The Joker: A Memoir (5 page)

But the real and impossible target of all the anger I channeled into crude wit was my father. Since I was terrified of him, I practiced my sarcasm in silence, fashioning put-downs so cutting he would fall at my feet and beg forgiveness, I imagined, if I’d been stupid enough to say them. I knew that the wit of a ten-year-old boy would be no match for my father’s intelligence, and even if it were, I’d simply be whipped for my success. I lived in my head, holding high-strung conversations with myself, forming witticisms and replying to them, topping myself, and then topping that top with even more cutting rejoinders. At the same time that I thought I was pretty darn clever, the Oscar Wilde of long division and the Oscar Levant of sentence diagramming, I knew to keep my mouth shut. My unspoken bon mots must have shown on my face as a smirk because both my parents snarled at me repeatedly, “If you don’t wipe that look off your face, boy, I’ll knock it off for you!” Sometimes, not
often, they did. Usually, as soon as Mom’s or Dad’s right hand drew back, I assumed an expression of exaggerated neutrality and they were content not to have to slap me.

My father would sometimes hit us. But swear, never. Not so much as a “damn” or “hell” passed his lips in my hearing. “Fart” was verboten. Even “durn” and “darn”—my mother’s curse words—were dodgy. But in his rage Dad hissed “stupid idiot” so venomously that it devastated me. A couple of times in my early teens I worked up the courage to tell people, in his presence, that I’d just recently learned that my name was Andrew, not Stupid Idiot. He responded that I’d only recently earned the promotion—a joke. Kind of. The few times my father assayed verbal humor, it was the dry, wounding type. When I was in high school, one of my aunts gave me a used watch, and my father, seeing me sit in the living room, winding it and admiring the faux-marbled red dial, asked if the watch were any good.

“It says it has a ten-jewel movement.”

“Well, why don’t you pry them out and sell them? Then we’ll all be rich.”

I reacted to his comment like the character in Edith Wharton’s story “The Mission of Jane”: “It occurred to him that perhaps she was trying to be funny: he knew there is nothing more cryptic than the humor of the unhumorous.” Even at fifteen, I knew this was an inappropriate barb for a father to direct at a boy thrilled to flash around a watch with a red face, stiletto hands, and a snazzy silver-gray leather strap. I couldn’t tell him his wit was unsuitable. But I reflexively analyzed the opening he’d left unguarded. All the nasty things I could’ve snapped back at him raced through my mind: “Well, it’d be more than you’ve ever done.” “I’ve come to like being poor.” “What do you mean
we
,
kemo sabe
?” I was tempted by the last option, but I was pretty sure he’d respond violently to the tone of it even if he didn’t recognize it as a punch line. The Lone Ranger
and Tonto are surrounded by hundreds of hostile Apaches, who are ready to sweep down on them. The Lone Ranger turns to Tonto, his faithful Indian companion, and says, “It looks like we’re in trouble this time, Tonto.”

“What do you mean
we
,
kemo sabe
?” Would the joke itself have amused Dad? Who knows? The joke is potentially racist and delights in disloyalty, choosing practicality over principle. I wasn’t going to risk it.

Jokes are often—some would say
always
—intricately wound up with power. Unable to reply with a cutting remark of my own, I was tempted to smile at my father’s joke, maybe chuckle subserviently to ease the tension of not laughing. Instead, I did something that many people have done to me in the years since: I stared at him, my head cocked with blank bewilderment—some of which was real—until he turned back to the TV.

How do you respond to the nearly humorless? Back in North Carolina, in the same house in which Dad told me my first joke, we were eating dinner at the kitchen table when I farted. Without a word, Dad, who was sitting next to me at the head of the table, lashed out and backhanded me across the face. I jolted backward with the blow, my chair tipped, and, falling, I smacked the back of my head against the washing machine.

Slumped on the linoleum in front of the washer, I blubbered, “I didn’t do anything. What did I do? You didn’t have to hit me.” The front panel of the washer had some flex in it, so I wasn’t hurt so much as shocked at suddenly being on the floor. By feigning more pain than I felt, I was trying to keep him from coming at me again.

“Quit making a show of yourself. You know what you did. You pooted at the table. Sit down, eat your supper, and if you need to go to the bathroom, go to the stinking bathroom.”

