The Joker: A Memoir (4 page)

For years, I tried to understand the song and couldn’t, which was a huge part of its continuing appeal. Did “pop” mean the weasel exploded? That didn’t seem right. Did it mean the weasel had leapt on the monkey, caught it, and killed it? Might have been right. Had the monkey caught the weasel and squeezed it till it popped? That explanation made more sense than anything else and I was guiltily
fond of the image it formed in my mind, though I still wouldn’t have bet my lunch money on it.

•  •  •

Looking back, I’m surprised all over again that it was my father who told me my first two jokes. He was a melancholy man, one who, as the ancient Greeks said of the unlaughing, had consulted the oracle of Trophonius. According to Pausanias, the seeker who consulted the oracle to learn what the future held was taken into a cave at night and placed, feet first, in a small hole, which then seemed to pull him in: “Then the rest of his body is immediately dragged along and follows quickly after his knees, just as if the greatest and swiftest of rivers were about to engulf one caught in its current. . . . The way back for those who have gone down is through the same mouth, with their feet running before them.” After enacting his symbolic death and rebirth, the seeker is brought to the priests, who sat him upon “the chair of Memory” and asked him what he learned in this quest. Then he is turned over to his relatives who “lift him, paralyzed with terror and unconscious both of himself and of his surroundings.” Sources other than Pausanias say that in the underworld the melancholy leave behind their capacity to enjoy life and never laugh again. In a significant way, they are already dead.

When I first read about the oracle of Trophonius, I thought of how my father would occasionally pull my brothers and me up onto the bed with him and lay still while we crawled over his body, sat on his chest, or stared up his nose. At first he laughed a little at our tickling, but then he fell silent. Slowly we realized that he wasn’t moving or speaking. Had he gone to sleep? How could he have fallen asleep with three boys clambering back and forth across his belly?

“Daddy, are you asleep?” we asked.

We poked his shoulder, but he didn’t rouse. We traced the bottoms of his feet lightly with our fingertips, tickling him and his
sides. He was ticklish in those places, we knew, but now he didn’t flinch or jerk away.

“Daddy, are you okay? Are you okay?”

We peeled his eyelids back and peered into the motionless blurred circles. We pinched his nose shut to see if he was breathing.

“Daddy, are you alive?”

Dear God, what would we do if he were dead? Would we have to go live with our grandmother? What would we eat? Who would take care of us?

In desperation, sitting on his belly, I reared back my head and slammed my forehead into his face. Yelling, he sat up and swept us off the bed and onto the floor. Standing over us, he shouted, “We were having fun and you stupid idiots had to go and ruin everything.”

Huddled at his feet, we sobbed in relief and terror. We were thrilled that he had returned from the dead and terrified at what he’d do next.
So it was a joke!
I thought.
Why aren’t we laughing? Why does every joke end with someone crying and someone yelling?

“Get out of my sight! Go to your rooms! Go to your rooms and stay there till I tell you you can come out.”

•  •  •

I grew up in a sour family, with both my parents secretly grieving and depressed. They had visited the oracle of Trophonius and lost the ability to laugh. I didn’t learn why until I was thirteen and my grandmother told me the family secret: I had a sister Andrea who died before I was born. According to my grandmother, my father believed God had taken Andrea back from him because in loving her so much he had committed idolatry before the Lord. My parents could not talk about her. Her life was too holy to mention. Her death in a car accident, my mother at the wheel, was a wound too raw for words to touch. By their silence my parents tried to protect me and my brothers from knowing about death. Instead, we
learned sorrow and fear. The sorrow that pervaded our lives was the only world I’d known, and so it seemed natural, as did the rage that stalked in sorrow’s footprints. Human existence was a joyless conscription to be marched through dutifully till death released us. I assumed our melancholy and anger grew from our Baptist belief in original sin, the depravity of man, and our knowledge that this world was a valley of temptation and suffering we warily pass through on our way to judgment. I was right, but not entirely right. My sister’s death gave my parents’ beliefs a terrible emotional force, the force of lived experience.

Because of that bleakness, I remember clearly the times I heard my father chuckle; they were aberrations, so marvelous and strange that I studied him out of the corner of my eye, suspicious that he was playing a trick on me. If there were a word that means at the same time fascination, skepticism, affection, sorrow, recurring surprise, and something just shy of wonder, that’s the word that would describe how I felt when I heard him chuckle at
The Andy Griffith Show
,
Gomer Pyle—USMC
, and
The Beverly Hillbillies
—all shows about Southerners who, through naïve goodwill and innocence, triumphed in the world. Was that how he saw himself? It was certainly the way he wanted the world to work.

