The Joker: A Memoir (28 page)

In the chill before eight o’clock, as we two twelve-year-olds walked to Del Vallejo Junior High to participate sullenly and minimally in another day of American schooling, Burkett asked me, “Did you wake up this morning with cream in your mouth and a nickel in your hand?”

“Cream? We don’t drink cream in our house.”

“Just answer the question, you motard! Did you wake up this morning with cream in your mouth and a nickel in your hand?”

“No.”

“Oh, sorry—I forgot to pay you!” he brayed, and pointed at me, chanting, “You, you, you!” as if he’d scored a devastating put-down.

“What are you talking about?” I hadn’t understood he was telling a joke, and when I understood, I didn’t get it. I felt stupid, and Burkett relished his superiority.

“You, you, you!”

“Stop being a creep and just tell me what you’re talking about.”

“The stuff that comes out of your dick when somebody sucks it, it looks like cream.”

“Like whipped cream? Wouldn’t that hurt?”

“No, it feels good.”

“How do you know? You ever had it come out of yours?”

“No. But my brother has and he says it feels good.”

His brother had humiliated him with the joke the night before, and Burkett had been eager to pass along the pain. Because I’d just learned of the penis’s unexpected role in baby making, I kept my doubts to myself. And because I was still struggling to comprehend heterosexual sex, I couldn’t even begin to grasp gay sex. My mother had already made it beyond clear that men did not, under any circumstance, do such things.

She made her point with a joke. Two men are camping. One takes his clothes off and slips into his sleeping bag. A rattlesnake, curled up inside the bag, sinks its fangs into the member that in our house was called the peenie. (Pee. Knee. Diminutive of penis. Cute-ification of it. I was sure my mother did not know any vulgarisms for the male member till I remembered she used to chant a little rhyme, “A woodpecker pecked on the schoolhouse door / and he pecked and he pecked till his beak was sore.” Why did she laugh when she said it? What was funny about that? In her version, nothing. When I later heard the unbowdlerlized version, I realized she was laughing at what she omitted: “A woodpecker pecked on the schoolhouse door. / He pecked and pecked till his pecker was sore.”)

“Oww, that hurts,” screams the snake-bit man as he jumps out of his sleeping bag, holding his privates.

“What’s the matter with you?” asks his friend.

“A snake bit my peenie. Do something. You’ve got to save me.”

The friend rummages urgently in his backpack, pulls out his old
first-aid manual, and quickly comes to the page about snakebites: to save a snakebite victim, you have to suck the poison out of the wound.

“Hurry up. What’s it say?” asks the snakebite victim, moaning and rolling on the ground, holding himself with both hands.

“It says right here in this book,
You gonna die!
”

My mother laughed and I laughed with her. The idea that one man would put his mouth on the peenie of another man was so unimaginable we found it hilarious. Confronted with the dilemma of taking his friend’s dirty part into his mouth or letting him die, this man doesn’t see a dilemma.
You gonna die!

I’m pretty sure my mother did not see the joke as homophobic, but in the same somewhat innocent way I did: don’t put dirty things in your mouth! When I was in college in the early seventies, I was sitting on the kitchen counter of our house in Montgomery when Mom said, agitated, “You know, I’ve heard all this talk about men and men and women and women, you know, being together, you know. But I don’t believe it. What would they
do
?”

For a few lunatic moments, I considered telling her.
CUNNILINGUS
and
FELLATIO
flew across my mind like advertising slogans on a banner behind a plane. Then another, smaller plane followed, trailing a banner reading
BLOW
JOB
and
CARPET MUNCHER
. I waited for a third plane but the sky was blue and endless. I said, “Jeez, Mom, I’ve heard that too, and I have no idea either, no idea at all.”

I realized Mom wasn’t the only one so ill informed when I read that Lydia Lopokova hadn’t quite puzzled out the conundrum either. In 1973, about the same time my mother and I had our conversation, Lopokova, who danced with the Diaghilev ballet, partnered with Nijinsky, and posed frequently for Picasso before marrying John Maynard Keynes and becoming Lady Keynes, wrote: “I can understand two men. There’s something to get hold of. But how do two insides make love?”

