The Joker: A Memoir (14 page)

I felt like a rat caught in a double bind. If I went down one path to get to the food, I got shocked. If I went the other way, I got jolted
again. So I stood in the middle, hungry and trembling, unable to move. I could neither give up the faith by which I’d understood the world for my entire life, nor could I embrace it. Though I wanted to be a sophisticated atheist, I still felt an instinctive spirituality. Yet, I knew this might be mere wishful thinking, a refusal to accept mortality. I couldn’t find a middle path. And Jesus specifically warned against people like me. “Would that you were cold or hot!” he says in Revelation 3:15–16. “So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew you out of my mouth.” I imagined myself as brackish, warm water being spat from the mouths of Jesus and the atheists both, each splattering the other and grimacing with distaste.

Besides coping with classwork, money pressure, a night job tending to a bedridden old man, and an afternoon job at a dry-goods warehouse downtown, I beat my head against these intellectual questions—or were they emotional and spiritual questions? Whatever they were, they pushed me close to a breakdown. A turning point came after my freshman year, when I took a summer class in folklore, and read epics, myths, fairy tales, and folktales with fascinated compulsion. One Sunday, bored in church, I picked up my Bible and, while the preacher droned, read it as a story, beginning at Genesis 1:1. With wonderment and despair, I saw that Genesis was like the folklore I was reading at school. Adam and Eve weren’t the first couple formed by a god in a garden, or the first evicted from paradise. Moses was not the first abandoned baby found and adopted by a king’s daughter. Mary wasn’t the first woman impregnated by a god, and Jesus wasn’t the first god-fathered hero whose birth was presaged by signs and whose childhood acts foretold his becoming a savior of his people. Greek myth was full of figures like Hercules and Orpheus, men with superhuman powers and divine fathers. The biblical stories were more polished, more complex, sure, but clearly they weren’t
like
folklore; they
were
folklore. The obvious will rock you when you discover it yourself.

As I was struggling with my turmoil at this new understanding, I heard this joke:

Jesus is in heaven, when suddenly he realizes that, though he sees his mother and God himself every day around the heavenly palace, he hadn’t seen his earthly father in almost two thousand years.

So he goes to St. Peter, who’s standing at the pearly gates, and asks where his human father is.

“Hmm,” St. Peter says. “That’s a tough one. What’s his name?”

Jesus thinks for a moment. “Joseph,” he says, proud of himself for coming up with it.

“There’re a lot of Josephs here,” says Peter. “What did he do for a living?”

“He was a carpenter.”

“Oh, in that case he’s probably been put out in the boondocks with all the other carpenters, so their sawdust won’t disturb everyone else. Let’s go see if we can find him.”

Jesus and Peter walk and walk until they are way out in the backwoods of heaven. After checking out every carpenter and lathe operator they run across, they finally find an old man in a small shop, sitting alone at a workbench. He’s covered with sawdust and little curls of shaved wood, and Jesus thinks he looks familiar.

He says to the old man, “Did you once have a child by miraculous circumstances?”

“Yes, I did,” says the old man.

“And did you then take that child and love him and raise him as your own?”

“Yes, yes, I did,” says the old man, excitement rising in his voice.

“And did he have holes in his hands?”

“Yes, yes, he did!” says the old man, leaping from his workbench.

Jesus throws his arms wide to embrace the old man, and says, “Father!”

And the old man launches himself into Jesus’s arms, hugs him, and yells, “Pinocchio!”

Oh, it is impossible to tell you how much I loved that joke. I don’t remember where I heard it or who told it, but I laughed until I had to sit down, tears leaking down my hot cheeks. I chuckled for the rest of the day, and when I woke up the next morning my jaws ached. I made a pest of myself, telling it to everyone I thought could stomach it. The joke plays on the search of a son for his lost father—a staple of myth, drama, and popular fiction—and ends here, comically, with him finding the wrong person.

