Andy Kaufman Revealed! (10 page)
I was always excited to see Andy in his appearances, but each time I felt us getting further and further apart. I was still working the Improv, but my wages kept me trapped in New York, barely ahead of the wolves each month. I wanted to get out to Hollywood to be with Andy, to get in on some of what he had going, but I was stuck. Then one day the gods smiled upon me. I was living in the Village, and as I walked home I saw a guy sitting inside a car at a red light and throwing a complete fit — punching the visor and the ceiling, screaming, the whole nine yards. I honestly thought he was going to have a heart attack, so I walked over and lapped on the window. “You okay?” I asked.
“Okay? Okay?” he repeated rhetorically as he punched the dash repeatedly. “Am I okay? I’ve been trying for two fucking hours to find a fucking parking place for this piece of shit and I’ve fucking had it! I’d sell this shitheap for fifty bucks if I could!”
Half thinking he was kidding, I quickly looked the car over and said, “Sold!”
“I’m not kidding,” he said. “It’s yours. You got the fifty?”
I lived two blocks away. He drove me there, I got my money, paid him, and he climbed out. “It’s all yours.” He signed over the pink slip and shook my hand. “One last thing. Do you mind?” he asked, pointing at his enemy of late.
Seeing that I’d paid fifty bucks, I didn’t care. “Knock yourself out,” I offered.
For the next few minutes he proceeded to kick the car a few dozen times. When he’d finished, one side of the car featured a kind of accordion texture to the sheet metal, and most of the nameplate had fallen off. He took a deep breath. “Whew, thanks, I needed that!” And he walked away. My new prize was a ‘67 Rambler Rebel 550, a vehicle that was considered junk fresh off the assembly line, yet this one had significant body cancer through and through due to its road-salt intolerance.
I used the car to perform a magic trick for friends. I’d climb up on its top and lay a handkerchief on the roof. With the aid of a broom, I’d pass the handkerchief through the rotten metal, into the interior, and then down through the decayed floor-boards to the asphalt. “Handkerchief Through Car,” I’d proclaim. I parked the fifty-dollar car a half hour away and would go visit it from time to time and sometimes actually drive it. But now I had a car. I could escape.
I also had a girlfriend, a cute Jewish girl named Shelly, who also worked at the club. We began to plan our escape. Realizing we were too broke to leave New York at that time, we worked extra hours, pooled our savings, and soon had enough for our cross-country odyssey. I planned to heed the words of John Bab-sone Lane Soule that appeared in 1851 in the
Terre Haute (Indiana) Express:
“Go west, young man.” That’s where it was happening, the West. Shelly and I bade good-bye to our friends and hit the road with abandon. No jobs, no responsibilities, no plan, just a general direction and a lot of hope. I was truckin’ down Route 66 with my “old lady,” gettin’ high and crashing with friends along the way. It was right out of a song. I was absolutely certain the results, when we got wherever we were going, would be just as promising, just as romantic.
I had no idea of the patience that I was going to need.
Go West, Young Man
You just never knew what Andy Kaufman was going to do.
RICK NEWMAN
In the back of my mind I knew that the road west would eventually take us to California, but Shelly and I stopped off in Chicago before moving on. This was home, and we needed a little grounding before jumping into the next frying pan. While staying at the apartment of my good friend Joe Troiani, Shelly and I gathered a little more money and prepared for the road ahead. Joe was heading out to San Diego for military training and invited us to join him there. After resting up for a few months (we needed it after being pummeled in the Big Apple for four years), we jumped in the beater and pointed the hood ornament toward the Golden State.
California, here we come
…
For me, trucking across the face of America is one of the great experiences of life. It awakens in me a sense of what the pioneers encountered as well as a feeling of patriotism, a feeling of country. Three weeks after departing Chicago, we looped over the north end of the Bay Area and headed down into the heart of San Francisco to that wellspring of free love, the Haight-Ashbury district. When we arrived at the intersection of those namesake streets, I got out of the Rambler and just stood and stared at the crossed street markers. Far more than just two street signs that had spawned the name of a community, it represented a way of life that was now gone but had altered, in however small a way, the course of human culture. Though the evidence of madras plaids and love beads and patchouli wafting on the air was fading, we had been out of Vietnam more than a year, and the notion that love could conquer hate had made its impression on more than a few. The free-love movement had served its purpose, and society had moved on, the better for it, one hopes.
