The Joker: A Memoir (31 page)

We know this amoral figure of undifferentiated desire, this embodiment of Freud’s polymorphous perversity. He’s the drowsy-eyed, man-womanish god Bacchus. Who’d be surprised if, in a newly discovered
Homeric Hymn
, Bacchus enters a shady grove and discovers a traveler who has been robbed, stripped, and bound, his wrists lashed to his ankles with leather thongs? Without a thought, the god takes his enjoyment and continues on his aimless way, his sleepy eyes alert for the next opportunity.

I told and retold this joke, shocking my friends as I shocked myself. The joke mocked our fears of being gay, immoral, or cruel. Bliss is bliss, and the moral categories we place on the sensual
pleasures are ludicrous attempts to control a force that is, in its essence, lawless and indiscriminate. Jokes and myths can shuck our delusions of civilization right down to the cob.

Yeah, maybe—but I wasn’t going to spend the rest of my life being Andrew the Goat Fucker.

With her tightly permed black hair and immaculate lace-collared white blouses, my tenth-grade English teacher at Lanier, Mrs. Halliday, looked like a neurotic and perpetually confused version of Minnie Mouse. She was so timorous she often slipped from the room without explanation to cry in the restroom or sit on the couch in the teachers’ lounge, rocking, smoking, waiting for her trembling to stop. She was the wife, someone said, of a big shot on the county Department of Education. That’s how she kept her job.

Our list of required reading was enough to reduce anyone to tears. Established by an act of the state legislature, the list contained such zippy reads as
Green Mansions
, the story of Rima the Bird Girl, “the fiery-hearted little hummingbird,” who chased her flickering shadow through the Venezuelan rain forest for mile after mile of thick green prose. “Ah, little spider-monkey—little green tree-snake—you are here!” says Abel, our hero, when he sees her,
which might account for her shyness. The list included
Captains Courageous
and
The Last Days of Pompeii
—the best-selling crap of two previous generations, which possessed the literary sufficiencies of being sex-free, curse-free, and atheism-free.

One of the questions on the book test was always “What was your favorite scene?” and one boy, in his report on
The Last Days of Pompeii
, answered, “The looks on the faces of the people as they ran out of the collapsing buildings.” He had read the
Classics Illustrated
version, that is to say, the comic-book version, of the novel. Though I wasn’t as amused by the melodramatically panicked expressions of the soon-to-be-incinerated Romans, I admired how he brazenly let Mrs. Halliday know he hadn’t bothered to read the book. She gave him a B.

I was so bored I killed class time by prying nails out of the floor’s oak slats with my fingernails, scraping at the old-fashioned iron cut nails till I could get enough purchase to rock them back and forth. Each nail took weeks. Half-listening to Mrs. Halliday’s trembling lectures, I had no trouble understanding the patience of Edmond Dantès, the long-suffering Count of Monte Cristo, as he scratched at the stone dungeon walls of the Château D’If. By May, I had six flat black nails in my underwear drawer at home. I’d torn my fingernails and fingertips bloody on them.

One row over and one seat up from me, a blond girl chattered constantly in a high languid Alabama drawl, sometimes cursing cheerfully under her breath when Mrs. Halliday announced a test. In the cooler months Francine often wore a sage heather angora sweater. Maybe it was a shade darker than sage. Maybe a shade and a half. I remember the sweater with disquieting clarity because I spent much time trying not to be seen studying the taut curves swelling it. One day, while Mrs. Halliday was off weeping, Francine unlatched her purse, rummaged down past her keys, gum, pens, change, and cigarettes, and pulled out a folded sheet of lined notebook paper.

“Listen to this. This is good,” she said, drawling out the last word till it was well over two syllables long. She leaned into the aisle and whispered:

It’s your first time. As you lie back, your muscles tighten. He asks if you’re afraid and you shake your head bravely. He has had more experience, but it’s the first time his finger has found the right place. He probes deeply and you shiver; your body tenses but he’s gentle like he promised he’d be. He looks deeply within your eyes and tells you to trust him—he’s done this many times before. His cool smile relaxes you and you open wider to give him more room for an easy entrance. You begin to plead and beg him to hurry, but he takes his time, wanting to cause you as little pain as possible.