But it’s more than just the wrong person. Jesus confuses this particular woodworker with Joseph, but Geppetto confuses the son of God with a puppet. If bringing down the high and mighty is funny, no descent is more vertiginous than the fall from God Incarnate to a hand-carved block of wood in a children’s story. Suddenly we see in Jesus, the exemplary man, a character flaw we had not expected: vanity. He’d thought himself the only person with holes in his hands who had been brought to life by a miracle and raised by a woodworker.

I was thrilled to hear this criticism, however mild, of Jesus. But what really fueled my laughter was seeing yet another way in which the story of Jesus, the story scholars call the myth of Christianity, was similar to other stories. The comic slamming together of the historical world of Jesus with the fictional world of the puppet is charmingly disorienting. Despite his having been indisputably a living person, was Jesus, as he was portrayed in the Bible, also fundamentally fictional?

F. Scott Fizgerald famously observed that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” Two opposed ideas are, with the right twist, often the source of humor, and I am grateful for the first-rate intelligence this joke embodied. It didn’t
solve my spiritual dilemma, but it showed me how to laugh at the forces at loggerheads in my mind. If I acknowledged that each force—faith on the one hand, skepticism on the other—was legitimate and each had a right to be there, jammed up against the other, the pressure to make a decision eased. Over time, I’d sort them out.

•  •  •

In the meantime I could still laugh at the excesses of the faithful. At Huntingdon, a pre-seminary student and his girlfriend began seeing extravagant, brightly colored demons perched on the shoulders of everyone who did not share their fundamentalism. I don’t remember what color they told me my demon was, but I remember that it was polka-dotted.

Some believers managed to keep their faith while acknowledging they followed a flawed and sometimes unreliable holy book; I, though, had been trained
not
to have a nuanced mind, one that could tolerate inconstancy, confusion, and imperfection. I knew now I would have to develop one. I kept eyeing faith: What form would it take if I could still have it? What would I believe in this new dispensation from absolutism, and how would I believe it?

After my sophomore year at college, I returned to the Royal Ambassadors Camp as a counselor because I was between jobs and I wanted to get away from home again. Mr. B was gone, forced out of his job by political maneuvering inside the hierarchy of the Alabama Baptist Association. Mr. B’s assistant, who just that year had graduated from college, now ran the camp, and he was the same age as some of the counselors. Had the camp really changed or was I merely two years older and more aware of others’ failings? I got my first taste of the new regime arguing with a new counselor, a college student who insisted
Baptist
was spelled
Babtist
—the way we all pronounced it. I’ve seen that spelling on rural churches.

During the second week of camp, leading my squad of boys on an afternoon hike, I heard a loud rhythmic voice echoing through
the hickories and loblolly pines. I told my campers to hunker down on the trail, and I crept toward the voice to see who it was. Trespassers were an occasional problem. Peering through the leaves, I saw one of the new counselors preaching to a water oak. As a teenager, Billy Graham had taught himself to preach by standing on a stump in the pasture and expounding the gospel to his father’s cows.
Maybe that’s what this guy is doing,
I thought. He’s trying to be Billy Graham. Voice rising and falling with stiff, unpracticed fervor, he flailed his arms, slapped his Bible, and harangued the oak to abandon its worldly aspirations and accept Jesus Christ as its lord and savior. His face was upturned in what I assumed was a direct address to the Lord until I noticed his eight campers perched on the limbs of the tree, swinging their legs in the air, and listening to the sermon. Quietly, I led my own boys away.

Unlike him, I did not enjoy public testifying. My first year I’d weaseled out of giving my personal testimony at local churches because of my youth. “We are ambassadors for Christ,” the apostle Paul wrote to the people of Corinth, and as an experienced, second-year Royal Ambassador counselor I could no long avoid ambassadoring. With three or four other counselors—some nervous, some raring to go—I stood before Sunday night prayer meetings in local churches throughout Talladega County and gave witness to my personal relationship with Jesus. Mumbling, hesitating, I rushed through a story cobbled together from other testimonies I’d heard, trying to make embarrassment and equivocation sound like diffident sincerity. I’d been born again in California, I said. In high school I’d fallen under the influence of bad companions but coming to work at the Royal Ambassadors Camp with good Christians had restored my faith and led me to rededicate my life to Christ. I hated standing in front of kind, earnest people, and lying about the thing that was most important to them. The first part of my story was mostly true, though I did not specify that
my bad companions were Voltaire, Darwin, Clarence Darrow, and H. L. Mencken.