Shelly and I spent just a few days in Haight-Ashbury. I had been headed to Hollywood all along, I just didn’t know it. I had rolled Andy’s words around in my head about a million times, but, given his increasing visibility on television and my decreasing finances, I kept hearing the little devil on my shoulder whispering in my ear,
Give it up, he’ll never call.
I didn’t want to believe it, so we struck out on Highway I, down the coast to Sodom.
Since our money was running low, we pitched our tent along the ocean and took our time getting to Los Angeles. The coastline was stunning to a Midwest boy who had never seen such magnificence. When we finally rolled into La La Land, we made the requisite detour from the coast highway and headed the twenty miles over to Hollywood. The actual section of Los Angeles called Hollywood can come as a bit of a shock to anyone who has never been there. It covers a very large area, and the unsuspecting find that it is not glamorous but rather aging and somewhat run-down. Even in 1976 it was shabby. Today crews are working to gentrify Hollywood, but it is still frayed around the edges.
Still, as we passed through those streets, every time I’d glimpse one of the famous Hollywood soundstages looming in the distance I’d get depressed because I wasn’t a part of it. I didn’t even drop down to Melrose to visit the Improv, for fear of running into someone I knew who would see how down on my luck I was. As we made our way back to the freeway, Shelly sensed my despair.
“You should call him,” she said.
“Call who?” I replied, playing dumb.
“Andy. Who did you think?”
“Why?” I said, wanting to hear her rationale; maybe it was more hopeful than what I was imagining.
“Because he’s your friend and he said he wanted you as his writer,” she said simply. But it was too easy. Andy hadn’t called me. It was his move, he was the big star. “Call him,” she said. “It’s about your career, it’s important.”
“He’s forgotten all about that by now,” I said bitterly.
“No, he hasn’t, he’s just busy. He’s not like that.”
She was so naive, I thought. What did she know?
“Fuck Hollywood!” I said, my voice rising in rage. “Fuck my career! Fuck the phoniness!”
We drove in silence for a while, and as we left Hollywood I had a deep sense of dread. I hadn’t been there an hour and I hated the place. It was ugly and cruel and run-down and I so desperately wanted to be part of it I could taste it. I pointed the car south to San Diego.
“They said Californy is the place you oughtta be, so we loaded up our truck and we moved to … Diego. San Diego, that is …”
We settled into a well-known hippie enclave called Ocean Beach, or O.B. to locals. It was a funky, eclectic community that ran the social gamut from people on welfare to those whose second car was a Bentley, but our particular area featured a well-insulated collective of free spirits. Many of our group were into crystals and auras way before most people knew dick about their chakras. O.B. was a laid-back but partying little place on the southwest corner of Mission Bay and the Pacific Ocean. Shelly and I rented a small bungalow two blocks from the beach and settled into Bohemianism. Shelly got a job at the People’s Food Co-op, which, in keeping with the anticapitalistic credo of our adopted class, didn’t pay a salary. But they did offer her carte blanche on all the organic fruits and vegetables we could eat, so out of necessity we became vegetarians.
On weekends I would go over to Balboa Park, by the zoo, and work as a street performer, doing the same magic act I’d done as a kid. Eventually I took a job as a short-order cook at one of the nearby hotel restaurants. After a few weeks an accounting indicated I was averaging precisely ninety dollars a week. This reality caused me to up my consumption of marijuana to carry me away from thoughts of a career that had never gotten going and the broken promises of a former friend that could have changed my life. The more dope I smoked the less I worried about my station in life, which was one of slinging hotcakes and eggs to people who could buy or sell me with the spare change in their pockets.
I had tried to become a radical, a social commando bent on changing the system by becoming an important part of it, but now I was at the lowest rung of the ladder, powerless, and my dreams went up in sweet smoke every night. Shelly and I had no phone or television, lest they bring tidings of someone we had known in our previous lives, “good” news that someone else had “made it.” I was terrified of television, for it promised at every turn of the dial to slap me in the face with the success of my former associates at the Improv.
