“It says right here in this book, You gonna die!”
My mother laughed and I laughed with her. The idea that one man would put his mouth on the peenie of another man was so unimaginable we found it hilarious. Confronted with the dilemma of taking his friend’s dirty part into his mouth or letting him die, this man doesn’t see a dilemma. You gonna die!
I’m pretty sure my mother did not see the joke as homophobic, but in the same somewhat innocent way I did: don’t put dirty things in your mouth! When I was in college in the early seventies, I was sitting on the kitchen counter of our house in Montgomery when Mom said, agitated, “You know, I’ve heard all this talk about men and men and women and women, you know, being together, you know. But I don’t believe it. What would they do?”
For a few lunatic moments, I considered telling her. CUNNILINGUS and FELLATIO flew across my mind like advertising slogans on a banner behind a plane. Then another, smaller plane followed, trailing a banner reading BLOW JOB and CARPET MUNCHER. I waited for a third plane but the sky was blue and endless. I said, “Jeez, Mom, I’ve heard that too, and I have no idea either, no idea at all.”
I realized Mom wasn’t the only one so ill informed when I read that Lydia Lopokova hadn’t quite puzzled out the conundrum either. In 1973, about the same time my mother and I had our conversation, Lopokova, who danced with the Diaghilev ballet, partnered with Nijinsky, and posed frequently for Picasso before marrying John Maynard Keynes and becoming Lady Keynes, wrote: “I can understand two men. There’s something to get hold of. But how do two insides make love?”
As a kid, I worried about letting a snakebite victim die because of my squeamishness, and in an ethical decision that consumed several nights of tormented deliberation, I decided I was morally compelled, no matter how revolting it was, to save the life of any man I encountered who had been bitten on the dick by a rattlesnake. I was grateful, however, that we did not go camping very often. Secretly, I thought Jesus would be proud of my audacity and sacrifice, even though I was beginning to understand the dirtiness of the peenie was not just physical, but also moral. Together, the two jokes—Burkett’s and my mother’s—brought me to some rudimentary concept of homosexuality. And it was about time too. My father had flinched away from the task earlier in the year.
The week before I started junior high, Dad called me into the living room at bedtime, when the house was quiet, and sat beside me on the couch. The lights were low and the room dark with obligation. This was the time and place of our depressing heart-to-hearts about how I was not working up to my potential at school, failing to help my mother around the house, sitting alone in my room too much, not making friends, not trying hard enough at sports, and not developing a positive attitude. I was expecting another round of the same when my father said, “You know you’ll be starting junior high in a couple of weeks. . . .”
Yep, I thought, chance for a new start. A fresh opportunity to get off on the right foot. I need to find something I really care about and stick to it.
“In gym class you are going to be taking showers with all the other boys.”
“Sir?”
“If anybody touches you while you are in the shower I want you to tell the coach immediately.”
I’d been in boys’ showers before. Sharing showerheads, we jostled for position under the spray, and sent one another sprawling with a casual shove if the one clumsy enough to drop the soap was also stupid enough to bend over to pick it up. Crouching and dropping one’s face to butt or crotch level was unimaginable. Best solution: kick the soap into the corner and then go get it, away from everyone. Or slide it up the wall with your foot until you can reach it without bending. I had no idea what Dad was talking about. It was impossible to shower without bumping into other boys or being bumped.
“I mean if another boy touches you, you should get out of the shower, find the coach, and tell him what happened.”
“Touch me, like how?”
“Just any way at all. Any kind of touching. I want you to tell the coach and then tell me. Just promise me that.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. I had no intention of keeping this promise because I had no idea what I was promising.
“Good. I’m glad we had this talk. Some boys do bad things with other boys in the shower.”
I thought he meant the bigger guys would beat you up when you were wet and naked. In the junior high locker room, the most frequent pain inflicted on me emanated from the welts scored on my butt and hips by a blocky, swarthy boy who delighted in whipping a wet towel against the flesh of smaller, pinker boys. I took his right to administer this petty cruelty as natural; he was wickedly accomplished at it and his back rippled with more, thicker, and blacker hair than I’d ever seen on a biped outside the primate cages at the San Diego Zoo.
