Goddess,
why do you love Andy Kaufman?
I don’t know— I just
Do.
I love looking at his face, those eyes…
I think about him when I [—] and he
[— — —]. I just
desire him
long for him
love him.
But would you still love him if he were a Zionist?

We’re on a camming website. People address me as ‘Goddess’; I tell them I want to be worshipped. They tell me they love me, love my body, offer to house me, pay for plane tickets to them, ask me to be their girlfriend, marry them. I decline. “Just send me tokens on this website please, not elsewhere, because I don’t want to get kicked off. I need the money. Plus, I’m reserved for Andy Kaufman.”

“Who?”

Everything is still for a moment. Then—

Along comes a man singing a Bloodhound Gang song: Foxtrot. Uniform. Charlie. Kilo.

He plays me a YouTube video of a bunch of Elvises dancing in a park that I swear I’ve seen before, somewhere in one of the numerous multi-hour livestream Hangouts of the Kaufman Lives community.

He tells me, “Those lips. I could die there,” and I melt.
I say, “Come here and die, then.”
We share stories of our lives, and he says, “You’re like me.”
I fall so hard.

He dedicates a song to me that begins: “Bring me back to life / Never let me go.” He will play this song for me numerous times over the next three years. He teaches me the word “Saudade”, a nostalgia for something that never was [I miss my Andy].



amira.h., Self portrait: Photobooth, digital photograph, 2018

---

There is a conspiracy that surrounds Andy Kaufman’s 1984 death from lung cancer. Andy’s entire art practice [call him a Dadaist if you really want to flatter him] was an interrogation of what’s real or not; eliciting real responses, real anger, real contempt, real bewilderment, real fun. Rob Reiner remarks, “Nobody can see past the edges, where the character begins and he ends,” because he would perform off-stage and not break character [Andy never breaks]; Marilu Henner sees him panhandling on the street when he’s making thousands per episode from their sitcom; he refuses to ever admit that he created the abrasive character of Tony Clifton, claiming he’s a real lounge singer; women think he is a real misogynist when he states they should stay in the kitchen and have babies, declaring that the natural order of society is:

While alive, Andy and his friend and writing partner, Bob Zmuda, record one of their phone conversations where they conspire to fake Andy’s death— not once, but numerous times. “Then when you really die, no one will believe it,” says Bob. “You’ll become immortal.”

When Andy does die, Bob scrawls on a bathroom wall,

---

“I’m gonna be FAMOUS,” the man on the sex site says to me (weird, as he works in Telecommunications Tech). He doesn’t look like Andy, but— the shape of his face… the slant of his eyes… [Is it a deepfake?] His voice is a perfect match, though. He’s speaking with an accent, but different to the character of Foreign Man. When he sings, the American accent shines through.

I fall for him because he reminds me of Andy.
He tells me he doesn’t know who that is.

---

I eat a cookie that sends me searching for him.
I meet a man who tells me,
“Andy Kaufman lives and I have proof.”
“Show me,” I say.
“I fully intend to. In time.”

He sends me an image of purple text on an orange background that reads,

Then writes, “That should clear everything up for you. :)”

It doesn’t.

I recognise the image as being taken from a Twitter account listed under the name Aaron Kanarek. He has an IMDb page that has only two listings: a Seinfeld episode, and the never-released documentary Kaufman Lives. I find the episode: ‘The Limo’, Season 3 Episode 19 from 1992, and check; his name is there, a credited extra, ‘Protestor #1’. It looks like Andy wearing a hat and thick-rimmed glasses. On the Twitter page, Kanarek alludes to being an uncredited extra in another Seinfeld episode: ‘The Parking Space’, Season 3 Episode 22, highlighting a man in the background of a street scene, thick-mustached and wearing a baseball cap, while George Costanza argues with another over where to park his car.

Andy and Seinfeld share managers: Shapiro/West.

Kanarek makes these posts in 2014. The posts get two likes each.

He also posts a photo of what appears to be a real Elvis jumpsuit behind protective glass, gold hardware belt buckle, rhinestones and all, with a sign in the foreground reading, ARUBA.

Lynne Margulies, Andy’s last girlfriend, claims that he used to talk about going to the island Aruba (after faking his death).

I throw my Seinfeld mug away once I see that Jerry attends an IDF Military Camp, gleefully posing with huge machine guns. It’s so fun imagining the massacre of Palestinians, right, Jerry?

---

Camming gets punishing.

Everything there is so overwhelming, a non-stop party, everyone talking at once. If people don’t address me specifically, I think they’re speaking to someone else. One day, he introduces me to his girls, saying, “Meet your queen.” I was wearing his favourite colour, a red teddy with thread that shimmered magenta in the light. Was he telling them I was their queen? Was he calling one of them his queen? Fuck, this is all too confusing. “Why do you doubt?”, he asks.

Someone tips me 10 tokens to rate their cock; he’s jealous that my attention has shifted. When he flirts with another girl in front of me, saying, “Come here, I will make you happy,” I leave— “hop” to another room. “I’m only goofin, why did you leave?”

Then he gets cruel.

[And I thought it was all milk and cookies.]

He takes revenge when I (unintentionally) slight him by having a private session with someone else when he had asked me to “stay there” while he ran errands (in my mind, I was “staying there”— I was not leaving the website). He comes back, angry, flirts with a Brazilian girl; “Look at that skin, that hair.” At first, I don’t bite, and he calls me a “strong woman”. He knows what he’s doing, he’s doing it intentionally, he’s trying to break me down. Then he says, “JUST YOU WAIT.” He plots. He messages the Brazilian and they go private. After a long while— he cums

back and says to me, “I WIN,” with a shit-eating grin on his face.
Tears fall down mine.
He smiles and nods.
I call him a cunt.

He antagonises me with,

I reply,

He says I need to learn how to speak his language, so I copy what he’s writing and paste it into translate:

The Brazilian girls tell him,

He responds,

He asks,

He says,

---

There is a mysterious author who says he will reveal his real identity before he dies. He claims his creative output is immense. He says the things he has made in his life are like little gifts left under the Christmas tree waiting for the world to discover them sometime in the future.

The author posts an animation he made, one frame reading, “Choices of the Day”: front and centre is Andy Kaufman’s birth date.

I wish Andy Happy Birthday, tagging the author in a screen shot of the image. “My video has been around for three years and @amiraball is the first person to notice this little secret, very good eye,” he writes.

But he blocks me after I question him about his silence on Palestine.

[Would you still love him if he were a Zionist?]

---

He starts telling me the story of a girl kidnapped by Hamas. He says the father hopes she’s dead because that would be better than being held hostage by them [she ends up being alive, and fine]. I tell him he is brainwashed by Western propaganda. When describing what happened to the ravers by the concentration camp, he asks, “Is that nice?” I say Israel has committed genocide. He says October 7 was a genocide too.

He says, “I don’t want to talk about it,” removes his earbuds and walks away from the computer while I weep over my people getting massacred.

[Is this for real?!]

---

amira.h., Andy’s, diamantés and posca on heart-shaped canvas, 2023