The Joker: A Memoir (36 page)

The doctor reaches behind himself, takes a book off the shelf, and flips through it, muttering:

“ ‘Looks bad, feels bad.’ No, that’s not it.

“ ‘Looks good, feels good.’ No, that’s not it either.

“ ‘Feels bad, looks good.’ Not it.

“Ah, here it is, ‘Looks bad, feels good.’ ”

“What is it, doc? What do I have?”

“Willie, it say right here in this book—you’s a vagina.”

Sometimes when Jill told the joke, a listener or two would laugh out of shock. But mostly people waited a few civil minutes and then drifted into another room.

“I
wish
she wouldn’t tell that joke,” three different people said to me at different times.

Mostly the joke is misogynistic, but the racism plays an important supporting role; it does a lot of work for the joke teller, other than just distracting us with racism to surprise us with sexism. The caricatured, minstrel-show blackness of the characters provides a reason for Willie’s ignorance as well as the doctor’s comically exaggerated attempt at diagnostic logic and pretentious misuse of medical terminology, just as it prepares us for the down-and-dirty
lubricious turn at the end of the joke. The racism has been stripped out of almost all the versions I’ve heard or read lately; the result is a somewhat less offensive but much more pallid joke. The characters’ ignorance becomes incomprehensible, the doctor’s behavior is disconnected from any understandable context (except for one intriguing variation in which the doctor plugs the research terms “looks bad, feels good” into a diagnostic medical computer program), and the transformation at the end becomes a half hearted stab at a dirty joke. The oldest version of the joke that I’ve found, in Legman’s
Rationale of the Dirty Joke
, also eschews racism for a straightforward misogyny that’s, if anything, even nastier: “
A man who says that he may look lousy but feel good is called ‘Mr. Cunt,’ on the grounds ‘That’s the only thing that looks so lousy and feels so good
.’ ”

Along the way, the older joke seems to have merged with elements of the minstrel show (I can find no evidence that it emerged from it). The doctor in Jill’s joke takes on the role of the Zip Coon, the stock character in minstrel shows who pretends to knowledge and education mostly denied African-Americans at the time. Willie’s doctor is a descendant of Dr. Squash in John W. Smith’s 1851 blackface play
The Quack Doctor: A Negro Farce
. Dr. Squash has a high opinion of his medical expertise:

So com to me all you niggers what’s ill,

For I am a doctor ob wonderful skill.

I can cure de cholera, cholic, or cramp,

I can cure de worst fevers, coast, typhus, or camp:

I am death on de diarreah, can physic off fits,

And can drive off de small-pox widout leaving pits.

Despite his burgeoning self-esteem, though, he is no more accomplished a diagnostician than Willie’s physician. When Crow comes
to him with a self-diagnosed toothache, Dr. Squash analyzes the evidence and arrives at a different conclusion:

I wants you to substantiate on your understanding dat de occipitital plugatorial bonum, vulgarly called a toof, am not in and within its own individual functuation liable to the fluctuations and sensations which you, nigger, am just now experiencing in a highly antagonistical degree, but on the contrary am entirely unperceptible to the warious contortions and laminations usually ascribed to it. Darfore, I hold dat it am not de toofache.

Instead, Crow is actually suffering from “de disagreeable ailimentary symptoms in medica phraseology denominated, achabus toothabus.”

Even Willie’s finding himself an embodied and ambulatory genital has an old and entertaining ancestry. Ann Marie Rasmussen’s
Wandering Genitalia: Sexuality & the Body in German Culture between the Late Middle Ages & Early Modernity
recounts a couple of poems in which private parts, after tiffs with their owners, set out on their own. The fifteenth-century poem
Das Nonnentumier
(
The Tournament of Nuns
) stars a penis that persuades the knight to which he is attached to set him free. The penis has quite a list of grievances:

It’s on my account that you are warmly received, and you have acquired more honor and dignity because of me than because of the most precious treasure you ever possessed, and yet you have never let me benefit in the least. Oh no, you have forced me into a corner, into the nastiest nook you possess, one even the basest servant would refuse. I want you to know that I’ve had it. If you weren’t such a base and lowborn coward, you would just cut me off right now so that women and men alike can see which of us fares better.

