The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (15 page)

"You already did the top drawer," I noted through the jam.

"That was the top drawer of my desk," B growled. "I still have to do the top drawer of my bureau. And then I have to start vacuuming because if I'd done the vacuuming first I'd have all the dust back again. So anyway, I do the top drawer. I pull it out. No matter how many times I clean it, it's always a mess. I can keep it clean for exactly one hour after I've cleaned it. I have to accept in my mind that this is a never-ending thing. The top drawer is always going to be messy and I'm always going to have to vacuum. I mean, if I order coffee in the morning and I'm pouring sugar from the little bag into the cup, well, some of those little granules are going to fall on top of the bureau, or on the floor. I may not feel that little granule of sugar but I know it's there. I may not see it, but I know there's dirt there. Then there's a part of the rug, that's sort of worn, you know, where there's a line and you can see just the thread maybe and no color. I go through all my Magic Markers till I find the right color. I test it on a piece of white paper, then I very lightly try to cover the gray line that has no carpet on it so it matches the rug. Now, my eyeglasses look filthy in here. I take them out of the drawer and put them on another piece of newspaper. On top of the towel on the bed. I don't dare put them on top of the bedspread that I brought back from the cleaners yesterday. Then, let's see. Eyedrops. Well, there's five bottles of eyedrops here: there's Collyrium, there's Visine, there's Murine Number Two, there's French Couleur Bleu—now
they're
not dirty but all their little caps are. They all need a once-over with Fantastik. And a dusting. So they get put on top of the towel too. Now there's a jar of Vaseline Intensive Care cream. Now
it's
not dirty but the top has coffee grains on it, a few crystals of salt, a hair, some lint ... if I look at it closely with a magnifying glass maybe I'll see that some soup dropped on it. So that needs to be cleaned with Fantastik. I take everything out of the top drawer and put it on top of the towel. Then I take the vacuum cleaner with the brush part and I brush and vacuum every empty space and partition. Then I go to the bathroom and make sure that the sink is really clean. I take some Lysol Basin Cleaner. Not Lysol spray for bad odors, not Lysol for john-bowls. This is Lysol for basins and tubs. And it's a spray. I spray the basin and the inside hole and down the drain-hole. I've got my rubber gloves on. Then I wash my brushes and combs to get them sterile. Then I put my five combs and my Mason Pearson hairbrush—but first I look in my jacket to make sure I don't have any combs in there and in the closet too—and then I put them in some Ivory Liquid Detergent. I let them all soak for five or ten minutes and after that I take a handbrush or nailbrush—the kind I like are from the hardware store, they cost thirty-five or thirty-seven cents and you can buy them now with white bristles which I think look nicer in the bathroom than the natural bristles. It looks nice and clean with white bristles. Then with each comb I go back and forth twice, once on each side with the handbrush in soapy water. Then I run the soapy water out of the sink and I go to the bathtub and hold each comb under the running water to rinse it. Then I lay all the combs and the brush on top of a white handtowel and wrap them up. And then I lay them on the windowsill for fifteen minutes to dry, but I leave them wrapped so they won't get dirty from the soot. So those are clean. Then I have a plastic box where I keep all my nail things, my tweezers, my pimple squeezers—now the thing I remember while I'm cleaning is I'm not just trying to clean everything to put it back where it was—I'm trying to ELIMINATE too. So if I have ten pairs of tweezers in there why not get the mirror out quickly and tweezer a few hairs here and there to be sure the tweezer works. Once I've done that I look on the tweezers to make sure there's no caked honey on it or anything like that. If it looks clean and it works, I put it back in its little tweezer holder. If the tweezer is no good, I take an envelope out of my desk—a white envelope—and put it into my typewriter and type, 'Tweezer to Be Repaired.' Then I take the clippers—they're usually in good condition because I usually put them in their clipper cases. They look dirty and dusty because the clipper cases are clear plastic on top. But they're not dirty on the outside because all the clippers have been kept inside a plastic box inside the bureau, but what looks dirty and dull is the inside of the plastic. So I have to take a piece of cloth and cut it—with a little Fantastik on it, and just stuff it down inside the case so the plastic gets clear-looking like glass. You know? Then I can put my little clippers back in. And I pour everything else out, like nail-whitener, and, oh, a few things like those wooden sticks for my nails. Well, if I see any that are dirty or that the points aren't sharp—I toss them right out into the waste basket and put it on another list. Insert it in the typewriter and put, 'Things to Buy.' Underline it and put 'Orange Sticks.' That's what they're called. Then I go through the eyebrow pencils and . . ."