As a kid, I worried about letting a snakebite victim die because of my squeamishness, and in an ethical decision that consumed several nights of tormented deliberation, I decided I was morally compelled, no matter how revolting it was, to save the life of any man I encountered who had been bitten on the dick by a rattlesnake. I was grateful, however, that we did not go camping very often. Secretly, I thought Jesus would be proud of my audacity and sacrifice, even though I was beginning to understand the dirtiness of the peenie was not just physical, but also moral. Together, the two jokes—Burkett’s and my mother’s—brought me to some rudimentary concept of homosexuality. And it was about time too. My father had flinched away from the task earlier in the year.

The week before I started junior high, Dad called me into the living room at bedtime, when the house was quiet, and sat beside me on the couch. The lights were low and the room dark with obligation. This was the time and place of our depressing heart-to-hearts about how I was not working up to my potential at school, failing to help my mother around the house, sitting alone in my room too much, not making friends, not trying hard enough at sports, and not developing a positive attitude. I was expecting another round of the same when my father said, “You know you’ll be starting junior high in a couple of weeks. . . .”

Yep,
I thought,
chance for a new start. A fresh opportunity to get off on the right foot. I need to find something I really care about and stick to it.

“In gym class you are going to be taking showers with all the other boys.”

“Sir?”

“If anybody touches you while you are in the shower I want you to tell the coach immediately.”

I’d been in boys’ showers before. Sharing showerheads, we jostled for position under the spray, and sent one another sprawling
with a casual shove if the one clumsy enough to drop the soap was also stupid enough to bend over to pick it up. Crouching and dropping one’s face to butt or crotch level was unimaginable. Best solution: kick the soap into the corner and then go get it, away from everyone. Or slide it up the wall with your foot until you can reach it without bending. I had no idea what Dad was talking about. It was impossible to shower without bumping into other boys or being bumped.

“I mean if another boy touches you, you should get out of the shower, find the coach, and tell him what happened.”

“Touch me, like how?”

“Just any way at all. Any kind of touching. I want you to tell the coach and then tell me. Just promise me that.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. I had no intention of keeping this promise because I had no idea what I was promising.

“Good. I’m glad we had this talk. Some boys do bad things with other boys in the shower.”

I thought he meant the bigger guys would beat you up when you were wet and naked. In the junior high locker room, the most frequent pain inflicted on me emanated from the welts scored on my butt and hips by a blocky, swarthy boy who delighted in whipping a wet towel against the flesh of smaller, pinker boys. I took his right to administer this petty cruelty as natural; he was wickedly accomplished at it and his back rippled with more, thicker, and blacker hair than I’d ever seen on a biped outside the primate cages at the San Diego Zoo.

My reticent father must have been troubled by my insouciance about public showering, along with a worrying constellation of other traits. I was a boy given to solitude and unexplainable weeping between bouts of anxious rage. Boys like me, the ones interested in books, art, crafts, wordplay that I hoped was arch, and what was then called the “ladies’ section” of the newspaper, tended toward
effeminacy, didn’t we? Since I was inept at hitting a baseball or even tracking its arc as it sailed through the darkening sky over right field and my outstretched glove, my teammates thoughtfully alerted me to the limitations of my manhood. That strikeout cost us the game, you stupid pansy! You fag, you couldn’t catch your ass with both hands. That fairy’s always an out for our side. Can’t we just skip him? Don’t be such a wuss. You aren’t really hurt. You fruit, you queer, you pussy. Maybe my teammates saw something in me that I couldn’t see myself. Maybe an unsuspected hankering for men’s bodies would come upon me suddenly, like puberty or religious conversion. Maybe I’d suddenly find myself hanging around campgrounds and hiking trails, looking for a man who’d been snakebit on the peenie.

From roughly ages six to twelve, every several weeks, I burst out at my mother, screaming with rage. Mom drove me past blubbering to snot-sucking terror with the usual response: “Just wait till your father gets home. Once he hears the way you’ve been talking to me you’ll
wish
you’d never been born.”

