The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (16 page)

"Hello," I said, returning just in time with some apple butter and a fresh spoon.

"I hate it when you leave me, A. If I could talk to myself I would, but I can't. That's why I need you." B was on the verge of tears. She is very sentimental about our conversations.

"Okay, I'm listening," I told her, unscrewing the brand new jar of apple butter.

"Sometimes I flush tons of food out. Like yesterday, I'll tell you what I threw away in the toilet. Do you want to hear?"

"What are you waiting for?"

"Okay, okay. I flushed down six times the heads of radishes, two plastic bags, one was a carrot bag, one was the radish bag, and one paper bag that the carrots and radishes had come in from the store. And then I flushed down the tops of the carrots and the bottoms of the carrots. Then I tore up the paper plate where I put the Krazy Mixed-up salt that I dipped the carrots and radishes into, and I tore up the paper plate and put that into the toilet. I flush each thing separately so that's fifteen flushes right there. Then, old pills I flush, too. And then, when I get very nervous when I hear the commercial on the radio. 'This is the one number you must know thump thump thump thump thump. Do you know your number? Have your blood pressure taken!' At that point I think I'm going to die so then I think, 'Oh, God! I better throw some of the pornography away.' So, back to the drawer of the Polaroids. Yesterday I decided to throw out the nude boys. I took the file card that says 'Cocks, Young,' and I tore it up to pieces and I flushed it, then I flushed the boys down. Then when I had muscle magazines to do the cock collages, people would give me the magazines, I was very paranoid that I was going to get busted with these magazines. So I cut all the cocks out and put them in a tiny little brown envelope, but then I had the magazines to contend with. I was too paranoid to leave them at the end of the hall so I had to cut each magazine into little squares and flush the muscle magazines down. Then I've got a lot of things that they say can't be flushed. I had a problem once when I flushed a dropcloth. That was when I had covered the rug with a plastic drop-cloth because I was having a boy paint the room, and after he was done I cleaned up the room, emptied everything, but I'd forgotten the dropcloth. So I cut it into four squares and I started to flush the dropcloth, and it became a bubble and it came out of the toilet. So. Art in the Toilet and Art in the Bathtub. A friend of mine told me that his psychiatrist had recommended as therapy that he fingerpaint while he was in the shower. So I really saw the fingerpaints in his apartment but not in the shower. Because if you fingerpaint in the shower on the tiles, it just washes away while you're taking the shower, it's all clean when you come out. So I decided to paint—when I stopped doing all that arty stuff and stopped buying Dr. Martin's watercolors, dyes and Magic Markers and all that stuff, because it made such a mess—I mean, I had to have a little glass of water, I had to have a little plastic thing to keep my brushes clean, I had to then clean my paint sets with something else, which was really a work in the toilet—to run water over a whole box of watercolors so that each color would stay its own color, because I'd get orange and green and black all in one little pellet, so I'd use up half a box letting hot water run into the watercolors and then try to blot it out with toilet paper and