I’d invented this bit of silliness after seeing—at the base theater—the antiwar film Dr. Strangelove, in which Peter Sellers as the crazed German nuclear scientist fights to keep his erratic mechanical right arm from launching a Heil Hitler salute. Almost every boy I knew did an impression of Dr. Strangelove and his arm. And we performed it exuberantly. We knew what it meant to have an uncontrollable member that snapped into fascist salutes at discomfiting moments.
Behind the invention of my epileptic pelican was also a routine that the comedian David Steinberg performed on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. Talking about his childhood, Steinberg abruptly snatched something invisible—a huge insect? a demon?—from his right shoulder, slammed it to the ground, and stomped it, while shrieking Get! [snatch!], Off! [slam!], Me! [stomp!]. Then, as if nothing had happened, he returned calmly to his original topic. I loved the bit because it wonderfully exaggerated the sudden wrenching moments of paranoia that I, like most boys I knew, experienced, and it showed them being defeated, or at least dealt with. One of Steinberg’s catchphrases was “disguised as a normal person.” I took that as my motto, and I always said it with a self-mocking adenoidal drawl, just like Steinberg.
While I stood at the register, my hand jerking, Doherty was embarrassed but unable to keep from laughing. He hurried toward the front of the store and abandoned me, elbow jiggling up past my head. By the time I’d bought my book and caught up with him we were giddy with adolescent hilarity.
It was night, we were boys, which means hungry, so we stopped to stare transfixed into a glass display case of oddly large donuts. What were donuts doing here? I’d never seen them in a discount store before.
On one of the aluminum trays, amid flakes of loose frosting, a misshapen donut lay alone. It was easy to see why this one was still there at the end of the day. Stretched till the hole in the center was a thin slit, the donut was stale, the glaze thick and crusty. It looked like a scabrous vagina, the organ that Kingsley Amis would notoriously describe as “like the inside of a giraffe’s ear or a tropical fruit not much prized by the locals.” I giggled and Tom chuckled, as much at my amusement as at the syphilitic donut. But does it really look like a vagina and how would you know if it did? asked a voice inside my head, and I laughed out loud at myself being myself.
The week before, Tom had come to our first-period classroom with a dazed look on his face, as if he had seen something that had altered his sense of reality. I have never seen him so bemused before or since. Before class started, he told me that his grandmother, who was slipping into dementia, had asked him over breakfast, “What does this remind you of?”
He looked up from his cereal and saw the old woman touching the fingertip of her middle finger to the nail of her index finger. Holding her hand before her face, she stared at him through the vertical smile created by her fingers, and cackled like a crone when her grandson’s eyes grew wide with reluctant understanding. Tom and I laughed with bewildered incredulity then, and now we were laughing again, with near-hysteria, at another simile of the vertical smile—the simulacrum of things unseen, the substance of things hoped for, as the Bible says in an antithetical context.
The more I laughed, the more Tom laughed, which of course made me, contagiously pixilated, laugh more. Soon we sprawled across the glass counter, holding our sides, laughing at our own laughter, laughing at our embarrassment at our laughter. Every time we almost composed ourselves, sucking chuckles back into our throats, they exploded back out as wet snorts so ludicrous that within seconds we were laughing again.
The absurd and pathetic donut was only the trigger. Seeing it as sexual revealed how sex, even in my ignorance of it, controlled my brain. We laughed in sexual fear, along with the distressing recognition that lust could reduce women to one part of their bodies, which I saw, in defiance of all good sense, in malformed pastry.
While we laughed, the middle-aged clerks, younger then than I am now, pretended to ignore us, glancing at us sideways as they went about ringing up sales. It was the late sixties. Had dopeheads wandered into their store? Tom might have been high. I was sober as a bone. Only when a woman picked up the house phone behind her register and began whispering into it, probably calling security, did Tom and I, bent over with laughter, stagger out of the store and back to my father’s Volkswagen.
• • •
If girls’ private parts remained, for me anyway, private, boys’ were much discussed. The language itself was already in love with our uneasiness with our genitals. From the cute to the grotesque, there are dozens and dozens of names for the penis. I favor the old-fashioned tallywhacker for its mildly risqué, mildly embarrassing self-consciousness. Wang stands up to humorous repetition, as do dong, pecker, willy, winky, and John Thomas, that formal gentleman. Baby-maker, one-eyed trouser snake, meat bayonet, tube steak, heat-seeking love missile, and skin flute are funny once, maybe. There are only a few common slang names for the vagina. Pussy, the most common, is so pervasive it has lost almost all connection to the over-precious metaphor it grew out of. And most of the others are equally coy: goodies, box, beaver, muff. But cunt is now probably the most vulgar, contemptuous word in English, and the tense distinction between the demure profanities and the ugly one is captured perfectly in a joke I heard in tenth-grade gym class, repeatedly, from Ricky Walker, who loved it:
Q: What’s the difference between a pussy and a cunt?
A: A pussy is a wonderful thing that provides unbelievable pleasure when you cuddle up to it at night. A cunt is the woman who owns it.
The joke perfectly embodies the male adolescent rage about his own indiscriminate lust and the human consequences of it. Cunt is so taboo as to be almost literally unspeakable in anything like civilized company. And the thing itself is powerful almost beyond naming. In the jokes about it, which are a mishmash of desire and terror, it is often enormous.
I cannot remember how many times I heard this repulsive joke, one I have never repeated.
