Andy Kaufman Revealed! (17 page)

At that point, Andy would enter the stage dressed in his ridiculous wrestling attire, which consisted of full-length thermal underwear beneath a baggy black swimsuit and his father’s robe. Sporting black socks and old gym shoes, he would taunt the audience and they would boo appropriately. If the winner of the audience selection was the big girl, Kaufman would decide to wrestle two women so he could get the beefy one out of the way, allowing him to focus on the runner-up, the sexy one. I always made sure the girls signed a release form to ensure that Andy wouldn’t get sued if one of them was injured. No one ever was.

Once the show was put to bed, I had to make sure Andy got laid and then went to sleep at a reasonable hour so we could start the whole thing over the next day. Though I was technically the producer, the reality was I was there to be Andy’s playmate.

One night we played a college near Chicago and, as usual, Andy offered to take on all female comers as the Intergender Wrestling Champion. That was a title we had invented, along with the elaborate tide belt, and it was the shtick that gave Andy license to wrestle girls. His main foe that night was a very cute buffed blonde who exuded loads of confidence and felt she as much as had our five-hundred-dollar prize in her pocket. She and Andy approached each other in the ring and began to tangle. She was feisty, a good fighter, exactly the type of opponent he liked. She darted left, reached in, and Andy countered. They slammed to the mat. As I leaned in looking for the pin, I over-heard Andy.

“Can you believe all these people are watching us do this?” he said in her ear. “Must be five thousand.” As the ref, I’d heard him do this rap many times — his idea of foreplay.

“Huh?” said the foxy grappler, not yet understanding they weren’t
really
antagonists.

Andy purred in her ear. “What are you doing after the show?”

The poor girl couldn’t take it and flipped him over. Andy rolled her back, straddled her briefly, rubbing against her, then leaped to his feet.
“Why don’t you go back to the kitchen where you belong, baby!”
he yelled for the crowd’s benefit.
“I got the bruins,”
he screamed, pointing at his head,
“and you’re just a girl!”
Andy loved punching that hot button of vicious sexism.

Hopping mad, she leaped at him, going for the takedown. Just before they crashed to the mat I could see he was now sporting a raging woody. They rolled around for a few minutes, but unfortunately for her, Andy really knew his moves, and in a flash he spun, pinned her shoulders, and I flew to the canvas and began banging my open palm. “One! Two! Three!” I jumped up. “Kaufman
wins!”
The crowd went wild, half booing, half screaming in delight. Realizing Kaufman was pitching up quite a tent, I rushed to swaddle him in a robe lest the people in the first few rows get the true idea about the nature of the match. As the crowd roared I heard Andy make another plea to the blonde. “C’mon, meet me backstage.”

“You’ve gotta be kidding,” she spat. “Not in your dreams!”

The next morning I got up and pondered our schedule. We had a gig at another college about two hundred miles away and our plane departed at two o’clock. We were supposed to check out around noon and a limo would whisk us to O’Hare in time to make our flight. We would arrive by three so we could have a four o’clock rehearsal with a band we’d never met, then run through all the lighting and music cues for an eight o’clock show with an audience of five thousand.

Though I was too busy to check on Andy all morning, I figured he’d stroll out when he was ready, as usual. At twelve-thirty the limo arrived and no Kaufman. I went to his room and found a handwritten note taped to the door (the Do Not Disturb sign was not good enough): “Under fear of death do not disturb — I am MEDITATING.” Typical Kaufman melodrama. I knew his meditation took only twenty minutes, so in case he had just put the sign out I gave him exactly that long and then returned. I knocked and then entered. (I had learned by then to secure my own key to his room.) He knew it was me, for no one else would have dared go in, given the written threat. Andy was lolling on the bed in a bathrobe, enjoying some room-service fare and watching cartoons. I heard the rush of the shower.

“We gotta go,” I said. “The limo’s waiting.”

The whooshing water stopped and a moment later the bathroom room door opened. A rush of steam heralded the entrance of a lovely
young
thing clad only in a towel. A blonde. The “not-in-your-dreams” blonde.

“Kelly?” Andy said between bites of Cap’n Crunch. “Zmuda. Zmuda? Kelly.”

