The Joker: A Memoir (33 page)

Fifteen years later, I heard a woman read her poems at an after-dinner get-together at a writers’ colony. As was the custom, she supplied the usual bottles of cheap wine and, to everyone’s surprise, a wheel of good Brie, which her audience scarfed down as she read. Her last poem, the finale of the reading, extolled at length the pleasures of performing cunnilingus. Attempting to describe the flavor of the beloved, the poem, considering and rejecting various comparisons, rose ecstatically to the end line, which the poet declaimed with loving fervor: “Not Camembert, but Brie!”

I looked around the room at the other listeners. Like mine, their mouths were poised in forced appraisal, one we had never expected to be making, and I could see people coming to the same assessment I had, “No, that’s not quite right.” Then, carefully making eye contact with one another, we smirked and shook our heads slightly, trying to make one another laugh. As I left the reading, I asked a woman what she thought, and, glancing to be sure she was out of earshot of the author, she exploded with rage, “Fish and cheese! Fish and cheese! That’s what we’re always fucking compared to and I’m fucking sick of it!”

All the joking about cavernous, ugly, odiferous vaginas was done behind the backs of adults, and almost never where girls could hear it. Public jokes about sex, especially at an event as squeaky-clean as a student-body election, broke open a window into the parallel world we all knew existed, and, once acknowledged, even the most glancingly risqué joke brought down the house.

At our high school all students were required to attend the speeches of the candidates for student council, our introduction to the stupefying cant of politics in action, the speeches as pointless as the offices the candidates were seeking. But amid the promises to work with the administration to make Lanier an even more
wonderful institution, one of the students ended his speech by telling the joke about the Indian who sits on a street corner all day saying, “Chance.” That’s all he says, “Chance, chance, chance” to each passerby.

Finally a lady, who is more au courant on racist clichés than the Indian seems to be, stops and asks, don’t you mean “How?”

“Know how. Want chance.”

After a moment’s indecision, the student body burst into wave after wave of laughter. I’ve seen the young Jay Leno perform, and he never got a laugh like that. The audience convulsed. We couldn’t stop laughing at his calculated audacity. The candidate, a huge grin on his face, preened as laughter and then applause mixed with laughter washed over him. Once the hilarity died out, he unctuously applied the joke to his situation: because of his vast experience in student governance he, like the roadside Indian, knew how. All he needed was a chance. Presumably, he was not running for school chaplain, though my memory is hazy on many particulars.

The joke was perfectly considered: just impudent enough to make him seem like a rebel while emphasizing that he had been a good soldier all along. The joke was so vague he could deny any impropriety, which he knew and we clearly understood. It brought down the house, and it is absolutely the only thing about the election I remember or cared about—so slick, so perfectly placed at the limit of allowable audacity, so appropriate to the occasion that I didn’t even scorn as much as I should have the cynicism behind it.

•  •  •

In my senior year I went out a couple of times with a girl whose open-mouthed, tooth-baring laugh I reveled in; I didn’t know any other girls who laughed that way. As she laughed, though, her eyes darted around, looking for approval, a tentativeness that caught my eye and surprised me because she was friends with many of the rich kids.

Occasionally, Kelsey dropped by my homeroom and listened to us boys tell jokes, laughing her intriguing mannish laugh, and of course I was flattered that she came by to see me, often wearing a pert gray sailor dress with a red ribbon on the front and blue anchors embroidered on each side of her collar. Once, when she walked in the room before the first bell rang, a boy named Gary had just finished telling his new joke for the second time that morning and we were all chortling. Four or five of us had gathered in the front of the room, lolling in the desks of kids who didn’t get to school as early as we did. The first time Gary had told the joke to me, and the second time I’d joined him in telling it to a new victim.

“What’s so funny?” she asked, leaning her hips against the desk I was sitting in.

“It’s just Gary’s new joke,” I said.

“Tell it to me. I want to hear.” She slid into the desk in front of me, and turned around, expectantly.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.” I didn’t want Gary to tell her, but I didn’t think I had the right to jump in and ruin his joke. My presumed gallantry irritated her.

“Come on, I want to hear it,” she said to Gary.

“You don’t have to tell her,” Gary told me. “It’s my joke. I’ll tell it.”

I shrugged.