As he presses closer, going deeper, you feel the tissue give way; pain surges throughout your body and you feel a slight trickle of blood as he continues. He looks at you, concerned, and asks you if it’s too painful. Your eyes fill with tears but you shake your head and nod for him to go on. He begins moving in and out with skill, but you are now too numb to feel him within you. After a few frenzied moments, you feel something bursting within you and he pulls it out of you. You lie panting, glad to have it over. He looks at you smiling, and you smile and tell him how good you feel now.

Francine stopped and looked at us, and I too looked around to see what she was seeing. Our mouths were hanging open, I noticed, and I shut mine abruptly. The girl in front of me, Brenda Somebody, whose elegant, delectable neck I stared at every day at school, was blushing, her pimples redder than ever on a sea of pink, and she smiled with a nervous rictus that showed the entire architecture of her braces. Francine, satisfied with what she saw, took a deep suggestive breath and read the last line:

After all, it was your first time having a tooth pulled.

•  •  •

A few of us ponied up weak laughs of relief—courtesy chuckles, the girls’ slightly closer to honest laughs than the boys’, I noticed, in the moment before I blurted, “That’s just stupid!”

“You don’t think it’s funny?” Francine said, her lip quivering just a bit. How could a girl tough enough to tell that joke in tenth grade suddenly turn as tender as Rima the Bird Girl?

“No, it’s obvious,” I said, knowing my objection was a lie even as I said it. I recently found Francine’s joke online. Reading it brought back to me how furiously I blushed and how completely taken in I was, though I desperately pretended otherwise.

“It’s just not funny. It’s—I don’t know—just silly or something. Forget it.”

Who wouldn’t make the obvious sexual interpretation, hearing these words from the lips of a luscious fifteen-year-old girl he’d been fantasizing about in nocturnal, hands-on imaginings? Night after night, I used words like these to tell my body stories that I knew nothing about, and every night, sometimes three times a night, my body believed the lies I told it. Though it was eager to hear my lies and I was eager to tell them, at the same time we were embarrassed for each other, my body and me. I was ashamed at not being able to tell it a truer story and contemptuous of, if gratified by, its gullibility. For my body, the emotions were reversed.

What a slippery and disheartening relief it was when, in her joke, the confident deflowerer became a dentist and the more-than-ready blossom transformed into his patient. I groaned at the joke, scoffing to cover my sexual unease. Francine was flirting with me and I had no idea how to flirt back. So, compulsively, without thinking, I ridiculed the joke as obvious when it hadn’t been, silly when I’d taken it all too seriously, and unfunny when I’d been too agitated to laugh. I was unnerved that words whispered by a girl had
caused my body to pitch an appalling erection against the fabric of my chinos—when those words, in the double-dealing way of jokes, turned out to be about a trip to the damn dentist. I felt like a fool.

Is the joke actually funny? Even now it’s too wound up with the circumstances in which I heard it more than forty years ago for me to say. I can see why a pretty fifteen-year-old girl would want to tell it. And I can forgive myself my adolescent ungraciousness because boys are almost invariably laggards when it comes to emotional maturity. I’m not sure I’ve closed the gap yet.

Even two years later I still lagged the girls in social poise. When I wanted to attend the junior prom just so I wouldn’t be one of the losers who couldn’t, I looked around for a girl who I was pretty sure was in the same fix I was. After working up my courage, I dialed her number, pulled the phone cord into my room, and with my head almost touching the hollow-core door, I cleared the hurdle of her father’s voice—“Hello, Mr. Reddick, this is Andrew Hudgins. May I speak to Phyllis, please?”—Then I lurched into my memorized spiel:

“Hi, Phyllis, this is Andrew Hudgins. From your history class? I was wondering if you’d like to go to the prom with me.”

“Yes,” she said.

“Now I understand that you might have already been invited by someone else, but I just wanted to call you to see if possibly . . .

“Yes, I’d like to go.”

“. . . if possibly you might still be available to go to the dance and all . . .,” my robot voice continued.

“Andrew, I’ve already said yes!” She was laughing.

“Oh, that’s right. You did. Great!” As we talked about the date, arranging a time for me to pick her up and getting directions to her house, I imagined her getting off the phone and telling her mother about the goober who’d been so sure he’d be turned down that he hadn’t heard her agree, twice, to go out with him.

