whose first name, Hubert, was like shrinely Hubert’s Museum—making-for-a-godly-coincidental-oh!) He carried with him always a canvas knapsack containing a beaten-up copy of Kerouac’s
On the Road—he
referred to it like a prayer book, evangelically citing passages—and reams of loose handwritten pages comprising his own novel,
The Hollering Mangoo,
which would be completed by his sixteenth year. Whenever he heard Kerouac invoked around the malt shop or in the park across the street, he brandished his copy of
On the Road
and followed with a fan-flourish of crumpled
Mangoo
pages and an open invitation for anyone to read from them. These loiterers and lollygaggers—they were all
attitude
—could not help but fall prey to his peculiar hubris, except for the ones who urged him to scram and elected to smoke in another direction.
Mangoo,
he indicated to the ones intrigued, was a teen angst fantasmagory, a tour de force of rage and horror and self-discovery played in the ominous shadow of an ephemeral bellowing beast that chased main characters throughout various kingdoms and suburbs. It was very very jackkerouackian, he promised. Also, it made no sense in the least whatsoever at all—but he pointed to the good parts, anyway. Like where this girl named Sadie screams the word fuck 103 times and 189 times (presented in seven columns twenty-seven times vertically—nothing else on the page) and also exclaims the word shit at the top of her lungs 127 times; and like where Sadie takes a bludgeon to her mother’s left breast (“ Here go your tits, baby! ”) and keeps hammering until, finally, it was hanging like an apple on a string and wobbling , and proceeds to tear it off and throw it against the walls, the ceiling, and bounced it on the floor ; and like where this boy named Charley is whiplashedunmercifully by his mother until his right eyeball is sliced in half and blood was spurting out of it and she keeps cracking the whip and leaving scars everywhere (“ All right, Ma! That’s enough! Fuck you, Mother! ”); and like where the mother of the Mangoo beast attacks the narrator boy by pelting him with clumps of dried vomit so I hid in a barrel but it was
full of shit
so I was in up to my neck while this crazy mother threw vomit at me—what should I do—duck?—it was a problem … but she kept throwing it at me so I ducked and got my face all full of the doody which now I realized was Charley’s and it was
his
mother who threw the vomit which hit my face. Years later, sheepish upon reflection, he said
Mangoo
—“the ultimate fantasies of a sixteen-year-old” whose characters combined “different aspects of myself”—was created during “my obscene period.” He had once shown it to his English teacher, he said, and delighted in the memory of almost being expelled as a result.
“I wrote this book,” he said, “so people would vomit.”
Most probably, he wrote it to purge himself, to sublimate a hostility so corrosive (over feeling dismissal from all quarters) that not even his poetry could plumb such depths. The bile could surface no other way. But to share it—kind of artfully, on paper—with others was to clankclatter his cup against cage bars, to get extreme unexpurgated reaction/attention. (He was, in effect, doing all of the hollering, if inwardly—not the mangoo.) Earlier, he had performed TV playlets in school shrubbery for similar purpose. Now, however, he became a curiosity worth noting—and perhaps a tad too frightening to ignore. Among the first of the Frederick’s crowd who paid heed was another beatnik aspirant named Moogie 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 fanaticism 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
On the Road—he
referred to it like a prayer book, evangelically citing passages—and reams of loose handwritten pages comprising his own novel,
The Hollering Mangoo,
which would be completed by his sixteenth year. Whenever he heard Kerouac invoked around the malt shop or in the park across the street, he brandished his copy of
On the Road
and followed with a fan-flourish of crumpled
Mangoo
pages and an open invitation for anyone to read from them. These loiterers and lollygaggers—they were all
attitude
—could not help but fall prey to his peculiar hubris, except for the ones who urged him to scram and elected to smoke in another direction.
Mangoo,
he indicated to the ones intrigued, was a teen angst fantasmagory, a tour de force of rage and horror and self-discovery played in the ominous shadow of an ephemeral bellowing beast that chased main characters throughout various kingdoms and suburbs. It was very very jackkerouackian, he promised. Also, it made no sense in the least whatsoever at all—but he pointed to the good parts, anyway. Like where this girl named Sadie screams the word fuck 103 times and 189 times (presented in seven columns twenty-seven times vertically—nothing else on the page) and also exclaims the word shit at the top of her lungs 127 times; and like where Sadie takes a bludgeon to her mother’s left breast (“ Here go your tits, baby! ”) and keeps hammering until, finally, it was hanging like an apple on a string and wobbling , and proceeds to tear it off and throw it against the walls, the ceiling, and bounced it on the floor ; and like where this boy named Charley is whiplashedunmercifully by his mother until his right eyeball is sliced in half and blood was spurting out of it and she keeps cracking the whip and leaving scars everywhere (“ All right, Ma! That’s enough! Fuck you, Mother! ”); and like where the mother of the Mangoo beast attacks the narrator boy by pelting him with clumps of dried vomit so I hid in a barrel but it was
full of shit
so I was in up to my neck while this crazy mother threw vomit at me—what should I do—duck?—it was a problem … but she kept throwing it at me so I ducked and got my face all full of the doody which now I realized was Charley’s and it was
his
mother who threw the vomit which hit my face. Years later, sheepish upon reflection, he said
Mangoo
—“the ultimate fantasies of a sixteen-year-old” whose characters combined “different aspects of myself”—was created during “my obscene period.” He had once shown it to his English teacher, he said, and delighted in the memory of almost being expelled as a result.
“I wrote this book,” he said, “so people would vomit.”
Most probably, he wrote it to purge himself, to sublimate a hostility so corrosive (over feeling dismissal from all quarters) that not even his poetry could plumb such depths. The bile could surface no other way. But to share it—kind of artfully, on paper—with others was to clankclatter his cup against cage bars, to get extreme unexpurgated reaction/attention. (He was, in effect, doing all of the hollering, if inwardly—not the mangoo.) Earlier, he had performed TV playlets in school shrubbery for similar purpose. Now, however, he became a curiosity worth noting—and perhaps a tad too frightening to ignore. Among the first of the Frederick’s crowd who paid heed was another beatnik aspirant named Moogie 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 fanaticism 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
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