One night, following one of my blowups, my father and I had another heart-to-heart on the couch in the dark living room. He’d already explained to me, he said, that my mother was just as much my parent as he was and that I should give her all the courtesy and respect that I did him, but somehow that had not gotten through to me. Neither had whipping me. Neither had grounding me. Or more whipping. He and my mother were at their wits’ end. They didn’t know what to do with me, and they weren’t going to accept this kind of disrespect. Choking up with frustration, fear, and resignation, he said that he and my mother had decided to send me to a psychologist.

“Am I crazy?” I blurted, shaking. I was willing to believe it. I knew I was out of control when I yelled at my mother. I knew, because she wasn’t the one I really wanted to yell at. I was too
frightened of my father to yell at him. When he didn’t like what I did, what I said, how I said it, or how I looked at him, he jerked his belt off, making four or five machine-gun pops as the leather whipped backward through the belt loops. He ordered me to take my pants off and kneel beside the bed with my butt in the air, and then he slashed the belt up and down my naked rear or thighs. My brothers and I kept a close eye on what was holding up his pants, especially the thin black civilian belt, the one that bit the hardest. Because I was apoplectic at his mean and arbitrary rages, and terrified too, I shrieked at my mother while he was at work, and she, seeing what looked to her like unmotivated derangement, ratted me out, trying to use his anger to make me act civilly to her, which at least gave me a legitimate reason to be furious with her.

“No, doll, you’re not crazy,” he said, and he hugged me, clasping my cheek tight against his chest, rocking me back and forth, as he laughed shakily at my fear, which was his fear. “You just need a little help.”

Every time I went to see the blond psychologist, Mrs. Miller, Mom instructed me to pay attention, do what I was told, and get my full sixty dollars’ worth of counseling. Did I understand how much money that was? Did I know we could buy the whole family’s back-to-school shoes with sixty dollars and have money left over for notebooks? I imagined that, unlike the boy in the jokes whose father took him to a whorehouse on his eighteenth birthday and paid a woman to “make him a man,” my parents paid a woman to listen to me talk and make me normal—an auditory prostitute, a talk whore. My God, I must be pathetic if it cost sixty dollars to entice someone to talk to me.

As it turned out, I liked to talk. Mrs. Miller always began our sessions by spreading cards across her desk, each with a different black-and-white photo of a face on it. The people were dressed in the clothes of an earlier time and they seemed European. I guessed
they might be postwar French or Dutch. From each grouping of cards, I chose the two faces I liked best and least, and by my choices Mrs. Miller diagnosed my mood.

After I got comfortable with Mrs. Miller and her office, I asked what the cards said about me. I liked asking her questions. The explanations were a bit thick with psychological jargon, but unlike at home, I could ask and she would answer.

She flipped the first series of cards back on the desk and said, “See that man? You always pick him.”

The young man had an open, unblemished face, full lips, light hair, and he wore an almost jaunty plaid sport coat. In retrospect I see a young version of the poet Hart Crane.

“He’s a homosexual,” she said, and hurried to add, “That’s nothing to worry about. It doesn’t mean you’re like him. Most people pick him. It just means you may be open to the feminine side of yourself. We all have that side, men as well as women.”

Almost magically, my fear vanished. A professional had said it was okay, maybe even good, to have a feminine side. Even her cursory explanation implied that normal sexuality included a wider range of complexity than I’d been told—and that homosexuality was part of the spectrum. It was one of the most thrilling and freeing moments in my life to realize that, despite everything I was learning at home, church, school, and on the playground, normal was a much wider category than I’d known. And sex was only part of it. Normal jobs, normal interests, normal clothes, normal food, normal fantasies, normal stories, normal jokes, normal thoughts were all suddenly commodious eight-lane highways and not the strait gate and narrow road of the gospels. Off and on for a month, I stayed awake at night, marveling at the insight, which I knew to keep to myself.

But the social opprobrium of being thought effeminate continued to haunt me. That’s why throughout high school I loved the
joke about the two old bulls standing in the pasture, overlooking the heifers they think of as their harem. What a great life to be a bull!