The Joker: A Memoir (11 page)

•  •  •

My uncles looked like my father, but without his austere expression. Bald men with large noses, they had pink faces creased with pleasure. Would I grow up to look like them or like my father? A few years ago a friend I hadn’t seen in twenty years mentioned that he had enjoyed watching my genial face age through the years in the author photos on my books. He was worried I’d be offended by his describing me as “aging,” but what caught my ear was “genial.” I’ve turned into a version of my uncles.

On the road between Herschel’s parsonage and his church, there was a factory with the company’s name painted on the side in huge white block letters:
SMITH MANUFACTURING COMPANY
. Every time we drove past—and I mean every single time—Herschel said, “So that’s why there are so many of them!” He said it with such compulsive consistency that I’d bet my next paycheck he said it even when he was in the car by himself. He chuckled at his own joke, which was in fact not his but something one of his parishioners had told him years before, as he freely admitted. But he had taken it over and it
never failed to amuse him. When he was moved to another church in another town, he continued to share his parishioner’s witticism whenever joke-telling time came around.

When I was young I couldn’t fathom why he loved this joke. But the tidiness of the pun lodged it in my head, and I’ve come to see how it must have pleased Herschel to drive each day past the perfect setup to a good little joke, a witticism that a preacher could tell even the stiffest starched shirt in his congregation. With each retelling, he must have enjoyed recalling the first time he heard it: there he was, driving past the factory with his friend, relishing again that half-panicked moment when he looked around to see why his friend should say, out of the blue, “So that’s why there are so many of them!” Then seeing the sign, making the connection: Suddenly nonsense turned into sense. His laugh was part admiration at the understated elegance of the wordplay, part relief that his friend wasn’t a nut, and part satisfaction at solving the puzzle. Now he shared and relived that aesthetic convergence. Do I exaggerate? I don’t think so. That’s how
my
mind works.

For all my adolescent superiority to Herschel’s pun, not only have I remembered it for forty years, I’ve thought about it every time I see a Smith or a Jones or a Johnson or a Williams Manufacturing Company. There are more of them than you’d think.

Herschel told a different joke one day while I was sitting with my brothers, squeezed onto his and my Aunt Hazel’s small sofa, flipping through one of their magazines while sunlight flooded the small parsonage. A boy and girl are kissing in the back of a car, and when they break their clench, the boy says, “Honey, that was some powerful kiss! I ended up with your gum.”

“Dum? Dat’s dot dum. I dot a told.”

I cringed, twisted my lips, and laughed involuntarily while swatting my hands in front of my face, as if I were trying to keep a fly from landing on my nose. Herschel roared with delight at my
boyish prissiness. The idea of another person’s snot in my mouth excited such a strong response that I twitched and shivered for the next fifteen minutes, and every time I did, Herschel laughed again. I’d never heard a gross-out joke from an adult before, much less from a minister—and a minister who acknowledged without judgment that a boy and girl would make out in the back of a car! This was heady talk! I was almost dizzy.

I sneaked a glance at my father. Was this joke going to mean trouble? Would he scold me later for laughing? He chuckled at my histrionic revulsion, but he looked uneasy, indecisive. Then he seemed to let his unease go, and I could almost see him think, “That’s just Herschel. He likes to push at the boundaries a bit, but he never goes too far. His heart is pure.” If I had told that joke to Herschel, I’d be in hot water. My heart was not pure, and we all knew it.

Throughout junior high and into college, though, I had great success telling the joke, if, as I do, you consider making your friends lose their appetite a success. My cousin Julie, Uncle Bob’s daughter and a Methodist minister now herself, was scandalized as a girl by Herschel’s joke about the cannibal who passed his brother in the woods, though now she laughs both at the joke and her old squeamishness. The joke seemed astonishingly racy then to both of us, the allusion to the natural function more shocking than the double taboo of fraternal cannibalism. Why? Because cannibalism was impossible to take seriously, we were free to imagine it, but talking about doing dooty was dirty and not to be discussed, though it was an act we performed every day, or at least on good days.

Another joke that Herschel got away with was telling us that when he, Bob, and Dad were kids they couldn’t afford to keep a Sears Roebuck catalog in the outhouse like the rich folks, much less toilet paper. They kept a bushel basket of corncobs. You wiped yourself, he explained, first with a red corncob and then a white corncob. Did I know why?

