The Joker: A Memoir (23 page)

By dying early in the year, Bryant spared himself the angst of witnessing the 1983 Iron Bowl, the Auburn–Alabama game, in which Bo Jackson, as a sophomore, gained 256 yards on twenty carries and led Auburn to a 23–20 victory. I never heard anyone say of Bo Jackson, “He may be a nigger, but he’s our nigger.”

The Auburn-and-Alabama rivalry still verges on open animosity between the state land-grant “Ag” school, with its emphasis on agriculture and farming, and the “prestige,” liberal arts university, where most of the state legislators, judges, and journalists went to school. Or used to. That’s changing as Auburn has become stronger in the liberal arts. I married into a family of Alabama fans and then went to Alabama for graduate school. But my brothers, all three of them, went to Auburn, and my brother Mike met his wife there. Their house is full of Auburn blankets, throws, bedspreads, mugs, magazines, pictures, sweatshirts, sweatpants, sweatbands, and memorabilia—all in the school colors of navy blue and burnt orange. When Bo Jackson played tailback for Auburn, huge posters of
the future Heisman Trophy winner covered my nephews’ bedroom walls, which pleased and startled me. The family dog was named Bo, and when Jackson went on to star briefly for L.A. in the NFL, the next dog found himself answering to Raider. Both of my nephews have since gone to Auburn, as they always knew they would, so it was natural for them to convert their rooms into virtual Bo Jackson shrines. A new era had arrived in the state of Alabama. Except for Jimi Hendrix posters taped on the bedroom walls of high school guitarists, I’d never before seen a picture of a black man in a white person’s house in Alabama.

I doubt there’s an Auburn–Alabama joke my brothers and I haven’t fired at one another. The jokes are pretty much the same jokes you hear about Texas–Oklahoma, Texas–Texas A&M, South Carolina–Clemson, North Carolina–North Carolina State: basically Little Moron jokes with a few regional twists whenever they can be worked in. The North seems less fond of them, but some of them attach to Ohio State–Michigan, Iowa–Iowa State, and USC–UCLA. Why was Auburn late for the game? Driving up the interstate, they kept seeing signs that said
CLEAN RESTROOMS
, so they did. How do you break an Alabama student’s finger? Punch him in the nose.

An Alabama student sees an Auburn football player in the frozen food section of Winn-Dixie, staring without blinking through the glass window at a can of frozen orange juice. “What in the world are you doing?” asks the Alabama student, and the Auburn football player replies, “It says
concentrate
.” A tornado recently went through Tuscaloosa/Auburn and did five million dollars’ worth of improvements. What’s the difference between a litter of puppies and an Alabama fan? The puppies stop whining after six weeks. What’s a seven-course meal in Auburn? A six-pack and a possum.

When Bo was first recruited by Auburn, my father-in-law liked to tell a joke in which Bo Jackson goes into a tailor shop in Tuscaloosa. (The most famous joke about Tuscaloosa is Groucho Marx’s,
from
Animal Crackers
: “While shooting elephants in Africa, I found the tusks very difficult to remove. But in Alabama, the Tuscaloosa.”) The tailor helps Bo select a good wool fabric, advises him on different pant styles, and measures him. The tailor makes the pants and ships them to Auburn. After Bo tries them on, he calls the tailor and complains that the pants are too tight. He can’t even get them past his knees.

The tailor is surprised. He knows he measured carefully but he tells Bo to mail them back and he’ll fix them. When the pants arrive, the tailor lets them out in the waist and sends them back to Auburn. But after Bo tries them on again, he calls the tailor with the same complaint: the pants are still too tight.

Once more Bo ships them back to Tuscaloosa. Once more the tailor lets them out, this time as far as they will go. Once more he ships them back to Auburn, and once more Bo calls the tailor to say they are still too tight.

“Well, Bo, you’ve got to remember,” the tailor says, “you just ain’t as big a nigger in Tuscaloosa as you are in Auburn.”

As soon as I heard the word
pants
, I was nervous, positive the joke was going to be about penis size, so I suppose the joke gives a slight head fake toward sex and then runs in a different direction. But like many race jokes, it just comes to the old surly point: Bo, you are a nigger and no matter what you accomplish you will always be a nigger to me.

