The Joker: A Memoir (39 page)

Sure, she loves and still urges me to ask people, “Where did George Washington keep his armies?” so she can laugh happily when I shoot my hands out of my cuffs and crow, “In his sleevies!” And she laughs though she knows that every single time I tell it, I think of Jill, who first told it to me.

She’s not so fond of another one of Jill’s, which I like simply because it’s silly, a pun so dumb it’s pure idiot music.

“Where does the Lone Ranger take his garbage?”

“To the dump, to the dump, to the dump, dump, dump! To the dump, to the dump, dump, dump!”

“When’d you learn that one, third grade?”

“And what do you have against third grade, Miss Big Shot College Professor?”

But I had learned a few new ones. After making love one afternoon, I asked her what a man could do in bed to ensure that his woman enjoys a massive, life-affirming, even life-changing orgasm every single time they make love.

“Okay, what?”

“Who cares?”—delivered with a dismissive shrug. Oh, she howled at that one.

It’s a guy joke. And it’s an ugly joke if one takes the speaker seriously. But most guys telling the joke are, I think, acknowledging that while there are guys who think that way, the ones telling the joke are not like them, or else the orgasm wouldn’t be so lovingly described. Some men certainly have no interest in anyone’s pleasure but their own, but it’s also true that there are times when one partner is going to climax and the other, for whatever reason, isn’t, and then one either tends to one’s own pleasure or is left unsatisfied. Would I have told this joke to my wife before we made love? Probably not. But afterward the implicit message is different: It says not only am I not one of those guys, I hope I’ve shown you I’m not. And as Erin and I age, that nasty punch line takes on a compassionate, even a deeply loving, note. If one of us doesn’t finish, who cares? The act of love is still love, dammit, if not as entirely satisfactory as sex.

Obligatory large penis joke: My wife has never had an orgasm. She passes out first from the pain.

Erin and I laugh at most of the same things for most of the same reasons, but with different slants. Her laugh seems to me
more compassionate, imbued with a generous Catholic sense that people, by revealing their flawed nature, are somehow reaffirming an ordered universe with God at the top and humans below. To her, the self-serving gratification of the “Who cares?” is, in its own small-minded way, life-affirming because, as St. Augustine says, “To blame the fault of a creature is to praise its essential nature.” There is some of that acceptance in my laughter. I wish there were more. But the Calvinism of my childhood makes me expect the worst from people. I see and celebrate the occasionally necessary selfishness behind “Who cares?” but I also deplore it. Erin disapproves of it too, but finds the cheerful lack of hypocrisy charming, just as she laughs with pleasure when she sees a dog unabashedly being a dog, even if it’s protecting its food bowl from a passing shadow, trying to steal another dog’s toy, or running to the basement to hide from thunder.

In the first weeks that I knew her, I told Erin the joke that became her favorite—another joke I first heard from Jill—and it’s no surprise that it’s about sex and levels of sexual avidity. A man has been on a desert island for twenty years, utterly alone, and one day, as he is walking along the beach, scavenging, he finds a woman washed up on the shore. He goes to attend to her and sees that it’s Sharon Stone. She must have fallen off a passing yacht. (Which means she fared better than another famously beautiful actress who stars in another joke. “What kind of wood doesn’t float?” “Natalie.” Erin does not care for that one.)

The castaway carries Sharon Stone up to his hut, cleans her up, feeds her warmed-up coconut milk, and slowly, tenderly nurses her back to health. After three months, when she is completely well, he says, “Sharon, I’m nervous about bringing this up because I don’t want to offend you and this is a little embarrassing to say, but, you know, I’ve been here alone on this island for twenty years and I’ve never seen a ship. I’ve never been close to being rescued. The chances of our being saved are virtually nil, and I hope you won’t
think I’m being forward if I suggest we might want to think about, you know, maybe having sex.”

Sharon isn’t so wild about having sex with a scroungy beachcomber, but the prospect of spending the rest of her life on an island with no sexual companionship is a pretty convincing argument; he has saved her life and taken care of her. With a little reluctance, she agrees. For the next two months they have almost nonstop, frantic, insane, passionate sex—the best sex either of them has ever had.

After three months, though, Sharon notices that her lover’s ardor has begun to decrease, and she thinks she ought to raise this issue with him.

