Lost in the Funhouse Read Online Free PDF Page B

performances for whoever poked deeply enough. He would coalesce
years
of stored recess broadcasts (all the way up through fifth grade, in fact), slipping into each splendid reverie with fresh conviction….
    “I could only do one program a day…. For a while, I did my version of
American Bandstand
where I played the Dick Clark part. I was the emcee Andy. Then I would be each of the performers—the rock-and-roll stars. Then I would be the kids dancing. Finally, I would be all these things at the same time…. For a few months, I put on a monster show called
Horror House.
I’d be strangling myself, yelling, going, ‘Get away from me! Get away from me!’ Then I’d turn around and do the other part:
‘Errggh, I’m going to keel you!’
‘No! No!’
‘Errggh!’
So if someone had been watching me, they’d think I was crazy…. Oh! And I’d do wrestling, too! I put on a wrestling show where I’d play both parts—I’d be both the bad guy and the good guy and wrestle myself.
    “One day a kid was chasing a ball and he came into the woodswhere I was doing a horror show:
‘Getcha hands off me!’
‘No! No!’ And I’d be serious. I wasn’t trying to be funny, but it would look like a crazy man. He stayed there and watched. The next day another came. A few more every day. The word got around. And do you know that after a while I had an actual audience! I really did!
    “They’d be clapping….
    “I was just a nut doing this stuff….
    “I was serious about it, but I suppose to them it was funny….
    “They were laughing….
    “I wasn’t trying to be funny….
    “They thought I was nuts and that’s what they were laughing at…
    “I wouldn’t care, you know. I’d still continue doing my shows the same way.
But they would be watching me….
    “Then, one day in the second or third grade, something funny happened. My show ran overtime and I was announcing the closing credits on the way back to the building after recess. Real serious. I was saying,
‘That’s all from
The Andy Kaufman Show!
This program was brought to you live by—’
All of a sudden, by my side, I heard a voice go,
‘No, this program was brought to you dead!’
I said,
‘No, it was live!’ ‘Maybe yours was live,’
this voice said,
‘but mine was dead.’
A kid who was watching me had begun doing the same thing on the other side of the playground. We finished our two shows together. We looked at each other and started laughing. We were exactly on the same wavelength! It was beautiful. We became best friends.
    “Every day we started putting on shows together. It was a partnership. Before that, I never had any friends—I was ‘nuts.’ I still remember his name: Alfred Samuels. After a while my parents thought he was crazy because he talked to himself and they forbid me to be friends with him. They also thought there was something wrong [with me], but not nuts like this guy. I was their son, so they loved me…. The funniest thing, though, is that his parents thought the same thing about me! His parents ended up moving out of town. I never saw him again. I wonder what ever happened to him….”
    Um.
    Stanley and Janice never knew of any Alfred Samuels.
    Nor did anyone else who knew their son.
    Nor, quite apparently, was there ever such a boy.
    Except for one.
    Not counting Dhrupick.
    Howdy had Buffalo Bob and what great pals they were! One really couldn’t exist without the other (they even sort of sounded alike), it seemed to him. And they had other good friends like Flub-a-Dub and Mr. Bluster and Dilly Dally and, of course, the antic mute Clarabell the Clown (see—quiet could be fun!). Then on
Terrytoon Circus
(on which host Claude Kirchner told him every evening to go to bed afterward like “all good boys and good girls”—for which he and Michael were inspired to throw things at the Dumont screen), Heckle had Jeckle and vice versa (and they looked an awful lot alike; magpies, whatever). Mighty Mouse, meanwhile, had other