No.

To see if you needed to use another red corncob.

I liked the joke because I knew Herschel was making fun of the you-kids-have-it-so-easy-now banter that kept erupting when the families got together—while hammering it home. He was also reminding us that indoor plumbing was a late arrival in their lives, a luxury they did not enjoy until adulthood. My parents didn’t mind the joke because Herschel was telling us something they wanted us to know. The joke slightly puzzled me, though. I understood the need for more wiping would reveal itself more clearly on the white cob than the red, and that texture was at the essence of the joke. “Rough as a cob” was how everyone described a country boy with no manners. But was there another detail of country life that I was missing? Were red cobs coarser and better for scrubbing than white ones? My aunt always shuddered at the punch line.

•  •  •

I was even more finicky about sex, which was a mystery to me. It scared me, and like most kids I freaked out when I tried to comprehend my elders doing it. Once while I was visiting my Uncle Bob in Toledo—I must have been fifteen—my cousin Jane handed me a thin, dusty box her father had hidden on the top of one of his bookshelves. Herschel had sent it to him—a gift from one minister to another.

“Look inside,” my cousin said. I lifted the lid, and pulled out a sheet of paper announcing the box contained a monokini, the male answer to the bikini, which was then new and getting a lot of press coverage. The gag gift from Florida was a skimpy polyester man’s bathing suit with an eight-inch tube sewn to the front, hanging down like an empty sausage casing.

My cousin laughed and looked at me, waiting for me to laugh. Because I didn’t want her to see I was creeped out, I squeezed loose a weak laugh before I hurriedly replaced the monokini in the box
and shoved it back into her hands. Why was I repulsed by this silly gag gift? I’d been telling dead-baby jokes with utter delight for years.

I was shocked that a minister would indulge in sexual humor, but mostly my prissy adolescent modesty was ruffled. The vaguely transsexual merging of men’s and women’s clothing perturbed me, and so did the faux-silk slipperiness of the fabric, which cheapened sex with a tawdry lubricity that still troubles me. As soon as I looked at this thing that was clearly never meant to be worn, that existed only for the concept, the joke of it, I imagined my uncle pulling the panties up his legs, stuffing his penis into the polyester tube in the front of the thong, and walking around the room. And that led me to imagine myself doing it. To a boy who’d never come close to having sex, those images were so threatening, so disruptive of my sense of an ordered sexual world, that I couldn’t see the humor in the monokini, and the fact that two ministers could laugh at what I couldn’t disturbed me even more.

My own body was frightening. Week after week, the preachers, citing the apostle Paul, railed from the pulpit about the “works of the flesh.” The flesh was a depraved substance our souls were trapped in, and I absorbed Paul’s contempt. The body was dirty. I could see that. Over and above the evacuations that I never once wiped away with a corncob, my body peed, spat, and blew boogers out its nose. Each night, while I slept, crust formed in my eyes. My mother scraped brown wax from my ears. Zits erupted on my face and squirted onto the mirror when I squeezed them. My body blistered and oozed. Even something as comically innocent as my belly button collected loose fibers from my shirt—and when I swabbed my finger around in the puckered hole, gray lint stuck to it and stank. And what about farts? Sometimes they were laughingly called “poots” and “toots,” and my brothers and I sang out, “He who first smelt it, dealt it!” Sometimes, a fart got us backhanded out of
the chair at the dinner table. As a result, I grew up with a Puritan fascination with, and mistrust of, bodily functions that my mother derided as “nice-nasty.”

I was as thrilled by this impermanent substance my soul occupied as I was wary of it. I instinctively understood Paul’s Platonic contempt for transient flesh that distracts our souls from the eternal. And yet God had put me in it, and even before sex arrived and made both pleasure and shame more intense, I loved the flesh’s passing pleasures. I raced to open the blue can of Maxwell House because I was enraptured by the first blast of coffee fragrance when the can opener breached the vacuum seal with a brusque
psst
. I sat in the tub for hours, reading comic books, luxuriating in the warm water till all my digits were wrinkled and tender, as if they were melting, and my mother forced me to dry off and put my pajamas on.

