Three Rounds At Andy
1. The Woman Who Wouldn’t Vanish
I haven’t eaten in two days, but I don’t feel hungry. Hunger is a noise I trained myself to ignore—a man yelling from across the street, trying to get a reaction. I let it echo. I let it die.
I sit at the kitchen table, which isn’t really a table—it’s a hollow door on two sawhorses I found behind a plumbing supply store in Brooklyn. There’s still a broken brass hinge dangling from one corner. Every time I move my foot, it clinks. Like it’s trying to remind me that I used to be part of something useful. I let it speak. I let it ache.
The typewriter in front of me is a Royal Quiet De Luxe. It’s not quiet. It skips the “e” half the time and the carriage jams whenever I hit return too hard, which I do, because I write with my whole arm. I write like I’m throwing punches. Every line I finish feels like it should bleed.
I am writing The SCUM Manifesto.
Not for attention. Not for legacy. Certainly not for men. I’m writing it because the world refuses to listen to women until we make them flinch.
Society for Cutting Up Men. That’s not metaphor. That’s diagnosis.
You can’t fix rot. You cut it out.
Don’t tell me it’s too much. Don’t tell me I sound crazy. You gaslight a woman long enough and she’ll burn the whole fucking house down just to prove the flames are real.
I’ve been called a genius, a deviant, a degenerate, a visionary, a whore, a prophet, and a bitch—all before noon. The only one I ever agreed with was genius. The rest are just variations on “you scared me.”
Good.
Andy Warhol scared me once, too. Not because of who he was, but because of how easily he erased me.
I gave him Up Your Ass.
Typed it on this very machine, every page stacked with scenes that made even me blush—truth peeled raw and laughing, a middle finger with footnotes. He called the title “bold.” Said I was “funny.” Laughed in that soft little non-laugh of his, the kind that sounds like a camera shutter. Then he tucked the script under his arm like a newspaper and walked away.
Never heard from him again.
I called. Left notes. Asked questions. Nothing. Weeks passed. Then months. The play didn’t resurface. It wasn’t produced. It wasn’t even rejected. It simply vanished.
Which is worse.
Rejection at least admits I exist.
People act like Andy Warhol was some kind of oracle. Like he saw things. Let me tell you what he saw: reflection. That’s it. He was a silver balloon of a man, floating through a gallery of other people’s pain, reflecting it back in just enough gloss to make you forget it meant something. He didn’t make art. He collected it. Extracted it. Flattened it into silk-screen sameness. You think a man like that couldn’t steal a play? That he wouldn’t?
Andy Warhol turned me into a ghost, and people like that shouldn’t be allowed to keep doing it.
The pistol is on the counter. I bought it from a man on Delancey who smelled like bug spray and turpentine. He didn’t ask for a name. Just twenty dollars and a handshake. I didn’t flinch when he handed it over. I held it like it was a key to a door I’ve been pounding on for years.
I’m not suicidal. I’m not reckless. I’m intentional.
Don’t mistake precision for madness.
When I put the gun in my coat pocket, it balances out the weight of everything else I carry. The letters I never got. The manuscripts they threw away. The conversations that ended with laughter and the door slamming shut.
They want women to scream quietly. To rage in lowercase. To die politely.
I write in capitals.
Tomorrow, I walk into The Factory.
Not as a freak.
Not as a muse.
Not as some half-starved footnote with bad hair and a manifesto no one reads.
Tomorrow, I enter as the author of my own story.
And if Andy can’t be bothered to look me in the eyes,
I’ll show him what three bullets look like when a woman refuses to vanish.
2. The Factory
The lobby smells like wet paper and linseed oil. A girl in silver tights and raccoon eyeliner smiles at me like I’m a misplaced umbrella—something someone will come back for, but probably not soon. She doesn’t know my name. That’s the point.
The Factory is quieter than you’d think. The myth says it’s a madhouse: amps buzzing, film reels spinning, half-naked bodies writhing in avant-garde orgies under neon lights. But myths have good PR. What I walk into is colder, slower. A few people are scattered across the studio—lounging on stained mattresses, flipping through magazines, laughing like they’ve got sedatives stitched into their gums. The kind of laughter that comes from not giving a single, solitary shit about anything.