Just then I yawned. Unfortunately I was spooning some more jam into my mouth and because of the yawn it got sucked in too far and my throat rejected it and spat it out all over the receiver. I dropped everything and ran to the kitchen for a paper towel and came back and wiped the receiver off. Hearing all this on her end of the line, B assumed that I was bored with our conversation, but I wasn't. I just got caught eating and talking—yawning is a way of talking—at the same time.

". . . okay, okay, okay, so I've got the whole top thing cleaned, I've emptied it and I've cleaned it. Now, I take my Hoover, the most old-fashioned kind, the best kind, the dirty old Hoover. But it's so hard to maneuver. I prefer the canister type. I have to do the Venetian blinds. Those I can always see the dust on and it drives me crazy! Crazy. Because I can really see it. And if I touch it with my fingers, I know it's blowing in the air. So I get up on a chair with the vacuum cleaner in my left hand, I've got the brush part on again and I'm—oh, I take the Venetian blind and pull the string so they're open, kind of, and I go along back and forth. Then—I've vacuumed all the dust off—I've got to wash the blinds. So here I am stark raving naked at the window and I want to wash my blinds. I'm so hot from cleaning and vacuuming— you see, people don't understand that vacuums are like toys. You know, like when children are given a five-and-ten-cent cart of little robots that they can turn on and make walk around a room. I mean that they could actually decorate like a toy. A canister vacuum cleaner could look like a little horse, it would look cute in a child's room just sitting there. I hang mine on the back of the bathroom door. And I keep all my attachments there. So once I've gotten all the dust off the blinds, because if I wash them with all the dust on, I've got a bathtub full of dust. Then I take the blinds down and I take one whole bottle of Zud—a can of Zud—and I mix it with aluminum ammonia. It really stinks. Then I put my blinds in the bathtub. I always wear my rubber gloves for this. Then I vacuum all the other drawers and the floor. What I basically want to do is raise the nap of the rug but before I start to vacuum I pick up every little thing I can find on the rug. If I see a spot, I get out my shampoo. There's a new kind of shampoo now that's supposed to be just spray and vacuum. So I spray, and it penetrates into the nap and in a few minutes I vacuum it up and it's clean. For the spots on the rugs I use those little spot-sticks. Renuzit, cleaning fluid—anything like that. I use that very small attachment. Because I get down on my knees when I vacuum and I always do it nude—I never vacuum with my clothes on—and I go back and forth in a vertical motion, very quickly with the little tiny attachment. And I look closely to make sure I've picked up everything and I think, 'Oh, God, why am I getting all those yellow bathroom-rug fibers when it's a turquoise rug?' What I'm picking up is actually yellow! Because it's all stuck, you see, to the edge of the vacuum cleaner part. So I do it as well as I can, I go to all the corners, and then when I get to a corner of the rug I even pick it up. So I decide, 'I'm going to, just for the excitement of it, run it along quickly underneath.' Underneath, below the tag, where the floor is getting old and cracked and there's a few nails. I can always hear 'ZZZZDDDZZZZZPPPP' and I'm picking up a lot. When I get to the closet I get really excited, I take everything out and I've always got five hundred million pieces of chipped paint that have fallen from the walls of the closet onto the floor, and I can hear those go click up the vacuum cleaner, and I love it. I really love the feeling of hearing it go up. I guess as much as I love to vacuum-clean ashtrays—you s,ee, if it were like a child's toy, always parked and plugged in, like a bicycle, it would be so great to just—zip right through the hose. But it's the big hang-up of taking it out of closets, being heavy, other people complaining. When I was a kid and I had to clean up after a party, I was the first one who ever thought of putting forty extension cords on a vacuum cleaner and going out by the pool to pick up forty million thousand peanut shells from the grass. Nobody else had ever thought of that. The dumb caretakers were too dumb. They'd just say, 'Go out and pick them up.' Well there I was picking them up with my fingers, but did I ever shock them when they were going back and forth on their lawn mowers and I was out there maneuvering my Hoover on the grass. That way it took me only five minutes to pick up the peanut shells.

