Andy Kaufman Revealed! Read Online Free

show. So he improvised.
    The Vegas Hilton was a huge scurrying anthill, and within a few hours of arriving, Andy had ingratiated himself with the staff and determined that Elvis was indeed going to perform that evening, and that when he did he would pass through the kitchen on the way to the stage. A service elevator that opened directly to Elvis’s penthouse came down to the kitchen, and by using it he would avoid his fans and achieve the quickest access to the stage.
    Andy found a small, rarely used walk-in storage cupboard and decided it would be his command center. After scrounging a few leftovers and an empty coffee can for disposal of his bodily excretions, he slipped into the closet and left the door cracked just enough to spot Elvis, or at least to hear any commotion. Like a wild animal burrowing into a den to await its prey, Andy hunkered down and mentally prepared himself for his close encounter. More than eight hours would pass while Andy sat patiently, the Book of Elvis clutched to his chest, his eyes wide in expectation.
    Finally it happened. Across the vast kitchen Andy was jarred from a transcendental reverie by an event: Elvis had left the penthouse … and was entering the kitchen. Andy leaped to his feet and prepared himself like a trap-door spider. Peering through the cracked door, suddenly he saw him, in the flesh: the man, the god, that son of Mississippi, Elvis Aaron Presley. Despite his TM discipline, Andy’s heart raced as Elvis advanced on his position, flanked by the preeminent members of the Memphis Mafia, his bodyguards Red and Sonny, the burly West brothers.
    Just as E and his coterie reached ground zero, the cupboard door flew open, and this wild-eyed, bush-haired kid popped out, thrusting what looked like a very thick subpoena at Elvis. Red and Sonny instinctively moved to shield their monarch and overwhelm the threat, but something about Andy caused Elvis to stop them.
    “Whoa, whoa, boys,” E said, staying any mayhem to the kid — after all, he looked harmless, and this was before stalkers turned pro … and psychotic.
    His manuscript held out in supplication, Andy summoned the guts to speak to his bespangled deity. “Elvis, I’m your biggest fan. I wrote this book about you.”
    Elvis nodded approvingly. “That’s good, that’s very good.”
    As he now seemed to have Elvis’s attention, however fleeting, Andy was pumped up enough to impart to Elvis the sentence he had traveled across the country to utter. “I’m going to be famous, too,” he said confidently.
    The King paused to regard him for a second, then uttered the blessing Andy so desperately sought: “I’m sure you will.” And with that, Elvis reached out and gently patted Andy on the shoulder.
    Then E continued on, a great white shark surrounded by pilot fish. The encounter had lasted all of twenty seconds, but for Andy it was timeless. Though it was over, he just stood there, still in the grip of its implications, his eyes wide, his feet unmoving. Elvis had already ascended the stage before Andy shuffled away, his book undelivered. But that was unimportant. Andy had received The Blessing. All other considerations were secondary. The moment had been perfect, with Andy saying exactly what he wanted to say, and with the King responding exactly as Andy had imagined he would. It was a defining moment for Andy, perhaps the single most motivating one of his life. He was now ready to become something, and though he wasn’t sure what, it didn’t matter: the King had looked into his eyes and acknowledged him and had transferred a seed of greatness to Andy. Now Andy needed only to cultivate it.
    While Andy began developing his stage presentation back in New York, I enrolled at Chicago’s Northeastern Illinois University. Imbued with the defiance I had inherited through experiences with fellow radicals and battles with the police, my scholastic career was oriented toward learning and protest, with the accent on the latter.