“Kelly.”

“Zmuda.”

Kelly casually dropped her towel and dressed as I tried to avert my eyes and Andy focused on the story line from a
Felix the Cat
episode. I was impressed with Andy’s resolve. He had overcome serious objections to ultimately make the sale with Kelly. I felt pride. “Let’s roll,” I urged, as Kelly slid into her clothes.

Andy roused very slowly, so I applied the lash. “Ten minutes, Kaufman, I mean it. We’re gonna miss the flight.”

“Don’t worry, I haven’t missed a show yet, have I?”

I stepped into the lee of the door and paused, lowering my voice to the sternest pitch that would convey the seriousness of the situation. “I’ll be waiting downstairs in the limo. Ten minutes.”

I left him to dress and went to the lobby to fret about the growing likelihood of missing our plane. Sure enough, ten minutes later Andy appeared but with Kelly in tow. “We’ve got to drop her off,” he said. It was now one-thirty, thirty minutes to departure time. Andy’s chivalry was going to cost us a gig. And on top of that it had started to rain. Hard. My tension level went through the roof.

After delivering Kelly we made it to the airport — at two-thirty. I assumed we were screwed, but to my complete surprise, when we got to the gate the plane was still there. Luck was with us, as it often seemed to be when I was with Andy. Then the tables turned.

“All flights are canceled,” said the sprightly young airline employee. “Rain,” she said simply. And she was right. The midafter-noon sun had been erased as low-flying clouds arrived and unloaded their cargo with a vengeance. According to the airline all flights were delayed until the next day.
Tomorrow!? Impossible! We have a show
tonight! I felt like Edmond O’Brien in the movie
D.O.A.
when he’s been told he’S already dead from the poison.

I panicked and called George Shapiro. He calmed me down and told me not to worry. “I’ll take care of it. Stick by the phone, I’ll call you back.” Before I could tell him the airport was closed he hung up. Ten minutes later he called back.

“Get to the limo,” he said. “I got a plane for you.”

As we hung up again I was thinking,
Holy shit, nobody has connections like a Hollywood manager.

The limo took us to another section of the airport. Now the rain was coming down so hard I barely made out the tiny Piper Cub with a lone man standing in front of it clutching an umbrella. The man beckoned, so we stopped and raced over to him.

“Hi,” he said between the gusts of wind, “I’m Wes, your pilot. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Kaufman.”

Wes was allegedly a pilot and sported a uniform of indistinct origin. I thought of Mr. X’s nondenominational military attire. I later discovered Wes’s wife had fashioned the costume for him.

“I thought the airport was closed,” I said, ever the nagging pragmatist.

“Oh, it is,” said Wes confidently, “for commercials, but we’re private, we can go.”

I looked at his flying machine, all of fifteen hundred pounds soaking wet, and wondered about the logic of us going up in it while hundred-and-fifty-ton machines sat idle. Sometimes you just gotta say
What the fuck.
Like idiots, Kaufman and I climbed aboard.

Andy wanted to meditate, so he crawled into the back of the plane and assumed his position. I figured that was good because if we actually made it to our destination alive he would have gotten the meditation out of the way and could go right to rehearsal. The plane was so small the three of us were required to sit single file. I was directly behind Wes — close enough to put my hand on his shoulder if the need arose — as he went through his short preflight checklist.

He punched the start button, and the engine coughed a few times and then sputtered out. He made several attempts to bring our plucky little engine to life, and each time it died so did I. Finally he lit it and we taxied to the runway. Though it was not even four o’clock the heavy weather had damn near rendered the day to night. As the rain hammered the cracker-thin aluminum shell Wes began a conversation with the tower.

“Control, this is Echo Alpha five seven nine, requesting clearance for takeoff.”

The tower shot back, “The airport is closed. You are
not
cleared for takeoff.”

Wes knew where that dialogue was going, so he switched off the radio. I suddenly thought of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper, and the ever-young Ritchie Valens.
Was that a rainstorm or wing icing?
I didn’t have time to decide, because my concentration shifted when Wes gave us some steam and we barreled down the runway, bound for either a small Illinois college or oblivion.

