The Joker: A Memoir (29 page)

As the two bulls consider their good fortune, the rancher drives through the gate, towing a trailer. He stops, walks around to the door of the trailer, unlatches the door, and jumps back as an enormous young brute of a bull blasts out into the pasture. The young bull spots the old bulls, glares at them, and paws the ground viciously, kicking up huge clumps of grass and dirt. The older bulls just look at him blankly, so the young one ambles over to the herd of heifers and begins to service them one after the other, roaring and grunting with delight.

After the fifth heifer has collapsed in a state of bovine bliss, one of the old bulls charges toward the young bull and begins to snort, and stamp the ground.

The other old bull runs up to his companion and says, “What the hell are you doing, you idiot? That young guy’ll kill you!”

“I just want to make sure he knows I’m a bull.”

I told the joke repeatedly in high school, even obsessively. The world of that joke
was
high school. Sidney Lanier was a jockocracy. Coaches made much more money than teachers, and the football players, on game days, sat at tables reserved for them at the front of the cafeteria, eating steak and baked potatoes heaped with sour cream and grated cheddar cheese while the rest of us munched corndogs and Tater Tots. When I complained, I was told that since the steaks were paid for from athletic department profits, it was none of my business. When I pointed out that the steaks were fried by county employees on county-owned stoves, I was threatened.

Football players were lionized at pep rallies, celebrated in the newspaper, and cosseted through dumbed-down math and history classes conducted by coaches who didn’t know what they were talking about except when they held footballs—and even that didn’t
always help. One coach taught history while holding a football, occasionally tossing it in the air and catching it while he talked.

In gym class, the athletes terrorized the non-athletes, smacking us around. Like a number of my friends, I occasionally wore my athletic cup to class because jocks, passing me in the hall, found it amusing to slap us in the groins. Their viciousness even extended to the team managers, boys who wanted to hang around the jocks so much that they became their servants, bringing them water and toting equipment to the field. Returning from an out-of-town game, the jocks at the back of the bus stripped the team manager, smeared his penis, testicles, and anus with Deep Heat, and then mummified him in Ace bandages. He rode the rest of the way home curled up on the floor, weeping and whimpering in agony. The football player who told me this story thought it howlingly funny and wanted to share the laughter. I was a joker, wasn’t I? Isn’t this story hilarious?

Tell the teachers if I was afraid? The teachers knew that the coaches made two or three or four times what they did. They knew that they were servants to the football players first and school administrators second. If they forgot, they were reminded every other Friday night when it was their turn to go to the stadium or the gym, and work without pay, selling tickets and soft drinks.

Tell the principal? If the football team had a bad season, he was as likely to be fired for it as the coach.

Tell the coaches? The coaches loved aggressive players, and they encouraged violence off the field to ensure violence on the field. A defensive back in my history class told me that on at least two weekends coaches drove him and other football players to Oak Park, and encouraged them to beat up the hippies. Before they got in the car, the coach issued them baseball bats from the school’s supply room.

In the lunchroom one day, I mentioned that I had cut my hand on a loose wire on my spiral notebook. The two-hundred-and-
seventy-pound offensive lineman who sat at my assigned lunch table said, “Where? Let me see.”

Astounded by his concern, I held out my hand. He took it and clenched down. Looking me in the eyes, he picked up the salt shaker and salted the cut. Unable to break the grip of a boy who outweighed me by at least a hundred and thirty pounds, I bucked and yelled, trying to get free, until a teacher came over and told me to shut up.

The violence peaked two years after I graduated, when a boy in the senior class led a spur-of-the-moment pep rally in the lunchroom. Jumping up and down on a lunch table, he exhorted the crowd to cheer the Sidney Lanier Poets on to victory.

Taped on his torso, pinned up and down his legs, blue-and-white pom-poms snapped with every step he took.

Suddenly the pom-poms soared into flame.

The rumor at the time was that a football player had, as a joke, snapped a couple of wooden matches at the pom-pom boy. The newspapers said that police investigating the incident had interviewed eighteen witnesses and the burned boy himself. They had a pretty good idea what had happened but they wanted to interview half a dozen more people before they announced their conclusion. With that, the newspapers dropped the story like a stinging nettle. As far as I could tell, the investigation was never concluded and no charges were ever filed.

