Changing the Past (7 page)

Now other people in groups no longer averted their heads on his approach, nor as individuals did they continue to find pressing engagements elsewhere. They stayed, often greeting him with an expectant smirk. After taking the pratfall to its limits without putting himself into the hospital—he did suffer a sprain, and was lucky it wasn't worse, when trying to add to one plunge a leap-twist that could only have been performed by a gymnast—he turned towards the verbal for his comedy. In this he exceeded himself. He had always been inarticulate in the written language, and writing themes and book reports was nightmarish. (
“
Black Beauty
is the story of a horse. This horse is black, and real nice. Some people arnt so kind to horses, but luckily some people are.”) Nor when called upon in class to respond vocally was he more eloquent, translating Caesar's dying words as “Brutus, you also are a brute,” sniggering and blushing. But now he found that putting words in certain combinations could make people laugh. Of course there was more to it than the context. Some comedy (usually successful despite or because of the revulsion it evoked) was founded simply on bad taste: most schoolboy sex jokes were of this character (“The Reverend Fluff, a minister of the gospel, is putting it to the choirmaster's daughter in a parked car, when a policeman pokes a flashlight into the window. ‘Officer,' indignantly says the preacher, ‘I'll have you know I'm Pastor Fluff!' ‘Buddy,' replies the cop, ‘I don't care if you're all the way up her a-hole, you gotta move on.'”) And sometimes there was virtually no point at all, nothing to laugh at whatever, except foul language (‘“How can you tell if a girl will put out?'Joe the jerk asks Vic, the local authority on nooky, whose answer is, ‘If she talks dirty.' So next time Joe sits on a couch next to a girl he asks her, ‘What would you do if a bear came down that chimney there?' ‘I'd shit,' says she. ‘Let's fuck,' says Joe.”)

Timing was crucial. The same joke, hilarious when told with the proper intervals between its elements, was lame when poorly timed (e.g., when one bum asks another, “Did you shit in your pants?” the question must be preceded by the visible and audible sniffing of the joke-teller,
pause;
and then a longer pause comes before the answer
…
“Today?”
). And other acting skills were helpful: being able to suggest the bodily movements of a spastic; to produce accents (“Vot are you doink, children?” “Fucking, Mamma.” “Dot's nice, just don't fight,” or as Rastus addressing the blacksnake which crawled in a torn pocket and out his fly: “Ah knowed you was black, and ah knowed you was long, but ah
nevah
knowed you had eyes!”); to simulate the facial expressions of those with strabismus, harelips, and receding jaws.

You couldn't, however, use blue material with parents or teachers, or even, given the era, with “good” girls as opposed to those who were “bad,” those, that is, who went beyond necking and engaged in mutual “petting” or even, in some cases, more. To entertain the respectable, Kellog therefore had to acquire a repertoire of hygienic jokes of the sort encountered in magazines in the dentist's waiting room or heard on the radio, but the trouble was
everybody
saw or heard those, and it was devastating to be beat to the punch-line by your audience. That was the trouble with jokes as such: once uttered, they were available to all, and it was precisely the funniest ones that were most repeated, so you always ran the risk of either not getting a laugh or, getting one, being identified as not original. Kellog would have liked to be socially acceptable in the routine way, namely, without making an especial effort, but as that had proved impossible, what he craved now was to be unique, superior to the herd, a headliner, the one-and-only, and that could hardly come about with twice-told material.

But it was one thing to want to invent a joke, and another to do it. Where do you begin? If not restrained by prudery in the matter of sex and prudence with respect to your audience (not all of whose affiliations might be known to the comedian), a headstart could be gained by using real or implied foul
language
or bigot's epithets: “‘Oh, how I love Dick,' said Richard's girl.”… “A nigger goes into a drugstore to buy rubbers. The druggist is this slick little sheeny…” But if obliged to keep a civil tongue in your head, you had to work much harder to arrive at something that was sufficiently biting to amuse but at which even the victim could not protest without attracting more derision. Fat people were God-given perfection, the ultimate; but eminently usable were the bald, the nearsighted, the bowlegged and the knock-kneed, those with impedimented speech, the effeminate male, and the unmarried female over forty.