His harshness grew not just from unspoken grief over his daughter’s death but also from an ongoing grief that the world did not conform to his faith. Church was his respite. Other than at worship services, the only times Dad relaxed were when his brothers came to visit, and those visits were rare. One uncle lived in Florida, the other in Ohio, and we, as a military family, were often in hard-to-drive-to military bases in Texas, New Mexico, England, North Carolina, California, or France—to list them in chronological order. When my uncles, both Methodist ministers, sat at our table after a long trip, my father didn’t talk much, but he smiled readily at their stories. He trusted them, as his brothers and as ministers, to act
appropriately. I was always intrigued by these two men who looked like my father but had laugh lines around their eyes and banter on their lips. When he was around them, my father became a little like them, at ease and agreeable, even happy—a man foreign to me.

Their visits were odd oases in our unhappiness. When I was young, my mother occasionally spent afternoons locked in her bedroom. I could hear her full-body sobbing through the closed door. Sometimes I’d kneel in the hall outside her door, trying to figure out what my father or I might have done to devastate her so utterly. Slowly, careful not to make the bolt tap against the strike plate, I pressed my ear against the hollow-core door and listened. All I could hear were sobs—gasping sobs as she fought for breath, then moments of calm, then moans that almost became words, then stabs at prayer that turned back to moans. Her crying spells lasted for hours, and after a while, bored and helpless, I’d slink off to lie on my bed and read, while listening for her door to open. Returning to my own inconsequential amusements while her comfortless sorrow wept itself toward a stopping place, I felt cruel and crudely separate from my mother, a feeling I understood was crass, necessary, and salubrious. When she came out to fix supper, her face was swollen and she walked as if she had been beaten over her back and legs. I had no idea what was wrong, and after the first time or two, I learned not to ask. “Crying? I don’t know what you’re talking about. Maybe you were hearing the neighbor’s radio. I was asleep. You must’ve heard me dreaming.”

Because she was so volatile, her pleasures, more full than my father’s, were all the more my pleasures. She enjoyed listening to Arthur Godfrey on the radio while she ironed. His on-air folksiness and even his gravelly crankiness delighted her. He’s down-to-earth, just like us, she said, with a satisfaction I adopted as my own.
The Breakfast Club
with Don McNeill, broadcast from “the Cloud Room of the Allerton Hotel, high above Chicago’s famous magnificent mile,”
was another of our delights. Settling in for a morning’s work, she arranged the ironing board so she could park her ashtray, Pall Malls, coffee mug, and water-sprinkling bottle on the kitchen table within easy reach. They often migrated back and forth from table to ironing board to table over and over each morning. In midmorning, the coffee was replaced by a Coke or Dr. Pepper. Mom dashed the wrinkled laundry with water from a Coke bottle with a cork-bottomed sprinkler cap jammed in it. When the sprinkler head went missing during one of our moves, she simply dipped her fingers into a bowl of water and flicked the laundry to moisten it. She loathed ironing, as she often told me, but she made the drudgery tolerable by balancing it with the workaday rewards of caffeine, tobacco, and radio.

I paid only fitful attention to Arthur Godfrey or Don McNeill. It was my mother I wanted to hear. I sat under the ironing board, and listened to her listening, attending to her chuckles, snorts, and muttered comments. “Well, that’s just ridiculous!” she’d say to the radio, and I could hear enjoyment even in her judgment and disgust. More than once, when she laughed too hard at a joke or huffed too fiercely at a story in the news, there were wild moments when the ironing board tipped, and iron, water, ashtray, lit cigarette, and parts of my father’s uniform flew past my head as she flailed at them to keep them from hitting me.

