Valerie Solanis, the founder of The Society for Cutting Up Men, walks in to The Factory and takes the elevator up to the fourth floor. She wants Andy to produce a script she has written, but Andy has said, “I’m not interested.” It is a long way up to the fourth floor of The Factory; she has plenty of time to load her gun.
The Factory, as usual, is full of people, even Lou Reed and Billy Name are there. Andy is on the telephone, talking to Ondine. Valerie Solanis takes three steps away from the elevator and waves her gun while pointing at the floor.
She says, “Andy, you cannot control me anymore.”
__________
At the hospital, his pulse is gone. The bullet has split his spleen and lung. The doctors take blood from his hand–they have run out of tracks. They work to bring him back and color a big scar in his pale side.
In the hospital, he learns needlepoint from his brother, the priest. Ingrid Superstar has taught the priest how to do needlepoint in the lobby because Andy won’t let her up to the room. He is afraid that she might steal his pills.
When it is all over, Andy puts his scar in an advertisement for his production of Frankenstein. He can never let things go to waste.
__________
Andy is about twenty. He is living in New York and trying to get a job to pay his share of the rent. He is living with seventeen other people in the basement of a building at 103rd Street and Manhattan Avenue. The rent is cheap, the apartment is furnished with cockroaches, and he needs the company of the people there.
In Carmel Snow’s office at Harper’s Bazaar, Andy unzips his portfolio. A roach crawls out and down the leg of the table. Andy stands humiliated but Carmel Snow gives him the job.
__________
The smack is in his veins: soul-searching in 1966 to remember Saint Vitus Dance.
When Andy was a young boy, he would begin his summers with a nervous breakdown. He had three of them by the time he was eleven. Recovering, Andy would lie in bed listening to the radio with his Charlie McCarthy doll and make cut-out paper dolls that would never get cut out. He would make plenty of these dolls so that he could put some underneath his pillow.
His Czechoslovakian mother would read Dick Tracy in her thick accent and Andy would always say, “Thanks, Mom,” when she was done even if he hadn’t understood a word. Every time he finished a page of his coloring book, she would reward him with a Hershey’s Bar.
She used to say, “The way to make friends, Andy, is to invite them up for tea.”
___________
It is October, 1971. Andy is standing on the street in Paris while an old, English lady stares at him. When he looks away, she approaches him.
“Aren’t you Andy?”
“Yes,” he says.
“You came to my house in Provincetown twenty-eight and half years ago. You were wearing a sunhat. You don’t even remember me, but I’ll never forget you in that sunhat. You see, you couldn’t take any sun.”
Her husband is there. He says, “No no no. We weren’t married yet, remember? So it must have been twenty-six and three-quarter years ago.”
Andy walks away quickly. He is eager to live moment to moment.
__________
Andy enters the neighborhood numbers-racket newspaper greeting card store when all the other shops are closed. He buys Harper’s Bazaar and asks for a receipt. It is very late and the newsboy is very irritable. He yells at Andy, and then writes the receipt on plain white paper.
Andy says, “List the magazines, please. And put the date: July fifteenth, nineteen-seventy-three. And write the name of the store at the top.”
The newsboy stares at Andy for a minute. He asks, very quietly and bewildered, “Why?”
Andy screams loudly, “The reason for doing it is that I want you to know that I am an HONEST CITIZEN, and I SAVE MY STUBS, and I PAY MY TAXES.”
__________
In 1964, Andy makes an Art joke at his April-May Stable Gallery show. An installation exhibit, his show comprises 300 boxes, silk-screened with the names and logos of Del Monte, Campbell’s, Kellogg’s, Mott’s, and Brillo, in a display of Supermarket Warehouse-dom. Some are stacked from floor to ceiling; some are on the window sill. Most are where Andy dropped them.
The butt of the joke is the happenings and installation exhibitions of various pseudo-prestigious galleries by a group of artists including Jim Dine and Claes Oldenburg. Ted Carey, who accompanied Andy to Oldenburg’s Store, says at the Stable Gallery show, “[the Store] was so overwhelming and so fabulous that Andy was so depressed. He said, ‘I’m so depressed.’” Andy makes an Art joke.
__________
1952. Andy Warhol is wandering around the galleries of New York, reading short stories by Truman Capote, his hero. There was a time when Andy slept at Capote’s front door. While sitting on the green at Central Park, Andy gets an idea. By the end of the year, Andy Warhol exhibits a series of drawings illustrating Capote’s stories at the Hugo Gallery and eats chocolate with Capote at parties.
After describing an apparently random series of people, Truman asks, “Now, Andy, you tell me what you think these people have in common.”
Andy attempts, “They committed suicide . . . ?”
Condescendingly, Capote instructs, “Now, use your mind.”
__________
Sitting at the ice cream shop a block from St.Patrick’s, Andy and Lou and the rest of the entourage share coffee, cigarettes, and really big chocolate sundaes: Andy’s weakness. Delmore comes in through the out-door, drunk. He starts jabbering about how Lou should call the White House to tell them that he is aware of the plot.
The pimple-faced nobody behind the counter says, “Look at that goddamn drunk; I better call the cops.” Because Andy is paying the bill, he gently takes the young man’s hand from the telephone receiver and slaps his own face with it. Andy throws down money and takes Delmore outside while Pimple-face gapes.
__________
It is snowing outside the car. Andy, Sylvia, and Lou are taking a cab uptown. Lou says to the driver: “Can you slow down, please.”
Andy is being evil tonight. He turns to Lou and, in a fey and whiny voice, says, “You wouldn’t have said that a few years ago.”
Lou never speaks to him again.
__________
Andy is out of the hospital again. The gall bladder operation has left him weak and drained, but John Cale comes by between AA meetings to exercise with him. It is 1987.
Today, Andy wakes up with blood on the linen sheets; the scars in his side are bleeding. And the corset he wears to keep his insides in hurts. John isn’t here yet, but Andy does three sets of fifteen pushups and four sets of ten situps. Blood appears on his shirt.
“The doctors said I was dead,” Andy scrawls into his journal. He lies down to dream about dying.
__________
At Andy’s funeral Mass, held in St.Patrick’s, Lou wonders aloud to Sylvia. “I expected Andy to be here surrounded by his latest entourage. Chocolates were his weakness.”
References
Garrels, Gary ed. Discussions in Contemporary Culture: The Work of Andy Warhol. Number 3. Dia Art Foundation & Bay Press. Seattle: 1989.
Koch, Stephen. Stargazer. Praeger Publishers. New York: 1973.
Reed, Lou and John Cale. Songs for ‘Drella. (Sire 1990) 9 26140-2
Reed, Lou. Between Thought and Expression (Selected Lyrics of LouReed). Hyperion. New York: 1991.
Warhol, Andy. The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B andBack Again. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. New York: 1975.
