“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.
If I could go back in time to speak to the person I was then and the person Kelsey was, the only thing I’d want to say to them is: “Radio!”
Twelve
We Might as Well Leave Now, Fanny
Love is the fart of every heart:
It pains a man when ’tis kept close,
And others doth offend, when ’tis let loose.
Sir John Suckling (1609–42)
When I think of the women I have loved or almost loved, I remember the luxurious, almost lascivious, delectations of shared laughter. When a woman and I moved apart, I missed the laughter nearly as much as I missed the love, the affection, the companionship, and the sex. Laughter’s plush harmonies were integral to all of the other pleasures.
When we were first dating, my ex-wife once said plaintively, “Everything’s a joke to you, isn’t it? Can’t you be serious about anything?” We were both in college, working minimum-wage jobs, living with our parents, and learning who we were together while learning who we were individually. One evening in 1970, after finishing my shift at the dry-goods wholesaler, I picked her up at the office where she typed for a buck-sixty an hour. We decided to grab a quick supper in a small restaurant in a strip mall. We each ordered a small burger, small Coke, small fries, and I was fretting about the cost. Tuition, books, gas, the room and board my mother wanted to charge me and that I’d been ignoring—how much was this rare indulgence of dinner with my girlfriend going to cost?
We talked about what we each might do for a living. I was working on a high school teaching certificate. Kathleen wasn’t sure. Maybe teach, maybe law, maybe who-knows-what? Did we want to encumber our lives with loud and dirty babies? Then the conversation went global. God, we were stunned by the wrenching pictures we’d been seeing every night on the news from a 120-mph typhoon that had blasted into the Ganges River delta and killed between 150,000 and 500,000 people. Perhaps 100,000 more were missing. To this date, no one knows the exact number, but even then everyone knew the typhoon was one of the worst natural catastrophes in history.
Even the lowest number would have been the equivalent of our entire city of Montgomery and most of the surrounding county being eradicated. The higher number would have represented the deaths of every citizen of Montgomery and Birmingham. The equivalent of our friends, our families, our high schools and college, churches, and families obliterated—and we were doing nothing. Hadn’t we studied, with dread and sorrow, the famous gut-twisting photo of a man, a holocaustal specter, holding the emaciated body of his wife, daughter, or a dying woman he had picked up? She was emaciated too. A ratty shawl looped across her torso half-revealed the full swell of one breast. The other, the one against the man’s chest, was fully exposed, but fuzzed out, the nipple airbrushed away so the picture, in all its poignant horror, could be published in family newspapers. Her face, tilted back over the man’s arm, was reduced to a stark abstraction of disease and starvation, the high, sharp cheekbones only two ghastly steps past the gaunt beauty of a fashion model. The picture, we said, was the Pietà with the Virgin herself as Christ.
What could we do? Nothing. According to the papers, cholera was now spreading through the camps. With as straight a face as I could muster, I asked Kathleen, “Let’s get serious, though. How’s Alabama going to do against Oklahoma in the Bluebonnet Bowl?” Because she loved me, she laughed.
I was reeling at my own inability to do anything but lament the disaster—as earlier in the year, I had reeled from the U.S.’s expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia, though in July, my number in the draft lottery had come in as a relatively safe 256 out of 365. In the Black September crisis, King Hussein of Jordan attacked the Palestinian Liberation Organization and other Palestinian groups in his country with a death toll that was initially estimated to be as high as 25,000. (Current estimates vary between 3,500 and 5,000.) The month before, we Alabamians had reelected George Wallace as our governor and the trial of William Calley for the Mai Lai massacre had begun. I was unable to do anything but lament. Or unwilling. If I were a serious person, I could quit school, work full-time, and give my wages to the Red Cross, couldn’t I?
In a way, my joke question was a real question. We both knew that Kathleen, her mother, and I would watch every minute of the football game, screaming so loud that Wally the dog would cower in a back bedroom for an hour after the game ended. Even then we’d have to entice him out with a Milk-Bone. If the Crimson Tide lost, we’d sink into the couch, exhausted by a grief more intense and personal than we ever could have felt for the Bangladeshis. How many of them died, I wondered, during the last movie we saw, during the game, or during the week between the movie and the game?
