Lost in the Funhouse by Bill Zehme Read Free Book Online Page A

dime. Like that. Liked doing that like that. Interesting. Was only fooling. No, really.)
    Coney Island stayed inside of him.
    Performances picked up. Got more daring. He had transferred to Baker Hill Elementary after the move to King’s Point, then quickly found a new wooded nook behind the school playground for his stagecraft. Boy in bushes continued apace with aforementioned flights. He would recall spending weeks in class expressing himself only in the voice of Jerry Lewis. (“And I had never seen Jerry Lewis.”
Nasal, hyperspastic, self-infantilizing.
“I just could not talk unless I talked like a little boy.”
More and more teacherparentconferences redux.)
In cold weather, he furthered his inadvertent study of response testing: At his mother’s insistence, he wore layer upon layer upon layer upon layer of clothing to prevent chill. Then, upon entering school, he methodically—never hurriedly—removed each layer after layer after layer after layer, which incited laughter and discomfort and derision among his classmates and teachers alike. He grew to enjoy each beat of the process, each pursuant guffaw and groan and glare.
    He began to add even more layers.
    He never did it to be funny, of course, possibly.
    Anyway, they all got bored with it.
    He was, after all, nuts.
    Meanwhile, in his new bedroom on Grassfield Road, the wall-camera business began wearing upon his mother. In his ninth summer, she demanded that he just stop. He would choose to remember it this way: “She said, ‘You cannot do these shows anymore unless you have an audience. Even if it’s only one person watching you.’ She thought,
Now he can’t do them anymore—ha ha ha!
This was very bad, in that he was onto something big by now. Panicked, he sought solution; his brother could not have been less interested, was always outside playing, anyway; friends were not an option, really; finally, he noticed another person in his family, female, two years of age, verymalleable. “My sister loved bubble gum. So what I would do was bribe her. I’d give her a piece of bubble gum every day if she would just sit in the room. Also, I wasn’t shy in front of her, because she didn’t know how to talk. So she would be my audience—and that was my loophole. I got my mother on that one.”
    Big break came the year before. Out of the blue. Changed everything. Started everything. Thus the panic and the desperate need for practice. Finally, for once, he had acquired a proper audience—not a gaggle of bemused/hectoring onlookers (as with schoolyard), or a loophole (as would his sister become), but an actual rapt assemblage that sat in little folding chairs to watch him. “I had a movie projector, and a friend of the family asked me if I would show some movies at his daughter’s birthday party. I said sure and I did some stuff between films.” Whatever the stuff, no memory would be retained. Musical chairs? Fun with phonograph? Magic tricks? All very likely. Certainly all would figure later, very much later, and also sooner. But this was his fleeting debut at something really real. It was a taste. It filled him with ideas. He got to do in public that which was previously private or semi-such. Gently, tentatively, he had performed for children who
wanted
and
expected
him to perform for them. And they seemed to kind of enjoy him. Little birthday party children, they liked him. This was very very good. He would do more. He could see it very clearly.
    February 13, 1975 (3:04 A.M. ):
    He had left the club, loaded his stuff back into his father’s car, driven the quiet Long Island Expressway from town back to Great Neck, back to Grassfield Road. Things had gone well enough—his work with the pitiful F. Man was only getting better and better and more fragile so as to almost crumble like brittle ash but never really. “Laughing at me? Or … laughing weeth me?” Grandma Pearl always told him with with with. Also E. was probably perfect by now, at least for these