It seems natural to me that a boy so attuned to the competing tugs of flesh and spirit would find that dirty jokes, with their emphasis on bodily pleasures and mortality, possess a power that edges into the theological. The gap between what we want to be true and what we find to be true, between the ideal and the real, between soul and flesh, is so huge that when we reduce it to concrete examples we laugh. The romantically deluded boy who’s kissed his girlfriend so passionately that he thinks he’s snorkled up her gum is informed brusquely that his romanticism has blinded him to what he actually has in his mouth. The body itself continually undercuts our inclination to romanticize our desires. Similarly, the farmer stranded on his roof has a concept of the divine that he is forced to redefine. In the world of perfect forms there are no floods. But if there were, God himself would rescue us from them. The deluded farmer is trying, by will and faith, to turn this world into the perfect world, and he is slapped down for it. But why should that happen? Christ himself ordered us, “Be perfect,”
the most startling of all his commandments and the only one that always makes me laugh.
As if
.

God watched everything I did, judged it good or bad, and kept a running total. More attentive to the bad than the good, God, as I understood him, was not very good at communicating positive reinforcement. I grew tired of being watched, distraught at being judged, and resentful of being instructed. Why did every story have just one moral? And was the moral always the whole of what the story was telling? I was, I thought, like the six-year-old boy in Sunday school, when the preacher’s wife is instructing the class about planning for hard times ahead:

“I’m going to describe something, and I want you to raise your hands as soon as you know what it is. This thing lives in trees,” she says, and pauses, waiting to see if anyone is willing to guess yet.

“It eats nuts.” She pauses again. “And it’s gray.”

No one raises a hand.

“It has a long bushy gray tail. . . .”

The children look at one another nervously, but no one says anything or raises a hand. The teacher is getting exasperated.

“And it jumps from branch to branch . . . ? And stores acorns for the winter . . . ?”

Finally, one boy raises his hand and says, “Well, I know the answer has to be Jesus—but it sure as hell sounds like a squirrel to me!”

•  •  •

Montgomery, Alabama—where I attended high school and college—is one of many places in the South that proudly dub themselves “the buckle of the Bible Belt.” Its religiosity is airless and pervasive. Disregarding the Supreme Court’s ruling against school prayer, Sidney Lanier High’s popularly elected student chaplain read weekly devotionals over the intercom. Some homeroom teachers, including mine in my senior year, passed the Bible around the class every day for students to read a verse to the class. Pep rallies and
student-body meetings began with a prayer led by the chaplain or a minister invited in from the community. One invocation, led by a local Baptist preacher, turned into a full-fledged revival meeting complete with an altar call for those wishing to be saved, to the astonishment of some students and the muttered rage and amazement of the Catholics and Jews.

As an adolescent in revolt against the unreflective pieties of my time and place, I was astounded that our teachers, who hammered at us to be good citizens and obey the law, so blithely thumbed their noses at the separation of church and state. But Christianity began as an oppressed religion, and its holy writings are steeped in oppression and defiance of authority. Paranoia often persists among believers because reading scripture leads us to identify with the early Church. Yet even I, a boy who went to church at least once and often twice a week, saw that the people who were loudly proclaiming their oppression were in fact the oppressors, a disparity both amusing and infuriating. In the Montgomery of my youth, the Christians were the Romans.

“Why don’t Baptists screw standing up?” asked a kid in my gym class. “They’re afraid someone will think they’re dancing,” he sneered, an answer that delighted me; I was fascinated to see my faith judged with a jaundiced eye. The non-Baptists mocked us Baptists as hypocrites who sinned in private but didn’t want to be seen committing the lesser but more public lapse of dancing. The Baptists I grew up with, though, danced every time they could get a date to any of the Sidney Lanier socials: the Junior–Senior prom, the homecoming dance, or the ROTC Ball. I know because I saw them on the dance floor every time I worked up the courage to ask a girl out. In Sunday school, we talked openly about the girls we had invited and where we had bought their corsages. For suburban Baptist teenagers like us, the joke was about rural believers who still thought dancing was a sin, though our elders, with
tetchy wit, called dancing “the horizontal expression of a vertical desire.”