Valerie Solanas: The Defiant Life of the Woman Who Wrote SCUM (7 page)

Up Your Ass
(1965)

Valerie’s notorious play,
Up Your Ass
, has received far more attention for its alleged role in the Andy Warhol shootings than it has for its artistic merits. That said, the play represents one of only a few finished works (albeit unpublished) created by Valerie during this time and one that would fatefully bring her into Andy Warhol’s orbit a few years later. The play provides another window into a version of Valerie she wanted to be: forceful, sarcastic, in charge, playful, eccentric, grandiose, and funny. Technically titled
Up Your Ass or From the Cradle to the Boat or The Big Suck or Up from the Slime
, the play showcases Valerie’s interest in theorizing and writing from the social
gutter
. About the play’s title, she joked, “Just in case the play should ever become a Broadway smash hit, at least there would be something acceptable to put on the theater marquee.
”
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Filled with cursing, playful linguistic romps (much like her work in the
Diamondback
years earlier), and hair-raisingly irreverent characters,
Up Your Ass
was the fictional companion to the later
SCUM Manifesto.

In the full title of the play, Valerie was referencing the notion that if women rock the cradle (that is, care for children), they won’t be rocking the boat, changing the world, causing trouble, wreaking havoc. The play features a hustler-panhandler heroine, Bongi Perez, and a variety of other hyper-stereotyped yet funky characters: the unconscious woman, the john, the Christian fanatic, and the drag queen. Reporter Judith Coburn wrote of
Up Your Ass
:

Putting forward a veritable clusterfuck of oddball characters,
Up Your Ass
features: Alvin, the dopey Hugh Hefnerite with his revolving bed; Ginger, the Cosmo career gal getting ahead and getting even by “lapping up shit”; Spade Cat, the black smoothie who gets all the girls; White Cat, the loser who never gets any; Mrs. Arthur, the sex-obsessed wife and homicidal mother; her penis-crazed kid known only as “The Boy”; Russell, the classic misogynist bore; and then, the ever-present Solanas character, the sanctimonious but wacko family counselor. . . . There’s also Miss Collins and Scheherazade, two over-the-top drag queens, sendups both of Warhol’s Candy Darlings and the tiresome claque of “superstars” like Ultra Violet. . . . At the play’s center is Valerie’s alter ego, Bongi Perez, a street-smart lesbian hustler and know-it-all who is as sex obsessed as everyone else and who puts out for her tricks but not for lovers.
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With vaudeville-like sequences of events, often flopping wildly between Bongi’s internal narratives and her interactions with those she meets on the street,
Up Your Ass
harnesses the full power of Valerie’s forcefulness and wit. The play includes Bongi’s selling her body for cash, fifty bucks for “five minutes with a three-quarter minute intermission,” ten bucks more for her to “sneer, curse, and talk dirty.” She goes on: “Then there’s my hundred-dollar special, in which, clothed only in a diving helmet and storm troop boots, I come charging in, shrieking filthy songs at the top of my lungs.” She eventually convinces her john to follow her into an alley for a quick twenty-five-dollar hand job. Prostituting and hustling, Bongi spouts rhetoric that would later appear in
SCUM Manifesto
: “All roads lead to Rome, and all a man’s nerve endings lead to his dick. . . . You might as well resign yourself: eventually the expression ‘female of the species’ will be a redundancy.
”
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Reviewing the play from its February 2001 run at PS 122 Theater in New York, New York in the
Village Voice
, Alisa Solomon wrote: “The play centers on a wisecracking, trick-turning, thoroughly misanthropic dyke called Bongi . . . [who] banters with drag queens (one yearns to be a lesbian: ‘Then I could be the cake and eat it too’). She entreats—and ill treats—clientele (letting a john buy her dinner, she tells him, ‘I’m gonna help you fulfill yourself as a man’).
”
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Up Your Ass
lets no one off the hook, taking jabs at masculinity and femininity and reserving as much humorous hostility for Daddy’s girls as it does for exploitative hetero men. Taking aim, Valerie portrays a well-heeled socialite gobbling up a turd because, Bongi says, “everyone knows that men have much more respect for women who are good at lapping up shit.”

