The Joker: A Memoir (37 page)

Westron wynde, when wilt thou blow,

The small raine down can raine.

Cryst, if my love were in my armes

And I in my bedde again!

Something like the same longing runs through both poems, but Coulette’s couplet is both more refined in meter and rhyme and
coarser in sentiment. The speaker of the “The Single Life” has clearly not always been single. Like the lonely lover in “Westron Wynde,” our modern lover too imagines his woman—or
a
woman—back in bed with him, but it’s a manual imagining. A bit of an awkward romantic himself, he eschews the tidiness of Kleenex and creates the love spot, which he sleeps on in a sort of perverse nostalgia. But since he’s alone, the act lacks the practical gallantry it would have if the lover were actually there. He affects a jaunty tone to mock his own predicament, while pretending to be surprised (“I find”) to discover himself seeking such uncomfortable comfort. Beneath the calculations of his rhyme and meter, the poem sounds like something blurted out late at night, the sort of joking maybe-I-mean-it, maybe-I-don’t confession that makes us turn away in discomfiture, uncertain if our friend understands just how much he’s revealed and wondering if he’ll remember in the morning, sober, what he’s said. What makes us embarrassed for him is the human longing he’s inappropriately and graphically revealed.

•  •  •

When I recall my single life, the time between Jill and Erin, my wife, I prefer to remember the times I wasn’t entirely single. Depleted by a divorce from a woman Erin calls my “evil, training wife” and an agonizing split with Jill, I spent a couple of months with Julia, a psychologist in training, who was wise, kind, my age, funny, and married. One of the first jokes she told me was similar to the medieval German ones. A man’s penis and his feet get into an argument about who has it rougher. The feet say, “I’ve got it tougher than you. No question. Every morning, he straps me in a dead animal hide and walks on me all day long.”

“I wish I had it that easy. Every night, he puts a bag over my head and makes me do push-ups till I puke.”

In response I told her why being a dick is the worst job in the world. You hang out with two nuts, your best friend’s a pussy, your
nearest neighbor’s an asshole, and when you get excited you throw up and then faint.

Early in our joke flirting, she told me the old racist joke that Jill had also loved. A black man goes to the doctor to get a vasectomy. When the doctor enters the examining room, he sees his patient is wearing a tuxedo. “Why in the world are you wearing a tuxedo?” the doctor asks.

The black man replies, “If I’m going to be impotent, I’m going to look impotent.” Zip Coon returns to mispronounce a word for us in a parody of black dialect, and once more he is associated with sexuality. The joke was regrettably prophetic. Because I felt guilty dating a married woman, I was borderline impotent much of our time together. A curious additional guilt exacerbates the gnawing culpability of adultery when you’re unable to give your lover the full benefit of her transgression. But Julia was, as I said, kind and wise. When, talking about my divorce and breakup, I said something about being depressed, she softly corrected me, saying, “No wonder you are sad.” She was right. Calling sadness by its right name gave it the dignity it deserved and held out the hope that it was transitory. Her wisdom extends even to herself. Years later, reconciled with her husband, she told me over coffee horror story after horror story of counseling beaten, starved, prostituted, and incestuously raped children.

“My God,” I said, “that must be depressing. I’d want to kill myself.”

“Why should I be depressed?” she said calmly. “I’m
helping
them.”

And she loved parrot jokes.

One involves a Jew who enters a pet shop and a parrot shouts “Awwwk! Moshe Dayan is a jerk-off! Awwwwk! Moshe Dayan is a jerk-off!”

Enraged by this slur on the Israeli minister of defense, the Jew
confronts the pet shop owner, who says that he’s embarrassed, but what can he do? He bought the parrot from the estate of an anti-Semite before he knew its quirks. Eyeing the Jew, the owner says, insinuatingly, “The parrot’s for sale, you know.”

After a moment’s thought, the Jew buys the parrot and, all the way home, the parrot, in his cage on the front seat of the car, screams, “Awwwk, Moshe Dayan is a jerk-off! Awwwk, Moshe Dayan is a jerk-off!”

Once they get inside the front door, the new owner grabs the bird out of his cage and yanks its tongue out. Then he returns to the pet shop, hands the cage to the owner, and smirks, “Here, see if you can sell a parrot that doesn’t talk.”

