(First appeared in WIGGLING WISHBONE, Autonomedia, 1995)
“He’s the only genius with an IQ of 85”
– Gore Vidal
The wig is rare & missing. It had been one of 99 wigs in the Warhol Estate Collection. 11 each of 9 styles. Mr. Warhol had discovered this aforementioned, & now missing gem in an Upstate NY garage sale. It was described as a capless “Freedom Power” wig, which is oft regarded by periwig specialists as “tough enough to turn on ANY man, be he miner, monk or martyr.” & has often been regarded as THE essential spark that ignited the initial 60s “Black Pride” movement. It is made of 100% miracle modacrylic.
The wig (catalogue #1122-A) has been the subject of much art market speculation of late. Art commdities experts estimate the missing wig would easily top $45,000 on the auction block. Much of the inflationary interest is no doubt due to the fact of its untimely & mysterious disappearance.
This same wig, coincidentally, has also been the choice of the Latin American arm of the CIA since 1974. They regularly recommend this particular style over all others for their counter-insurgency Third World Allies. Reference is, in fact, made to it in the Psychological Operations In Guerilla Warfare Manual, which is largely devoted to semi-violent decoy & transvestite cohersion tactics, tactics consistent with stated U.S. foreign policy. This wig supplies numerous footnotes to the purported Hispanic penchant for women with voluminous “afros” & ample glutous maximi.
It seems amply clear that on our fateful, & largely anti-climactic eve, that Mr. Warhol had been particularly titillated by the high cross-cultural kitsch factor of the particular fete we attended together, which honored 4-star general, Panama campaign media pet, art collector & arms dealer, General John Vasectome.
Mr. Warhol had been particularly taken by the ostentacious combination of brass Pakistani table ornaments, lacquered Mexican Mariachi musicians in sombreros, Japanese fortune scrolls, red Swiss Valentine doilies, 400 mermaid candles donated by a Taiwanese electronics magnate & the 250 coral-studded pewter goblets flown in by hostess Joan Herring on 3 private jets from the Canary Islands.
Pre-arousal Warhol had reveled in the details of the feast disaster when, 1 course into the elaborate 6 course meal, 3 trays of carmelized sorghum sugar baskets, filled with pomegranate sorbet collided with a tray of swordfish eyes floating in a chartreuse flambé jelly which, in its own turn, ignited several of the guests’ Japanese fortune scrolls.
Kitsch recall was a more effective self-arousal tactic than any other method at my fingertips. It reminded me of Lou Reed’s comments in ‘85, when he alluded to Mr. Warhol’s eccentric foreplay techniques in terms of The Rise Of 20th Century Fascism. He referred to the phenomenon as “auto-oblivia”, a spiritual exhaustionsteeped in the notion that neither American nor British citzens were aware that their fantastic achievements in prosperity were almost totally dependent on the degradation & exploitation of millions of unskilled laborers, both at home & abroad, workers held prostrate in “abject poverty by the insatiable Western desires for comfort & material acquisition.” Or so I remember Reed putting it.
Lou Reed’s words ring chillingly true even to this day as my mind (be it in the unemployment line or the check-out line) endlessly mulls overr past conjugal torments with Mr. Warhol. I remember his recumbent body, campily & cinematically flung across his art deco love seat. & his sickly diminutively dimensioned & arrogantly flaccid member as he reverted to his, by now, renowned & oft imitated posture of empty pallette. His nihilistic corpus stylishly replete of all function, like a man intent on starving his brain of oxygen by refusing to breathe, all in attempt to cover up the facts of his psycho-sexual dysfunction. I only ever accomplished minimal arousal response from him (despite my ambi-sexual bilateral reputation) utilizing rubber gloved-mechanical ejaculatory pump-action techniques.
& through it all the pseudo-aroused & utterly microphobic Warhol corpus always seemed more likely to break into a yawn than into convulsion. He had, afterall, often referred to love as “mouth to mouth germ warfare.”
The endless replay of 60s TV commercials did little to stimulate electro-capillary engorgement. & thus our relationship came to that rude but, I must say, welcome denouement when his famous “Freedom Power” wig tumbled to his freshly refinished parquet floor, that late eve of the General Vasectome Roast. Mr. Warhol even tried to retrieve the spectacle of the moment when he re-enacted one of the cinematic & semiotically-charged swoons of Jean Harlow.
None of you probably ever suspected that Mr. Warhol enjoyed romping gingerly around his apartment like a semi-clad sylvan nymph in his #1201-B wire-base Wonder Wiglet made by the renowned RC Hair Fashions of Omaha. Well, he did. He really did. I just wished I’d had the foresight to save the photos.
This particular model has a very special push-up base to allow for a wide array of winsome styles. It is super thick & long to provide for a maxi-cascade of shimmering tresses made of 100% human hair from Manila. All of which seemed to echo Mr. Warhol’s fervent belief in spiritual materialism. Mr. Warhol, in fact, absolutely adored shaking that bonus 6.5 ounces of hair. Which replicated for him a particular voluptuousness that seemed to be so absolutely stifled in his public, evasionary non-life.
The public Warhol (as you may well know) always preferred the ultra-famous lite-ash blonde wig (catalogue #1336-A). “Fave ‘do #6!” he’d command from the utter worthlessness of his spectacular repose. He, in fact, never appeared in public without it. This particular model, of which there were 11, seemed to heighten that strategic veneer of impenetrable & trademark coy blandness.
