The Joker: A Memoir (27 page)

So entertained was my mother by the Oof-oof bird that for days after she first laughed at it, my brothers and I acted it out again and again. As she was ironing in the living room, fixing dinner, leaving the bathroom, or just sitting, staring into space, we stooped in front of her, flapped our elbows, scrunched up our faces in imitation pain, and grunted, “Oof! Oof!” Her mirth must have taken on a strange richness when she saw boys to whom she’d given birth imitate childbirth in front of her, utterly uncomprehending what they were doing—while pretending to be birds. But perhaps those disguises—and the distancing of laughter—are what it takes for a boy to begin to feel in his own abdomen a flinching twinge of what his mother felt bringing him into the world.

By the time I got to high school, I joked about childbirth, belaboring its similarities to another way to drop a load. On the way to the school restroom, I joked about giving birth to a baby so big I’d have to buy it a puppy. Once in the restroom stall, I read graffiti that commanded, “Squeeze hard, you are giving birth to a state trooper.” And I remember with pleasure a restroom rhyme from the sixties: “Here I sit, butt a flexin’ / Giving birth to another Texan.” Jokes, like St. Augustine, know we are
inter urinas et faeces nascimur
, born between urine and feces, and as Freud understood, the pleasures of sex and elimination are often, in the adolescent mind, inseparable: tail is tail is tail.

Though I was slow to catch on, even children know it.

Several years ago, a friend who is a single mom was invited on the spur of the moment to a dinner with some important men in her field. Unable to line up a babysitter so quickly, she swallowed hard and took her son along with her to the up-market steakhouse.

The meal went swimmingly until the main course was served
and the conversation was getting down to serious business. The boy leaned over in his high chair and whispered, “Mom!”

“Hush, Marc,” she whispered. “Mommy’s busy. Eat your french fries.”

She turned back to her colleagues, pleased to see that Marc had not disrupted the conversation.

But only a few minutes went by before Marc called again, “Mom! Mom!”

“Honey, just be quiet—okay?—and I’ll get you some ice cream in a minute.”

The next time that Marc interrupted, though, he wasn’t going to be deflected by french fries or ice cream.

“Mom! Moooom! Moooooooom! I got to tell you something!” Marc’s voice was now loud and commanding, and he had the attention of the whole table.

“Mom, you know when you go to the bathroom. You know? You know?”

“Yes, I know.”

“It feels so
gooooood!
”

Marc was stating a truth that the not-so-stuffed shirts at the table uproariously agreed is universal. But Marc, whose fiber needs were obviously better tended to than mine, might not take as much glee in the Oof-oof bird’s travails as my family did.

•  •  •

In
Moby Dick
, Herman Melville’s Ishmael states that whale ships were “my Yale College and my Harvard.” The Yale and Harvard of my sexual instruction were, in one of the oldest traditions of American Puritanism, small groups of pimply boys giggling at half-understood filth as they walked to and from school. At home, I both anguished in shame at being an amoral mammal and exulted at having uncovered an essential secret that adults had tried to conceal. Camille Paglia is absolutely right when she describes the discordant
mind, which I thought unique to me, as an irreducible fact of life: “Sex has always been girt round with taboo, irrespective of culture. Sex is the point of contact between man and nature, where morality and good intentions fall to primitive urges. . . . It is the place beyond the pale, both cursed and enchanted.” That irreducible contradiction is the engine of much humor, some of it enchanted (“When she was good, she was very, very good—and when she was bad she was
wuuuunderful
!”) and some of it simply ugly.

Like debauched salts on one of Melville’s seaborne Harvards, we boys, to prove our worldliness, strove to outdo one another at flouting taboos, though our flouting was entirely verbal and imaginary, and perhaps the more debauched without the constraints of the physical world to limit us. Once one breaches the border of a taboo, it’s not only possible to go too far: It’s inevitable.

On most school mornings, on my way to my seventh- and eighth-grade classes, I met Jack Burkett at the end of my street and we walked the rest of the way to Del Vallejo Junior High together. The walk took only twenty minutes, but to a thirteen-year-old, it seemed interminable without someone to talk to. Nothing at school drew my feet eagerly toward the classroom.

