The Joker: A Memoir (32 page)

After the movie, Tom and I drove around Montgomery, killing time before my eleven o’clock curfew. We often stopped at Bellas Hess, a discount store on the Southern Bypass between his house and mine, and wandered around the aisles, checking out paperback books and records. A few times as the elderly cashier, with excruciating exactitude, rang up my copy of
Is Paris Burning?
or the sound track to
The Graduate
, my right hand started quivering at my side. As the cashier tried not to look, my whole arm began to twitch and tremble, until, with a will of its own, it jerked at full extension, flailing spasmodically, as I politely conducted the transaction, pretending not to notice. I did a pretty good job, I think, of ignoring the hand’s shenanigans because I’d stood in front of my dresser mirror and practiced twitching. Wanting the arm to seem alien to my body, I imagined it as a pelican having a seizure in midair, and I practiced looking as if I had no idea what was happening to my pelican.

I’d invented this bit of silliness after seeing—at the base theater—the antiwar film
Dr. Strangelove
, in which Peter Sellers as the crazed German nuclear scientist fights to keep his erratic mechanical right arm from launching a Heil Hitler salute. Almost every boy I knew did an impression of Dr. Strangelove and his arm. And we performed it exuberantly. We knew what it meant to have an uncontrollable member that snapped into fascist salutes at discomfiting moments.

Behind the invention of my epileptic pelican was also a routine that the comedian David Steinberg performed on the
Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour
. Talking about his childhood, Steinberg abruptly snatched something invisible—a huge insect? a demon?—from his right shoulder, slammed it to the ground, and stomped it, while shrieking
Get!
[snatch!],
Off!
[slam!],
Me!
[stomp!]. Then, as if nothing had happened, he returned calmly to his original topic. I loved the bit because it wonderfully exaggerated the sudden wrenching moments of paranoia that I, like most boys I knew, experienced, and it showed them being defeated, or at least dealt with. One of Steinberg’s catchphrases was “disguised as a normal person.” I took that as my motto, and I always said it with a self-mocking adenoidal drawl, just like Steinberg.

While I stood at the register, my hand jerking, Doherty was embarrassed but unable to keep from laughing. He hurried toward the front of the store and abandoned me, elbow jiggling up past my head. By the time I’d bought my book and caught up with him we were giddy with adolescent hilarity.

It was night, we were boys, which means hungry, so we stopped to stare transfixed into a glass display case of oddly large donuts. What were donuts doing here? I’d never seen them in a discount store before.

On one of the aluminum trays, amid flakes of loose frosting, a misshapen donut lay alone. It was easy to see why this one was still
there at the end of the day. Stretched till the hole in the center was a thin slit, the donut was stale, the glaze thick and crusty. It looked like a scabrous vagina, the organ that Kingsley Amis would notoriously describe as “like the inside of a giraffe’s ear or a tropical fruit not much prized by the locals.” I giggled and Tom chuckled, as much at my amusement as at the syphilitic donut.
But does it really look like a vagina and how would you know if it did?
asked a voice inside my head, and I laughed out loud at myself being myself.

The week before, Tom had come to our first-period classroom with a dazed look on his face, as if he had seen something that had altered his sense of reality. I have never seen him so bemused before or since. Before class started, he told me that his grandmother, who was slipping into dementia, had asked him over breakfast, “What does this remind you of?”

He looked up from his cereal and saw the old woman touching the fingertip of her middle finger to the nail of her index finger. Holding her hand before her face, she stared at him through the vertical smile created by her fingers, and cackled like a crone when her grandson’s eyes grew wide with reluctant understanding. Tom and I laughed with bewildered incredulity then, and now we were laughing again, with near-hysteria, at another simile of the vertical smile—the simulacrum of things unseen, the substance of things hoped for, as the Bible says in an antithetical context.

The more I laughed, the more Tom laughed, which of course made me, contagiously pixilated, laugh more. Soon we sprawled across the glass counter, holding our sides, laughing at our own laughter, laughing at our embarrassment at our laughter. Every time we almost composed ourselves, sucking chuckles back into our throats, they exploded back out as wet snorts so ludicrous that within seconds we were laughing again.