Each of these 11 #1336-A style wigs is made of 100% human hair. The ideal human hair for which he personally searched long & hard. Mr. Warhol, at 1 point, in September of 1968, I recall, began to correspond with one Larry David Jennings. Mr. Jennings had sent Mr. Warhol a photo of himself as stipulated by an ad Mr. Warhol had placed in the Personal Ads section of Screw. Although Mr. Warhol was never particularly known to be romantic he was capable of stimulating a certain quasi-romanticism through the utilitarian exchange of product for favor. Mr. Warhol implored Mr. Jennings to grow his hair to a specified length. Then have it cut & sent to Mr. Warhol via express mail. Mr. Warhol, in exchange, vowed to arrange a power law firm to handle his appeals process.
Mr. Jennings began supplying the hair for the trademark ash blond mop wigs from his Huntsville, Texas Death Row Cell. This while Mr. Warhol’s lawyers succeeded in prolonging Mr. Jennings’ appeals process. Mr. Jennings had been found guilty in 1964 of torching his wife’s poodle, then bludgeoning her to death with a refrigerator door & then killing her parents with a Phillips head screwdriver. Yet, he fervently maintained his innocence right into 1976 when suddenly his appeals process seemed to dry up.
Mr. Jennings had always been very grateful to Mr. Warhol. Mostly for help & support that Mr. Jennings only imagined. In prison he managed to familiarize himself with the art of Mr. Warhol. & he too decided he liked the way cereal boxes & beer cans looked & so thought that were they to meet they’d have plenty to talk about. But he had never met Mr. Warhol personally. Until April 12, 1976, when arrangements allowed for Mr. Warhol to be presented with Mr. Jennings’ 10th Ziploc Baggie of ash blond clippings in person. This however, was to be his last contribution to the Warhol Periwig collection. Because Mr. Jennings’ had already placed his order for his Final Meal, an entire pepperoni pizza, Greek salad, large slice of 7-layer chocolate cake & a Dr. Pepper. (The same remorseless meal, it has been strongly suggested, he calmly consumed over the dead body of his wife.)
& later on that very same day, Mr. Warhol, joined the privileged members of the press & bitter survivors of his wife’s family, to witness the pulling of the proverbial switch.
Some say Mr. Warhol cynically let up on the appeals process when it became clear that Mr. Jennings would supply him with his much anticipated 10th crop of hair. Some of these same people claim that Mr. Warhol had, in fact, petitioned the Appeals Review Board months in advance for a good seat at the execution. Thus far, records do not bare out these slanderous accusations.
Others claim that his Electric Chair litho series was inspired not by politics but by his special relationship with Mr. Jennings. (Afterall, wasn’t it Mr. Warhol who had created that haute scene equation: stylish boredom = fashionable politics?) In fact Mr. Warhol once told me that he was grateful to Mr. Jennings because he had sucked all the painful emotion that could ever be associated with executions out of that particular spectacle. This, Mr. Warhol reasoned, made it easier to go on living.
Mr. Warhol later confided that the mere thought of wearing this ash blond mop wig, composed of the last strands of Mr. Jennings’ hair, aroused in him strange primal stimulations & bio-electrical pangs. Upon his request one eve, I actually felt his quickened pulse coursing through his wrist. He sat back proudly, absorbed by the magnificence of his Angel-winged Victorian chair, as if these exaggerated blips of pulse proved that he was something vaguely human afterall.
On the lining of the wig’s skull cap is a small patch, (I’ve seen it – I think) a miniature rendering of his Electric Chair litho series with the initials LDJ meticulously added to the back of the fateful electric chair.
Mr. Warhol never found a suitable replacement for Mr. Jennings although he DID visit several other maximum security facilities in the early 80s. Mr. Jennings seemed to possess, for Mr. Warhol, that ideal confluence of victim & victimizer. The gruesome & spectacularly publicized proportions of his crime seemed to lend Mr. Jennings a certain Shakespearian mien, the appearance of a man of immense, if troubled, humanity. Mr. Warhol was, of course, always kept safely away from the ferocious & untidy details of Mr. Jennings crimes.
On the aforementioned night, right after the General Vasectome Roast, I remember Mr. Warhol showing me his shaved morbid corpus, which more amused than aroused me. The side effects of massive injections of female hormones, scars where erectile tissue had been transplanted & all the scars from his 2 botched Mexican sex change operations had left him in a kind of quanderous ambi-sexual equilibrium, a kind of fleshy no-mans-land & served only to mitigate any pleasure I might have been able to professionally squeeze out of the situation.
& as he tipped his head back, in “Dying Slave” fashion, in that posh Angel-winged Centaur-hooved Victorian chair I saw his adam’s apple bobbing up & down as he wearily whispered potentially lucrative insider trading information into my ear. As if it were no longer possible to fool himself that this numeric litany approximated the language God prefered. & then the wig fell off like a bird’s nest full of blue eggs. & his post-Harlow homage aside, his body went quite rigid like a firm fish market bass on a bed of ice.
I have since dropped out of the competition to be “the Warhol that didn’t really die”. I don’t have the stomach for the kind of intra-Factory spirit assassination it takes to be the someone else i dread i really am anyway. (Besides, i don’t have an agent.
But now, to put personal strife & further speculation aside, I must personally vouch for the location of that original “Freedom Power” wig. I assure you it is very safe in a Ziplock Baggie in a shoebox in the safe deposit box of a major east coast banking establishment.
I assure you I have gone to this safe deposit box & I have donned this wig for short intervals. But only within the very discreet confines of my private safe deposit cubicle. But I prefer not to reveal the precise location of said wig, at this time, for fear of involving you as possible accessories to this purported “crime”. & I hope that this recent Polaroid snapshot of said wig will satisfy any lingering doubts you may have.
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bart plantenga
graphic by Dix10
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