The joke suggests that redneck Auburn fans are “nigger lovers” who overvalue Bo Jackson. Oddly, the joke all but admits the failure of its metaphorical attempt to cut the famous black man down to size. Bo Jackson was a Heisman Trophy winner with astonishing power and speed, a pro athlete in both baseball and football, and a handsome man whose face was world-famous from Nike’s “Bo Knows” ads. The joke’s clear subtext is that the rest of the world may see Bo as a big shot, but I’m sticking to my mulish refusal
to see what everyone else sees, even my fellow Alabamians. The strained effort to belittle Jackson reveals the littleness of the attempt. Yet, within the undeniable racism of the joke, there’s something unmoored in the bigotry. It doesn’t link Jackson to a racial stereotype. It just calls him a nigger. For what it’s worth, this is the only racist joke I can remember about a football player, in Alabama or anywhere else. Calling an African-American a nigger remains a deep transgressive pleasure for a few people.

•  •  •

Once I stood in line with my father-in-law, waiting for him to buy a pair of pajamas, while the harried and inept clerk struggled to ring up customers. Mr. Ruby, who had been daydreaming, suddenly looked up, noticed I was getting antsy, and said, “What’s taking that nigger so long?”

“Will you shut up?” I muttered, laughing with shock, trying to make a joke out of it. He was my father-in-law. I thought then that I was going to live with him the rest of my life. And I loved him. I didn’t want him to say things like that.

“What do you mean?” he said loudly.

“She can
hear
you!”

“But she
is
a nigger—and she knows she’s a nigger too.” He laughed at my discomfort.

How much of this exchange was his wanting to get my goat and how much of it was true entrenched racism, I don’t know. But what was tolerable and even funny teasing at home, in his house, was intolerable in public, where the overwhelmed clerk had to deal not only with her job but also racist abuse.

“Just be quiet,” I said, again through tight jaw muscles. “Please. Before you get us killed.”

He laughed, enjoying my anxiety and embarrassment, but he changed the subject.

Because I loved him, I am still, I know, making excuses for him,
and these are some of them: He had never said anything similar before in public, and never did again. After he had been fired from the
Montgomery Advertiser
, where he had worked since high school, he fell into a depression so persistent that he submitted to several rounds of shock treatment. They altered his personality, weakening his sense of discretion, and he changed even more after four heart attacks and a coronary bypass.

My wife and I had been divorced for several years when, working in his garden in one-hundred-degree heat, my father-in-law suffered his fifth and final heart attack. He died there on the perfectly tended turf, next to the lush bed of hollyhocks bounded by monkey grass, as everyone for a decade had told him he would.

Because I happened to be in Montgomery, visiting my father, I attended the funeral service, in the Episcopal church where Mr. Ruby sang in the choir and where my ex-wife and I had married. I sat in the back row. Although it had only been three years, the family pew held several people I didn’t recognize. The church was so packed with mourners that the air-conditioning system was overmatched, and I sweated through my shirt and coat. I stayed till the service ended, then quickly slipped out into the bright afternoon light of the parking lot and my car before I had to talk to anyone. The picture of my mother-in-law lost in grief haunted me. Later that night I called my friend Tom, whom I had known since high school and who knew Mr. Ruby because he had briefly dated my ex-wife in high school. From Montgomery, he went to Spokane for college because it was just about as far as he could get from Alabama. Tom observed gleefully, “That’s luck, isn’t it? You’re in town one week a year and that’s when the old guy kicks. For normal people the odds of that happening are—what?—two percent? For you it’s practically inevitable.”

That was the best laugh of the week.

Later the State of Alabama, because of his work for the Bureau
of Tourism, named a rest area after my father-in-law. I have stopped there many times over the years, not as homage but because I have to use the restroom, and each time I try to imagine the jokes he would have made about the Warren T. Ruby Welcome Center.