I blend in. That’s the secret. You can go anywhere if you wear your irrelevance well enough.
I’m wearing it like a fucking veil.
Andy isn’t here yet. Good. I want to sit with the air. Let it tell me what’s changed. Let it confirm what hasn’t.
There’s a screen printing station in the corner, a half-finished Marilyn face drying like a ghost. One of the Superstars—I forget which—flits past me in a fur coat with no shirt underneath. She doesn’t say hello. No one does.
That’s how it works in here. You matter until you don’t.
You shine until you’re shadow.
“Hey,” someone says. I turn, expecting security. Instead, it’s a tall man with teeth too straight to trust. “You looking for Candy or—”
“No,” I say.
And he moves on.
I love how easy men give up when you offer nothing to fuck.
The coat I’m wearing is heavy. Too heavy for June. But nobody asks. You can wear anything here—except expectations. I sit on a crate covered in paint splatters and watch the room slowly fill. Someone drops a film canister. It rolls across the floor and bumps into my foot. I don’t move.
The gun presses into my ribs like a reminder.
This isn’t performance art. This isn’t a scene. This is what happens when you dismiss the wrong woman one too many times. I didn’t come here to make a statement. I came here to end one.
He walks in an hour later like it’s nothing. Like he’s never made anyone disappear with a smirk. Thin, pale, sunglasses even indoors. He floats more than he walks—sliding past people like a mannequin on wheels. Someone hands him a Diet Coke. Someone kisses his cheek. He nods once, like royalty.
He doesn’t see me.
Of course he doesn’t. That’s what Andy Warhol does. He lets you orbit. Lets you imagine he notices. Lets you fall in love with proximity and then forgets your name while quoting someone else’s ideas.
I stand.
My hand’s already in the pocket.
Three bullets.
One for erasure.
One for theft.
One for the indifference that covers everything in this place like cellophane over rot.
I step forward.
He turns.
We lock eyes.
He looks at me like he’s trying to place the face on a poster he didn’t sign. A twitch of memory. The faint unease of a name he never bothered to learn.
“Valerie?”
Not a question. Not quite.
He reaches out—maybe to shake my hand. Maybe to pat me on the shoulder like I’m a rescue dog who finally found the door. Maybe to defuse something he doesn’t fully recognize as danger yet.
I raise the gun.
For once,
Andy Warhol sees me.
3. The Play
I first met him in a hallway that smelled like developer fluid and spoiled eggs. He was holding a camera like a priest holds a relic—light as nothing, but sacred all the same. There were three people clinging to him like static, laughing too loud at something he hadn’t even said yet.
I waited until they peeled off to answer the phone or snort whatever glamour tastes like. Then I stepped in front of him.
“Andy,” I said.
He blinked at me behind those goddamn sunglasses like I was light he didn’t expect.
“I wrote a play.”
He smiled, small. Half there. Like maybe he had other versions of himself inside, busy doing something more interesting. “Oh yeah?”
I pulled the envelope from my bag. It was thick. Sixty pages. Typed single-spaced on a machine with a busted “e.” I stayed up two nights making it legible. Burned through half a ribbon and three packs of Camels.
“It’s called Up Your Ass.”
His smile got wider, but not friendlier. The kind of grin you use when your party’s been crashed by someone with no makeup and the wrong politics. “That’s… a title.”
“It’s a play. Not a petition.”
He took the envelope from my hands like it was a child’s drawing. Like he was doing me a favor. “I’ll take a look.”
That was the whole thing. No follow-up questions. No interest. No engagement. Just a nod and a turn, and then he was walking away. One of his blondes looped her arm through his and whispered something in his ear. He laughed, soft and hollow.
I stood there, still holding the shape of the envelope in my fingers like it might regrow.
Three weeks later, I called. Nothing. Two months after that, I showed up. He wasn’t in. I left a note. Heard nothing.
It’s not the rejection that burns. It’s the silence.
You hand a man your work—your voice, your guts, your goddamn soul—and he slips it into a drawer under a stack of Polaroids and forgets you were ever there. He doesn’t even dislike you. That would require friction. He just… deletes you.
Up Your Ass wasn’t a cry for help. It wasn’t a love letter. It was a scalpel. It cut open the soft pink myth of gender and fame and power, and it bled truth onto the floor. But Andy didn’t want blood. He wanted replicas. Smooth surfaces. People who could be printed again and again until the ink ran dry.
I wrote women with rage in their throats and come on their fingers. I wrote them loud, wrong, unapologetic. And he laughed.
He laughed. Fuck him!
4. The Walk
I don’t sleep the night before. Sleep feels indulgent. Soft. I don’t want softness. I want clarity.
The radiator spits in its sleep. The faucet drips one syllable at a time. My upstairs neighbor fucks her boyfriend at 3:14 a.m. I count the thrusts like rosary beads. At 3:21, it ends. He never lasts past the third Our Father.
I lay on the mattress, fully clothed, staring at the ceiling and mouthing lines from the manifesto like scripture. I don’t speak them aloud. Speaking makes them fragile. Breathing makes them vanish. I want them ironed into my jaw.
At 4:00, I get up.
The coffee tin is empty, but I scrape the sides with a spoon and pour hot water over what’s left. It tastes like rust and old arguments. I drink it anyway.
The gun waits on the counter. It’s clean now. I wiped it with my T-shirt, then wiped the T-shirt with bleach. I’m not an idiot. They’ll call me that. They’ll call me worse. But I’ve spent years with men who write checks with my genius and cash them in their own names—I know how to prepare.
I dress in layers. A thin shirt, a sweater, the coat. Summer is leaking into the city already, thick and wet, but I need the weight. I need the shape of it. The gun sits snug in the right pocket, heavy enough to make me lean a little. I like it. Feels like purpose. Feels like balance.
The manifesto goes in my bag, pages folded, annotated, stained with coffee and ash. I’ve underlined whole paragraphs with a felt-tip pen I stole from a bookstore display. I want someone to read them after. Maybe in court. Maybe in headlines. Maybe never. I’m okay with all three.
I walk twelve blocks to The Factory.
I pass a man in a suit who looks through me like I’m a breeze. I pass a mother dragging her child by the arm and yelling about jellybeans. I pass a girl in a plastic miniskirt with a face that says she’s practiced being dead and still doesn’t know how.
I walk like I have somewhere to be. Because I do.
I don’t rush. Rushing is for people who fear they’ll lose their nerve. My nerve is a fucking fortress. I walk like a person who’s been patient long enough. Like a woman who has stopped asking. Stopped knocking. Who has every intention of taking the door off its hinges.
When I get to the corner of 47th and Broadway, I stop for the light.
The sun’s coming up now, bleeding into the cracks between buildings. Everything’s gold for a minute, even the trash. Even me.
I touch the gun through the pocket. Just to confirm it’s still real.
No one notices. No one ever does.
A bus rumbles past. A woman in the window is reading The Bell Jar. I smile. Not because I like Plath. Because I’ve outlived her.
The Factory is two blocks away. Two blocks of broken sidewalk and cigarette butts and gum spat out by men who say I’m too loud, too mean, too much. Two blocks of breath, of remembering what he did and didn’t do. Of watching that fucking envelope vanish into Andy’s hands and never come back.
I don’t feel nervous.
I feel ready.
Every story needs a final act.
Every silenced woman deserves an audience.
And I’m done waiting for the curtain to rise.
5. The Shooting
He sees me. He sees the gun. There are gasps all around the factory.
There are too many people here. I didn’t plan for that. Some are strangers.
Some I recognize.
Mario’s in the corner, flipping through Polaroids like he’s bored with the world again. A woman in go-go boots squints at me through mascara so thick it could hold up a bridge. Someone’s laughing behind me. Nervous. High. Not sure what’s happening yet.
Andy takes a step closer.
“I didn’t think I’d see you again,” he says. It’s the voice he uses when he wants you to calm down. Soft. Neutral. Like water over pills.
I reach into my pocket.
The gun is smooth and cold and small. He doesn’t notice. His eyes are too busy scanning my face for familiarity, for softness, for an exit.
I lift it.
His eyes go wide.
The room stops.
And I fire.
The sound doesn’t echo like in movies. It slams into the walls and dies quick, like it’s embarrassed. The first shot catches him in the stomach. He folds, slow. Like surrender. Like a bag of laundry tipping over.
Screams now. Scrambling. Andy hits the floor hard, and blood spills out like he’s been holding it in too long. I aim again. Fire. His shoulder jerks. People start running. Someone knocks over a table. Someone else is yelling my name, or maybe his.
Third shot misses. Hits the filing cabinet. The gun jams.
I breathe.
Everything is loud and wet and red.
Mario rushes me. I step back. He freezes. We stare at each other across a puddle that wasn’t there a minute ago.
The gun is still in my hand, but it’s done now. The trigger clicks, but nothing follows. It’s empty. Or broken. Or God has punched out.
I lower it.
Andy makes a noise. Not a word. Just a sound. Like a balloon deflating through a straw.
I don’t look at him again.
This isn’t about him now. This is about all of them.
All the men who told me I was brilliant and dangerous and then left me to rot. All the ones who read my words and laughed. All the ones who took what they wanted and offered “you’re too intense” as payment. All the Warhols—smooth, soft men who collect people like knickknacks and forget that we bleed.
I walk out.
No one stops me.
The city swallows me back up like a pill, bitter and still unchewed.
I don’t run.
I walk.
Slow.
Steady.
Satisfied.
Let them remember me now. Let them say my name loud. Let them put my play back where it belongs—on the desk, not the floor.
Three bullets. As planned. One for silence. One for theft. One for being ignored so thoroughly I had to become myth just to be visible again.
This was not a breakdown.
This was the climax.
6. Under Arrest
I walk three blocks before the gun starts to feel like a souvenir. It doesn’t weigh the same. It’s quieter now, a spent thing. Its hunger gone.
The city moves around me like it always has. Taxis honk. A man argues with a hot dog vendor over mustard. Somewhere behind me, people are screaming, probably still trying to spell my name. I hear sirens, but not close. That’s the beauty of violence in New York—nobody’s surprised.
I take a left at the pawn shop where I bought the gun. The man behind the counter sees me through the glass and looks away. He knows. He knew when he sold it to me.
I walk past a laundromat. The smell of bleach hits hard. The kind of clean that tries too hard. Inside, a woman folds a man’s underwear with the same numb precision I used to type with. I keep walking.
The police station on East 5th looks like every other lie they tell us—brick, badge, and bullshit. I climb the steps like I’ve been invited. The officer at the front desk doesn’t look up right away.
Then he does.
Then he sees the gun in my hand.
He stands.
Two others move in.
Hands on holsters.
The whole temperature changes.
“I’m Valerie Solanas,” I say, calm as still water.
I set the gun down on the desk like a tip.
“I just shot Andy Warhol.”
One of them blinks. Another says, “Excuse me?”
“I shot him,” I repeat. “He had too much control over my life.”
That’s all I give them. That’s all they need. The rest is theirs to infer.
They take me into custody. I don’t resist. That part’s done.
In the cruiser, they ask if I’m aware of what I’ve done. I tell them I’m more aware than they’ll ever be. One of them, a young one, asks me if I regret it. He doesn’t say it like a question. He says it like a test.
I don’t answer.
Because that’s not the kind of thing you give away for free.
They try to be gentle at first. Try to figure out if I’m mentally fit, if I understand the charges, if I know what day it is. I do. I know all the days that led here. Every one of them ignored.
They fingerprint me. The ink is cold. I smile for the camera. They think I’m being difficult. I’m not. I just want them to get the angle right. If they’re going to put me in the paper, they’d better not crop the woman out of the crime.
They book me as a lunatic.
Of course they do.
The woman’s never allowed to be political. Never principled. Never revolutionary.
Only broken.
Only hysterical.
Only crazy.
But what do you call a system that deletes a woman so thoroughly she has to open fire just to prove she was ever there?
You call it normal.
And you lock her up when she refuses to be part of it.
7. The Forgotten
They put me in a white room.
Not prison. Not yet. Psychiatry first. It’s easier for them that way. A woman with a manifesto is dangerous. A crazy woman with a manifesto is dismissible.
I’m diagnosed before they even ask real questions.
Paranoid schizophrenia.
The words land like a gavel. A label is cleaner than a conversation. It wraps the mess in medical tape and lets them sleep easier.
They feed me pills that flatten the sky. The ceiling stops moving. The colors go out of the day. I shuffle down hallways in socks too loose, watched by nurses who don’t read.
They lock up the gun.
They lock up the manifesto.
They try to lock up the reason.
Andy lives.
Of course he does. That soft, pale man with nine holes in his gut and a gallery of sycophants weeping over his hospital bed. He survives. But he doesn’t come out the same. He starts wearing a corset. He walks slower. Talks softer. Flinches more.
He says he forgives me.
As if I asked for it.
As if forgiveness belongs to him.
They interview me once, for the news. The reporter asks if I regret it. I ask him if he regrets being a coward. That part doesn’t make it to print. What they run is a photo of me behind glass, mouth open mid-sentence, with the caption:
“Valerie Solanas: disturbed feminist shoots Warhol.”
Not writer.
Not playwright.
Not woman silenced and erased until her only act left was irreversible.
Just disturbed.
After I’m released, no one comes looking. I drift. Hotels with roaches. Coffee shops with cracked booths. Cheap cigarettes. Folded pages of SCUM worn soft with use. I send it to publishers. I send it to women I admire. I send it everywhere, until the postage runs out and my teeth start to fall out with hunger.
I write until the keys stick for good.
I talk to myself, mostly.
Sometimes I talk to ghosts.
Years pass like graffiti on a freight train—fast and almost beautiful, if you don’t look too close.
One day, I see a poster. Warhol retrospective. Bright colors. Marilyn’s face smiling from behind plexiglass. A caption calls him “a master of modern myth.” No mention of the blood.
I walk away before I throw something.
I die in a welfare hotel in San Francisco, alone. Pneumonia. 1988. They find me four days after. No funeral. No friends. Just a room full of notes scribbled in the margins of old newspapers and a box labeled “THE PLAN.”
Later, academics will rediscover me.
They’ll call me “complicated.”
They’ll write essays about the symbolism of the shooting.
They’ll debate whether I meant it. Whether I mattered.
They’ll make my madness safe by carving it into context.
They’ll never stage Up Your Ass.
And still—
Somewhere, a woman reads the manifesto and stops apologizing.
Somewhere, a girl bites back instead of swallowing it.
Somewhere, someone finally says:
“I will not vanish.”
And maybe, just maybe, that’s enough.
Author’s Note
This story is a work of fiction rooted in fact. Valerie Solanas did shoot Andy Warhol on June 3, 1968. She fired three times—one bullet struck Warhol and nearly killed him, tearing through multiple organs and leaving him physically and emotionally altered for the rest of his life. Another man, art critic Mario Amaya, was also wounded. Solanas turned herself in shortly after, stating, “He had too much control over my life.” Diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, she spent time in psychiatric institutions before serving a reduced sentence. While this piece imagines her inner world, her actual voice—especially in the SCUM Manifesto—was colder, sharper, and more satirical than how she’s rendered here. We’ve fictionalized her perspective to create emotional immersion, not to replace historical record. The lost manuscript of Up Your Ass was eventually found among Warhol’s papers, seemingly unread.
Valerie Solanas was not a hero or a villain. She was a woman whose fury stemmed from erasure, poverty, and systemic dismissal. She remains one of the most radical, unflinching feminist writers of the twentieth century—brilliant, unstable, infuriating, impossible to ignore. This story does not seek to glorify her act of violence, but to reckon with the conditions that gave birth to it—and to her. Warhol survived, but The Factory was never the same. Neither was the culture. In the end, Valerie got what she wanted: to be seen, to be read, to be remembered. And maybe that’s the scariest thing a woman like her could ever do.
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