My reticent father must have been troubled by my insouciance about public showering, along with a worrying constellation of other traits. I was a boy given to solitude and unexplainable weeping between bouts of anxious rage. Boys like me, the ones interested in books, art, crafts, wordplay that I hoped was arch, and what was then called the “ladies’ section” of the newspaper, tended toward effeminacy, didn’t we? Since I was inept at hitting a baseball or even tracking its arc as it sailed through the darkening sky over right field and my outstretched glove, my teammates thoughtfully alerted me to the limitations of my manhood. That strikeout cost us the game, you stupid pansy! You fag, you couldn’t catch your ass with both hands. That fairy’s always an out for our side. Can’t we just skip him? Don’t be such a wuss. You aren’t really hurt. You fruit, you queer, you pussy. Maybe my teammates saw something in me that I couldn’t see myself. Maybe an unsuspected hankering for men’s bodies would come upon me suddenly, like puberty or religious conversion. Maybe I’d suddenly find myself hanging around campgrounds and hiking trails, looking for a man who’d been snakebit on the peenie.
From roughly ages six to twelve, every several weeks, I burst out at my mother, screaming with rage. Mom drove me past blubbering to snot-sucking terror with the usual response: “Just wait till your father gets home. Once he hears the way you’ve been talking to me you’ll wish you’d never been born.”
One night, following one of my blowups, my father and I had another heart-to-heart on the couch in the dark living room. He’d already explained to me, he said, that my mother was just as much my parent as he was and that I should give her all the courtesy and respect that I did him, but somehow that had not gotten through to me. Neither had whipping me. Neither had grounding me. Or more whipping. He and my mother were at their wits’ end. They didn’t know what to do with me, and they weren’t going to accept this kind of disrespect. Choking up with frustration, fear, and resignation, he said that he and my mother had decided to send me to a psychologist.
“Am I crazy?” I blurted, shaking. I was willing to believe it. I knew I was out of control when I yelled at my mother. I knew, because she wasn’t the one I really wanted to yell at. I was too frightened of my father to yell at him. When he didn’t like what I did, what I said, how I said it, or how I looked at him, he jerked his belt off, making four or five machine-gun pops as the leather whipped backward through the belt loops. He ordered me to take my pants off and kneel beside the bed with my butt in the air, and then he slashed the belt up and down my naked rear or thighs. My brothers and I kept a close eye on what was holding up his pants, especially the thin black civilian belt, the one that bit the hardest. Because I was apoplectic at his mean and arbitrary rages, and terrified too, I shrieked at my mother while he was at work, and she, seeing what looked to her like unmotivated derangement, ratted me out, trying to use his anger to make me act civilly to her, which at least gave me a legitimate reason to be furious with her.
“No, doll, you’re not crazy,” he said, and he hugged me, clasping my cheek tight against his chest, rocking me back and forth, as he laughed shakily at my fear, which was his fear. “You just need a little help.”
Every time I
went to see the blond psychologist, Mrs. Miller, Mom instructed me to pay attention, do what I was told, and get my full sixty dollars’ worth of counseling. Did I understand how much money that was? Did I know we could buy the whole family’s back-to-school shoes with sixty dollars and have money left over for notebooks? I imagined that, unlike the boy in the jokes whose father took him to a whorehouse on his eighteenth birthday and paid a woman to “make him a man,” my parents paid a woman to listen to me talk and make me normal—an auditory prostitute, a talk whore. My God, I must be pathetic if it cost sixty dollars to entice someone to talk to me.
As it turned out, I liked to talk. Mrs. Miller always began our sessions by spreading cards across her desk, each with a different black-and-white photo of a face on it. The people were dressed in the clothes of an earlier time and they seemed European. I guessed they might be postwar French or Dutch. From each grouping of cards, I chose the two faces I liked best and least, and by my choices Mrs. Miller diagnosed my mood.
After I got comfortable with Mrs. Miller and her office, I asked what the cards said about me. I liked asking her questions. The explanations were a bit thick with psychological jargon, but unlike at home, I could ask and she would answer.
She flipped the first series of cards back on the desk and said, “See that man? You always pick him.”
The young man had an open, unblemished face, full lips, light hair, and he wore an almost jaunty plaid sport coat. In retrospect I see a young version of the poet Hart Crane.