As a sample of the dialogue in
Up Your Ass
, Bongi says, “Oh, my, but aren’t we the high class ass. You got a twat by Dior?” Later, a character named Spade Cat says, “That’s a
mighty
fine ass. And yours ain’t at all bad. You may consider that a high compliment, being I’m a connoisseur of asses. There’s nothing dearer to my heart than a big, soft, fat ass.” Bongi replies, “Because it matches your big, soft, fat head?” Bongi proceeds to have dinner with a man she despises and recounts her “engaging memories” of stomping up and down on a man’s chest and breaking the glasses he wore in his shirt pocket. “I’ll take it you’ll do just about anything,” the man says. “Well, nothing
too
repulsive—I never
kiss
men.” (He later admits, “I have quite a light, playful streak in me that I keep sharpened up by a faithful reading of the more zestful men’s magazines—
Tee-Hee
,
Giggle
,
Titter
,
Lust
,
Drool
,
Slobber
, and, just for thoroughness,
Lech
.”)
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In a later scene, she talks to a woman named Ginger, who enjoys “lapping up turd,” and who says, “We both agreed that a woman with any kind of spunk and character at all doesn’t have to choose between marriage and a career; she can combine them. It’s tricky, but it can be done.” Bongi retorts, “What’s even trickier yet is to combine
no
marriage with
no
career.” Ginger goes on to pridefully tell Bongi she has always been a rebel; on her refusal to pick up her toys as a child, she says, “I’d stamp my foot and say ‘No!’ twice before picking them up. Oh, I was a mean one. My latest rebellion is my childhood religion; I’ve just rebelled against that. I used to be a High Episcopalian.” “What’re you now?” “Low Episcopalian. Do you know they’re even days when I doubt the Trinity?” “You mean Men, Money, and Fucking?” “No, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. What religion do you belong to?” “I used to belong to the Catholic, but I wrote it off when they started talking about demoting Mary” (11).

Bongi has dinner with Ginger and her “boyfriend,” Russell, which leads to some banter between them. When Russell blows out a match Bongi has lit for her cigarette, she yells, “You dumb ass! What’d you blow my match out for?” “I was only trying to be a gentleman. I wanted to light it for you.” “Russell’s a perfect gentleman at all times,” Ginger says. “You mean he fucks with his necktie on?” Bongi quips. After Bongi rants at them for the unnecessary gesture, Ginger snidely says, “She has penis envy. You should see an analyst. I’d recommend mine, Dr. Aba Gazavez, a truly remarkable man. You’ve probably heard of him; he’s the famed authority on women and the leading exponent of the doctrine that labor pains feel good.”

The end of the play features a teacher from a Creative Homemaking class discussing the joys of becoming a homemaker: “Integrate your sex life with baby bottle washing: wait until hubby’s getting ready to take his bath; then, quick, soap up the baby bottle brush, working it up into a nice foamy lather; then when hubby’s all nicely naked and is leaning over to test his bath water, you come te-e-a-a-r-r-ing in . . . (demonstrating.) . . . r-a-a-m-m-ing the brush right up his asshole. So, you see, Girls, marriage really
can
be fun” (14–15, 23–24).

Ginger later asks, “Tell me, what must a woman do to seduce a man?” “Exist in his presence,” Bongi replies. “Come on, now; there’s far more to it than that.” “Well, if you’re in a really big hurry, you can try walking around with your fly open.” “Why don’t you run for president?” asks the Alley Cat. Bongi replies, “Nah, I like to think big.” Lecturing Russell on the inevitable demise of men, Bongi says, “You may as well resign yourself: eventually the expression ‘female of the species’ll be a redundancy.” Russell responds, “You don’t know what a female is, you desexed monstrosity.” Bongi snipes back, “Quite the contrary, I’m so female I’m subversive.” “Well I for one wouldn’t make love to you for a million dollars.” “Maybe not, but you’d do it for nothing” (16–18).

In her final conversation in the play, Bongi speaks to a woman named Arthur who hates her husband and endures bad sex with him. Arthur muses, “Sure, I’d like to do something radical and daring—like think, but you have to make a
few
concessions, if you want to live in society, so I have sex and collect antiques; I kinda like musty things from out of the past.” “You mean like men,” Bongi replies. “You might say that; men do have a naturey aura about them; when they’re around Fuck is in the air; it’s overpowering; it carries you away with it, sucks you right up.” Bongi says, “Very fucky world we live in. My only consolation’s that I’m me—vivacious, dynamic, single, and queer. . . . You know what really flips me? Real low-down, funky broads, nasty, bitchy hotshits, the kind that when she enters a room it’s like a blinding flash, announcing her presence to the world, real brazen and public. If you ever run across any broads look like neon lights, send ’em my way” (27–28).