He leaned forward, locked his eyes on hers, and said, “These two queers are on an iceberg, see, all dressed for the cold—boots, hats, fur coats—when suddenly the iceberg breaks in half, and the two halves start drifting apart.

“One queer is on each half of the iceberg, standing there, looking at the other one float farther and farther away.”

Gary paused for a moment and looked at Kelsey until she nodded to show she was following the story. I stared past her toward the green chalkboard at the front of the room. I had suffered many
humiliations at that board, at the hands of mathematics and its earthly emissary, Mz. Gorrie, my Analysis teacher.

“The two queers can’t swim across the gap because the water’s too cold. It’ll kill them,” Gary said. “They run around looking for a kayak or raft or some way to get across the water, but they can’t find anything. Finally as they start to sail out of sight on their melting icebergs, one queer runs to the edge, puts his hands to his mouth, and shouts as loud as he can, ‘Radio!’ ”

Cupped hands held to the sides of his mouth, Gary acted out the scene, drawing out the word,
Rayyyy-deee-oh!
and we boys all exploded with raucous hilarity, some of us with our heads down on the desk, laughing, others slapping our thighs, all of us glancing at Kelsey to see what she was doing. She laughed with us, open-mouthed and wholehearted, and suddenly I was furious with her.

When Gary had told me the joke earlier in the morning, I’d disappointed him and my friends by refusing to laugh.

“I don’t get it,” I’d said, as they hooted.

“Sure you do,” Gary said, gasping for breath. “The one queer says, ‘Radio!’ ”

The other three boys cracked up all over again, and again I had looked at them, face scrunched with cogitation, trying to figure it out.

Now, though, I was on the other side of the joke. “Isn’t that a great joke, Kelsey?” I said meanly.

“Yes,” she said. Her eyes were moist at the corners with tears of laughter.

“Do you get it? Do you get the joke?”

“Yeah.”

“You sure you get it?”

“Yeah, it’s a good one.”

“That’s funny,” I said, “because it doesn’t make sense. It’s not a joke.”

As the laughter froze on her lips, the other boys erupted into real laughter. Pale, Kelsey pushed herself abruptly up out of the desk, cracking her hip hard on the edge of it as she rose, and stalked out of the room. As my friend Danny Anderson says in a poem, “It’s always funny until somebody gets hurt / and then it’s really funny.”

The joke was a con, and as con artists supposedly say, “You can’t cheat an honest man.” The two-queers-on-an-iceberg opening isolates a traditionally despised minority on an arctic version of the desert island we know from many other jokes. The two men are separated by chance, and then the story arrives at a simulated punch line, one that almost makes sense. If they had radios, they could contact each other. The joke has not, however, mentioned radios before, and
radio
doesn’t evoke any antigay prejudice or practice. It simply doesn’t connect. The joke relies on social coercion as much as the famously infectious nature of laughter. Who wants to be the excluded, ferret-eyed mumbler who wasn’t clued in enough to comprehend whatever-the-hell cleverness it is that those two gay men communicate? Or whatever-the-hell nasty antigay jibe the joke embodies?

Later that month, Kelsey abandoned me at the senior dance and spent the night dancing with the black kid whom her parents had forbidden her to date. It was a comeuppance I earned fair and square.

When I had called Kelsey and asked her to the graduation dance, she agreed, and then cheerfully informed me that she’d really wanted to go with Luther Simmons, a black student, but her parents, at the height of the Wallace era in Alabama, had forbidden it. Though she made it clear I was her second choice, I felt I had to go with her: I’d asked and she’d agreed. I did not possess the cool presence of mind to inquire, “Why are you telling me this?”

We double-dated with some friends of hers, and at her door I presented her with the requisite corsage I’d ordered two weeks before—a huge white carnation graced with a blue pipe cleaner
twisted into the letter L. I’d picked it up at the florist’s on Friday afternoon and kept it in the refrigerator overnight. The carnation was still cool when I lifted it out of its clear plastic box and pinned it to the strap of Kelsey’s blue gown. She giggled when the back of my fingers rubbed clumsily against her pale hot shoulder.

At the old civic center downtown, Kelsey boogied with an unstable, explosive disregard. Released by the heavy beat of Billy Joe Royal’s band, she shimmied her full hips and shook her pale shoulders with the self-aware sexual force of a fully grown woman, while I, practically tone deaf, shuffled around the beat. The narcissistic sexual power of her dancing left me behind, alone on the dance floor, and I was relieved that she did not expect me to follow.