The absurd and pathetic donut was only the trigger. Seeing it as sexual revealed how sex, even in my ignorance of it, controlled
my brain. We laughed in sexual fear, along with the distressing recognition that lust could reduce women to one part of their bodies, which I saw, in defiance of all good sense, in malformed pastry.

While we laughed, the middle-aged clerks, younger then than I am now, pretended to ignore us, glancing at us sideways as they went about ringing up sales. It was the late sixties. Had dopeheads wandered into their store? Tom might have been high. I was sober as a bone. Only when a woman picked up the house phone behind her register and began whispering into it, probably calling security, did Tom and I, bent over with laughter, stagger out of the store and back to my father’s Volkswagen.

•  •  •

If girls’ private parts remained, for me anyway, private, boys’ were much discussed. The language itself was already in love with our uneasiness with our genitals. From the cute to the grotesque, there are dozens and dozens of names for the penis. I favor the old-fashioned
tallywhacker
for its mildly risqué, mildly embarrassing self-consciousness.
Wang
stands up to humorous repetition, as do
dong, pecker, willy, winky,
and
John Thomas,
that formal gentleman.
Baby-maker, one-eyed trouser snake, meat bayonet, tube steak, heat-seeking love missile,
and
skin flute
are funny once, maybe. There are only a few common slang names for the vagina.
Pussy
, the most common, is so pervasive it has lost almost all connection to the over-precious metaphor it grew out of. And most of the others are equally coy:
goodies
,
box
,
beaver
,
muff
. But
cunt
is now probably the most vulgar, contemptuous word in English, and the tense distinction between the demure profanities and the ugly one is captured perfectly in a joke I heard in tenth-grade gym class, repeatedly, from Ricky Walker, who loved it:

Q: What’s the difference between a pussy and a cunt?

A:
A pussy is a wonderful thing that provides unbelievable
pleasure when you cuddle up to it at night. A cunt is the woman who owns it.

The joke perfectly embodies the male adolescent rage about his own indiscriminate lust and the human consequences of it.
Cunt
is so taboo as to be almost literally unspeakable in anything like civilized company. And the thing itself is powerful almost beyond naming. In the jokes about it, which are a mishmash of desire and terror, it is often enormous.

I cannot remember how many times I heard this repulsive joke, one I have never repeated.

Did you hear about this guy that’s screwing a girl and he falls all the way inside her and gets lost in the dark? He flicks on his lighter, and looking around, he sees another guy. That shocks him so bad he drops his lighter. In the darkness, he yells to the other guy, “Hey, help me find my lighter and maybe we can find our way out of here.”

“Forget about your lighter,” says the other guy. “Help me find my keys and we’ll drive out.”

The point of the joke is of course the male fear of the promiscuous woman with a vagina so accommodating as to become hugely, indiscriminately commodious. The encompassing vagina has quenched the first man’s flame and stalled the second man’s engine. But it’s hard not to notice that the two men have more of a relationship with each other than with the woman whom they were both “making love” to, an inadvertent ménage à trois reduced to two because, although all-encompassing, the woman is hardly present. The seemingly throwaway detail of the first man’s snapping on a lighter inside the most delicate part of a woman’s body is viscerally unbearable; it highlights how dehumanized she is by the ancient conflict of men’s desire for the sexually accommodating woman whom he then despises as a slut. Years before I knew it had a name,
I struggled with the Madonna-whore complex, blanching when boys said, “If you screw her, you’d better strap a board to your feet or you’ll fall all the way in.” Jokes like these, which I hated and yet absorbed, made it hard to develop a mature regard for women. But underneath everything, I heard again the male fear of becoming lost to desire, of losing one’s head over a piece of tail.