“But I didn’t know I was going to do it. It just came out.”

“Don’t lie to me. I saw you lean over to let it out.”

He had me dead to rights. I
had
shifted my weight from my right buttock to my left and leaned over slightly to ease the gas out. I couldn’t
believe
he’d seen me do it.

Forty years later, detached from the shame and ill usage I felt then, the moment seems irresistibly comic. I don’t know why Dad didn’t see the humor and couldn’t laugh, and I wish I could have. If he had read Augustine’s
City of God
, he would have known that flatulence has a long history as a public entertainment that the saint himself enjoyed: “Some have such command of their bowels, that they can break wind continuously at pleasure, so as to produce the effect of singing.” And if he were a joker, he could’ve said what the third man said to the devil. Three men who had sold their souls were given a last chance to redeem themselves. All they had to do was name one request the devil couldn’t fulfill. The first asked for a roomful of gold and the devil immediately conjured it up. The second asked for the most beautiful woman in the world to be his slave, and the devil, with a wave of his hand, produced her. The third man farted, and said to the devil, “Catch it and paint it green.”

In fifth grade, every time one of the boys farted, the rest of us shouted, “Catch it and paint it green!” It was our tribute to the embarrassment of the body and the vividly impossible. We did not know the joke goes back to at least 1560, when, in a German version, the devil was ordered to catch a fart and sew a button on it. The joke is so common that folklorists have given it a number and a name inside the larger category of “Tasks contrary to the law of nature”: “H1023.13, Task: catching a man’s broken wind. Type: 1176.”

•  •  •

When I was twelve or thirteen, I finally let one of my supposed witticisms escape my lips.

As we drove out of San Bernardino, California, to Lake Isabella, where the government rented old air force blue trailers for military families on vacation, my two brothers and I squirmed, whined, and
elbowed each other in the backseat of a Volkswagen Beetle. In the un-air-conditioned car, our thighs sticking to the hot vinyl, we were practically pasted to each other from knees to shoulders. We were furious with Dad because, instead of taking the Chevy wagon, he’d opted for the VW to save on gas. We were miserable—ceaselessly, vocally miserable—and our jostling, quarreling, and carping must have been maddening to listen to. It was supposed to be.

As we approached a billboard advertisement for Volkswagens that announced, “It’ll grow on you,” my father read it to us and, with a triumphant snort, told us to settle down back there. “It’ll grow on you.”

“Yeah, it’ll grow on us. Like mold,” I said.

“Yeah, like fungus,” Roger added, and laughed. The giddiness of our own incessant bitching had made us bold, and reversing the needle that Dad had jabbed at us improved my mood briefly.

He jerked the car to the side of the road and sat for a moment, his hands clenched on the steering wheel, before, his face red with rage, he turned and glared at us over the front seat.

“Get out,” he snarled. “Both of you. You don’t like what I provide for you, so you can just get out! I don’t want you to ride in a car that’s not good enough for you.”

I froze. He was joking, wasn’t he? He had to be joking. He got out of the car, tilted down his seatback, and snarled, “Go on! Get out!”

Roger shrugged, and slipped out of his spot behind the driver’s seat, and stood beside Dad.

I sat where I was, waiting for Dad to say he’d made his point and we should just sit still and shut up till we got to the lake.

“You too,” he said, and jerked his head in the direction he wanted me to move. “Get out.”

I scrambled over Mike, who sat in the middle of the bench seat, his legs straddling the transmission hump, and stumbled out of the
car. Blinking in the harsh California sunlight on the edge of Central Valley and near the desert, I looked through the window at Mike. He was safe because he was four, and he was studiously looking innocent.

Roger and I stood by the side of the road, nothing but sand and scrub brush as far as we could see. Dad slammed the car in gear and drove off. Roger and I watched till the car slipped around a curve and was gone. I kept staring at the last spot it had occupied before it had disappeared in the distance. Surely Dad was coming back. He couldn’t just leave us by the road in the middle of nowhere, could he? It was against the law to abandon children, I knew that, but I knew it because I’d read newspaper reports of people who had done it. And I was thirteen. I wasn’t sure I completely qualified as a child anymore.