Did you hear about this guy that’s screwing a girl and he falls all the way inside her and gets lost in the dark? He flicks on his lighter, and looking around, he sees another guy. That shocks him so bad he drops his lighter. In the darkness, he yells to the other guy, “Hey, help me find my lighter and maybe we can find our way out of here.”
“Forget about your lighter,” says the other guy. “Help me find my keys and we’ll drive out.”
The point of the joke is of course the male fear of the promiscuous woman with a vagina so accommodating as to become hugely, indiscriminately commodious. The encompassing vagina has quenched the first man’s flame and stalled the second man’s engine. But it’s hard not to notice that the two men have more of a relationship with each other than with the woman whom they were both “making love” to, an inadvertent ménage à trois reduced to two because, although all-encompassing, the woman is hardly present. The seemingly throwaway detail of the first man’s snapping on a lighter inside the most delicate part of a woman’s body is viscerally unbearable; it highlights how dehumanized she is by the ancient conflict of men’s desire for the sexually accommodating woman whom he then despises as a slut. Years before I knew it had a name, I struggled with the Madonna-whore complex, blanching when boys said, “If you screw her, you’d better strap a board to your feet or you’ll fall all the way in.” Jokes like these, which I hated and yet absorbed, made it hard to develop a mature regard for women. But underneath everything, I heard again the male fear of becoming lost to desire, of losing one’s head over a piece of tail.
• • •
Growing up in Alabama in the sixties was like growing up in a Puritan near-theocracy. For us southern Baptists, boys and girls were kept apart in church; even going to a school social was a charged religious issue during a time when our faith forbade dancing. As a result, jokes were one of the few ways to talk and learn about girls and sex. Boys were supposed to remain pure themselves and marry virgins. Even if we weren’t pure ourselves, we were supposed to marry
women whose purity would serve as a light and a reproach until we found the proper path. Consequently, the jokes we told emphasized the dismal consequences of defiling ourselves with tainted women. Of course, they reflected our anger that the best pleasure our bodies had to offer was forbidden us.
“What is the definition of rape?” Carl Blegen asked me in tenth grade as World History was dismissing for the day. “Assault with a friendly weapon,” he said, grinning deviously. I laughed uproariously. The answer perfectly caught the mixed emotions of fifteen-year-old boys. We knew rape was a terrible violation of a woman, an assault that often did turn deadly. But we knew our weapons—our little soldiers, our purple-headed love monsters—as sources of the deepest bliss we had known. Who wouldn’t want to share?
The jokes warned us away from loose women, but how do you know if a girl has kept herself pure? I’d been married to my first wife for four years when, thinking to amuse her, I told her the first time I’d kissed a girl I cracked my front teeth so crisply against Melanie Ames’s incisors I had to squelch a yelp. I was mortified when Kathleen stopped rubbing lotion in her hands, blinked at me in surprise, and blurted, “You dated Melanie the Whore?”
Immediately I was thrown down a rabbit hole of conflicting responses. My somewhat fond memory of innocent fumbled kisses was turned upside down. I felt like a dolt who had missed the main chance. But what, in the context of the time, had it meant to be Melanie the Whore? Had she made out with a lot of guys or screwed two? Or fifty? What right did she have to play the innocent with me? I thought, then, abashed, I acknowledged to myself that I’d have never invited her out if she hadn’t. A sense of estrangement from all women was a side effect of worrying about who was a whore and who wasn’t. As a happily married man, I had hoped I was safely beyond such small-mindedness, but this question in passing showed me what I suspected: my hopes were merely yearnings.
Under the Madonna-whore complexes that plagued me and most boys, there was a deep Christian fear of ourselves as animals, creatures of flesh more than spirit. In women the division was even more startling, with childbirth and menstruation. And so our jokes emphasized the animalism of sex and the supposed ugliness of the vagina, as we tried to keep ourselves under control. When boys and men told me, as many did, many times, “Never trust anything that bleeds for seven days and doesn’t die,” they were in a long tradition that includes Edmund Spenser, whose Duessa is lovely to look at but a witch underneath. You don’t even have to see her “secret filth” to apprehend its misshaped monstrosity:
A filthy foule old woman I did vew,
That ever to have toucht her, I did deadly rew.
Her neather partes misshapen, monstruous,
Were hidd in water, that I could not see.
But they did seeme more foule and hideous,
Then womans shape man would beleeve to bee.
Later, when the witch is stripped naked, her vagina is too foul to describe—her “secret filth good manners biddeth not be told”—though all of her other foulnesses are fair game, right down to the unintentionally charming tail she sports:
Her craftie head was altogether bald,
And as in hate of honorable eld,
Was ouergrowne with scurfe and filthy scald;
Her teeth out of her rotten gummes were feld,
And her sowre breath abhominably smeld;
Her dried dugs, like bladders lacking wind,
Hong downe, and filthy matter from them weld;
Her wrizled skin as rough, as maple rind,
So scabby was, that would haue loathd all womankind.
Her neather parts, the shame of all her kind,
My chaster Muse for shame doth blush to write;
But at her rompe she growing had behind
A foxes taile, with dong all fowly dight.
Though it might take some getting used to at first, I would love to love a woman with a fox’s tail.
The animal aspect of the vagina was not limited to its looks. The first time I heard a boy say, “Morning, ladies!—as the blind man said when he passed the fish market,” I had no idea what he could possibly mean. I inquired. As I’d thought, the joker, aspiring to a coarse worldliness he didn’t have, was just repeating something he’d heard. His confused answer was that the blind man was confusing prostitutes with ladies, and prostitutes, from screwing a lot of different men, smelled like fish.
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 Joker: A Memoir Page 25