•  •  •

Growing up in Alabama in the sixties was like growing up in a Puritan near-theocracy. For us southern Baptists, boys and girls were kept apart in church; even going to a school social was a charged religious issue during a time when our faith forbade dancing. As a result, jokes were one of the few ways to talk and learn about girls and sex. Boys were supposed to remain pure themselves and marry virgins. Even if we weren’t pure ourselves, we were supposed to marry women whose purity would serve as a light and a reproach until we found the proper path. Consequently, the jokes we told emphasized the dismal consequences of defiling ourselves with tainted women. Of course, they reflected our anger that the best pleasure our bodies had to offer was forbidden us.

“What is the definition of
rape
?” Carl Blegen asked me in tenth grade as World History was dismissing for the day. “Assault with a friendly weapon,” he said, grinning deviously. I laughed uproariously. The answer perfectly caught the mixed emotions of fifteen-year-old boys. We knew rape was a terrible violation of a woman, an assault that often did turn deadly. But we knew our weapons—our little soldiers, our purple-headed love monsters—as sources of the deepest bliss we had known. Who wouldn’t want to share?

The jokes warned us away from loose women, but how do you know if a girl has kept herself pure? I’d been married to my first wife for four years when, thinking to amuse her, I told her the first time I’d kissed a girl I cracked my front teeth so crisply against Melanie Ames’s incisors I had to squelch a yelp. I was mortified
when Kathleen stopped rubbing lotion in her hands, blinked at me in surprise, and blurted, “You dated Melanie the Whore?”

Immediately I was thrown down a rabbit hole of conflicting responses. My somewhat fond memory of innocent fumbled kisses was turned upside down. I felt like a dolt who had missed the main chance. But what, in the context of the time, had it meant to be Melanie the Whore? Had she made out with a lot of guys or screwed two? Or fifty?
What right did she have to play the innocent with me
? I thought, then, abashed, I acknowledged to myself that I’d have never invited her out if she hadn’t. A sense of estrangement from all women was a side effect of worrying about who was a whore and who wasn’t. As a happily married man, I had hoped I was safely beyond such small-mindedness, but this question in passing showed me what I suspected: my hopes were merely yearnings.

Under the Madonna-whore complexes that plagued me and most boys, there was a deep Christian fear of ourselves as animals, creatures of flesh more than spirit. In women the division was even more startling, with childbirth and menstruation. And so our jokes emphasized the animalism of sex and the supposed ugliness of the vagina, as we tried to keep ourselves under control. When boys and men told me, as many did, many times, “Never trust anything that bleeds for seven days and doesn’t die,” they were in a long tradition that includes Edmund Spenser, whose Duessa is lovely to look at but a witch underneath. You don’t even have to see her “secret filth” to apprehend its misshaped monstrosity:

A filthy foule old woman I did vew,

That ever to have toucht her, I did deadly rew.

Her neather partes misshapen, monstruous,

Were hidd in water, that I could not see.

But they did seeme more foule and hideous,

Then womans shape man would beleeve to bee.

Later, when the witch is stripped naked, her vagina is too foul to describe—her “secret filth good manners biddeth not be told”—though all of her other foulnesses are fair game, right down to the unintentionally charming tail she sports:

Her craftie head was altogether bald,

And as in hate of honorable eld,

Was ouergrowne with scurfe and filthy scald;

Her teeth out of her rotten gummes were feld,

And her sowre breath abhominably smeld;

Her dried dugs, like bladders lacking wind,

Hong downe, and filthy matter from them weld;

Her wrizled skin as rough, as maple rind,

So scabby was, that would haue loathd all womankind.

Her neather parts, the shame of all her kind,

My chaster Muse for shame doth blush to write;

But at her rompe she growing had behind

A foxes taile, with dong all fowly dight.

Though it might take some getting used to at first, I would love to love a woman with a fox’s tail.

The animal aspect of the vagina was not limited to its looks. The first time I heard a boy say, “Morning, ladies!—as the blind man said when he passed the fish market,” I had no idea what he could possibly mean. I inquired. As I’d thought, the joker, aspiring to a coarse worldliness he didn’t have, was just repeating something he’d heard. His confused answer was that the blind man was confusing
prostitutes with ladies, and prostitutes, from screwing a lot of different men, smelled like fish.