flush it down the toilet to clean the paintbox. So I said, 'No more painting, NO MORE ART!' Then I said, 'I've got to use up all these supplies, all the Dr. Martin's watercolor dyes so I can throw them out.' I would have thrown them out full but I said, 'To hell with it, I'll make a movie. I'll throw them out in the tub.' So I took pink and I just squirted pink down the bathtub. Then I took a little bit of turquoise blue and I squirted that next to the pink with a white towel in between and then I added a little water to it and got this beautiful pattern, and I put a sunlamp on top where the shower curtain is and it was beautiful, and I started to film it with a Super-eight movie camera and I emptied the bottle of dyes and they were in the plastic liners in the trash can, and then I just turned on the water faucets and I had a clean surface and I hadn't made a bit of a mess and yet I had a whole painting. I Polaroided it and I still have the Polaroid. Then I decided I could do Roy Lichtenstein in the toilet so easily. I wanted to get rid of all those little round balls that I have from the sixties Psychedelic Art sticker period, so I went through a drawer and as I went through I thought to throw all the dots from Childcraft, throwing all the dots in the clean white toilet and they were floating around and looking so pretty because the bowl was clean, I'd put Comet in before, green Comet—and used a johnny brush, so it was really white—and I took a Polaroid of the dots and it looked just like a Lichtenstein, and then I flushed the dots and the painting was gone. And then I had some little American flags—I don't know, I read on the street that you get arrested if you put an American flag on an envelope and so I thought I'd do some Jasper Johns on the toilet. I threw all my American flags into the toilet and then I had a Polaroid Jasper Johns. I did a Warhol in the john too, using the Dr. Sertoli's liners from the insides of my shoe. They were really ratty and they were sticking to my feet, so I thought I might as well get rid of them. So I put them in the toilet and took the Polaroid and they looked like the dance-step painting. Flushed those down. It was hard for me to do a Rauschen-berg so I just threw an announcement for his show down. I flushed it and it stayed up so I had to cut it. It's the same thing with the laundry. In a way, watching something flush is like watching the spin cycle in a laundry-mat. Or drying in a dryer. You get incredible patterns. When something's on a spin cycle, even if it's a print—all prints of tulips and everything—it looks like a Kenneth Nojand in the dryer. It has all straight lines. Just on the spin cycle. Or in the dryer when it's going really fast. Or on the extractor cycle. I buy Marlboro hard in the carton and when I take them out of the carton I take the cellophane wrapper off each box and I open the lid and take that one little silver paper out, because I know I'll have to do that eventually, so to save time I do all ten at once, throw them down the toilet and put the cigarettes in the drawer, so when I go to get a pack of cigarettes, I don't have that to do any more. Sometimes, I smoke just to make space in my cigarette container. Anyway, I'm always photographing whatever I put in the toilet and then I photographed when I peed. To give it a good effect, I like to wipe myself and then throw the cigarette I was smoking between my legs—I burned myself once that way. And I throw the cigarettes into the toilet because I'm always trying to stop smoking.