In outrage, I told this story to my friend Tom Doherty, who graduated from Lanier the year after I did. Tom, now a professor of American Studies at Brandeis, said, “Come on! Of course no charges were ever filed, Brainiac! It was a football player!”

“Yeah, that’s right,” I said. I’d forgotten that in Alabama football-immunity extended even to felonies.

But maybe that horror wasn’t the peak. Maybe the peak was the boy, I believe he was a cornerback or safety, who, rumor had
it, buried a cat up to its neck in his backyard and then mowed the grass methodically, arriving at the cat in due course. He was so vicious in attacking hippies in Oak Park that one of his victims was reputed to have driven to New Orleans and paid for a professional hit on him. The hit man—and as an animal lover I have mixed feelings about this—did not fulfill the contract.

For my entire sophomore year, at night, in bed, in fear of going back to school the next day, I imagined stealing a rifle and striking back at the football players who made my life a daily misery. Instead of counting sheep, I made lists of people I wanted to kill. I stopped my murderous fantasies because I realized if I didn’t, I might actually slip out of fantasyland and then into action. I had a strong hope, even an expectation, that if I just held on till graduation, I could go to college and pursue a life not shaped by fear and humiliation. But to get there, like the old bull in the joke, I was going to have to pretend like I wasn’t frightened.

You don’t have to think too hard to grasp the bull joke’s meaning: It’s better to be defeated in a hopeless fight than to be treated like a woman, better to die than let another man use you sexually. The joke’s sympathy is with the old bull, and the story stops in the nick of time for it to be funny. If the joke went one step further, only one logical thing can happen: The young bull will kill the challenger.

Like the old bull, I realized that I might have to fight stupid and pointless fights, knowing I’d be whipped. If I was going to be abused by the bigger boys, I was at least going to make it as difficult for them as I could—and if I couldn’t hurt them, I’d at least make them hurt me enough that they might get in trouble for it. In tenth grade, that determination, along with flailing, screaming, and unyielding panic, saved me from being stuffed into a gym locker. As the jocks shoved me into the tiny space, I kept jabbing a hand, arm, or foot out of the locker, and they had to decide if they wanted to break one of my bones to get the door shut. Two other boys were
crumpled into the narrow, three-foot-tall lockers, jockstraps yanked down over their faces. With an enraged dignity that I admire to this day, one military brat—Larry Pizzi, I believe—pulled his street clothes on after he got out of the locker, walked the two miles to the police station, and filed a complaint for criminal assault. Although he’d been in town only a few months, he already knew nothing would come of complaining to the coach or principal, but he didn’t yet know nothing would come of filing an official complaint with the police, who were almost to a man ex-jocks and diehard fans of their old teams. But after that, Pizzi was left alone, and after I had vowed that I would exact as much cost as I could from the bullies, legally or physically, even if it meant being maimed, so was I. I’m not sure how my determination conveyed itself. My wife tells me that when I believe I must do something, no matter what it costs me, I assume a look of fervent kamikaze resolve that makes sane people back off. You learn that look if you attend a school in which students go up in flames.

In another way, by telling the joke, my friends and I acted out the role of the combative bull, as we assured ourselves and others we were straight. The joke implicitly demeans gays, and you could say we were picking on those weaker than we, but gays at Sidney Lanier were deeply closeted, and jokers like me were one of the reasons they stayed that way. We were bullies without knowing it, our jokes reaffirming what we already believed—that it was morally wrong, personally sick, and socially unthinkable for a man to have sex with other men. The jokes relied on our boyish, visceral revulsion at gay sex to drive the humor, which only strengthened the taboo. Example: Guy orders ten shots of whiskey. Slams all ten back. Shakes head. Orders another. Bartender cuts him off.

“Ah, man, come on. I just had my first blow job.”

“Oh, in that case, have one on the house before you go.”

“Just forget it. If ten won’t get the taste out of my mouth . . .”

I’m more ashamed of the homophobic jokes I laughed at and repeated than the racist ones. I seldom took jokes about race seriously because I never took racial superiority seriously, even when I should have listened more closely to what the jokers—and my laughter—were telling me about themselves, the world, and me. But because I dreaded other boys thinking I was gay and because I accepted the prejudices of my time, gay sex seemed absurd and therefore risible. Still, contrary to what preachers roared from the pulpit, an insistent voice inside my mind—or maybe it was simply an enlarging sense of what normal was—grew stronger and stronger, arguing that people’s loves were none of my damn business.