“How do you stop a tsunami?” I asked Kathleen. Before she could tell I was shifting from near despair to humor, I answered. “You throw half a million Bangladeshis in front of it,” I said, laughing.
“Oh, Andrew,” she said as she laughed, “That’s terrible.” Terrible. That was the point. The answer to the joke seemed to be God’s answer.
So when she then said, “Can’t you be serious about anything?” I was jarred. Didn’t she know I joked about terrible things because I wasn’t willing to forgo my date with her to save the money and send it to the Red Cross? I wasn’t going to forgo watching Alabama play Oklahoma to a 24–24 tie or my chance at graduating from college and living a more or less comfortable life. Since I couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do anything to help the dying thousands in Bangladesh, wasn’t any kind of exaggerated concern merely histrionic hypocrisy? When I made the joke, however feeble, I knew it was on me and my failings, and on life itself, not on those poor refugees dying of dehydration and malaria. Laughter was the one way I could approach the deep, appalled fears that haunted me—a hopeless sense of helplessness, a lifelong dread of death, and—couldn’t she see it?—an apprehensive and growing commitment to love.
I had a young and driven man’s urgent need to conceal that I was young, driven, and frightened. Most of the time, I hid my futile empathy behind a selectively permeable membrane. Without that shield, the world’s miseries would hammer me down to an oozing mound of useless guilt. Don’t we all, except the saintly, learn the limits of love’s jurisdiction? And don’t we also feel vicious and even sinister because of our necessary callousness?
The refrain of the marriage was “Oh, Andrew . . .”
“Oh, Andrew . . .” meant she did not understand why I thought something was funny, and if I thought about it, I should have known she wouldn’t laugh. But as jokers do, I persisted, knowing that if I could overcome her resistance the joke would be even funnier, provoking the moment when she would, laughing, say, “That’s not funny.”
Six years later, when we were moving toward divorce, Kathleen said, “What’s wrong with you? You never laugh anymore.” In the months before, as she’d moved out of the house and, relenting to my entreaties, returned, then moved out and then relented again, I brooded over the past we had shared. One of us alone could decide it meant nothing—or not enough—and that understanding got to be true for both of us. And the person who was moving toward and retreating from this decision for the both of us expected me to laugh?
Seven years after
our divorce, I was sitting on a porch at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference late in the evening, talking and joking with people, one of them my former teacher, the poet Don Justice. What were we talking about? Divorces? Exes? Women in general? I don’t remember, but after several drinks, my tongue grew as loose as my brain, and I began to tell stories about my ex-wife.
I told them that soon after we were married, Kathleen took a job as a secretary in the Geology Department at the University of Alabama, where I was a graduate student. In the job interview, she had told the department chairman, her prospective boss, that while she was happy to attend to her secretarial responsibilities, she was not going to make coffee for the office, one of the hot-button issues at the time. Secretaries were professionals, not servants, not maids, and not substitute wives. They shouldn’t be expected to clean the coffeemaker and keep it brewing unless they wanted a cup of coffee themselves, dammit. The boss was happy enough to agree since he had an office manager who already took care of the coffee, and because Kathleen could out-type the capacity of an IBM Selectric, tripping the keys so fast that the machine occasionally locked up and pitched a row of hyphens across the page.
But once the other woman quit, and Kathleen was promoted to office manager, the previous office manager’s job of tending to the yellow-stained, dilapidated Mr. Coffee fell to her, a lack of respect that infuriated her. She grudgingly brewed coffee first thing every morning, while complaining about it sourly and often at home. After several months, I noticed she hadn’t mentioned coffee in a while. I asked her why not. Had she trained the boss to do it for himself?
She laughed gleefully. No, she said, she still made the coffee. But she’d stopped tossing out the old damp grounds from the day before. She just threw new coffee on top of them each morning, splashed in water, and flipped the switch. By Friday, the paper filter was full, so she tossed it out and started over on Monday. Or, it being summer in Alabama, when the coffee grounds turned green. What made her laugh was this: since she’d quit washing the machine and changing the grounds daily, the boss, practicing positive-reinforcement management techniques, bragged to visitors about what a good job his office manager did making coffee.
The Joker: A Memoir Page 26