The sky was now black, and startling forks of lightning stabbed around us.
If not for the courage of the fearless crew the Minnow would be lost … the Minnow would be lost …
The wind shear was so violent that Wes had the plane crawling sideways half the time. The tiny motor strained. I looked back five minutes into the flight to see Andy calmly meditating.

Fifteen minutes later the weather thickened and the wind began hurling us up and down like a roller coaster that could very easily end our lives. The four little cylinders groaned like a lawn mower encountering heavy, wet grass … I
think I can, I think I can …
We were doomed.

Wes reached up and drew a small curtain between us. This was ludicrous, as the shroud nearly touched my nose and did nothing but obscure my view of the instruments and the blackness ahead. The death grip I had on my seat was possibly the only thing holding us aloft, so I felt that my losing sight of the instruments might somehow bring us ruin. Then I heard Wes whispering to himself. Assuming he was trying to figure out how to get us out of this mess, I concentrated hard and listened in, curious about what procedures a highly trained pilot goes through at a time like this.

“Our Father who art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come …”

Oh, fuck. Instantly, my terror-gripped mind spun out a newspaper, like one of those old movies, and the headline read: “Andy Kaufman,
Taxi
Star, Dies in Crash with Pilot, Other.” My death would be merely a tiny footnote in the history of American popular culture. I comforted myself with the knowledge that at least Andy and I would have company to chill with up there, others with whom we could relate: Buddy, Ritchie, the Big … I made a mental note to kill George Shapiro in the off chance we survived.

Again I turned to check on Andy, and the son of a bitch had his eyes closed and the sweetest expression of calm I’d ever seen. I made a mental note to kill him, too. Now Wes had advanced to his Hail Marys and I lost my shit. Remember
The Mummy
with Boris Karloff? In one of its best scenes an archeologist is all alone in the tomb one night, going over some scrolls, when the Mummy comes alive. As the hapless scholar sees the undead king coming toward him he becomes so frightened he loses his marbles and begins to cackle madly and laugh uncontrollably. That was me in that plane.

Somehow, Wes managed to find the tiny airport and get us back onto terra firma. I later found that Wes had precisely forty-six hours of flight time, including the two with us, and that the FAA required forty to receive a license. Wes had also just purchased the plane and needed all the paying customers he could get to make the payments. Andy later said it was meditation that kept us in the air. Perhaps. As soon as I could find a phone I called George and bitched him out, screaming, “Never again!” After I calmed down a bit I firmly stipulated that neither Kaufman nor I would ever fly on an aircraft without a center aisle or fewer than two engines.

Our show went off without a hitch and, as a matter of fact, was one of the best we’d done to that point, probably as a result of the euphoria brought on by the “I’m alive” thrill of dodging a bullet.

Afterward, we had a pleasant surprise awaiting us at the hotel. It seems the Hilton chain had received some inside info regarding a freeway that was to pass through this little town. Following the business axiom “Build in the path of progress,” Hilton jumped in and erected a lavish multimillion-dollar facility. Once complete, they flung open their doors and waited for that concrete ribbon to deliver multitudes of road-weary customers. It never happened. Somebody had gotten some bad 411 and Hilton was stuck with a white elephant. With no choice but to minimize their losses, the hotel management began offering a “fantasy weekend” to the locals (read: college students) and cut their overhead by employing but one co-ed to work the front desk.

When Andy and I arrived to check in, we were dropped into the middle of something the likes of which we had never seen. We heard a commotion, so after we schlepped our bags to the rooms, we went to the pool area to investigate. To our extreme delight, we found upward of a hundred college students, all naked. It was as if a nudist colony had convened safely within the walls of a respectable three-star hotel. What made it even better was that most of the students had just been to the only entertainment in town that night, our show, so Kaufman was like a pig in shit.

After he disrobed poolside, everyone cheered as a buck-naked Andy strutted back and forth before diving in. There’s something quite primal about communal nudity, and soon we were at one with everyone present. Booze and joints passed between nude bathers, and soon the aquatic partyers were all pleasantly hammered. Normally, given the presence of dope, Andy would have fled, but this time he stayed, likely due to the influence of the dozen or so lovely ladies lavishing attention on him, making sure he went nowhere.