So even as I repeated them, I was growing uneasy with the lisped jokes about limp-wristed Bruce, including the one about his attending, for some reason, Sunday services at a rural Baptist church and putting a twenty into the offering plate. The impoverished congregation is astounded by his munificence, and, as thanks, the preacher asks Bruce if he’d care to choose the next three hymns. Bruce stands up, looks around, and says that he is, in his turn, astounded by their generosity and, pointing three times around the congregation, says, “I’d like to choose him, him, and him.”

Ba dum tish!
A dismal
Ba dum tish.

If there’s any comic pleasure here, I can’t find it in the tortured and suffering pun, God knows, or in the clash of cultural expectations between rural fundies so poor they are astounded to discover a double sawbuck in the collection plate and a citified gay so ill educated he’s never heard of hymns. What sparks the humor, if there is any, is the violence that implicitly ensues after the farm boys realize what they have been selected for. Does anyone think the pastor is likely to respond with a frosty, “Sir, that is not what I meant?” The city boy is likely to get his three hims and not in the way he hopes.

Even in my revulsion at my former homophobia, though,
there’s room for a laugh. I still chuckle at a joke, dated now, that my mother and I heard Johnny Carson tell on
The Tonight Show
.

Clasping his hands in front of him, rocking back slightly on his heels, Carson asked, “Did you hear about the three gay men who assaulted a woman?”

Any mention of sex while I was in the room with my mother made me anxious. Adding gayness, a category she didn’t grasp, as I knew then, turned up the thermostat. Assault turned it up even higher. And of course there’s the built-in tension of a riddle. Can I answer the question? Will I understand the answer when it’s given? And this riddle is a poser. Why would gay men attack, presumably sexually, a woman?

When Carson began the answer, “Two held her down . . .,” the tension becomes almost excruciating. All I could think about, sitting six feet away from my mother, was gang rape.

“Two held her down.” Pause. “And the third fixed her hair.”

Mom and I laughed in relief, sure, but the joke is also clever in the way it sets rape so thoroughly and illogically in our head that we can’t see past it, and then suddenly resolves more or less harmlessly if you aren’t, as we weren’t then, offended by the stereotyping. For my mother, at least a little of the humor must have resided in the esoteric concept of sissy men fixing hair. Her hair had only ever been set by women, and when I was dragged along to the beauty salon with her as a boy, I was almost always the only male in the room. Even the men who were waiting for their wives or, if it were near five, the husbands picking up the hairdressers, usually waited in their cars.

The three gay men are so offended by the woman’s visible lack of beauty that, in a sort of aesthetic rape, they force beauty on her to satisfy their need for it. And the joke hints that
real
men’s different needs for a woman would lead to the gang rape the joke teases us with in the beginning.

•  •  •

Identity is at the heart of teenage agonizing, and so a lot of the jokes I loved then were about how we define ourselves or have ourselves defined. Though I heard it often, a joke I never laughed at is the one about the man who, on the psychiatrist’s couch, just happens to mention that he’s been having sex with his horse.

Taken aback by this casual admission, but trying to be calm, professional, and nonjudgmental, the doctor asks, “Is it a stallion or a mare?”

“It’s a female of course. What do you think I am—a queer?”

In the telling, it’s necessary to get the right tone of outrage, incredulity, and contempt into the punch line. Even when I heard it told well, I rolled my eyes, not because I was offended but because the punch line is so predictable. Once the psychiatrist asks about the sex of the horse, the joke has an obvious path, and it takes it. Still, the joke has some interesting wrinkles that my contempt for its punch line blinded me to. What is worse, homosexuality or bestiality? The patient is more indignant at being thought gay than being thought a horse fucker. The joke is funny, to those who find it funny, because the man accepts with equanimity the greater taboo—he doesn’t even acknowledge it is a taboo—but angrily rejects the lesser. The horse fucker clings to his dignity by insisting that there are straight horse fuckers and queer horse fuckers, and whatever else he is, he’s straight! What I missed in high school is that even as the joke winks at the patient’s delusions, it clearly signals that homosexuality is so outside acceptance that even horse fuckers look down on queers. The man’s voice saying, “What do you think I am—a queer?” is also the voice of the joke teller, donning his terror of gayness.