“He’s a homosexual,” she said, and hurried to add, “That’s nothing to worry about. It doesn’t mean you’re like him. Most people pick him. It just means you may be open to the feminine side of yourself. We all have that side, men as well as women.”
Almost magically, my fear vanished. A professional had said it was okay, maybe even good, to have a feminine side. Even her cursory explanation implied that normal sexuality included a wider range of complexity than I’d been told—and that homosexuality was part of the spectrum. It was one of the most thrilling and freeing moments in my life to realize that, despite everything I was learning at home, church, school, and on the playground, normal was a much wider category than I’d known. And sex was only part of it. Normal jobs, normal interests, normal clothes, normal food, normal fantasies, normal stories, normal jokes, normal thoughts were all suddenly commodious eight-lane highways and not the strait gate and narrow road of the gospels. Off and on for a month, I stayed awake at night, marveling at the insight, which I knew to keep to myself.
But the social opprobrium of being thought effeminate continued to haunt me. That’s why throughout high school I loved the joke about the two old bulls standing in the pasture, overlooking the heifers they think of as their harem. What a great life to be a bull!
As the two bulls consider their good fortune, the rancher drives through the gate, towing a trailer. He stops, walks around to the door of the trailer, unlatches the door, and jumps back as an enormous young brute of a bull blasts out into the pasture. The young bull spots the old bulls, glares at them, and paws the ground viciously, kicking up huge clumps of grass and dirt. The older bulls just look at him blankly, so the young one ambles over to the herd of heifers and begins to service them one after the other, roaring and grunting with delight.
After the fifth heifer has collapsed in a state of bovine bliss, one of the old bulls charges toward the young bull and begins to snort, and stamp the ground.
The other old bull runs up to his companion and says, “What the hell are you doing, you idiot? That young guy’ll kill you!”
“I just want to make sure he knows I’m a bull.”
I told the joke repeatedly in high school, even obsessively. The world of that joke was high school. Sidney Lanier was a jockocracy. Coaches made much more money than teachers, and the football players, on game days, sat at tables reserved for them at the front of the cafeteria, eating steak and baked potatoes heaped with sour cream and grated cheddar cheese while the rest of us munched corndogs and Tater Tots. When I complained, I was told that since the steaks were paid for from athletic department profits, it was none of my business. When I pointed out that the steaks were fried by county employees on county-owned stoves, I was threatened.
Football players were lionized at pep rallies, celebrated in the newspaper, and cosseted through dumbed-down math and history classes conducted by coaches who didn’t know what they were talking about except when they held footballs—and even that didn’t always help. One coach taught history while holding a football, occasionally tossing it in the air and catching it while he talked.
In gym class, the athletes terrorized the non-athletes, smacking us around. Like a number of my friends, I occasionally wore my athletic cup to class because jocks, passing me in the hall, found it amusing to slap us in the groins. Their viciousness even extended to the team managers, boys who wanted to hang around the jocks so much that they became their servants, bringing them water and toting equipment to the field. Returning from an out-of-town game, the jocks at the back of the bus stripped the team manager, smeared his penis, testicles, and anus with Deep Heat, and then mummified him in Ace bandages. He rode the rest of the way home curled up on the floor, weeping and whimpering in agony. The football player who told me this story thought it howlingly funny and wanted to share the laughter. I was a joker, wasn’t I? Isn’t this story hilarious?
Tell the teachers if I was afraid? The teachers knew that the coaches made two or three or four times what they did. They knew that they were servants to the football players first and school administrators second. If they forgot, they were reminded every other Friday night when it was their turn to go to the stadium or the gym, and work without pay, selling tickets and soft drinks.
Tell the principal? If the football team had a bad season, he was as likely to be fired for it as the coach.
Tell the coaches? The coaches loved aggressive players, and they encouraged violence off the field to ensure violence on the field. A defensive back in my history class told me that on at least two weekends coaches drove him and other football players to Oak Park, and encouraged them to beat up the hippies. Before they got in the car, the coach issued them baseball bats from the school’s supply room.
In the lunchroom one day, I mentioned that I had cut my hand on a loose wire on my spiral notebook. The two-hundred-and-seventy-pound offensive lineman who sat at my assigned lunch table said, “Where? Let me see.”
Astounded by his concern, I held out my hand. He took it and clenched down. Looking me in the eyes, he picked up the salt shaker and salted the cut. Unable to break the grip of a boy who outweighed me by at least a hundred and thirty pounds, I bucked and yelled, trying to get free, until a teacher came over and told me to shut up.
The violence peaked two years after I graduated, when a boy in the senior class led a spur-of-the-moment pep rally in the lunchroom. Jumping up and down on a lunch table, he exhorted the crowd to cheer the Sidney Lanier Poets on to victory.
Taped on his torso, pinned up and down his legs, blue-and-white pom-poms snapped with every step he took.
Suddenly the pom-poms soared into flame.
The rumor at the time was that a football player had, as a joke, snapped a couple of wooden matches at the pom-pom boy. The newspapers said that police investigating the incident had interviewed eighteen witnesses and the burned boy himself. They had a pretty good idea what had happened but they wanted to interview half a dozen more people before they announced their conclusion. With that, the newspapers dropped the story like a stinging nettle. As far as I could tell, the investigation was never concluded and no charges were ever filed.
In outrage, I told this story to my friend Tom Doherty, who graduated from Lanier the year after I did. Tom, now a professor of American Studies at Brandeis, said, “Come on! Of course no charges were ever filed, Brainiac! It was a football player!”
“Yeah, that’s right,” I said. I’d forgotten that in Alabama football-
immunity extended even to felonies.
But maybe that horror wasn’t the peak. Maybe the peak was the boy, I believe he was a cornerback or safety, who, rumor had it, buried a cat up to its neck in his backyard and then mowed the grass methodically, arriving at the cat in due course. He was so vicious in attacking hippies in Oak Park that one of his victims was reputed to have driven to New Orleans and paid for a professional hit on him. The hit man—and as an animal lover I have mixed feelings about this—did not fulfill the contract.
For my entire sophomore year, at night, in bed, in fear of going back to school the next day, I imagined stealing a rifle and striking back at the football players who made my life a daily misery. Instead of counting sheep, I made lists of people I wanted to kill. I stopped my murderous fantasies because I realized if I didn’t, I might actually slip out of fantasyland and then into action. I had a strong hope, even an expectation, that if I just held on till graduation, I could go to college and pursue a life not shaped by fear and humiliation. But to get there, like the old bull in the joke, I was going to have to pretend like I wasn’t frightened.
You don’t have to think too hard to grasp the bull joke’s meaning: It’s better to be defeated in a hopeless fight than to be treated like a woman, better to die than let another man use you sexually. The joke’s sympathy is with the old bull, and the story stops in the nick of time for it to be funny. If the joke went one step further, only one logical thing can happen: The young bull will kill the challenger.
Like the old bull, I realized that I might have to fight stupid and pointless fights, knowing I’d be whipped. If I was going to be abused by the bigger boys, I was at least going to make it as difficult for them as I could—and if I couldn’t hurt them, I’d at least make them hurt me enough that they might get in trouble for it. In tenth grade, that determination, along with flailing, screaming, and unyielding panic, saved me from being stuffed into a gym locker. As the jocks shoved me into the tiny space, I kept jabbing a hand, arm, or foot out of the locker, and they had to decide if they wanted to break one of my bones to get the door shut. Two other boys were crumpled into the narrow, three-foot-tall lockers, jockstraps yanked down over their faces. With an enraged dignity that I admire to this day, one military brat—Larry Pizzi, I believe—pulled his street clothes on after he got out of the locker, walked the two miles to the police station, and filed a complaint for criminal assault. Although he’d been in town only a few months, he already knew nothing would come of complaining to the coach or principal, but he didn’t yet know nothing would come of filing an official complaint with the police, who were almost to a man ex-jocks and diehard fans of their old teams. But after that, Pizzi was left alone, and after I had vowed that I would exact as much cost as I could from the bullies, legally or physically, even if it meant being maimed, so was I. I’m not sure how my determination conveyed itself. My wife tells me that when I believe I must do something, no matter what it costs me, I assume a look of fervent kamikaze resolve that makes sane people back off. You learn that look if you attend a school in which students go up in flames.
The Joker: A Memoir Page 22