, as Paul would have wished. Andy instigated the only way he could: “It was his inspiration to get us back together,” said Stanley. “We were on completely different wavelengths and I had to get off my kick with the hair and realize there was more to life than that.” Andy handed his father a copy of On the Road and asked him to read it. Stanley read it. One weekend morning he knelt beside his bed, where he liked to read (back problems), and “I got to a particular passage and I started to cry because it was so tremendously moving. It related to the conflict between this father and his son. I now understood why Andy wanted me to read this book. At that moment, he walked into the room and he saw me there and he knelt down next to me and we sort of read it together. And we both cried. And we began to understand each other a little better. There was détente and finally a little mutual respect.”

  Oh! Victory triumph conquest. It happened at last. It happened the way it happened because Margaret had sadly departed family employ—the children were all of responsible size now—leaving free her maid’s quarters, the small bedroom beside the den, to be usurped by the wily denmaster himself. The move was logical and obvious. He would now control the entire lower level of the house on Grassfield Road, except for the laundry room. Downward, he lugged all prized possessions, installing his Howdy Doody puppet, his Willie the Clown doll, wrestling magazines and artifacts, chin-up bar, Fabian photos, Presleyana in vast array, congas, broken bongos, stacks of comic books, record collections ever growing, beatnik books, his own poetry and writings, and every oddity his grandparents had ever given him. Plus, now there was extra square footage for F Troop sleeping bags so as to allow for inevitable group crashovers. So—they found this girl on New Year’s Eve at Penn Station, a devastating hippie chick, smarter than her years, which were the same as theirs. Her name was Carol. Oh, a most beautiful redhead, very, um, liberal and forward sexually, an altogether new kind of chick, a city chick, to boot. Glenn fell in love with her first, serenaded her on harmonica, and they started doing it in no time. She came to Great Neck a lot and would decide—believing in free love and all—to arbitrarily get it on with each member of the troop. She had not yet completed her mission, since Andy was Andy and he was not easy to engage as such. On the night the world changed, she had been making out with most all of them down in the den until there was only Andy, whom she led into his new bedroom and suggested greater measures. Very very excited but—oh! He told her to wait and rushed out to his friends and said, “Um, okay, what should I do?” “He had zero idea,” said Gevins. They sat him down and mapped each movement for him. “We’re talking very graphic instructions, all about lubrication and insertion and licking and biting and stroking, step by step.” He kept having them repeat what they told him. One more time, from the top. His eyes bulged as he drank in the precious invaluable information. “Now, wait, so first I kiss her? How long do we do that?” After a half hour, he said, “Okay, I got it now.” The troop—all of whom had been convulsing throughout—rose up to pat his back encouragingly, told him, “Good luck! Go for it! You can do it!” At ten o’clock the following morning, they would all remember, he emerged from his bedroom with eyes resembling golf balls and he pronounced in an effusive tone they had not heard before, “Today I am a man!”

  “In the eleventh grade,” he proudly told an interviewing person years later, “I lost my virginity and kissed a girl the same night!”

  But he screwed everything up. He always did, every time he got a little too cocky. He noticed this pattern in himself and hated it. He actually came to believe that he was cursed in four-year cycles. “Every four years I’d be successful for a few months. Then that would blow away. [After losing his virginity] it was great. For the next few months, I got really high headed about it and I went out with a lot of girls. Then I got really stuck up … and I went too far.” He saw certain moments of the seventh and eleventh grades as high points and all periods that intervened or immediately followed were hopeless and dismal (and, um, fine). With this girl Carol, it was the same. They kind of dated and had sex and she openly adored his odd/awkward sweetness, sincerely urged him to be a better him, which she knew he was. She learned to slip down through his foliage-obscured subterranean bedroom window—as many would over time (just for the illicit thrill of it; the back door to the den was ever an option)—and showed him how to do things, which he liked very very extremely much. Other hippie girls sensed his newfound power and enticed him as well and what else could he do? After all, the other guys did it, too. But this Carol girl was more special, more interesting—whenever he gave her train fare to and from Manhattan or bought her espresso coffee ice cream, she blithely joked about how he was paying her for services rendered. Then he once made a similar crack to her, only a little less playful, not to be mean, not really, which truly made her feel like a prostitute —he dreamt of prostitutes, couldn’t believe such a wonderful thing could exist, and this Carol was able to sort of make him feel like he was paying her for their sex, only in fun, just fooling, but still, oh!—which she didn’t think was funny and she stormed away and he felt like an asshole, then figured he was an asshole, and just went ahead and acted like an asshole, and his grades went deeper into the toilet than ever before and he told his father that he wanted to drop out, but his father convinced him he would be less than nothing without a high school diploma, so he stayed on and dedicated himself, just barely, to the twelfth grade and graduated, just barely, from Great Neck North, 419th in a class of 461 (due to a final 70.6 grade point
average, thankfully not the utter basin of D-ness) on June 23, 1967, thereby setting forth in a world he mistakenly thought he knew well, equipped with an IQ of 114 and an inscrutable malevolent novel and the ability to entertain children and drug-dazed friends and no exact idea of just how he would become famous other than knowing that he would and then everyone who ever doubted him would feel foolish, very very foolish, please mark his words.

  Of course, shrinks had returned to his life. In the last stages of high school, as he traipsed again into fated nadir, they were back, one in Great Neck, another (a black doctor, kind of exotic) in Brooklyn. Same routine. Now they were giving him new sorts of reality tests and he shared his reality as he knew it and it was a reality unsettling to psychological purview. His father, his mother, they saw him smile, just like always, as he left the offices, or as he returned home from such inquests, having given new recitations of conjured otherness, extemporaneously executed—no, really. There was a war on—did he know this? What exactly did he know of Vietnam? Wasn’t it like some restaurant? Did he believe in his country? His invisible twin brother was Japanese, so he was conflicted, of course. He could never be angry at somebody Asian/Oriental, unless maybe the chow mein in the restaurant didn’t taste right, but these things happen, don’t they? It’s not their fault, maybe the stoves weren’t working the way they should, everybody makes mistakes and stuff, right? He got his letter, just as all scions of Great Neck upward mobility aimed to get theirs. It was a breeze, for him. The doctor wrote to strenuously suggest that his patient be kept from military service at all costs. “He said I was in a fantasy world since preschool days and I was in a little bubble and I couldn’t be broken out of it and if I was in the Army my fantasies would get the better of me and I’d completely lose my mind.”