He didn’t really live long enough for us to know if he was truly disturbed, or singularly obsessed, but it was a music that only he heard.  When we could hear it, too, it was pure joy, but otherwise we were lost and felt dumb for not getting the joke.  In that spirit, I checked into a five star hotel in New York by pretending to be someone else, I won’t say who, just in case it’s still on the register somewhere, and spent the weekend in this other name, as if it were an alter ego.  The only thing I could do that was familiar, I told myself, was to read part of the Kaufman biography I’d already been through a dozen times.

I don’t really know what the intention was, but I know that somewhere along the line I went from nervous to absolutely giddy.  It was extremely gratifying to have people believe me in coffee shops and park benches, and I began to see some of the appeal of putting people on.  That strange figure who I once watched at my parents’ house, on Van Dyke and Company, started to make sense.  This was only a glimpse, however, because the weekend was over, and I was out of money.  It was something I would never repeat, because it opened up something strange, a kind of box of phantoms there that dance at the edges of the place where life starts to blur into art.

Man on the Moon in NYC is a post from: VidMama

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