After a couple of minutes, Roger said, “Let’s go.”

“Where?” I looked back where we’d come from and ahead to where the car had vanished.

“Let’s just go,” he said, and started marching down the shoulder in the direction the car had taken. After he’d gone about ten yards, I hurried to follow, my feet clumsy on the loose gravel and the steep rake of the shoulder. Before we’d walked a mile, my father puttered up on the other side of the road and braked to a stop across from us.

“Want a ride?” he called out the window. Beside him, my mother laughed. It was close enough to a joke for me. Almost whimpering with gratitude, I squeezed behind my father’s seat, while he bent forward against the steering wheel to make room for me. On the road, Roger kept walking, his back rigid, his eyes fixed on the distance, acknowledging neither my father’s presence nor my capitulation. Dad cut a three-point turn in the middle of the road, and crept along beside him in the car. Roger never turned his head. Finally, Dad yelled at him to stop being silly and get in the car.
Roger ignored him. Finally, Dad got out and wrestled him into the car by the neck. He looked like a cowboy bulldogging a steer.

For weeks, my mother teased me about my craven gratitude and Roger’s stubborn refusal to be cowed, even though he was the younger brother. She laughed with a pleasure I resented, though I had to acknowledge the truth behind the laughter, and the justice of her repeatedly slamming it into my face like a cream pie. Roger was her favorite, as she told me, always adding that she loved me just as much. I was my father’s, as she also told me, and all my life I’ve felt a little like Israel. Being the Lord’s favorite is a difficult blessing. I wish I had been confident enough to laugh at the comedy of it all. But, like the devil, I couldn’t catch it and paint it green.

Away from home, at school, I learned I could make people laugh by being outrageous. Not witty, not clever, not smart—just obnoxious. I did things there I was terrified to do at home.

As soon as my father arrived home from work, my mother would scream out a litany of my transgressions during the day: mouthing off, ignoring her when she called, whining for a Hershey bar. Usually he tried to soothe her—who wants to be the wrath of God coming home with an empty, grease-spotted, brown lunch bag in his hand, one he’d reuse the next day? But sometimes my trespasses were grave enough that, as he was hearing her out, he looked at me and snarled, “Go to your room, pull down your pants, lean over the bed, and wait for me.” I still remember the sound of his belt snaking out backward through his belt loops, the end of it snapping against each loop. I began screaming as soon as his hand went back.

“Shut up, I haven’t even hit you yet,” he’d yell in exasperation, a half second before he hit me.

Screaming had its pleasures, but it was safer to do it at school than at home. Though I was usually quiet at school and polite, about once a year, when the teacher was out of the room, I shrieked. My high-pitched yelp split the near silence of pencils scritch, scritch, scritching over notebook paper. Boys jerked in their seats, and a girl or two always squealed, ripped from reveries of Brazil. In my memory, we were always in Brazil on our tour of “South America: Land of Contrast.” The boys laughed at me for screaming and at the girls for squealing. But someone always told the teacher, and the laughter guttered to an uneasy silence when I was flung into the hall and ordered to the principal’s office. My rough exit usually provoked smothered laughs as parting gifts.

Other times, as the teacher walked down the classroom aisle, I would slip from my desk, stretch out on the floor behind her, and lay there until she noticed my classmates tittering. The longer I sprawled on the linoleum, letting the giggles build, the funnier my breach of second-, third-, or fourth-grade decorum became. But if I drew the joke out too long, the teacher jerked her head around and saw me scrambling back into my seat, and I was once more slung into the hall and shoved in the direction of the principal’s office. If I got away with my stunt, I sat at my desk and picked at my shirt and pants, now gritty, smudged, and damp from the floor that thirty kids regularly tromped across. I could feel the eyes of the other students looking at me expectantly, as if waiting for me to do something else.

I hated the dead moments after the laughter was over. I felt stupid, exposed, unfinished, and lonelier than I had been before. My shenanigans, I saw, didn’t change the tedium of the classroom; they depended on it. If there’s no decorum, there’s no shocked laughter in violating it. What disturbed me was how little a point my
pointless stunts turned out to have and how lost I felt afterward, as if what I had done, the act I’d performed, had abandoned me.