Valerie took immense pride in
Up Your Ass
. This document held much of her identity as a writer, artist, and provocateur. She spent many years drafting and editing the play (recall that she first showed it to a director in 1962), refining words and story lines, making sure the dialogue flowed smoothly. In the 1967 copy of
Up Your Ass
, retained in the late 1990s by the Andy Warhol Museum, recovered from a silver-painted trunk belonging to Billy Name, Valerie’s handwritten corrections appeared throughout the manuscript.
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Small instructions of where a character should hold her glasses (“he had his glasses in his shirt pocket”) and careful spelling error corrections (“Hungers” to “Hunters”) appear throughout this copy. Valerie’s original 1965 copyrighted version—a carbon copy of the hand-typed, sixty-page version placed with the Library of Congress collections—included numerous typographical errors carefully corrected in her hand using white tape and blue ink. Valerie had seen
Up Your Ass
through years of corrections and refinements and had even produced mimeographed copies of the play in 1967 to sell at several bookstores: Eighth Street Bookshop, Sheridan Square Paperback Corner, Underground Uplift Unlimited, Tompkins Square Book Store, and East Side Book Store.
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Valerie had tried to sell her play to alleviate her constant cash flow problem, printing an advertisement in the
Village Voice
on October 13, 1966, that put a relatively high price on the play:

photo offset copies of

“UP FROM THE SLIME”

by Valerie Solanas

are now available at

$10 per copy

222 W. 23rd St, Room 606

Valerie wanted to find an audience, to revel in the play’s subversive, over-the-top campiness; still, the price suggests a seriousness in how Valerie circulated the play. A ten-dollar investment in 1966 from someone mail-ordering
Up Your Ass
signified real interest in the work.

Valerie had eyed Andy Warhol quite early on as someone who would perhaps show interest in producing the play (though her reproducing copies of the play to raise money contradicts the popular assumption that Andy had her only copy). Valerie sent him a copy (before she personally knew him) sometime in late 1965, just after she copyrighted the play. In a letter to him dated February 9, 1966, she wrote, “Dear Andy, Would you please return my script,
Up Your Ass
, that I left with you some time ago? Thanks. Valerie Solanas.
”
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Because Andy refused to produce
Up Your Ass
(and lost his copy), and because other producers found it so vulgar and pornographic that they could not or would not produce it, reviews of the work began only after the 2000 staging (the play’s first)—notably set to the music of ABBA and featuring an all-female cast—at the George Coates Theater in San Francisco. (George Coates learned of the play only after his assistant director, Eddy Falconer, saw the film
I Shot Andy Warhol
and suggested that they stage the play in San Francisco as a revolt against the strict “decency” clause recently implemented by the National Endowment for the Arts.)
96

Like
SCUM Manifesto
, the play still retained a timely and relevant feel, reaching much further than most contemporary plays in its depiction of a gender-bending dystopia. Nearly forty years after its inception,
Up Your Ass
provoked postmodern anxiety in its audiences and reviewers. As Alisa Solomon stated in her
Voice
review, “What astonishes more is the ahead-of-its-time critique of gender roles and sexual mores embedded in the jollity. Queer theory has nothing on the boundary-smashing glee of Solanas’s dystopia, where the two-sex system is packed off to the junkyard. Think early Charles Ludlam infused with feminism, glitter drag mixed into the Five Lesbian Brothers.
”
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As it does with many writers, the act of writing may have transported Valerie—however temporarily—away from the conditions of her life. The gender dystopia found in
Up Your Ass
mimicked her wildly fluid approach to her own sexual identity. Always hard to pin down, she never fully identified as a lesbian but adamantly refused to identify as heterosexual. Bongi allowed her to exist in an as-yet-undefined other space. Through
Up Your Ass
and “Primer,” Valerie could circulate in New York City as a bright, ambitious, clever, wisecracking woman, able to thrive while panhandling, engaging in prostitution, “shooting the shit,” and writing. This version of herself found a way to survive that did not overly compromise her: “I finally hit upon an excellent-paying occupation,” she joked in “Primer,” “challenging to the ingenuity, dealing on one’s own terms with people and affording independence, flexible hours, great stability and, most important, a large amount of leisure time.
”
98
This version of Valerie may have stood in stark contrast to her coping with days filled with “sordid rooms, inadequate food, and performing blow jobs to pay rent. . . . There were times when Valerie slept on rooftops and ate what was left on other peoples’ plates at the Automat.
”
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Valerie lived a hard life, and it would only become harder over the next two decades.