Not the first or the last man to be persuaded by what his penis tells him, the knight castrates himself, but instead of being celebrated, he is derided, mocked, and beaten by the women he thought would celebrate his new enforced chastity and he “spends the last thirty-five years of his life as a hermit in a cave.”

The emancipated penis, not knowing what to do on its own, retreats to a convent and holes up under the stairs. After a year, despondent, suicidal, but unable to kill itself, it decides to stand in the cloister walk until the nuns discover it and kill it. The nuns, though, take turns chastising the penis alone in their rooms. Some sterner nuns chastise the penis so ardently and long that other impatient nuns, chafing to chastise it too, complain to the abbess, who declares the nuns will compete for the penis in a tournament: “The nuns assemble the next day on a meadow, riding in formation under the banner of a naked man and carrying the penis on a silken pillow, which is placed so that it can view the jousts. The tournament degenerates into a wild brawl, during which the penis is stolen.”

The penis watched the jousting nuns! Despite Jill’s love of the Greenie Weenie, I am uncomfortable imagining a penis with eyes.

Not only penises were discontent during the German Middle Ages. In
The Rose Thorn
, a magic root enters a young virgin’s
fud
, miraculously enabling it to talk—and not just talk, but whine. The
fud
, it turns out, is nearly as annoying a kvetcher as its male counterpart: “I think it’s too much that you are thriving and yet I am not allowed a share, especially considering that men everywhere adore you only because of me, and if you were to lose me, every single one of them would find you completely worthless.”

The virgin and her
fud
exchange hot words and heated abuse before separating, and the young lady then accepts a suitor who, the moment he understands just how she is incapacitated, rejects her. Word of her condition gets out, and the townspeople respond with all the pity and commiseration you might expect. They point
her out on the street and shout, “There goes the cuntless woman!”

Things don’t go markedly better for the
fud
. It offers itself to a young man, who mistakes the talking vulva for a talking toad and kicks it. Chastened, the roving
fud
retraces its path back to the lady, and the narrator of the poem helps them out by “nailing the vulva back in place.”

•  •  •

I had always hated the joke about Willie for its
Amos ’n’ Andy
-style racism and its in-your-face disgust with women’s bodies—a twofer if there ever were one—but hearing it from the lips of a woman I loved madly made me rethink its merits. Jill wasn’t interested in the racism or misogyny in the joke. She relished drawling the Dionysian pronouncement “feels goooood,” and her open delight in sexual pleasure was my relish and delight. Underneath the joke’s ugliness she heard the sexual joy celebrated in the medieval folktales.

I was twenty-nine, and Jill was twenty-two. I fretted about the age difference; she didn’t. So I told her about the old man in his nineties who was marrying a woman who was—oh, just to pick an age at random—twenty-two. The night before his marriage, his friends and family come to him and say that, though they didn’t want to intrude, they were very concerned about the disparity in ages between him and his wife. They didn’t know quite how to say it but they hoped that on the wedding night he’d take it easy because the exertions could—well, you know—prove fatal.

The old man tells them that he deeply appreciates their concern but life is sometimes a matter of chance and hard decisions, one has to take the good with the bad. As far as he’s concerned, if she dies, she dies.

Whenever I worried about how much older I was, Jill simply laughed and said, “If I die, I die”—punning on the Elizabethan use of
die
, meaning to have an orgasm.

Once when we were making love, long and strenuously, I was
so lost in the act that, mouth open, I looked down and saw a long, looping strand of drool unfurl from my lips and hang connected between us for an eternally unfolding half second. Then it dropped. Oh my God, I was mortified. She howled with laughter at my distress and the reason for it, neither of us separating. I was beyond gratified that, instead of fussing at me, she preened. She was, she said, so sexually accomplished she’d reduced her man to a slack-jawed, drooling mouth-breather. It was true. When I told her I was going to fuck her brains out, she always grinned and said, “Duh!” What could I do now but look at her and say, “Duh!”?