Cruelty might not necessarily be funny, but nothing was funnier. This became clear to Kellog before he was out of his teens, but it was also evident to him that he had little gift for invention. He could tell jokes, even perform them with the vocal effects and bodily movements of a trained actor, but he could not cut one from the whole cloth. Soon he had to buy by mail, for twenty-five cents, a book entitled
The World's Hundred Best Jokes
and then its sequel,
100 More
, etc., and believed he could breathe easy for the moment with this stockpile behind it. But as ill luck would have it, one of the new acquaintances he had made through the exercise of wit plucked one of these volumes from the pocket of Jack's raincoat and held it high. “Hey, look where Kellog gets his jokes!”

But being so exposed had less effect on his other classmates than he at first had feared. In spite of the entertainment he had afforded them for months, most were indifferent to its sources.
He
was the one who got the laugh when he grabbed the other boy's right hand and thrust it aloft. “Hey, look where Riggins gets his lovin': Miss Rosie Palm!” He was helped by a blush of Riggins' that was so violent as to seem a prelude to hemorrhage, for by chance the straitlaced girl on whom Riggins had a crush was standing nearby at the time and though a reaction of disgust on her part would have been regrettable, her simper of amusement was disastrous: in the passion of self-pity Riggins upon the moment suspected her of not being the virgin he had supposed but rather a kind of slut, who would perhaps put out to anyone who applied, and took her to the movies and tried to feel her up. She made a scene in the theater, from which Riggins was thereupon banned for life, and next her father threatened to thrash him and subsequently almost came to blows with Gordon Riggins, Sr., after which the two families, friendly for a generation, became enemies.

And no one thought of blaming Jack Kellog, the only begetter of this calamitous sequence. Riggins in fact became, at least in his own mind, Kellog's best friend.

“I ain't any good with words, Jack. It don't matter with guys, but I just don't know how to talk to girls.”

Ordinarily Kellog would have responded, callously, with the gag about the bear coming down the chimney, but Riggins had uniquely addressed him by his first name, and he was moved.

“Huh. That's tough, Gordo.”

“See,” Riggins said from his urinal, next to the one being used by Kellog, “what I was thinking, that's your specialty, talkin': you got a million of ‘em. I don't care if they come from books, you know how to tell a joke. That one you told the other day, Jesus, it was real funny: the old coon seein' the snake crawlin' out of his pants and thinkin' it's his dick? I tried to tell that one to my old man, after supper that night, but you know what? I couldn't do it. I just can't get that nigger-talk right.” He had finished peeing and was violently whipping his peter in the air, to dry it. “He slapped my face, anyway: he's the only one allowed to tell a dirty joke.” Riggins punched his large fists together. “I tell you, I'm bigger'n him now. I could trim his ass any old day.”

Kellog was on the last button of his fly; it was his other pair of pants that had the zipper. In a slightly superior tone, as befitted an expert, he said, “Whoever you're talking to, you got to act like you're in charge whether you are or not. You can't let them think you're uncertain. And don't let ‘em rush you. And you have to get the words
exactly
right. For some reason, the same joke ain't funny if you stumble over just one word, They'll make fun of you for your mistake and won't laugh at the joke itself.”

“I don't know,” Riggins said dolefully. “I just get tongue-tied.” He knew no need to wash his hands, even though Kellog was providing a good example. As the latter was reaching for a paper towel, Riggins said, “What I was wondering, maybe you could put in a word for me with Betty Jane Hopper. Know what I mean? Crack a few jokes—clean ones, nothing dirty. She goes to Sunday school every week. Then work in someplace that I like her, that Gordon Riggins thinks she's neat.”

“Why the jokes?” asked Kellog. “I could just tell her, couldn't I?” Putting his talent to this sort of use would seem to demean it.

“Soften her up,” Riggins said as they went through the swinging doors into the basement corridor. “Girls listen to guys who make ‘em laugh.”

Kellog had noticed this, to a degree, but he had not arrived at Riggins' theory of the so-called softening-up process. Being entertained was another thing than being manipulated…or was it? After classes he lingered at the corner of the schoolyard, where Riggins had assured him Betty Jane could be encountered on her way home, and when she came along he said, “Hey, Betty Jane, did you ever hear the one about the big fat lady who went into the department store and asked the floorwalker where she could buy talcum powder? Now, this guy was bowlegged, see, and he said, ‘Walk this way.'” Kellog bowed his own legs and demonstrated. “So the lady said, ‘If I walked that way, I wouldn't need the powder!'”