"And I throw out the covers of
Oui
so the hotel manager won't know it's a dirty magazine. I throw out things I don't want people to see."

"Can you hold on," I interrupted, rather politely I thought. I could have just put the receiver down quietly and snook away. "I have to go pee."

"I can't, A." "Okay, hold on."

I ran to the bathroom—and ran back. "Okay," I said.

"I'll tell you another thing," B said. "I don't like to go to the John any place but here. I'd rather come all the way home to go and then go back. But at some point I really have to."

"That's just like me," I said, wondering if way-back-when I picked up this idea from B or she picked it up from me.

"Anyway, last night I walked across the street to the deli and bought a sandwich, a beer, a cake, frozen cake, orange, Sara Lee, some ice cream. Came home, ate the sandwich with my coat still on because I wanted to throw away the paper it came in and drank the beer, too, so I could throw away the bottle. Then I thought I couldn't wait for the cake to defrost. I really didn't want butter pecan ice cream, I wanted Haagen-Dazs new honey ice cream but they didn't have it. Of course I couldn't wait for the ice cream to pour or the cake to thaw so I chewed them both. I'm so edgy that just waiting for the elevator drives me crazy. I still have a quarter of the orange cake left and all I want to do is throw out the plate, so maybe I can become undepressed right now if I flush the cake down the toilet and don't eat, to throw out the plate. I can prove right now that cleaning is more important than eating to me. I flush the cake down the toilet and put the tin box in the waste basket. Now I have to get dressed to take the basket out because it has something in it. The silver tin won't flush. It just floats on top. A number of times I've gotten really nervous because I've had a flood. What I was flushing down was 'pokers,' because I got very nervous and thought, 'Today they're going to get me.' I got nervous and flushed. Well, the plastic poker flushed but the sewing equipment stayed at the bottom right near the hole. They didn't flush. You can throw all your needlepoint needles down the toilet and they don't go down, they just sit there at the bottom. Well, I had to fish them out. So I had to put on the yellow lined gloves again and it was very hard with rubber gloves to pick up the needles. So I put—first, I put more Comet in to make the toilet clean and some Sani-Flush and I flushed again, I knew the needle wasn't going to go down, so I had to pick it up and put it in a Marlboro box, and I knew that the Marlboro box always goes down, so I put the needle in and out like I was sewing it. In the cardboard. And wrapped it up and it went down and my worries were gone. Then all of a sudden the toilet started to bubble. And when I flushed it again it went up to the rim. It didn't really go over the rim; it just stayed there. I could have dived in. You know? I said, 'Oh, I don't have a plunger and I'm broke.' I called the engineer. I said, 'John, I can't understand it, my toilet's overflowing.' He came up here and he said, 'Was it anything?' And I knew it was not like what any other girl would probably worry over, like a Tampax. I was just scared about the Marlboro box, because I knew that if it came back up it would be all soggy and there would be the sewing equipment visible right there. Then nothing seemed to come up and he asked me what I'd put in there and I said, 'Nothing, maybe a lot of toilet paper and a bar of soap, I think.' Because I always put the soap in when the Yardley's gets down to very small. I don't dig small cakes of soap. Anyway, he's plunging and I'm thinking of all the things that are going to come up. Well, I'm asking him questions about where does it all go, because all of the stuff that I've flushed for the last ten years was probably going to back up in my toilet just then. I wonder where it really does go. I flushed as a child too. I flushed everything I didn't want my mother to see. Flushing doesn't take as long as burning. Now, you can burn a letter with dirty words up in an ashtray. But God it takes so many matches just to do that little thing when you can just flush it. Anyway, after I clean my room I still have to clean my body. I don't really have any set routine of getting up and taking a bath in the morning or taking a bath at night because I can get up any time, clean any time, vacuum, flush—I just do it when I'm in the mood. My bath can be at night, in the afternoon, or in the morning. But before I take it, I have to know that I'm well stocked. With everything I'm going to need. I used to really love creams. I used to go to drugstores and spend a hundred dollars on all these different eye moisturizers and under-eye creams and all that total junk, and I realized that when I put it under my eyes when I went to sleep, I'd wake up and my lashes would be stuck together with crust on them and everything, and I kind of just began to get simpler, to eliminate some products, and yet I still just have to buy every new thing I see. I use this stuff called Time Spa, which comes in a big jar and it's a dollar ninety-five. And yet I also go and buy the essence of the same stuff which is much more expensive and comes in little packets. First I put that in the tub. I use half the jar, it's like a quart jar. I run lukewarm water in the bathtub. And I get in when the water is a quarter filled. Because when I get in, you see, it goes up pretty high. So I don't want to waste the stuff, you know? So I get in and I lie flat down in the tub with my legs sort of up because I really can't fit in the tub that well. I'd sent away for this pillow on a