DEAD
OR ALIVE
walked in wearing a monster mask. He
introduced himself as Maddox.
“He didn’t want anyone to see his
face,” Nora said.
The masked man led Nora into the
conference room. The conference itself, which can be viewed online, went
as bizarrely as you might expect, with a
puppet show mixed in with the playing
of unintelligible audio tapes. For most
of the viewers, the scene was simply live
comedy. (Fittingly, the reporter there for
Weird New Jersey, Chris Gethard, later
landed his own Comedy Central show,
Big Lake.)
But for the disciples and their ilk, the
stakes were high.
“People were accusing me of being in
on things,” Nora said. “This was all being watched on the Internet by a small
group of dedicated people.”
Once again, no Kaufman. After the
event, the AKLives members seemed to
lose hope. The forum turned less wild,
focused on Kaufman’s legacy in creating a “trickster archetype,” as Nora puts
it, with little debate about whether the
man was actually alive or dead.
Then Maddox re-emerged. In an email,
he told the disciples he wanted to explain everything. According to several
disciples who said they were on the
call, he gathered them over the phone
and unwound a far-fetched story now
repeated as gospel: that he is Andy
HUFFINGTON
06.16.13
He isn’t
answering his
emails. What I
thought was his
phone number is
not accepting calls.”
Kaufman’s son, that his mother and
Kaufman were teenagers when he was
born, and that his maternal grandparents raised him as his parents.
In Maddox’s telling, in the ’80s, when
Kaufman’s career declined and his devotion to Transcendental Meditation
reached new highs, he wended his way
back to the woman who’d had his first
child. What Maddox said happened next
is straight out of a fairy tale, or a thriller:
Kaufman was fed up with his life and so
he swapped identities with the man to
whom Maddox’s biological mother was
married. That man, who was ill at the
time, made use of Kaufman’s bank account to pay for his health care, Maddox
told the disciples. Meanwhile, Kaufman
got a second life with a woman he loved.
In this story, the cancer-ridden body
in the casket, which mourners whis-