“Yes, Sharon, you’re right,” he says. “I guess I haven’t been as fully engaged with you, as fully besotted with you, as I was in the beginning.”

“You know we’re likely to spend the rest of our lives here on this island,” she says. “Is there anything I can do, anything at all, that will get you excited again—that will make our love complete for you?”

“Well, yes, there is. Do you mind if I call you Bob?”

Sharon is taken aback. Nothing in the castaway’s demeanor had prepared her for this. But twenty years alone on an island . . . no real hope of rescue . . .

She shrugs, and says, “Yeah, sure, you can call me Bob.”

“Hey, that’s great. Thanks. Why don’t you come here and sit down beside me, Bob?” he says, and pats a spot on the log he’s sitting on in front of the fire.

With a sigh Sharon sits down, not sure what’s going on.

The castaway looks at her, smiles, and says, “Hey, Bob! Guess who I’ve been fucking?”

How lovely to tell this joke to a woman with whom you are in the wild, first stages of a love affair! We were both besotted with each other and yet wondering whether the passion would turn to
enduring love or, as it were, peter out, and this joke let us acknowledge that fear and laugh about it while reveling in what we had at the moment. But being a joker—carrying a donkey on your back—exacts a toll on one’s dignity. When Erin and I decided we were serious, she called her mother and told her she was seeing a new man. “Oh,” her mother said. “What’s he like?”

“Uh, uh, well, he’s southern.” Erin knew her father, a lifelong Californian, had gone to medical school at Louisiana State University, where he’d joined a fraternity. To the last year of his life, he kept his initiation pledge to stand whenever he heard the song “Dixie,” even if he were alone in his house watching football on TV and the band struck up the tune. He’d love having a southerner in the family.

“Oh, southern!” said her mom. “Is he courtly?”

Long pause, interspersed with giggling.

“What’s so funny? Are you laughing at me?” Her mom was imagining Ashley Wilkes, not a man carrying a donkey on his shoulders.

•  •  •

After we married, the second marriage for both of us, Erin and I spent a lot of evenings and weekends watching music videos and stand-up comedy on TV—talking and joking as we watched. We were tuning our sensibilities, learning in greater detail which music the other loved and what we both laughed at. We were trying to understand and embrace the other’s pleasures.

We also watched home-decorating shows, trying to coordinate our tastes. We wanted to furnish our new house with something other than the graduate-student furniture we’d dragged around into middle age—bookshelves made of concrete blocks and two-by-sixes, sofas cast off by friends and family, and twenty-year-old, swaybacked mattresses. We were fond of a short-lived show called
The Furniture Guys
on PBS. Ed Feldman and Joe L’Erario stripped, refinished, and reupholstered furniture while keeping up a farrago
of sub-Grouchoesque puns and insults. On one episode, they brought in a woman who specialized in stenciling, and while she earnestly stippled flowers around the edge of a refinished cabinet, Ed and Joe mocked her, laughing and egging each other on. The more they joked, the stiffer her neck grew, until finally, upper lip curled back on her incisors, she snarled, “You two just crack each other up, doncha?”

It was the first catchphrase of our marriage, one we still use, burnishing and cherishing it. When one of us amuses the other in a way too silly for others to bear, one of us sneers, “You two just crack each other up, doncha?” The joke is a warning about making our private jokes in public, a caution against being so into each other we’re rude. But it’s true that we have become dedicated to making each other laugh or smile. I will mention only the lifelike plastic lizard that appears regularly in coffee mugs, in the silverware drawer, pressed into the bottom of a bar of soap, or poised to fall off a cabinet door. Taking the time to polish a pun or fine-tune a practical joke is a way of saying,
I’m thinking about you and I want to please you.
It is the opposite of “Who cares?”

The catchphrase I’m most fond of is one I stumbled on at the biennial meeting of the Fellowship of Southern Writers a few months after we were married. In the hospitality suite of the hotel, I loved listening to the banter of luminaries like Louis Rubin, Wendell Berry, Ernest Gaines, Shelby Foote, Elizabeth Spencer, and Fred Chappell—writers whose works I have admired for decades. I’d never dreamed of meeting them, much less hanging out with them as they gossiped, played guitars, and sang.