Does every love have a moment that turns into a symbol when the love is over? Jill and I were still in the early stages of being in love, living together in the cheap first floor we rented in an old house in bad repair. It was a fraught and tender time. One evening as we sat down to dinner, the frosted glass fixture came off the light, hit the table between us, and exploded, flying apart in splinters. I both did and did not understand what was happening, as unmoving, I seemed to see every glass fragment as it flew around, over, and at us. Glass shards clung to our clothes and our hair. I was seized with guilt. When I last replaced the bulb, I hadn’t tightened the retaining screws enough. I leapt up and quickstepped over crunching glass around the table to Jill, who had not moved. We were fine. I plucked white flakes from her black curls. We were not hurt at all until, in trying to tweak a splinter from her cheek, I pressed it into the flesh and blood trickled down her face.

If I hadn’t touched her, she wouldn’t even have been cut.

After nine months, the usual time it takes for the crazy expansion of self in new love to begin contracting, we shrank back toward our regular selves. She loved playing Scrabble with friends, and she didn’t believe me when I told her that friendly competitions do not remain friendly when I’m involved. She insisted, I capitulated, and despite a genial beginning, I soon became an impatient, aggressive,
and self-loathing player, berating myself for bad decisions and cursing unlucky dispositions of chance. Like me, she didn’t like the person I hadn’t wanted her to see.

For my part, I was annoyed and troubled by her casual, even amused, dismissal of the things I was wrestling with then—Freud, faith, and history. I was particularly irritated by her insistence that when she was fifteen and saw her father wheeled out the kitchen door, dead of a heart attack, she knew instantly there was no God. That’s not good enough, I said. It’s simplistic and emotional. Everybody dies. You can refuse to believe in God but that isn’t a good enough reason. Didn’t matter if it was logical or not, she said. She knew what she knew. Later, much too late, I came to understand she was of course right and reasonable—death is the test of God.

We knew the joke: What are the three stages of love? Kitchen sex, bedroom sex, and hall sex. In kitchen sex, you are so madly in love, so crazy for each other, you screw everywhere—living room, couch, floor, kitchen. In bedroom sex, passion simmers down and you make love exclusively in the bedroom. And in the final stage, hall sex, you pass each other in the hall and say, “Fuck you!”

We never reached that last stage, but as time passed we fussed and fought, arguing more and more sadly. Let one detail suffice for a hundred: Jill was an avid moviegoer, one who sat through every minute of the credits while I considered the damn movie over as soon as
THE END
appeared, and I wanted to go home. I hated being trapped in a theater, unable to leave when I was bored. During
Yentl
, the Barbra Streisand film of an Isaac Singer story I like, I repeatedly left the theater and stalked around the lobby, enraged by Streisand’s self-adoration. In one scene, Streisand, the director, aims the camera reverently upward at her face while light shines down, beatifically. Her profile fills the screen, and at one moment, the camera is staring up her left nostril, which is lit like a stained-glass window. Big
noses, as the comedians say, are always funny, and in over-loving her own visage, Streisand inadvertently created a moment of anti-Semitic caricature that made me bark out loud and slide down in my seat, giggling. Jill was steaming. She thought I was mocking the movie and her for liking it. She was half right. Maybe, I’m pained to admit, three-quarters right. But the middle of a movie is no place to hash out fine distinctions in mirth, artistic merit, and two lovers’ widening divergence in taste. By the time we left the theater, we were both too angry and hurt to sort out our concerns. We had begun to think they didn’t matter.

For the last six weeks or two months of our life together, as we waited out the end of our lease, she slept in the bed and I slept on the floor beside her, holding hands until one of us rolled over, seeking sleep.

•  •  •

After we broke up, I relearned the truth behind “The Single Life,” an epigram by my old teacher Henri Coulette; it’s probably the most wince-eliciting couplet ever written: “Being a bachelor’s not so hot. / I find I sleep on the wet spot.” A world of pathos (and the simply pathetic too) hides, poorly, behind the bravado of these two lines and fourteen words. Along with whatever life experience he brought to it, Coulette almost certainly wrote his poem with another poem in mind, the famous Middle English lyric fragment that we call “Westron Wynde”: