The Joker: A Memoir (6 page)

Outside the principal’s office, I slumped forlornly on a folding chair stationed there for miscreants. The first few times the principal called me in, he gave me a long heart-to-heart about “disruptive behavior.” The yellow North Carolina sun streamed over his shoulder, and the playground spread behind him, the monkey bars and teeter-totters filled with kids from other grades, kids who were strangers to me. Though he tried to keep his expression vexed and his voice stern, he didn’t seem to care much. Soon he took to letting me stew out in the hall for most of the hour, before leaning out the door of his office and telling me he was disappointed in me and that I should go back to class and behave myself. Everyone was disappointed in me, including me.

And I kept on disappointing us all. One prank, my masterpiece, I performed annually between fourth and seventh grade. With the teacher away on a coffee break and the other students answering the end-of-the-chapter questions about the plight of the Arcadians, the melancholy fate of Evangeline, the triumph of Athenian democracy, or the contrasts of “South America: Land of Contrast,” I surveyed the classroom. All the other heads were bent into the work, engrossed in the corrosive tedium of copying each question and answering it in full sentences. I was so bored I thought I might be going insane.

I hefted the fat history book and weighed it on the flat of my palm, playing with my indecision, and then I reared back and threw the book as hard as I could toward the blackboard. As it arced above the heads of my classmates, the heavy book rotated in air, its pages riffling. I stared at it, hoping it wouldn’t fly open and that I’d timed the rotation so the cover smacked flat against the board. When it did, it boomed into the silence, then slid down the wall, clipped the chalk tray, and toppled to the floor. Girls screamed, the boys
laughed uneasily. What a blasphemous charge there was in throwing a book, which is why I always threw a history book. I
cared
about history. And history books were always thick enough to make a loud dusty
whap
against the chalkboard.

I only stopped throwing books because, in seventh grade, after someone ratted me out, I was invited back to the history classroom that afternoon for a couple of swats. The teacher was a gym coach, muscular and unamused. Though I wore my gym shorts over my underwear and under my pants for padding, he hit me hard enough, three times, to force tears to my eyes. Still I was grateful that he didn’t call my parents, who promised that if they ever heard of my getting swatted at school, I could count on getting a double dose at home, and twice as hard, a prospect that kept me awake at night, meditating terror, throughout elementary school and junior high. From the coach’s anger and my classmates’ failure to laugh, I could see I’d gone too far this time.

Why was I doing these stupid things? The obvious answer is that I wanted attention, which I suppose I did, and I didn’t have a better way to get it. I was average at math, better than average at social studies, and pretty good at spelling because my mother drilled me on each week’s spelling list. But I was so socially maladroit that I was completely unable to talk to other kids. The one thing I excelled in, reading, no one could see I was good at, not even me; I assumed that what I was doing everyone else was doing just as well or better. And what did it matter anyway? I was a kid reading kids’ books and I knew it.

Boredom alone didn’t seem to be enough to explain my behavior. An earnestly churched boy, I also seriously pondered the possibility of demonic possession. I sometimes felt spurred to these occasional antics by a force outside myself. Was I possessed, like the Gadarene demoniac in the Bible? The naked wild man in the land of the Gadarenes was so powerfully infested with a legion of demons
that, wailing and cutting himself with stones, he wandered day and night among the tombs. Jesus cast the demons into a herd of two thousand swine that immediately ran off a cliff into the Sea of Galilee and drowned, the porcine mass suicide making short work of the mercy Jesus had wasted on the disoriented devils. Two thousand demonically possessed pigs stampeding over a precipice—that’s an image I long pondered. Like the demoniac, I heard voices competing to form me—the voices of parents, teachers, other kids, preachers, books, movies, and radio shows. And along with those voices, I felt an assertiveness that felt self-destructive, a force that might be more at home cast into the body of a suicidal hog. But while my yelping, sprawling on a dirty classroom floor, and throwing books was clearly naughty, could anyone call these outbursts evil? Whatever my motives were, they weren’t malicious.

Lonely and isolated from the other kids at school, I yearned for a world where people laughed regularly and happily. Was I imagining their happiness? Desperation drove my laughter, not delight. When I finally encountered Percy Shelley’s assertion that “Our sincerest laughter / With some pain is fraught,” I knew what he meant because I had lived it. If my stunts ended with visiting the principal, being paddled, writing a hundred times that I would not talk in class, or standing at the blackboard on tiptoe for an hour with my nose pressed against a wad of gum I’d been chewing—though I’ve never liked gum and chewed it only because it was forbidden—the punishments didn’t bother me much. They were just the cost of doing business. I stopped my stunts because, as we got a little older, the other kids stopped laughing. What used to be funny no longer was. I was moving in their minds from “odd guy” to something approaching “jerk.” I wanted to stop before I got there.

At least one teacher thought I had already gone to “jerk” and beyond. In the fifth grade, playing kickball at recess, I caught a popup and hurled the big rubber ball toward a tall girl named Michelle,
who had edged off first base. My throw caught her flush on the side of her head, knocking her glasses off. Her face looked naked without her glasses, and she seemed nearly featureless.

Double play! Game over! I was thrilled. It was just like the miracle endings I’d read about in sports novels, where the no-talent kid suddenly leads the Hogansville Cougars to the state championship of an unspecified state. So I was dumbstruck when Mrs. Thompkins dashed across the asphalt, grabbed me by my upper arm, and shouted into my face that I was a vicious little brat and she was going to keep me after school and call my mother. I was in more trouble than I’d ever dreamed of. She’d see to that.

It was against the rules, she said, to aim the kickball at someone’s head. I’d done it deliberately. I was just
mean
.

That rule was news to me (and to everyone else, I believe). I was astonished at the accusation and flattered that she thought I was athletic enough to drill the ball from third base and hit a moving human head on purpose. I wished I were that good. I’d been aiming vaguely at a spot between her and first base, and had simply thrown the ball as hard and high as I could to get it there. I was so flabbergasted that I didn’t even think to defend myself, and it took me another moment or two to understand that her accusation wasn’t even the main point. This mishap was her excuse to punish me for screaming in class, rolling on the floor, throwing my book.

I was shocked to realize she didn’t like me. I was a
kid
. Adults weren’t
allowed
to dislike kids. None of the stupid stunts I’d pulled in class had anything to do with her. She was just there—an authority figure, a role not a person, a face I could throw myself at as if I were a cream pie in a Three Stooges movie. It never crossed my mind that what I did in class could ruffle her. We were both diminished by this new understanding. I was distressed to realize that the next time I did something stupid for a laugh that I wouldn’t just be exploiting the role she played but also hurting a fellow human
being. I saw myself as at worst mischievous but still innocent. My teacher, and maybe others—the principal, my classmates—saw me as a brat, a creep: someone who enjoyed being aggravating. For many days afterward, I lay on my bed after school and studied the overhead light, troubled by the difference between how I saw myself and how others perceived me.

Some military brats react to perpetual dislocation by becoming socially adept, at ease with new situations and new people. I was not of their company. I was one of the ones who withdrew into themselves as my family moved from Fort Hood, Texas, where I was born, to New Mexico, England, Ohio, North Carolina, California, France, and Alabama. Always being the new guy, the person learning the new rules and the new pecking order, wore me out.

After my father was transferred from North Carolina to San Bernardino, California, my family lived off base, “on the economy,” as the military said, and I was suddenly attending Del Rosa Elementary with kids who mocked my southern accent, especially the over-enunciated way I’d been taught to say “the” with a biblical long
e
sound, like
thee
, while they used the casual and, I thought, rudely dismissive, short
e
:
thuh
. The most searing expression of contempt in my sixth-grade class was “farmer,” and every time I opened my mouth, I revealed myself as a farmer, which I had up to that year thought a noble profession. “How could we eat without farmers?” my teachers in North Carolina had asked, though North Carolina’s most famous and lucrative agricultural product was tobacco and the only field trips we took, other than to the Coca-Cola bottler, were to tobacco auctions and curing barns.