"And then there's loose tea from teabags inside the box where I have the teabags. Lipton's tea. There's like, forty-five packages. Well, I take all the teabags out of the box and vacuum the bottom, because some of the tea has come out of the bags . . . and then, I get petrified that my neighbors are going to hear this vacuum cleaner going all the time and I keep wondering do they think they're listening to a room that has maid service at two in the morning and is preparing for a new guest? You know? I keep on forgetting I still have to vacuum all my shopping bags because they all have residue on the bottom. You know, there might be an odd little piece of paper at the bottom of the bags, a peanut, a granola, anything. I have to put the bag right on the floor and I have to put my two feet into it. Then I can put the hose to it. Otherwise, I mean if you hold the shopping bag and vacuum it that way, you vacuum up the bag. Then I vacuum-clean my plants. I have to be very delicate. I only vacuum-clean the dirt part, the bottom of the dish where the water's supposed to drain to. And very very lightly I vacuum-clean the dust off the leaves. Then I open up the air conditioner where the screen is and I turn off the air conditioner and I vacuum the screen inside the filter and then vacuum around the bottom of it and along the top and underneath and around the windowsill and if everything doesn't come off, if everything isn't right, I write on my pad of 'Things to Do' to paint the spot on the windowsill, to paint the part of the radiator that's turning brown.

"I might paint the vacuum too—green or yellow for the summer—and find a place for it. They're just so great. On the bottom, you can take the hose part with the suction, and screw it onto the bottom of the vacuum cleaner, and get blow-out air. One day I didn't have my hairdryer and I thought I could use that to dry my hair. So I attached the hose to the blow-out part and I blew out everything that was in the bag. It blew all over into little pieces of dust. One thing, you can always tell when your habits change by checking that bag.

"And A, you know how I care what the outside of my door looks like. I can hear the maid doing the hallway—she doesn't do it with a vacuum, she does it with a broom, and she vacuums the dust out of the room across the way with a broom too. Well, it's my territory and I feel that it's wrong of her to do that. So I have to vacuum up the hall. And one day, belligerently, because they don't wash the halls outside my room, I was out there with my African dress on and I was washing a wall, because I was testing a new product on their wall before I used it on my own. I was using Big Wally. I get all these products from television. So I was out using Big Wally on the walls and I was doing it and the maid kept looking at me, she wasn't saying anything. But I was giving the hint to her, like—'I know, the union doesn't let you do that.' " For some reason, this conversation was making me very hungry. But I was getting tired of plain grape jam. I wanted something more exotic, like guava. So I very gently put down the receiver and tip-toed into the kitchen. B talked on.

"That reminds me of art in the toilet. It started this way. One day I decided to tear up all the nude pictures of myself, i was vacuuming my Polaroids—I had just finished up vacuuming my checkbooks—and I decided that I had to vacuum all the little boxes where I keep my Polaroids because they were filled with food and hairs. I don't know if it happens to everyone, I don't know how I always get the stray hair in the drawer when I open it, I just can't figure it out. Anyway, I have to take all the Polaroids and like I did with the tapes I have to keep them all in order because they're all in files. So, this one day, I decided to go through the pictures of myself, all my self-photographs where I would kneel down, pull in my cheeks, put my tits together, and take pictures of myself. So I went through the file and the ones that weren't any good I tore up and put in the waste basket. And the next day the engineer came up here and he said—I'd called him to borrow another five dollars or something, because money is another thing like cleaning that I worry about terribly—but anyway, I asked him if I could borrow another five, and he said, yes, he's a Negro engineer, and then, he said, 'I have something very close to you right here.' and he patted his left-hand shirt pocket. And I said, 'What's that, John?' And he said, 'I've got it very close to me, right here,' and he took it out, and he had pasted it back together and there it was. A nude picture of me. Well, with that, I started to be really selective about what I sent down to the end of the hall. A lot of times now I take things in shopping bags out of the hotel and put them in the garbage can a block down on the corner. I have to go through the whole thing, because sometimes when I start to flush it down the toilet, I don't want the people across the hall to think that I have diarrhea for three hours while I'm flushing. Like
TV Guide.
Or an empty cigarette pack. I don't want to put them in the waste-paper basket because I want that EMPTY so I sit on the edge of the bathtub and I take two pages of
TV Guide
at a time and I tear it up into four or five pieces, put it in the toilet, flush, and I go through that with the whole
TV Guide.
You know, if I've come back from emptying the trash and I see, 'Oh, that's last Saturday's
Guide.'
Then I do it with an empty box of cigarettes. I take the silver paper out and I crumple that in a ball—I put that in the toilet—then I take the little box of Marlboros and make it into little pieces. I decided I can get pretty much down the toilet. Oh, then I remember that I've had milk sitting on the windowsill for four hours, and I think it's going bad, but I never taste it to see if it is, so I pour the milk in, and then I have to come in for the scissors because I can't rip the carton sometimes because of the arthritis in my left fingers so I have to cut the milk carton up into squares and flush that and that's about four flushes . . . HELLO . . . HELLO . . ."