With his long, angular face, large teeth that tilted forward so that his lips couldn’t quite cover them, a shock of dirty blond hair that swept down over his forehead, and a harsh equine laugh, Burkett looked like an adolescent facsimile of Francis the Talking Mule. But Burkett had fallen in love with some quirks of Renaissance diction that made him sound more like Mr. Ed, the talking horse. He never said no. It was always “Nay, nay, wretch. Nay, nay!”

He punctuated his punch lines with a sharp punch to my shoulder.

“Where were you born?” he asked one morning as we dawdled on our way to school.

“Texas,” I said.

“Me, I was born in a hospital. Did your mom stick her ass out the window?”
Har, har, har
—the last
har
emphasized with a stinging overhand right to my deltoid.

The image created by this ugly and nonsensical joke—nonsensical because the hospital was in Texas and my mother was in both—has never left me: my mother’s naked legs and torso hanging out the eighth floor of a hospital as I fell from it. I assume the point was to draw attention to the speaker’s knowledge of sex and the fact that we humans are mammals, a fact we learned to recite in school but the details of which we don’t usually care to dwell on.

“How,” Burkett asked on another morning, “is a tribe of Pygmies different from the girls’ track team?”

Groups of something—what? I couldn’t figure it out. “I don’t know,” I said.

“One is a bunch of cunning runts, the other is . . .” His voice lifted insinuatingly.

“Is what?”

“Figure it out, asshole.”

“Running girls?”

“Nay, nay!” he crowed, and punched my shoulder. “One is a bunch of cunning runts, and the other is a bunch of running cunts.”

When I asked him what
cunt
meant, I got called “asshole” again, along with “rube,” “farmer,” “baby,” “moron,” and, one more time, “asshole” before he paused for breath. I had to beg—“Come on, just tell me what it means”—before he consented to enlighten me. I instinctively knew the word was one that I had better not repeat. Maybe it was the way he said it. Maybe it’s the way the word has to be said. The hard
k
sound, the short
u
, and the ugly
nt
almost force you to sneer.

The word is famously sneered in
Hamlet
. The prince, mad or feigning it, bullies and humiliates Ophelia with sexual innuendo so explicit that it’s barely innuendo at all. Shakespeare was centuries
ahead of country singer Carlene Carter, who, not knowing that June Carter Cash and Johnny Cash, her mother and stepfather were in the audience, introduced a song by saying, “If this song doesn’t put the cunt back in country, nothing will.” Carlene’s pronouncement is truer than she knew. As Shakespeare was well aware,
nothing
is also slang for
vagina
:

Hamlet:
Lady, shall I lie in your lap?

Ophelia:
No, my lord.

Hamlet:
I mean, my head upon your lap?

Ophelia:
Ay, my lord.

Hamlet:
Did you think I meant country matters?

Ophelia
:
I think nothing, my lord.

Hamlet:
That’s a fair thought to lie between maids’ legs.

Ophelia:
What is, my lord?

Hamlet:
Nothing.

Another day, as we walked home from seventh grade, Burkett asked me if I’d heard about the guy who went to the morgue and asked to see Marilyn Monroe’s corpse. This must have been in 1963, the year after her death.

Once more my answer, as it almost always was to Burkett’s questions, was no.

“See, this guy goes to the morgue and asks to look at Marilyn Monroe’s body before she’s buried. The guy working at the morgue tells him to go away, but then the guy offers him a hundred dollars just to look at her body, and so the guy says okay. He pulls out the tray with Marilyn Monroe on it, and the man looks at it kind of dreamily for a couple of minutes and then asks the guy if he can touch her breasts and offers him five hundred dollars if he’ll let him.

“The morgue guy says, ‘You must be some sort of creep,’ but he takes the five hundred dollars and lets him touch her breasts. Then
he takes a thousand dollars to let the man kiss them. Finally the man says, ‘I’ll give you one hundred thousand dollars if you’ll let me take one breast home with me.’

“The morgue guy says, ‘That’s just sick, you pervert. Get out of here.’

“ ‘Okay, I’ll give you two hundred thousand dollars.’

“ ‘Man, you really are sick. No way. Get the hell out of here.’

“ ‘All right, all right—one million dollars. But that’s all I got. Take it or leave it.’

“The morgue guy cuts off Marilyn Monroe’s breast and says sarcastically, “ ‘You want me to wrap it for you?’

“ ‘No thanks,’ says the man, ‘I’ll eat it here.’ ”

Har, har, har
, hard smack to my shoulder.

“That’s it? That’s the joke?” I asked. I felt ill.

“Yeah, that’s it. What do you want?”

I wanted it to be funny. The joke spirals downward through layers of depravity, passing through insane sexual obsession and necrophilia on its way to cannibalism, but it finally reveals itself to be simply a shaggy dog story, one that goes on at length, dragging the reader along on a pointlessly degrading trip to a deliberately flat ending—a child’s attachment to the breast taken to a ghoulish conclusion. For all its horror, the joke has no wit, other than to juxtapose the escalating horror with the banal language of a customer and a cashier transacting business at a hamburger stand.

I did not like Burkett or his jokes, and I doubt he liked me. We were just boys who were thrown together at school. Because he had a couple of older brothers who’d been to juvie, he had a window and probably a doorway into a world strange to me. He knew words, jokes, and stories about sex so outlandish they had to be real, didn’t they? To the naïve, the most corrupt person seems the most knowing. Forbidden knowledge seems the most real because it’s forbidden—and that is why Satan was so effortlessly able to lead
Adam and Eve to the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and entice them to sup. I knew that the more I asked Burkett to explain his jokes the more I was treading innocence underfoot, and I was happy enough to trample it because innocence seemed more and more like stupidity, though stupidity possessed the charm of not nauseating me.

The curse of taboos is that pointless vulgarity and perversion are hard to distinguish from suppressed truths. Vulgarity has the thrill of uncovering truth because, in the beginning, tabooed truth
was
vulgarity, and the more outré something is, the more sophisticated it seems because few others know it. Like incipient adepts of the occult, we intuited that the weirder and more improbable something was, the realer it probably was.

On that same Polynesian island inhabited by the Oof-oof bird, there’s yet another rara avis, sharing the tropical canopy. Back in 1961, when I was ten, an expedition of European explorers was hacking its way through the jungle when a large bird that they had never seen before flew across the sky and, as they were looking up at it in wonder, let loose with an enormous load. It coated one explorer, who, gagging, started to scrape it off his head, but the guide, who was beaming with excitement, ran up and told him to stop. The Foo bird is magical. To be crapped on by the Foo bird means wealth, fame, knowledge, and a lifetime of good luck. But the befouled explorer is too disgusted to listen to the guide who he suspects is having fun at his expense. He can all too easily imagine the guide returning to camp and telling the other natives about the stupid explorer he convinced to walk around with bird crap on his head. He dumps his canteen over his head, scrubs off the Foo bird excrement, looks haughtily at the guide, and falls over dead.

The next day, after the funeral, the expedition continues and again the fabulous Foo bird flies overhead and covers a second explorer from head to foot. Again the guide runs up, smiling with
pleasure, and tells the explorer he is lucky to be singled out for fame, wealth, and knowledge by the divine Foo bird.

“Don’t give me that primitive nonsense!” says the explorer. “Yesterday was just a coincidence. I’m not going to traipse all over this wretched island with dried bird crap on my head.” He scrapes it out of his hair with his fingernails, flicks it to the ground, and instantly keels over.

After yet another funeral, the third and only remaining explorer sets off into the jungle, and before he takes three steps into the wilderness the Foo bird soars overhead and unleashes a third direct hit. This explorer, having learned by the deaths of his colleagues, leaves the feces untouched on his head and continues with his expedition. He discovers species of animals unknown to science, unearths hitherto unknown civilizations, discovers hidden treasure, and returns home as the most famous and richest explorer in history, though he is widely considered eccentric because he never bathes. The moral of this story? If the Foo shits, wear it.

That’s how I felt about a lot of the knowledge I had dumped on me. Enlightened but tainted. Dirtied in an essential, mostly magical, way. And even if I wanted to, I couldn’t undirty myself.

Scripture has long known the moral the Foo bird embodies. In one of its stranger moods, the Bible tells us, in Proverbs 14:4: “Where no oxen are, the crib is clean, but there is much increase by the strength of the ox.”