The Joker: A Memoir (30 page)

But there’s even more to the joke. It’s the homophobic inverse of Virgil Thomson’s famous quip while walking down the street with a friend. A gorgeous young woman walked by, and Thomson sighed,
“Dear, when I see a beautiful woman like that I can’t help wishing I were a lesbian.” At first I had dismissed this witticism as an easy reversal of expectation. Only on hearing it the fourth or fifth time (and it’s unclear whether Thomson actually said it) and pondering my gay friends’ affection for the quip, did I begin to understand the depth of the wit. Thomson, reveling in how his gayness defined both his sense of himself and how he wanted to be seen, understands that if he physically desired a woman he’d have to be a lesbian. Thomson’s sexual desire does not lead, but follows, sexual identity.

•  •  •

In high school, jokes about gays, bestiality, and incest flowed together because they were all about the territories lust was forbidden to explore. Because bestiality seemed too ridiculous to take seriously, I laughed easily at the torrent of jokes about it, but I began to wonder if I shouldn’t take it more seriously.

The country boys, bussed to Sidney Lanier High from the country, regaled us air force brats with stories about stump-trained heifers, receptive sheep, and chickens so ubiquitous that nobody noticed when, from time to time, a hen went missing. Since I had never seen female genitalia, I occasionally glanced at the privates of a dog or cat, and involuntarily wondered if it
would
be possible. Even those few clandestine glances made me feel like an irredeemable degenerate. So I listened avidly to the country boys’ jokes. I wanted to know the things I wasn’t supposed to know. What happened in the showers that left my father speechless? What happened in the barn, behind the barn, and out in the farthest pasture?

Like a lot of boys I was fascinated by the details, the know-how, of the forbidden. As Samuel Johnson once said, “There is nothing so minute or inconsiderable that I would not rather know it than not,” though it’s hard to envision the Great Cham listening raptly to pimply boys explain that a stump-trained heifer was one taught to stand
still in front of a tree stump so they’d have easy access to her, and that if you wear hip boots you can jam a sheep’s rear legs in them so she can’t wander off during sex.

The country boys knew I wanted to know, so of course they refused to tell what they meant when they yelled, laughing, “Get up, wo-bak! Get up, wo-bak!” They sniggered it in gym class softly so the coach couldn’t hear. They called it to one another in the hall between classes, and mumbled it in front of teachers, sure that no one would understand. It was their joke and they weren’t sharing it with any of us outsiders, the air force brats who were new in town.

I was crazy to understand the farrago of incomprehensible syllables. Not until a decade ago, reading Gershon Legman’s
The Rationale of the Dirty Joke
, a bravura compendium of filth and screwball Freudian interpretation, did I discover the rest of the joke. Git-up-whoa-back! Git-up! Whoa! Back! It’s what the world’s laziest pervert says when he’s screwing a mule.

I thought bestiality was merely a joke, but in one of my classes, the boy who sat behind me claimed otherwise. He’d already bragged that he and his junior high buddies had, just the year before, hurled burning bags of their own feces at Martin Luther King Jr. and the Selma-to-Montgomery marchers, but I was even more disturbed when he hissed into my ear, with moist intimacy, “Hudgins, you ever fuck a chicken, Hudgins?” When I, incredulous, croaked, “No,” he said, “Hudgins, this is what you gotta do first. You gotta snip off its legs off with wire cutters or it’ll claw your thighs up something terrible.

“Oh man!” he sang to the back of my stiff neck, his voice soft with remembered ecstasy, “you ought to
feel
that dyin’ quiver!”

When I jerked my head around and stared at him, trying to determine if he was telling the truth or just trying to get under my skin, he cackled. When I turned again to face the teacher, he slapped the back of my head, delighted in my shock. Some
days—this is true—I actually calculated the chances that Satan had assumed human form and sat behind me in tenth-grade biology, whispering lascivious iniquities into my ear.

Now that boy reminds me of the horse fucker on the psychiatrist’s couch. I’m sure he would have beaten me to the ground if I had ever suggested that he had made love with another boy. It was a hen, not a rooster. What do you think I am, a queer?