During the final week of camp, takedown week, all the counselors moved into the main meeting hall, the building we held services in when it rained. We used the building as a makeshift barracks while we dismantled and folded tents, stacked tent platforms, and covered them with tarps. After work one day I noticed a
Penthouse
magazine tossed in the corner of the locker room. It remained there untouched and uncommented on for several days. The longer it lay there, everyone ignoring it, the more toxic it grew. Finally, its sheer silly forbiddenness overwhelmed me, and I picked it up and ostentatiously flipped through it. I was just being bold, trying to see if I could shock anyone, including myself. Since I lived at home and my parents monitored me closely, I’d never held a girlie magazine in my hands before.

One of my friends called, “Woooo! You’re going to go to hell. Straight to hell.” We laughed, nervousness edging into our voices.

Thomas, a barrel-chested man who was already jackleg preaching at local churches, looked around the corner from his locker to see what we were laughing at.

“I don’t think you should be doing that,” he said tentatively.

“Sure we should, we’re guys,” I said.

He grumbled and the only phrase I could make out was “abominations before the Lord.” Encouraged by his disapproval, I flipped open the centerfold, took a long leering look at it, and held it out for my friend to see.

“Whoa, ho!” he said. “Good-looking!”

Thomas jerked his head up in a small challenge, a we’ll-see-about-that gesture, before he slammed his locker door and stalked out.

Defiant now and determined to get under his skin even more, I eased the centerfold off of its staples, took it upstairs, and stuck it on a nail jutting from the wall above my cot.

Lying in bed, lost in a book, I’d already forgotten about the picture when Thomas, who’d come into the room, snorted loudly twice, like a bull in a Bugs Bunny cartoon, and charged across the room toward me. He reached over my head, tore the picture from the wall, and held it crumpled in one fist. He stared at me, breathing in heavy gulps.

I leapt off my cot and snatched the wad of paper out of his hand. “What do you think you’re doing? That’s private property! Keep your hands off it!”

“This is blasphemy! You’re desecrating the Lord’s house.”

“What? I’m what?”

“We hold
church
in this room.” He snatched at the creased and torn centerfold, and I held it behind my back, out of reach.

“I’m not desecrating nothing. That naked body was made by God and you may find God’s work disgusting, but I don’t.” I was tossing out clichés, egging him on, trying to goof with his head, enjoying myself. But I could feel myself slipping into real anger, unable to back down.

I unwadded the picture, smoothed it as flat as I could, and jammed it back on the nail. Thomas lunged for it, grabbing over my shoulder. I slapped his hand away, and suddenly we were chest to chest, eyes locked, breathing into each other’s faces. He bumped me, and when I bounced backward a step, he grinned.

“You Nazi!” I yelled, and I jammed my chest back up against his, shouting into his face. I was afraid. He was a thick, powerful man and the zealous light in his eyes glowed even brighter than usual, but I was sure he wouldn’t hit me if I didn’t swing first.

The other guys rushed from their cots and stepped between us, and the camp director, who’d run upstairs from his office when he heard the yelling, ordered us to calm down. He took me aside, and when we were out of Thomas’s hearing, he laughed and told me I knew better than to hang up a nudie picture at a church camp. I
needed to take it down. He was right, of course, but I appreciated his laughter. It made it easier for me to walk across the room with everybody watching, and pull the mangled centerfold off the wall.

Then half-reluctantly, at the urging of the others, Thomas and I shook hands.

•  •  •

Back home that fall, I announced to my father that I didn’t want to go to church anymore. He sat in his olive-green lounge chair and kept staring at the TV set while I sat a few feet from him in the orange swivel rocker, pivoting it back and forth nervously. I’d had to work up my courage. I was afraid of him—physically afraid and afraid too that he’d stop helping me with my college expenses. Both my parents had told me often enough, “While you live in my house, you’ll play by my rules or you can leave.”