Among the stars was Andrew Lytle, a novelist and one of the authors of the famous southern agrarian manifesto
I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition
. A bit overawed by the folks in the hospitality suite, I’d been talking to John Jeremiah Sullivan, then an undergraduate at Sewanee: The University of the South. John,
who lived in a downstairs apartment in Mr. Lytle’s house, was at the meeting to tend to the elderly writer. But I had failed to get John’s name, and when he left the group, I asked someone what his name was.

“Who?”

“The kid who was just here,” I said. “Mr. Lytle’s boy.”

From across the circle, a man who’d heard only the last part of the conversation looked up from his guitar and snapped at me, “He has a name! It’s John!”

I was abashed. Bourbon and sloppy camaraderie had led me to a patronizing characterization of a young man I’d just met. When I repeated the story to John a decade later, he laughed: “But I
was
Mr. Lytle’s boy!”

That night, though, when I called Erin, I was still embarrassed by my gaffe. Erin consoled me. The stranger, she said, perhaps feeling the bourbon himself, had seized a harmless blunder and chastised me in public to make himself look good in front of the famous writers—a true egalitarian who nobly rebuked the snob who did not trouble himself to learn the names of the little people. And so our most enduring catchphrase was born.

At breakfast last week, I asked Erin, “Do you want me to clean it?”

“What?”

“The thing there,” I said, nodding across the kitchen counter. I’d gone blank.

“It has a name!” she said. “It’s TOASTER!”

•  •  •

Being married also meant integrating myself into a new family, and telling jokes was how I worked out a relaxed relationship with my father-in-law, both in person and on the phone. Tom wasn’t much of a joke teller but he loved hearing jokes. Like his daughter, he loved to laugh. One of his favorite stories, one that still made him chuckle
seventy years after it happened, was about being aboard the SS
President Hayes
as a marine in World War II. Tom bunked in the extreme forward area of the ship, two decks down in the narrow part where the prow comes to a point. Because of bad weather, the ship pitched up and down dramatically at both ends like a teeter-totter, and he was surrounded by the vomiting and moaning of the men inclined to seasickness. Once he stumbled to the crowded head and saw that the pipes had backed up and troops were slipping on the vomit.

The SS
President Hayes
was headed to Guadalcanal, and the old hands on the ship’s crew amused themselves by telling the young marines frightening tales about the dangers of amphibious landings and the horrors of island combat. The night before the assault on Guadalcanal, the marines were lying in their bunks, nervous, unable to sleep, wondering how a landing that had been so chaotic in practice would unfold under enemy fire. In the hot, anxious darkness, someone ripped an enormous, reverberating fart.

Embarrassed silence. Then one marine sang out, “Sing again, sweet lips, that I may find thee.”

The men exploded in laughter. According to Tom, they laughed till they wept. He knew that the men’s fear, perhaps the greatest fear they would ever feel, fueled their laughter, and, after the catharsis of that giddy, anxious hilarity, he relaxed enough to fall asleep.

Fear fueled the laughter, but what makes the wisecrack crackle? The lofty and archaic poetic language connected to the earthy business of ripping a big one is part of it. The sweet lips and the antique
thee
suggest chivalry, romance, and female companionship—now a world away for men anticipating some of the most savage fighting of World War II. But the sweet lips are not the cherry-red lips of an idealized woman in song and poetry, but the anus of another man. The combination of bleak conditions, men alone, and the hint of homophobia must have fired the nervous laughter for a group of young men concerned with manhood and how those around them
measured it. Men and fart jokes—we are a marriage that will last until the last puts out the light.

Obviously the line was not ad-libbed. But where’s it from? At first I thought it was a line of highfalutin romantic poetry called up from memory and applied to a note played on the butt flute. Who’d have thought a poetic line about seeking sweet lips to kiss had actually come from a 450-year-old poem and had been about farting to begin with? I should have. A little rooting around took me right to the source: Chaucer’s “The Miller’s Tale,” probably the greatest bawdy story in all literature. I’d spent an entire summer at the University of Alabama studying
The Canterbury Tales
under the tutelage of Dr. Woodrow Boyett. In the tale, two young men are courting a young woman behind her husband’s back, and while Alisoun, one of the sexiest minxes in all literature, is lolling in the sack with Nicholas, Absalom, the town clerk, comes by, whispers to her through the window, and refuses to leave till she grants him a kiss. To give Nicholas a laugh, Alisoun sticks her butt out the window and that is what Absalom kisses. He becomes aware of his error immediately: