The Further Adventures of The Joker

by Martin H. Greenberg

  The Joker backed into the wall. The Emmett Kelly plaque was directly behind him. When he felt the nose against his spine, he leaned back. He heard a welcome click. A ladder-equipped trapdoor dropped from the ceiling. The Joker slid up it like an eel.

  Batman leaped for it, snaring the lowest rung. He rolled onto the ladder as the trap lifted flush with the roof.

  The Joker was waiting for him, knife in hand. He slashed down, the box held clumsily in the other hand.

  Batman rolled to one side, evading the awkward blow. He leaped to his feet.

  “You’ll need more them a knife to protect yourself from me,” Batman warned. He feinted with one hand. The Joker ducked. Batman kicked out, clipping the Joker’s ankle. The Clown Prince of Crime stumbled back, brandishing the knife before him.

  “No, you don’t. It may be your skull, but it’s my handiwork,” the Joker taunted. “Behave and I’ll cut you in on the royalties.”

  Batman reached into his utility belt for a Batarang and clipped a length of nylon line to it. He started swinging it overhead like a bola. It made a dull warning sound like an old-fashioned roar devil.

  Batman came on. To his surprise, the Joker pocketed the knife and undid his bola tie. Holding it loosely by the cords, he mimicked Batman’s stance, copying the whirling action.

  “Duel of the bolas, Batman? Or is yours a bolo? I’m so bad with names. If only the cameras were running. This is priceless.” He looked behind him, toward a solitary toolshed, and began walking backwards.

  Batman let fly. Simultaneously, the Joker released his bola tie. The Batarang tangled the Joker’s legs. He went down. But the tie snared Batman’s neck like a noose. The turquoise slide raced for his neck like a spider after a web-caught fly. Batman grabbed his throat and doubled over.

  “Did I say bola?” the Joker chortled. “Well, excuuuse me. I mean boa—as in constrictor!”

  And while the Dark Knight Detective struggled with the mechanical garrote, the Joker calmly severed the Batarang cord with his knife and stumbled toward the toolshed, the box in hand.

  He undid the hasp and pulled out a hang glider with a death’s-head moth painted on the wing. Assembling it quickly, he climbed into the harness. The hatbox clutched tightly, he set himself for the run off the roof.

  Back by the ladder trap, Batman had sunk to his knees, pulling on the constricting bola tie with both hands. The lower part of his face was turning a sullen lavender. His nostrils flared, straining for air.

  “Don’t you just hate these choked-up good-byes,” the Joker squealed and began running. He vaulted into the air. The hang glider dipped unsteadily, then rose again as an updraft caught it. The Joker leaned into the wind and sent it circling back, his eyes gloating.

  Down below, Batman was struggling on. One hand groped for his utility belt and brought forth a plastic capsule. He broke it against the tie clasp. There was a spurt of white smoke and the tie snapped away like a broken spring.

  Batman came to his feet unsteadily, shaking off an acid-burned glove. He looked up, his cowled countenance an Art-Deco abstraction.

  “Sorry I can’t stick around,” the Joker called down. “But the show must go on.” He lifted the cardboard box mockingly. “Write if you get work.”

  The hang glider began to rise.

  Calmly, resolutely, Batman retrieved his Batarang and pitched it.

  It rose, looped, and came around in a wild impossible curve. It missed the hang glider by twenty yards on the way up.

  “Nah, nah, you missed,” the Joker taunted.

  His smug expression broke apart as the Batarang flashed by his purple shoulder on the way down. The hang glider listed. The Joker fought to get it level. He saw the tear the Batarang had made in the fabric above his head. His eyes went stark.

  Down below, Batman caught the returning Batarang with practiced ease.

  He called up. “Care to go again?”

  The Joker saw that he was losing altitude. He kicked off his purple shoes. The glider rose slightly, but its downward spiral resumed immediately. Resting his chin on the control bar, he began emptying his pockets in a desperate attempt to lighten the wing’s burden. A long-barreled pistol came out, followed by a deck of razor-edged playing cards, an acid-squirting flower, and finally his knife. The roof slid out from under his woolly purple stockings and he was looking down the sickening drop to midtown Gotham City.

  “Toss me the box,” Batman called. “Or I clip your wings.”

  The Joker hesitated. If he could reach the roof, Batman had him. If he didn’t, Batman would send him to a hard, hard landing. Either way, the box was lost.

  “Curses,” he muttered in a Snidely Whiplash voice. “Foiled again.” He pitched the box, and fought to regain equilibrium.

  Batman ran to intercept it. The heavy box fell into his hands as if meant for them.

  Like a limping goonybird, the Joker glided off into the sunrise. He was already out of Batarang range.

  Batman stood on the parapet edge, oblivious to the fifty-story drop, and watched him go with cold empty eyes. Long after the Joker had dwindled to nothingness, he kept his eyes on the horizon.

  Then, wordlessly, he walked away, the box safe under one arm.

  Hours later, the box lay, still unopened, on the ebony table in the Batcave. Bruce Wayne was in costume, his cowl resting on a fresh cape next to the box.

  He was talking into an untraceable phone.

  “No sign of him, Commissioner?” he was saying. “I see. Yes, I agree. We’ll hear from him again. But not soon. He likes to lick his wounds awhile. At least we got the Melopopone twins.”

  Wayne’s eyes went to the hatbox.

  “The box? No, I haven’t opened it yet. I’m afraid I’ll have to keep what I find inside a secret. You understand. Yes. Good-bye, Jim.”

  Batman hung up. His eyes went to the box again.

  Alfred came down the stairs and cleared his throat.

  “Don’t you think you should rest, Master Bruce? It’s noon. And you’ve not slept in nearly twenty-four hours.”

  “One last item and I’m done for the night,” he said, lifting the lid.

  Alfred drew closer as Batman reached into the box and withdrew the plastic-covered object.

  He lifted the plastic. His jaw tightened. Alfred gasped.

  The face that stared up at him was a face only in that it had eye sockets, a nose, and a mouth. The features were twisted, bloated and gouged like an elephantiasis sufferer. There was nothing recognizably human in its slick gray contours.

  The gash of a mouth clamped a folded notecard. Batman pulled it free. He opened it and read the green ink message:

  IF YOU HAPPEN TO READ THIS, BATS, YOU NOW KNOW MY DEEPEST, DARKEST SECRET: IN KINDERGARTEN, I FLUNKED MODELING WITH CLAY!

  The note was signed “The Joker.”

  Dying Is Easy,

  Comedy Is Hard

  Edward Bryant and Dan Simmons

  Seeing Johnny Carson rip off his own face, just like one of those effects in an early David Cronenberg movie, was bad enough. But what came next was truly grotesque.

  I gotta admit, I stared. But then we all had to be an appreciative audience—the goons with Uzis and MAC-10s, and H&K miniguns made sure of that. If you’re wondering how I know so much about all that cool ordnance, it’s not ’cause I spend a lot of time on the street—it’s because I see a lot of B-movies.

  I really hope I live to go to a lot more . . .

  The Aladdin Theater is named after the dude that rubbed a lamp and got a genie. Right now I wish I had the three wishes that guy received. All of us here on the stage do. No genie coming out tonight. Nope, just pain, blood, and a whole lot of grief.

  Frankly, it’s enough to make me rethink my career . . .

  I admit it, I come alive—truly alive—only at night. Then I descend on the concrete canyons and brick catacombs of Gotham City, take the train into its decaying downtown between Art Deco skyscrapers from some earlier age, walk its rainswept stre
ets and ratty back alleys smelling of garbage and the homeless, seek out its basement improv clubs and East Side nightclubs sandwiched in between the porno palaces and hotsheet hotels—the clubs smelling of cigars and cheap perfume and urine and something much worse: flop sweat—and then, only then, in the dark belly of this dying city, performing for the drunks and adulterers and lost souls and lonely insomniacs, then I come alive. Then—in the dark, with the bile of fear burning at my insides and the stench of failure and humiliation just a short arc of silence away—then my true life begins.

  I know now that I’m not alone. There are others who come alive at night, in the back alleys of Gotham City. Others who wait through the mundane turning of days for the violent whirl of night’s greatest realities. Others who shed their daylight skins and become other people. I know that now.

  The creature that calls himself the Joker is one. The Batman—that human puzzle wrapped in a cowl and enigma—is another. I know that now.

  And I almost understand.

  This isn’t going well. Where to start?

  My name is Pete Tulley. I’m twenty-nine years old, black—or African-American as the self-appointed spokespersons of our race now say, not married, not living with anyone right now, and during the day I’m a manager of the Burger Biggie franchise on the corner of Sprang and Robinson. It’s not really that bad of a job. The hardest part is keeping a steady flow of kids trained and working behind the counter, getting them to understand that Burger Biggie is a job, a responsibility, and not just a place to hang out and laugh with their friends while the customer stands and waits for his Biggie and fries. I’m a graduate of Burger Biggie Hamburger College—the franchise’s four-week training school in Peoria, Illinois—and as stupid as that sounds, as easy as it is to sneer at the idea of a Hamburger College, the chain actually stands for something (even if that “something” is only good fast food, prepared promptly to nationwide standards of taste and quality of ingredients, in clean surroundings), and I try to communicate those standards to the people I train and manage. I must be at least partially successful at that since my Biggie at Sprang and Robinson has won the Gotham City metro-area B.B. Excellence and Cleanliness Award two years running.

  And despite the obvious temptation—since stand-ups are like fiction writers in that they use everything around them—I’ve never done hamburger franchise jokes in my routines. It seems like too cheap a shot. Plus, I owe something to the people who keep me employed in the daytime so I can come alive at night.

  But I’ll use the gags someday. In the long run, nothing is sacred.

  I’ve been a stand-up comic for three years. Three years this March. Like most would-be comics, I started by getting a laugh from my family when I was a little kid. (I remember the first time—it was unintentional—I was six and watching a Dolly Parton special on TV and said, “I bet she can swim real good with those inflated things on her chest.” If we’d been alone that evening, my mother probably would have frowned and my dad would have swatted me on the side of the head, but we had Uncle Louis and Aunt Nell and Cousin Sook and a bunch of other folks over—they’d been drinking beer since the picnic that afternoon—and the room just howled with laughter. It became a sort of family joke—Uncle Louis used to mention it about everytime we got together—and it was really the first time I’d been noticed by everyone. Or at least the first time they’d all noticed me and liked me.)

  Anyway, it taught me that sex gets laughs, and if you can throw in some popular culture or a public figure, so much the better.

  I went to Charity Hills High School—although there were no hills in our old Southside suburb of Gotham and by the midseventies there was damned little charity either—and I became a comic there just to survive. Charity Hills had inherited most of the Gotham City gangs by then, sort of gang franchises, I guess you might say, and to stay an independent you had to be incredibly smart or damn tough. I was neither. So I made myself funny.

  The caption under my high school yearbook photo says “Always good for a laugh” and that was my armor and chameleon cloak. I figured that the jocks and street goons and dopeheads and musclebound dipshits who ordinarily showed their superiority by beating up wimpy types like me would think twice if I had a reputation as a clown. I figured that it might be easier for them to laugh at me—make me perform for their peers in the hallways and gyms and cloakrooms of dear old CHHS rather than stomp the crap out of me. And it worked. Most of the time.

  Anyway, I started taking comedy seriously a couple of years ago, after I realized that nothing else in my life was going to give me a life worth living. I started out in the suburban improv clubs, getting in on amateur nights where people came to laugh at us rather than with us. That was okay. I was used to it. I always threw up before a performance, but I soon began to judge audience response by whether I threw up after the show.

  I spent a long, hungry summer out in the Los Angeles area, getting booked for very few performances of my own, but getting to see a lot of the greats in the field at their old comedy club stomping grounds. The field of amateurs was too rich for me to compete out there, so I came back to Gotham City—where at least I knew a few of the club owners, had done them favors and could get a few in return. And besides, Burger Biggie doesn’t have any franchises west of the Mississippi.

  And so I came alive at night for two years and then some, taking the 10:38 P.M. train in from Finger Park to Gotham Center, performing for money when I could—usually at one of the East Side back-alley basement clubs, a place for the slum dwellers to come in out of the cold and for the yuppies and dinner-jacket types to go slumming—but usually I had to settle for another amateur night, another contest, or another free-drinks and dinner-if-you-get-here-early-enough performance.

  I got to know most of the other comedy club circuit people. A few went on to the ranks of the serious professional. One got rich and famous and died snorting bad coke in Las Vegas last fall. Most got discouraged, dropped out, and have been replaced by younger would-be somebodies. A few, like me, have hung in there and taken what they could get—honing their material, slowly improving their performances and on-stage personalities, trying to make up in experience and sheer persistence what they lack in talent. A few of these other survivors of the Long March have become friends. Some of the rest are real assholes. All of them, friends and assholes alike, are competitors.

  But in a strange way we are like some medieval guild: aging apprentices hoping to become journeymen and praying to be elevated to Master. We’re sort of a family of misfit hopefuls, sharing nothing but our common dream and the fact that we come alive only at night, in front of the audience.

  And then the Joker started killing us.

  It was last November in that gray, dead-branch period between the childlike nonsense of Halloween and the all-too-adult loneliness of Thanksgiving. The Carob Comedy Club on Alameda and Franklin had been staging a three-week Comedy Countdown—shows every Tuesday and Saturday—with a bunch of us eliminating each other via applause-o-meter showdown for a five-hundred-dollar first prize. That sounds like a decent amount until you realize that Al Jacobs, manager of the Carob, had over a dozen amateur comics firing off their best material twice a night, two times a week for three weeks, and only the winner would end up getting anything.

  Anyway, it was the final Saturday night and the original mob of stand-ups had been winnowed down to seven—me, my cracker friend Boonie Sandhill, a tired old ex-borscht-belt comic named Dandy John Diamond, a Roseanne Barr imitation called Tiffany Strbynsky, a gifted black teenager named Fast Eddie Teck, a beautiful but not very funny medical student named Diana Mulhollen, and George Marlin. I’d drawn the first slot for the late show and the audience wasn’t just cold, it was frigid. I gave it my best shot—using my Cola Wars stuff where every major world event of the past three decades was explained as an incidental by-product of the global sales war between Coke and Pepsi—but either the material was too cerebral for this crowd or it just wasn’t my night. I knew I wa
s out of the running even before I took my bows, reset the mike on the stand, and backed out of the spotlight. At least Tiffany waddled onstage to a warmer crowd.

  Al Jacobs lets us early casualties sit at the bar and down a few comped drinks while we watch the others work. Tiffany was hot this night, but she still was only a good imitation of the real thing and even though the applause-o-meter swung almost half again as far to the right as it had for me, I knew that the race would be between Fast Eddie and George Marlin.

  Marlin was next and he hit the audience hard and fast. New Jersey was overweight but he never did fat jokes; his dialect was so Brooklynesque that it made Boone Sandhill’s drawl sound normal, but Marlin didn’t rely on dialect or borough in-jokes. He rarely did the off-color stuff that makes up ninety percent of club routines these days. George was just funny and he generally just schmoozed along with tales from his childhood and early adolescence that had the sense of this-really-happened, which every comedy bit needs and so few have.

  So George was telling about his days as a lonely teenager and how he was convinced he was a superhero—the Dung Beetle, armored nemesis of evil-doers everywhere—and the audience was roaring and I was on my third vodka rocks and the applause-o-meter was pinning itself and I was wondering idly whether Fast Eddie’s street-smart vulgar strut ’n’ jive routine could top this stuff, when suddenly George stopped in midroutine and stared at the microphone in his hand.

  The head of the mike was growing, inflating like a balloon. George stepped back, still holding the thing and watching it expand, and because Al Jacobs was too cheap to install cordless traveling mikes, George got tangled in the wire and glanced back to see what was stopping him. Meanwhile, the audience was still roaring, thinking—as I did for a second—that the expanding mike was part of the routine, some phallic gag.

  In those final seconds, George knew it wasn’t part of the night’s entertainment; the head of the mike was a metal sphere and it had grown to the size of a soccer ball. Still tangled in the cord, George started to drop the microphone as if it were the business end of a snake.