At Del Rosa Elementary when baseball teams were selected, the captains usually walked off with their players and left me standing alone on the playground, unselected. I was astoundingly uncoordinated, perhaps as the result of being born prematurely—that’s what my mother thought. I was useless at sports. I retreated to the
green bench beside our classroom and to my books with despair and relief.

One morning, over the top of my book, I saw a teacher walking across the asphalt toward the green bench. Sensing the purpose in her stride, I pretended to concentrate on my book while glancing at the ground, looking for her feet to come into view. Boys were not allowed
not
to play games. I’d been breaking the rules and now I’d been caught.

“Get your nose out of that book and go play with the other kids,” she said. It was meant as gruff kindness, but what did she expect me to do?

I wandered down to the swing sets, because no one was there, sat on a swing and swung back and forth desultorily. She was watching me. I swung, cried a little, and sniffled until recess was over, then lined up with the rest of the kids and filed back into the classroom. The next day I took my book back to my spot. The teacher who had rousted me the day before glanced in my direction once or twice, but I could see she’d given up.

Like most adults, including my parents, she was probably reluctant to stop a boy from reading, a reverence I counted on to get out of things I didn’t want to do. I let them think reading was work, learning, ambition—though it was always pleasure and only incidentally edifying. As soon as I could read, I retreated into books for the comfort of worlds that were comprehensible. I might not understand everything in the book I was reading, but I could understand the arc of the story. This was not true in life, which had no arc I could see. Books told me why people did what they did. In life, my parents’ and my teachers’ thoughts were a mystery, and most of what they did, kind or callous, a surprise. Books gave me an illusion of order, and step by slow step they taught me how to interpret what I saw: to see that the coach’s crispness didn’t mean he disliked me but considered me irrelevant; that the tightness of the lunch
lady’s lips meant she didn’t like smacking food onto plastic trays for a living; that Mrs. Porter’s constant anger, though often triggered by a student whispering in class, really came from somewhere else; that Mr. Alvin’s long stories about serving in Korea meant he was bored to stupefaction after twenty years of teaching fractions and he really didn’t much care anymore if we learned them or not. Books helped me understand that Mrs. Thompkins, who thought I was mean, was an easily frazzled woman and that only some of her rage against me was caused by what I’d done.

Soon after we moved to California, I discovered books in the library by the great comedians of my parents’ generation: Fred Allen, Sam Levenson, Steve Allen, Bob Hope, Jack Benny, and Jack Paar. I was astounded that men my father’s age could tell jokes one after the other, mock themselves, and treat their dignity as something to cast away and then pull back like a yo-yo. They turned their sense of self into a toy and played with it. These comedians didn’t see their self-respect as a bulwark against the world. They used humor to clear some ground in the world for them to stand on, a trick I wanted to learn—and of course they made me laugh.

I practically memorized two books that came as part of a six-books-for-only-ninety-nine-cents enticement to join the Book of the Month Club:
Bennett Cerf’s Bumper Crop
(“His 5 biggest best-sellers, complete and unabridged in 2 volumes”) and a collection of hillbilly anecdotes called
Tall Tales from the High Hills
. I assume the books were my mother’s choice. Cerf’s omnibus was packed with anecdotes from a literary milieu so foreign I thought of it as Oz—skyscrapers, subways, cocktails, celebrities, and anecdotes about Ernest Hemingway’s chest hair—while the other rollicked with the thumb-in-your-eye humor of my Georgia relatives: one world was sophisticated and beckoning while the other rejected and mocked that world. Both seemed right to me. To laugh, you have to stand outside yourself and look at what is happening now as transient, passing so quickly
as to be already past—and I was scrambling toward that vantage point. In my scramble, I was assisted by elephants.

Q: What’s gray and dangerous?

A:
An elephant with a machine gun.

Q: Why’d the elephant paint his toenails red?

A:
So he could hide in a cherry tree.

Elephant jokes became a national craze the year I entered Del Vallejo Junior High in San Bernardino, and I was enraptured.