•  •  •

In my first-period gym class, sitting on the bleachers, trading jokes and stories, the country boys repeated, with fervent conviction, the rural legend that humans could impregnate ewes. Months after the act, a violated ewe would drop a distorted creature in the pasture, half-human, half-lamb, a ghastly, doomed mutant being that would die shortly after it was born because . . . because . . . because things like that just can’t live, that’s why.

In “The Sheep Child,” the poet James Dickey takes the adolescent myth and points out its purpose:

Farm boys wild to couple

With anything . . .

will keep themselves off

Animals by legends of their own:

There’s this thing that’s only half

Sheep like a woolly baby

Pickled in alcohol . . .

The myth of the sheep child keeps adolescent horndogs off the livestock. If during birthing season in early spring, your father finds a woolly mutant baby slipping from a ewe, your explanation that evening over the family dinner is going to be awkward.

The sheep child lived in the stories we told, laughed at, and
flinched from on the gym bleachers at Sidney Lanier High. And he was very effective at his job of protecting the sheep. In Alabama, in Wyoming, in Mississippi, in Greece, in Some-Rural-Place-That-You-Don’t-Like, how do they separate the men from the goats? With crowbars. And this story is a crowbar with a lot of leverage.

In that tenth-grade gym class, though I could hardly bear to think about it, I always laughed at the farmer who hated bestiality, just hated it. Why? Because when he was having sex with his mule, it was exhausting to keep running around to the front to kiss her. The tenderness inside the depravity undid me. I loved the comically pornographic Keystone Kop picture of a naked man frantically running back and forth from one end of a mule to the other so he can share the romance with her while not losing interest in his own pleasure, but I writhed in embarrassment at the stupidity of the poor, uncomprehending boob who so confused lust with love. I identified with him. The creepy poignancy of the farmer’s misplaced decency inside his greater indecency upset me. It seemed the sort of idealistic mistake I’d make if I were to, um, find myself in his situation. He had lost his head over a piece of ass, and not just a figurative ass either. And not just a piece. All of her.

•  •  •

In high school, we learn some identities are transient, experimental, or playful. Others are ineradicable. Does anybody not know the classic joke that tells us that?

A young man sits down at a bar and falls into conversation with a grizzled old fellow. When the old guy finishes the whiskey in front of him, the young man buys him another one, clearly not the old guy’s second whiskey of the day. The drink makes the old guy loquacious, and in gratitude, he wants to share the wisdom his eight decades of life have taught him.

“Look out that window there, sonny. Those eighty acres of feed corn and the eighty acres of prime pasture next to them, I made
them out of scrub and nothing—but do they call me John the Farmer around here? No, they don’t.”

Next drink.

“And the fence around all those one-hundred-sixty acres? I built that fence with my own two hands, felling the trees, cutting the boards, setting the posts. But do they call me John the Fence Maker? No, they don’t.”

Next drink.

“And remember that bridge you drove over coming into town? I built it myself, standing there in the mud of the river. But do they call me John the Bridge Builder? No, they damn well don’t.

“But you fuck one goat . . .”

Bestiality is a zero-tolerance offense. You do it once and you forever forfeit all your achievements and complexities and become merely, irrevocably, and comically John the Goat Fucker. It’s a steep price to pay for an ephemeral, if presumably pleasurable, depravity. It was easy to extrapolate the lesson behind the joke to other sins, iniquities, and indulgences, including homosexuality and incest. Suck one cock, you’re a cocksucker. Fuck one mother . . .

The closest of the intimate taboos was the one that made my friends and me flinch the most. One morning, before Analysis class began, my friend Tom observed that he had nothing against incest in the abstract. It was only when he considered his limited list of options . . . His voice trailed off and he waited for me to laugh, which I did.

Walking home that afternoon, as I cut through Sears for the blast of air-conditioning and then continued south on Court Street, tramping along the edge of people’s yards because there were no sidewalks, I passed the time ticking down my own circumscribed list of possibilities. A few female cousins, not so bad, but aunts? Oh, please. After that there were, jeez, my grandmothers. That was beyond nasty. My brothers? Mom, Dad? Then I had to stop. I’d meant
to entertain myself by toying with my gag reflex, but now my lips cramped from being curled so long.

Jokes love to play with visceral responses, and incest offers one of the most reliable revulsions. In the tenth grade, just as study hall was beginning, a girl I barely knew popped into the room, stopped in front of my desk, and asked, “What’s the grossest thing in the world?”

Her hair was cut in a brunette pageboy, and she wore a burgundy crew neck sweater over a white blouse. Gold chain necklace. I seem to remember a green and red plaid skirt.

“I don’t know,” I said.

She leaned forward and looked at me intently. “It’s when your eighty-year-old grandmother kisses you good night—and she slips you the tongue.”

I scrunched my lips as a little bark of laughter burst through them. My mouth felt unclean. I wanted to spit. And I was also exquisitely aware that an attractive girl had just told me a joke about French kissing and laughed at my reaction. She said “slips you the tongue” as if she were nonchalantly familiar with an act I had only dreamed of.

Being a moron, I assumed that she had told me the joke only because she thought it was funny and was totally unaware that a boy might wonder if she were flirting with him. I guiltily dismissed the thought. It was unworthy of her. But the joke, I loved the joke! When she left, I whispered it to the boy on the other side of me, and kept telling it to anyone who’d listen for the next two days, until I’d exhausted my list of available listeners, gleefully telling it as a grandpa joke to girls, and to boys as a grandma joke.

Boys winced as they laughed, but girls often swatted at the air in front of their breasts, elbows held tight to their sides. They looked as though they were batting away a bee or trying to brush dust off their sweaters. The gut response is so overwhelmingly strong that
listeners felt as if their minds were hijacking their nervous systems, and I was fascinated and delighted to see words exercise that much power over bodies.

The question “What’s the grossest thing in the world?” sent us searching for feces, death, and mutilation, but then reversed direction when confronted with the innocent image of a grandma giving us a goodnight smack on the cheek as she tucked us in, an untainted moment of pleasure and security that we were not far removed from. Then, at the last moment, a dangerous swerve spun us into sex, incestuous sex. Was grandma a horny pervert or was she going senile? It didn’t matter. We were shifting from a child’s secure intimacy to an adult’s riskier sexual kind, and we needed to know the rules. No matter why Grandma might do this, don’t let her. Our visceral responses confirmed that we got the message.

Me, I twitched even more than my friends. My grandmomma dipped Bruton’s Snuff.

But the entire time I was absorbing the warnings and prohibitions of these jokes I was also telling and thinking about a strange joke that disturbed me greatly for years. It didn’t reinforce sexual categories but broke them down, challenged them, confused them. It was a joke you whispered to one person at a time, not one you gathered a bunch of friends around to hear. And my compulsive telling of it was more than a little like probing a wound, picking at a scab in my psyche.

A truck driver is taking a leak beside the road when he hears a voice farther out in the woods, crying “Help, Help!” The truck driver zips his fly, pushes through the brush into a clearing, and finds a man standing in the middle of the clearing, buck naked, with his hands tied to his ankles.

“Whoa, what happened to you?” asks the truck driver.

The man twists his head up at the truck driver and says, “I picked up a hitchhiker who pulled a gun on me and forced me to
drive out here. Then he made me take off my clothes, tied me up like this, and drove off with my clothes, my money, and my car.”

The truck driver kneels down beside him and says, “Those ropes look awful tight.”

“Yeah, I can’t move at all.”

The truck driver thinks for a moment, stands up, walks behind the man, pulls down his zipper, and says, “Buddy, this just ain’t your day, is it.”

The cruel humor is of course that just when you think things can’t get any worse and rescue is at hand, things can in fact get worse.

We enter the scene through the trucker’s eyes. So we, with the trucker, walk into the clearing, see the abducted and bound man, and try to understand what we are seeing. When the trucker reaches his conclusion, we are standing with him, grasping the possibility of a free fuck, complicit because we are sharing his point of view.

Is the truck driver, usually stereotyped as hypermasculine, gay—as well as a blithe rapist? Or is he just a man seizing without scruple what chance offers, taking pleasure without anxiety for whatever category it falls in, unconcerned that his pleasure and another’s horror depend on each other?