I slipped into my routine of rising at five-thirty to be at work at six to dish up fried animal products to the ruling class. Shelly and I were living a marginal yet pleasant existence, so finally, like an emergency-room doctor who’s been beating a dying patient’s chest too long, I just gave up. Why didn’t I pick up the phone and call Andy? I guess my pride wouldn’t allow it. He was in the driver’s seat. If he didn’t call me, then calling him wouldn’t make any difference. Feeling a lot of self-pity, I figured the parade had not only passed me by but also run me over.
I have never been a believer in psychic phenomena, but something happened to me during this time that deeply rattled my skepticism. I still have a hard time accepting what transpired because I absolutely cannot explain it, but I have a number of friends who witnessed it and will verify its occurrence.
One morning around eight, I was at work dishing up breakfasts from my griddle when I heard a voice. It wasn’t like someone speaking next to me, but more like one in my head. (I warned you.) It was unsettling because it was so clear, so arresting.
“Take off your apron, immediately, walk off this job, go home, and wait for further instructions … for your life is about to change,”
said the voice. The voice was so strong, so compelling, that I set down my spatula, undid my apron, and handed it to my stunned boss on the way out.
“Where you going?” he asked.
“I just quit. Nothing personal. See ya,” I said, and walked out.
I went out and climbed into my rusted Rambler Rebel and drove home, where Shelly was getting ready for work.
“What’s wrong? What are you doing home so early?” she asked.
I told her the story and she was cosmic enough to accept its possibility, so she kissed me good-bye, wished me luck, and left. I sat down, fired up a joint, and awaited my instructions from the other world. The day passed and I waited patiently, knowing something was going to happen.
That night Shelly asked to hear the story again. As I retold it, her enthusiasm renewed mine. We went to bed with the certainty that the next day would bring me my new destiny. The day came and went, and by the end of the third day I was beginning to doubt my sanity. Shelly and our friends were becoming concerned about my mental state, and I discussed with them the possibility of seeing a psychologist at the local free clinic.
The next day I got up, still jobless, kissed Shelly as she exited the door for her job, and sat down to mope about my fragile mental and financial condition. Sometime around midafternoon there was a knock at the door. I thought it was a well-meaning neighbor coming over to “counsel” me, but to my surprise it was a delivery man.
“You Bob Zmuda?”
“Yeah,” I said warily, as if my bad luck had manifested some forgotten misstep from my previous life.
“I gotta telegram. Sign here,” he said, thrusting his clipboard at me. I signed, and he handed me a sealed telegram. I went inside and looked at it for a moment, scared that it might be bad news, but also filled with excitement from the promise of my “voice.” I opened it.
BOB — CALL MY MANAGER GEORGE SHAPIRO IMMEDIATELY. SIGNED, ANDY
I stared at the message in my hand for a moment or two, almost disbelieving it. Andy was becoming a big star, he wanted me, and the “voice” had told the truth. The phone number was in Los Angeles. Hollywood. It was two-thirty on a Wednesday afternoon, and I ran in my bathrobe, screaming in glee, to a phone booth down the block. I got an operator who instructed me to drop some coins in. I was still dropping in coins when George Shapiro’s assistant, Diane, answered.
“Good afternoon, Shapiro/West,” she said.
“Uh, yes, may I speak to Mr. Shapiro?”
The sounds of the coins coupled with the naïveté in my voice caused her to shortstop me. “Mr. Shapiro is not in. May I take a message?” she said with the slightest touch of derision. I was crushed.
“Well, when will he be back?” I asked, still hopeful, but taken down a notch.
“Later. May I take a number?”
“Sir, you’ll have to insert another seventy-five cents,” said the operator.
Now Diane was really wondering, and when I said, “Sorry, I don’t have a number,” she dismissed me.
“I’ll tell him you called. Your name?”
“Bob Zmuda,” I said as I shoved my last three quarters in the slot, trying to keep the connection. Suddenly all hell broke loose.
“Bob Zmuda!?” she screeched. “You’re Bob Zmuda? George, George! It’s him,” she screamed to Shapiro. “It’s Bob Zmuda! We found him!”