box of Q-tips—'Send-Away-Pillow-for-the-Bathtub.' And I thought I'd get a yellow one. So I blew it up and I suction-cupped it to the back of my tub so I can lay flat in the tub and rub hot water on me. The first thing I start to wash is my shoulders. I haven't gotten my hair wet yet, and I'm still lying down, and I've put an old ratty scarf around my head. Just so I can relax and get my neck clean. Because I'm going to take a shower after this anyway, to rinse this bath off. So I just start with my left arm, that's the first thing I scrub with my terry mitt that I put my whole hand in, then I scrub my chest, then I scrub my left leg and my left foot. I hate this foot business, because it means reaching down or lifting up, it means bringing the foot up to my mouth or sitting up in the tub like I'm at the typewriter and bending down to wash my feet. First I do it with the mitt. Then I use a vegetable brush. And I scrub like hell the soles of my feet. Then I use pumice stones called Weiss. I used to use Dr. Scholl's pumice stones but they had sulphur and the smell was so disgusting I'd have to let the tub out again just after doing my feet because there'd be all these little flakes of black stuff from the sulphur. So I found this thing called Weiss. It's German and you let it float in the water for a second, let it get soft. First I pumice-stone my heels, and up the sides of my feet, and then my toes. Then after I've done that to both feet, I'm all totally out of breath and I have to lie back again. I
still
have to go through the thing of reaching again and going up and down because the razor is at the end of the tub near where the faucet is. And every time I take a bath I take the razor, and I put a little soap under my arms and I shave down under both arms. Then I squat down further in the tub so my leg is sort of touching the pole in the shower and I start to shave my legs. I kind of rub them with soap, a little loose soap and water, and then I shave the hair on my legs, and then I shave the hair on both big toes. And then I open up the razor and run lukewarm water over it, because I once found a razor where the hair was stuck to the blade and it made me sick. I don't ever touch my face in the bathtub. Then I wash my cunt. I kind of lie there. I do that with my mitt too. And if I have a Tampax in I have to stand up again, in the tub, and pull it out. Because even if I have my period I want to pull the Tampax out and still do a good scrubbing. I mean, I don't scrub up inside or anything like that, but I do scrub on the outside. I scrub my fanny, but I don't get anal. I don't go in there for a separate operation. I know it's getting clean just sitting in the water. Then I always put the soap right back. I hate soap when you get it out of the soap dish and it has gotten all soft and slimy. That makes me throw up. Then I just lie there for another ten seconds and I let the water out of the tub. Then I decide, well, since I've gotten the end of my hair a little wet, I may as well wash it. I move the yellow bathroom rug that's hanging over the top of the shower because I don't want it to get dirty because then I'd have to take it to the laundry. I get under the shower and with lukewarm water I just wet my hair and then I wring it a little bit and then I decide which shampoo I'm going to use. I get a nice lather UP and I massage my head with my fingers really great. Near my temples. And then up at the top of my head. Then I rinse with lukewarm water which I let get colder and colder and colder. So then my hair is rinsed and I just take like a big blob of water in my hand, like a cup, and I splash that on my cunt and make sure all the soap is off. Then I turn the water off and I take the green—because my bathroom's yellow and green—I take the green sponge and wring it out. I always have to sponge down the ConTact paper on the wall because it begins to peel off, so I sponge from the ceiling all the way down, then I sponge the chrome bar, and then I look at that and get really depressed because there's some rust on it, and then I do the walls just to get them dry. Then I bend down outside the shower because now there's a big puddle where the water's gone and I sop that up and then I squeeze the sponge back in the tub. Then I put a white mat on the floor, put a towel around my head, tie it in a knot, and then I sort of shake myself a little bit—I like to do a kind of bird motion with my arms. And then I put on my yellow soft terry-cloth bathrobe. I learned that from the French husband of a friend. And then I use a whole brand new towel, I just stick it between my legs. You know? Then I get the hairdryer out and turn the air conditioner off. So I don't blow a fuse. Then I plug the hairdryer in and I stand in the bathroom with my legs apart, and I hold the dryer and I dry my pubic hairs. But I'm more interested really in drying the insides of my thighs. Because if they're at all wet and I put my underpants on and walk around with wet between the thighs, I can't stand it. It really hurts. When it's completely dry I just take a little bit of baby powder and with my hands softly put a little on. And then I have a comb that's like a comb for the purse. And I just sort of fluff up the pubic hairs a little. But then I never finish, because I always think, 'My God, why am I bothering to fluff them up so they come as far out as my stomach?' And every two months or so when I feel they're getting a little long I take regular art shears and clip maybe an eighth of an inch off so it's always neat. I did it once too much and it itched terribly. I walked down the street and it was just insane. A, are you there? Are you bored?" "No."