After a few dances, Kelsey yelled above the music that she had to go to the ladies’ room, and for fifteen or twenty minutes I stood by the stage, watching Billy Joe Royal sweat. He was famous for “Down in the Boondocks,” which had reached number nine on the pop charts. The dance committee was proud to have signed a name act—one even more famous than the Classics IV, who, a month before, had played their hit “Spooky” four times at the junior-senior prom.

What was taking Kelsey so long? Had she lost me in the crowd? I pushed through dancers doing the Pony, the Frug, the Boogaloo, and when I found people I knew, I asked if they’d seen her. Betsy, a girl in my French class, said Kelsey was on the other side of the room, dancing with some black guy.

I worked my way again through the crowd, moving cautiously this time, until I saw Kelsey and Luther, whom I had never met, dancing. The other dancers had pulled back from them, and Kelsey had seized the space they’d given her, throwing her hips loosely and aggressively with the music.

Numb, affronted, I circled the outside of the crowd and sat down on one of the civic center’s old swivel-bottom seats. Because
the seats were higher than the dance floor, I could watch Kelsey and Luther while I tried to think of what to do. I’d never even
heard
of a girl who’d gone off with another boy at a school dance. There were several iron-clad rules, rules designed to keep fighting to a minimum, and one was that you danced with the one what brung you, as the saying goes.

I just wanted to leave the dance and go home, but because we’d double-dated I didn’t have a car. I had to wait at least three hours till the dance ended, then cadge a ride with friends. Sitting there, staring at the dancers, I knew I looked pathetic and dejected. The unhappiness that showed on my face was partly real, partly adolescent histrionics that I hadn’t learned to suppress—and partly I was trying to make Kelsey feel guilty. But, to my surprise, I was strangely detached, and pleased at how clearly I could understand what was happening. I could see that Kelsey didn’t care about Luther any more than she cared about me. From the haughty sexual strut of her dancing and the gratified and determined look on her face, I could see she savored being the center of attention, reveled at being looked at because she was dancing with a black guy, thumbing her nose at her parents. Me? She might have been paying me back for the joke about the queers on the ice floe, but I doubted it. I had been momentarily useful and that was all. She shimmied her shoulders so hard that the corsage flew off and skittered under the feet of other dancers, which made her laugh.

Was it more humiliating for me that she had dumped me for a black guy?
I wondered. Nope. Same humiliation. I felt pretty good about my liberal humanism. But didn’t it make things worse in the eyes of all the other people in this dingy civic center in the heart of the Deep South? Was I expected to stomp over to the dancing couple and punch him out? I might could have. He was about my height and skinny, with thick black-rimmed glasses. He was, I believe, a trombone player in the marching band. I actually tried to work up a
little racial animosity. But “My God, she’s abandoned me for a black man” sounded hopelessly self-aggrandizing. What really wounded me was another great southern passion: manners. Using me as a beard and then ditching me without a word just seemed like plain bad manners.

During the dance, friends stopped by to talk to me and to offer me rides home. My friend Betsy, one of those preternaturally mature high school students who at seventeen is already a fully adult woman, stalked over to Kelsey during the band’s second break, pulled her aside, and said, “Don’t you know how unhappy you’re making Andrew?
He’s
your date.”

“I’m not doing anything to him!” Kelsey snarled. “He can be miserable if he wants to be.”

When Betsy reported the conversation to me, I laughed out loud. Even then, seventeen and wretched, I heard in Kelsey’s retort the delicious theatrical wickedness of an actress who loves playing the soap opera vixen. It clarified the situation. I never saw Kelsey again. Decades ago, someone once told me she had become a nurse, but I have no idea if that’s true.

I date the beginnings of my emotional maturity to that evening. Now, thinking back on it, I’m puzzled at how I sat for three hours on a rickety seat in the old civic center and seriously pondered whether my failing to punch a black guy I had never seen before and haven’t seen since, over a woman I no longer even liked, would mark me forever as a coward in the eyes of people with whom I thought I’d live the rest of my life. I am very happy that time and distance have left me puzzled by what I thought. Then, I believed I understood it perfectly.