I happily sat at her feet and listened when she talked on the phone to her friends, trying to understand the whole conversation from the half of it I heard. What did it mean that Mrs. Wilcox had sat in the same pew as Jenny Carlow at church Sunday morning? That Mom’s sister Joyce was looking for a job at the towel mill? That Jack Somebody from Dad’s class at West Point had made colonel already? I couldn’t puzzle it out, and wasn’t supposed to. “Little pitchers have big ears,” she said into the receiver before skirting around a story she was telling, filling it in for her friend with verbal nudges and auditory winks. In a few years, I would find myself mostly
relegated to third base or banished to right field in Little League, but I always dreamed of being a pitcher, so I was mildly stung by Mom’s derogatory assessment of my ears. For a couple of months, as I was getting ready for bed at night, she taped them to the sides of my head with white first-aid tape. She was training them not to stick out. Why, a big wind would blow me away. I didn’t want to look like Dumbo, did I?

Even when I didn’t know what she was talking about on the phone, I knew not to ask. If I did, I’d be sent from the room, away from her occasional laughter. When my parents laughed, they became, for a moment, younger and lighter. I sensed, though I could not have said so, a time when they had not been unhappy, and I blamed their unhappiness on the trials of raising children, the burden of responsibility. The burden of me. I was wrong. Or partly wrong. I was misinterpreting the burden: My parents were terrified that I would die, as my sister had, and they hovered over me, watched me with fearful vigilance, and corrected me vehemently so I would be careful, stay alive, not die. My father’s rage grew, I imagine, out of fear. My rage grew out of my fear of him.

When I was small, he clenched my wrists in his hands and smacked my face with my own hands as he laughed and said, “Don’t hit yourself.” I fought to control my hands, to keep from hitting myself, but again and again my own hands slapped my face. In the struggle, he sometimes hit me—or I hit myself—sharply. My cheeks stinging, my own hands hurting me, and I could not stop them. Soon I was sobbing with frustration, and I was a bad sport, a sissy who couldn’t take a joke. But when I clutched my brothers’ wrists and popped their palms against their cheeks, crowing, “Don’t hit yourself! Why are you hitting yourself?” my parents screamed that I was mean. I was hurting my baby brothers. Well, sure—and the joke was finally, for the first time, funny.

We seldom agreed on what was funny. On the last day of fourth
grade, I raced home on my bike after a half day of class, and met my father getting out of the car in the carport, home for lunch.

“How’d school go today?”

“Fine,” I said. I was elated. Last day of school!

“Did you find out who your teacher’s going to be next year?”

“Yes, sir. It’s Old Lady Porter.” That’s what I’d heard the other boys at school call her.
Old Lady Porter
. I relished the tough-guy knowingness of the phrase—one cowboy talking to another about the lady who owned the saloon. I thought it was funny because I knew I was a kid trying to sound like a cowboy, a hood, a detective, a Bowery boy.

I was still straddling my bicycle, toes touching the concrete, when Dad grabbed my arm, jerked me off the seat, and shook me by my shoulders, his face jammed up nose-to-nose with mine.

“Her name is Mrs. Porter to you, young man! Mrs. Porter! And that’s what you’ll call her. Do you hear me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then say it!

“
Yes, sir
!” I shouted. I’d read this was how recruits addressed officers.

“Not that! Her name, you stupid idiot.”

“Mrs. P—P—Porter.”

The ensuing and scathing lecture on respect for adults in general, women in particular, and teachers especially, left me trembling with shock and, secretly, indignation. I could have understood the gravity of my transgression with a more temperate reprimand. But even as he yelled and I trembled, I saw that, though the yelling was probably unnecessary for me, for him, it was essential. Because of my thoughtless joking, he
had
to yell at me; he was morally compelled to correct a mockery I hadn’t intended. And jokes, I also saw, were not something to share willy-nilly. I’d have to be cagier about whom I joked with.

•  •  •

My childish sense of humor was a weapon I honed on my brothers, who were younger than I and, for a while, weaker. My brother Roger and I were eating fried egg sandwiches for lunch when he eagerly announced that he’d read Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” the night before. It had unnerved him so deeply that he’d spent the night awake, with the covers pulled up over his head. I must have been in the fifth grade then and he must have been in the third. I nibbled the bread and the egg white of my sandwich until one end of the naked yolk was visible. Holding it in front of Roger’s face, I intoned, “The beating of his hideous heart!” and squeezed the bread. The still-liquid yolk bulged toward him. Over and over again, I chanted, “The beating of his hideous heart!” squeezing the yolk till it almost burst and jabbing it toward his face as he cringed. When he broke down blubbering, I popped the yolk, let the yellow run like blood down the toasted bread, and ate the imaginary heart with exaggerated appetite.