Bob Zmuda, Lynne Margulies, Bob K. Momchilov

 

Bob K. Momchilov, webmaster of the Andy Kaufman´s Official Website, Lynne Margulies, Bob Zmuda, Man on the Moon, 1999.

ANDY KAUFMAN, The Midnight Special - Con los ojos cerrados

Bill Jensen, Waking Andy Kaufman, November 9 , 1999

There are no empty beer cans or cigarette butts that can guide you to his grave. No crowds. No security guard. No graffiti on the neighboring headstones. Walk past Fishman and Waldman in Section One-4 of Beth David cemetery in Elmont until you reach a small bush with those little red berries that our moms all told us were poison when we were kids. Look down and you'll see it.
There is no bust of him in his Elvis getup, lip curled and hair coiffed. No statue of him standing awkwardly next to a phonograph, waiting to lip synch the Mighty Mouse theme song. No mention of his lounge-lizard alter ego Tony Clifton or the lovably incompetent Latka Gravas or the sword-swallowing fakir. No mention of his profession at all. No sign of what he was or who he was. Just a slab of granite, sticking six inches above the ground at the front of the Kaufman-Bernstein family plot, etched with the words "beloved son, brother and grandson."
Andy Kaufman's body is supposed to be lying six feet below this hunk of stone. Nobody's sure whether to believe that or not.
If Kaufman isn't lying underneath this pitch of earth in Elmont, then where would he be? Where would he have gone all these years? Elvis went to truck stops. Jim Morrison went to Africa. Maybe Andy went home.
"He would talk to Lynne Margulies, the love of his life, about if he was going to do this, what would be the right amount of time that he would be gone to prove that he was really dead?" Zmuda recalls. "And he came up with ten years. Who knows? If he had done this, maybe when the ten-year mark came up, he said, 'You know what? This is so cool what I'm doing now and I have such a different life. Who needs it? I've lived that one.'"
'The time to rise has been engaged'

Oh! Very good, this is how you kiss? Oh, could I see that again?

Among the first of the Frederick's crowd who paid heed was another beatnik aspirant named Moogy Klingman, who wanted to be Bob Dylan and understood weirdness to be an asset. He saw raw nobility - -or was it fine freak madness? - in this popeyed poet with the wild book pages. "His Kerouac fanticism was Andy's calling card to the beatnik scene in Great Neck - that and "The Hollering Mangoo", Klingman would recall. "He was kind of an aloof nerdy guy, but people came to be really taken with him because he was so strange. He would pull out these pages, but I don't think he seriously meant for anyone to actually read them . He just meant to impress us that he was weird." ........Moogy instructed him in rebel ways - on how to defy parents - ("He'd say, 'I've got to be home by six' and I'd tell him, 'Andy, today you're going to sit and hang out and you're not going home till midnight!' But he'd just say, 'I can't" and he jumped on his bike and rode home.") On how to develop proper scornful attitudes ("He never said anything bad about anybody, never even taliked about anybody, was always being very nice and polite, never jealous or competitive. He was just in his own world")
And, most crucially, on how to make it with girls. They spoke of sex frequently, as in "what- will-it- be like?" And as in " I will have sex all the time once I ever actually have sex" Finally, it was Moogy who first lured a female into the arena, somewhat, which Andy thought was fine. "I got this girlfriend, a kind of foxy hippie girl named Liz, and we would show Andy how to kiss by kissing in front of him. Tongue kisses, a little petting. He would watch closely and study. I would feel her up and he would stand there taking notes in his mind and say with extreme politesness, "Oh! Very good, this is how you kiss? Oh, could I see that again? Oh, that's very interesting."

Bill Zehme, Lost in the Funhouse, 1999