Pleased with himself, he drops by the pet store a week later to see what’s happened. As soon as the bird sees him, it flips one wing over his left eye, imitating Dayan’s eye patch. He drops the other wing to his crotch and makes an exaggerated wanking motion.

The joke’s only fairly amusing, and fewer and fewer of us can recall Moshe Dayan and his eye patch, but what’s irresistible to me was seeing, and now remembering, a good-looking, thirty-year-old curly-headed doctoral student throwing an imitation wing over her eye with one hand and jerking the other hand up and down in front of her crotch, imitating a speechless parrot imitating Moshe Dayan masturbating.

Julia was also the first person to tell me one of the great jokes of the last fifty years. Man buys a parrot. Parrot curses all day and all night without ceasing, flaunting the most inventive invective and curdled filth imaginable. After a while, the man becomes worn out from being subjected to the relentless barrage of profanity, and he’s embarrassed and lonely because the parrot has driven away all his friends and potential girlfriends. He tries to reason with the bird, asking it to temper its language, at least when people are around.

His request makes the bird even more profane. Cursing up
a storm, it mocks the man for being a friendless, unloved pansy. Infuriated, not knowing what to do, the man picks the parrot up by its feet, slams it into the freezer, slams the door, and stalks off. After a couple of hours, he begins to worry about the parrot freezing to death. Bracing for yet more swearing and insults, he opens the freezer door.

To his surprise the parrot immediately says, “Sir, I want to apologize profoundly for my terrible behavior, and I want to assure you, sir, that from this moment on I will be the model of good behavior and civility. You will have, sir, no further complaints about my vocabulary or behavior.”

The man is dubious, but the parrot is as good as its word—polite, deferential, and even obsequious in its desire to please. After three weeks the parrot, though, clearly has something on its mind. “Sir,” it begs, “do please forgive me if I’m being too inquisitive, and of course you don’t have to answer. That’s entirely up to you. But if you don’t mind, would you please tell me what the chicken did?”

For me, the bird’s voice is forever Julia’s oleaginous creation of it, and the bird’s last question is a triumph of her storytelling. I wonder if she didn’t see me as a bit like the parrot. Over another cup of coffee a few years ago, she told me that, as a psychologist, she had long speculated that I might suffer from a mild form of Tourette’s syndrome. I have a propensity for profanity and a delight in invective, like Caliban in
The Tempest
, who tells Prospero that he is grateful for the darker resources of the language: “You taught me language, and my profit on’t / Is I know how to curse.” And of course Jill had taken a professional interest in my twitchy legs and my susceptibility to muscular and vocal tics, some of them nearly involuntary.

Did my compulsive joke telling, especially of offensive and vulgar jokes, give me a marginally acceptable way to use profanity in public? she wondered. At times I think she was right, given my
powerful impulse toward crude joking. At other times I think she is wrong. I get no pleasure, merely relief, from jerking my head to the side, as I used to do, or by popping air against the roof of my mouth with my tongue, as I now find myself doing, sometimes startling even myself with the sharp clicking noise. Occasionally the joking is compulsive, and I’m startled by what I hear coming out of my mouth. More often, though, I simply take immense, deliberate pleasure in laughing, making others laugh, and thinking about laughter.

•  •  •

There were other girlfriends, other jokes. I must also celebrate the girlfriend with the marvelous dark throaty chuckle who asked me a question that has haunted me for twenty years: Why do cheerleaders wear such short skirts? She wasn’t telling a joke. She’d heard only that much and assumed that I would know. Though I have searched high and mostly low for an answer, I’ve never found one. I’m afraid the punch line might be something as insipid as “so the losers will have something to cheer for.” Did she perhaps mishear the homophobic riddle that asks, “Why do cheerleaders in San Francisco
not
wear short skirts?” “So that when they sit down their balls won’t show?” Or is the mystery of the joke still a mystery, waiting to be appreciated? (Mystery solved: A copy editor of this book just told me the punch line is “To make the fans’ root harder.”) The classic joke on ladies’ garments is probably, “Why do widows wear black garters?” “In memory of those who have passed beyond.” It is a joke so close to benign I believe I first heard it from one of my godly minister uncles.

Because we lived thousands of miles apart and rarely saw each other, our relationship wasn’t destined for the long haul, but every week when I called her I fell in love again with her laugh. You are “so silly” she told me over and over again, laughing, because I’d say almost anything to provoke her great dark-chocolate chuckle. I reveled in it the way an otter revels in water.

Silly, my girlfriends called me, knowing I made myself silly for their delight, knowing too that sharing jokes with someone is a way of saying to them that you trust them enough not to think you are stupid but deliberately aping stupidity and that you trust them to trust your good intentions.
Cill Lee
, they said, playing with the pronunciation, pulling it out, making
silly
silly.

Sometimes jokes make it clear when a relationship is bound to founder short of love.

In the early days of getting to know each other, a girlfriend and I drove the tedious length of Illinois together. I liked her very much. I wanted to love her. I was taking her home to meet my father in Montgomery. As the cornfields of southern Illinois went on for mile after unvarying hot green mile, I ran through every bit of conversation I could think of and then started telling jokes. The one that caused the problem might have been one of the racist jokes I’ve written about earlier. Or it could have been a joke I’d heard just recently from Henri Coulette, who lived almost his entire life in Los Angeles.

“What are the first three words a Mexican baby hears?” Henri asked as I was driving him from his room in the student union at the University of Iowa to the Kmart so he could buy toiletries. My mind raced to the famous three words “I love you,” then tried to figure out what they would be in Spanish. Before I could go any further, Henri answered, “Attention, Kmart shoppers.” I laughed so hard I almost drove into a telephone pole, and Henri laughed too, enjoying his own joke and my response. I had to pull over to the side of the road while Henri and I composed ourselves.

“Why do you think that would be funny?” my girlfriend asked, wanting me to justify my apparent racism.

Though I bristled, I tried to explain my complex attraction to the joke. First, I laughed simply because the joke had taken a turn I hadn’t expected. It also amused me because I knew that Henri had
only thought of the joke because we were driving to Kmart. And it opened a world I hadn’t thought about. The jokes I’d heard about Latinos were few, rote, and mostly served to support the familiar homegrown racism: Why do Mexicans refuse to let their kids marry blacks? They are afraid the kids will be too lazy to steal. But Henri’s joke went in an entirely new direction. It mocked Latinos for being poor and for shopping at the déclassé Kmart—the very store we were driving to and a chain I had patronized without irony since high school, my mother and I chasing the blue light around the store to see what was on sale. The prejudice against Kmart startled me almost as much as the one against Mexican-Americans because it was also a joke on me.

“Are you sure there isn’t really another reason you are laughing at the joke?” she asked. Her eyes were bright and encouraging, the eyes of a parent trying to elicit a confession from a pigheaded adolescent.

“What would that be?” I asked. I’m sure I must have snarled.

“It’s a very unpleasant joke.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Then why did you tell it?”

“I just explained that.”

“Do you think what you said really explains why you laughed?”

“It’s the best I can do. Look, it was just a joke,” I told her. “It failed. I’m sorry. Let’s let it go, okay?”

“Do you know people who’d think that joke was funny?”

“Yeah, rather a lot of them in fact.”

With each of us silently reassessing the other, the next hundred miles or so of green cornfields, silos, and the occasional red-winged blackbird plucking at something dead alongside the road were less agreeable than the identical hundred miles that had preceded them. Alert to the joke’s disparagement of Latinos as impoverished but inveterate shoppers, she was disturbed at being in the car and maybe
in love with a possible hate-monger who apparently swapped jokes with many other hate-mongers. For my part, I was exasperated to be interrogated like a xenophobic bigot unaware of the offense inherent in the joke. I felt I had earned the benefit of the doubt for good intentions with wicked jokes. In something as short as a joke, context is so thin that sometimes it’s impossible to tell if there is a nasty intention in the heart of the teller. The joke was morally indefensible, but I thought it was funny anyway. I foresaw a future of justifying every laugh that passed my lips. Amazingly we didn’t break up before crossing the Kentucky state line, but stayed warily together for a few more months before drifting apart.