•  •  •

When my marriage broke up, I consoled myself in another round of graduate schools, first for two years at the University of Iowa and then for a year at Stanford. In that time, the only racist jokes I heard were from joke connoisseurs, people like me who were interested in jokes as cultural artifacts or mechanisms to be examined, appreciated, and chuckled over. Of course we joke tellers always displayed a bit of wariness as they approached the border of taboo and then, with mutual assent, crossed over. Ugly jokes make you wonder about the people who tell them. We serious jokers have to sort out the motives of the teller, our own responses, and the cleverness of the joke all in an instant while never breaking contact with the expectant eyes of one another. Because most graduate students in creative writing are trained to look at stories objectively, I didn’t feel so much like the tempter, enticing friends to laugh at things they don’t want to laugh at, when I asked, “Why do a black man’s eyes turn red after sex?”

I assumed, not always correctly, that other jokers would see the joke not as racist but a joke
about
racism. And when I told the joke, or one like it, I started by saying, “Now, this is a racist joke.” I was trying, not always successfully, to tell the listener I was not, under the guise of humor, passing on my own beliefs. As Shakespeare has Rosaline in
Love’s Labour’s Lost
say:

A jest’s prosperity lies in the ear

Of him that hears it, never in the tongue

Of him that makes it.

It’s a dicey business for a joke to prosper when it’s ugly and racist in one of the worst possible ways, so I tried to make damn sure that the ears that heard it from my lips understood I was not endorsing the sentiments in the poem, but enjoying the surprise of how it juggles racism for comic effect. Why do a black man’s eyes turn red after sex? Mace.

A few painful and aggravating times I was accused of racism because I told jokes like this, and a few times I walked away from conversations where they were being told by people I didn’t trust, but no one ever succeeded in completely turning the tables on me—until the spring of 1983. I was standing in the kitchen of a house on the Stanford campus, where a bunch of my friends were hosting a large dance party. I was telling jokes with friends, all men, when a poised and well-dressed black woman entered the house to a flurry of whispers. “Look who that is!” “She did come.” “I didn’t think she would. She just said she’d see if she could make it.” There had been some gossip, some hope, and now here she was, vibrant in the excitement her presence elicited. Already a star in academe, she was the future provost of Stanford, the highest academic officer of the university, Condoleezza Rice.

She joined the small cluster I was in, probably because we were nearest the door. I don’t remember what jokes I was telling, but they must have included two time-bound ones I was infatuated with then.

Q: Why did Menachem Begin really invade Lebanon?

A:
He wanted to impress Jodie Foster.

From the moment an old girlfriend posed the riddle, I loved the audacity of the comparison. Who wouldn’t be intrigued by a joke that conflates the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, at the order of Prime Minister Menachem Begin, and John Hinckley’s attempted
assassination of Ronald Reagan in 1981? It takes Hinckley’s insane motive for his attempted murder of the president and applies it to a decision in which it’s even crazier. The joke suggests Begin’s decision, like Hinckley’s, was motivated by deranged macho posturing. Whether one agrees with that assessment or not, the joke elegantly makes a complicated critique in just over a dozen words.

The other joke is more complex, and requires remembering that in the early, confusing days of the AIDS epidemic many of the first victims were Haitians who had come to America in the Haitian boatlift in 1980. At first, briefly, the illness was considered a Haitian problem. Then, before scientific understanding enlarged to include drug injectors and finally anyone sexually active, AIDS was thought to be primarily restricted to gay men. Here’s the joke I probably told Condoleezza Rice:

Q: What’s the most difficult thing about having AIDS?

A:
Trying to convince your parents you are Haitian.

When I first repeated the joke, a stranger at a dinner party, alert to my accent, sneered, “That may be true in Alabama, but it’s not true here in San Francisco.” Then he asked my girlfriend if she’d like to go boating with him that weekend. He twisted my obvious relish for the joke to imply that I was an insensitive redneck with no regard for the suffering of AIDS victims. I replied that I didn’t think it was easy to come out of the closet in either San Francisco or Alabama—an answer that nonplussed him into silence—and made my girlfriend laugh.

He was right that the joke suggests a victim, even in the face of death, would try to hide his homosexuality. I heard that in the joke, just as he did. But to my ear, the joke supposes sweet and terrible empathy with the victim. It’s saying,
Not only is this poor imaginary
bastard dying, but he is dying in a hostile world that forces him to deny his sexual orientation by telling a desperate and humiliating lie to the people least likely to believe it.