Betty Jane frowned. “That's pretty smutty.”

“Are you kidding,” Kellog asked in false indignation. “Talcum powder?”

She shook her head. “You know very well what I mean, Jack Kellog. You're getting quite a name for yourself with these off-color jokes.”

“Come on, don't you have a sense of humor?” He was conscious of a newfound feeling of power. He had no memory of having addressed a girl to her face when he was alone with her, and though other homeward-bound students were nearby, he and Betty Jane were isolated from them at the moment.

“I certainly do, but I
don't
care for anything immoral. It just lowers a person.”

Her prissy little mouth annoyed him, and he did not find her very attractive in the first place. He liked long blond straight hair with a sheen, and hers was short and dark. Her eyes seemed small, her complexion was too pale, and whereas his ideal was big jugs with an otherwise slender body, she was stocky, and her chest was thick; her tits were actually undersized, so far as he could tell from the Argyle sweater. Why Riggins was so stuck on her Kellog could not have explained. But he was irritated now by her criticism, and he remembered his mission.

“Look, I don't care what
you
think about me,” he said to her petulant profile as they started up the sidewalk. “What I'm supposed to tell you is that Gordon Riggins likes you a lot.”

She stopped and stared at him. “Is that supposed to be funny?”

“Well, dammit,” Kellog said. “What's wrong with you? This guy told me to say it, and I have, and that's that, as far as I'm concerned.”

“You don't have to curse,” Mary Jane told him. “I was just asking. Never, never have I given Gordon Riggins any reason whatsoever to think about me. I hardly know who he is. Is he that stupid jerk who is practically illiterate in class?”

This appealed to Kellog's natural malice. “That's pretty much on the head of the nail. I hear when he was born, the doctor lifted him up and slapped his face.”

Betty Jane giggled at this, though she said, “Oh, you're so awful.”

“He's so dumb,” said Kellog, “he thinks Lincoln's Gettysburg Address is a post-office box.”

Now Betty Jane shrieked. “See, you don't have to be dirty to be funny.” She had the most grating laugh he had ever heard, though naturally he liked her better now.

“You know, he asked me to lend him a dime and said, ‘I ain't had a bite all day.'… So I bit him!”

When her laughter was done, she asked, “Oh, my gosh, where do you get ‘em?”

“Gordo went to the doctor to have a physical exam, and the doctor examined him and said, ‘You're sick.' Gordo said, ‘I feel fine. I want to get a second opinion.' ‘Okay,' said the doc, ‘you're ugly too.'”

Now Betty Jane laughed so hard that a breath went down the wrong way and she coughed and clasped her books to her chest. “If you don't stop you'll give me heart failure,” said she when she was again able to speak.

“Okay, then,” said Kellog, “I told you what I was supposed to: Riggins likes you. So long, then.” They were coming to a corner, and he had run out of ready material. And even if he had not, he was aware of the need to leave the stage while they still wanted more instead of waiting till they began to long for relief.

“Where are you going now?” asked Betty Jane. “You live in this direction too, don't you?”

“Got to see a guy about a horse,” he breezily answered, using a line he did not understand but had heard on the radio more than once.

“Well, say,” said Betty Jane, a slight flush washing her freckles, “maybe we'll meet again I don't know where or when.”

Kellog grunted. Now he had to pretend he really did have some important business elsewhere. He might go to the drugstore and buy some zinc oxide to put on his pimples (it was of little effect but you had to do something), but in recent weeks his acne had been clearing up, and the reason could not have been that he was beating his meat any less nowadays. Yet here he was, talking with a girl in the flesh, and sex was the last thing on his mind. Thick ankle-socks above dirty saddle oxfords and below a skirt of plaid wool was not a costume that evoked lust. His taste was for black lace underwear with long garters and high heels; tits upthrust and compressed to form a deep cleavage not far below the chin, in a brassiere strained to the breaking point; glistening scarlet lips; and a smoldering cigarette in a long holder of black onyx.