That triumph of savoir faire was still two years in the future
when Mrs. Halliday again fled the classroom, leaving us alone to tell jokes. Because a new student had joined the class, Francine had slipped back a seat and was now sitting next to me. Once more she pulled out a folded sheet of notebook paper, and this time she read a poem:

If the car broke down and we were alone,

would you?

If my parents were asleep and the lights were low,

would you?

And if the night was warm and the kisses hot,

would you?

At the end of the poem, she looked me in the eye and asked, “Would you, Andrew?”

I couldn’t hold her gaze. I blushed, started to stutter, and then just shut up and smiled at her weakly. I was completely unable to come up with something light to say, anything that would deflect attention away from me. Here was a moment just like the fantasies that I told myself every night, and I was completely flummoxed because I could not speak the truth. The truth would have been to yell at the top of my lungs, “Yes, Jesus-screaming-God, yes!” Followed by a firm sotto voce, “No, not really.” Or vice versa.

Her simply telling the joke made her seem so sexually aggressive that I was scared, and sure she wasn’t the kind of girl I would want to be seen with. Yes. No. Yes.

No. If I said no, how could I explain that she was so experienced I felt like a six-year-old ogling the babysitter whenever I looked at her? That she was much closer to being a woman than I was to being a man? Or that, most of all, I was terrified beyond words of getting a girl pregnant and having to sack groceries at the A&P for the next thirty years to support her and our child? And that
I knew I’d quickly come to hate her, myself, and our children for all I’d given up: a life that I imagined with terrible clarity as I lay awake at night, wrestling with lust.

By the last month of the school year, I often saw her escorted through the halls by a senior in a yellow windbreaker with his initials embroidered on the left breast, collar turned up, and a Beatles comb-down over his forehead, the tips bleached blond. She laughed at everything he said, slapping his shoulder playfully as he leaned possessively over her, tall and mostly unblemished.

While my awkward encounters with girls revealed what I didn’t know, my camaraderie with boys often confirmed I wasn’t alone in my ignorance. If I could wheedle the Volkswagen out of my father on Saturday night, I’d drive from east Montgomery to Southlawn and pick up Tom Doherty, and we’d go out to Maxwell Air Force Base, where our fathers worked. As air force brats, we could show our ID cards, pay fifty cents at the base theater, and, along with a room full of young enlisted men, watch a movie. Often we didn’t even know what we were going to see until the title rolled up on the screen. Before the show started, everyone stood, those in uniform holding a salute, the rest of us with our right hands over our hearts, while the national anthem played and a scratchy image of an American flag rippled over scenes of marines splashing onto a beach in the South Pacific, a squad of Sherman tanks rolling through a snowstorm and down a muddy road into Germany, a fleet of destroyers shepherding a convoy of transport ships through the North Atlantic corridor, and, suddenly in color, the Blue Angels, four bright blue Phantom F-4s, shooting up the screen in a terrifyingly close formation and veering apart, sketching a white, vapor-trail blossom in a flawless blue sky.

As the last martial strands faded and the lights went down, someone always yelled “Play ball” and a few people laughed at the exhausted joke, repeated now as ritual. About twice a year, a
disgruntled old officer or an earnest young one wrote to the base newspaper and chastised the misguided boors who thought it funny to bellow “Play ball,” as if that were the natural ending of our country’s national anthem. They showed grave disrespect to the song, the flag, and the many brave men and women who had died so today’s moviegoers would have the right to act like fools. Reading the letters, I was always convinced by the authors’ appeals that we respect the sacrifices of our troops, until I remembered that the
men
who yelled—I never heard a female voice cry “Play ball!”—were themselves pilots and frontline mechanics prepared to follow their predecessors to the grave, if necessary, to defend the country. Some died without going near the front lines. In Vietnam, one of my father’s mechanics died when the overheated brakes on an F-4C Phantom jet boiled the brake fluid and exploded in the service bay. The way I saw it, the young men were entitled to heedlessly yell “Play ball,” the retired colonels were entitled to be stuffily offended, and I was entitled only to observe and keep my mouth shut.