The SS President Hayes was headed to Guadalcanal, and the old hands on the ship’s crew amused themselves by telling the young marines frightening tales about the dangers of amphibious landings and the horrors of island combat. The night before the assault on Guadalcanal, the marines were lying in their bunks, nervous, unable to sleep, wondering how a landing that had been so chaotic in practice would unfold under enemy fire. In the hot, anxious darkness, someone ripped an enormous, reverberating fart.
Embarrassed silence. Then one marine sang out, “Sing again, sweet lips, that I may find thee.”
The men exploded in laughter. According to Tom, they laughed till they wept. He knew that the men’s fear, perhaps the greatest fear they would ever feel, fueled their laughter, and, after the catharsis of that giddy, anxious hilarity, he relaxed enough to fall asleep.
Fear fueled the laughter, but what makes the wisecrack crackle? The lofty and archaic poetic language connected to the earthy business of ripping a big one is part of it. The sweet lips and the antique thee suggest chivalry, romance, and female companionship—now a world away for men anticipating some of the most savage fighting of World War II. But the sweet lips are not the cherry-red lips of an idealized woman in song and poetry, but the anus of another man. The combination of bleak conditions, men alone, and the hint of homophobia must have fired the nervous laughter for a group of young men concerned with manhood and how those around them measured it. Men and fart jokes—we are a marriage that will last until the last puts out the light.
Obviously the line was not ad-libbed. But where’s it from? At first I thought it was a line of highfalutin romantic poetry called up from memory and applied to a note played on the butt flute. Who’d have thought a poetic line about seeking sweet lips to kiss had actually come from a 450-year-old poem and had been about farting to begin with? I should have. A little rooting around took me right to the source: Chaucer’s “The Miller’s Tale,” probably the greatest bawdy story in all literature. I’d spent an entire summer at the University of Alabama studying The Canterbury Tales under the tutelage of Dr. Woodrow Boyett. In the tale, two young men are courting a young woman behind her husband’s back, and while Alisoun, one of the sexiest minxes in all literature, is lolling in the sack with Nicholas, Absalom, the town clerk, comes by, whispers to her through the window, and refuses to leave till she grants him a kiss. To give Nicholas a laugh, Alisoun sticks her butt out the window and that is what Absalom kisses. He becomes aware of his error immediately:
Aback he leapt—it seemed somehow amiss,
For well he knew a woman has no beard;
He’d felt a thing all rough and longish haired,
And said, “Oh fie, alas! What did I do?”
Absalom hightails it to the blacksmith, borrows a red-hot coulter, which is the cutting blade on the front of a plow, and returns to Alisoun’s window to beg another kiss. This time, Nicholas sticks his ass out to receive the suitor’s kiss. In the dark, Absalom calls out, “Speak, sweet bird, I don’t know where you are.” Nicholas “let loose a fart / As strong as a thunderclap, / So that Absalom was almost blind with its force.” But he still possesses the stamina to wield the hot iron effectively: “He struck Nicholas in the middle of his arse: / Off went the skin a hand’s breadth on each side.” Ouch.
The red-hot chunk of iron my father-in-law met the next day was Guadalcanal. He didn’t talk about the war, and I imagine a medic on Guadalcanal had more to forget than most World War II vets, a famously reticent cohort, but he loved to tell the story about meeting the love of his life on that island. He was walking by a group of Quonset huts one day when he saw something he’d never seen before, something beautiful. In a cage was a dog, a Doberman, and Tom, a dog lover, climbed into the cage without a second thought and within seconds, as he told the story, he had the dog on his back, legs in the air, tongue lolling ecstatically to the side as he scratched its belly and talked loving nonsense to it.
From the distance, the dog handler came racing down the beach, yelling, “Get away from that dog! He’s a trained killer.” Yeah, well, not to Tom McGraw he wasn’t. Tom loved to tell his cherished stories, and I liked laughing and listening to them. The shared humor helped us understand and take pleasure in each other, and the stories helped me understand Erin.
Like her dad, Erin is a dog lover. She was the sort of toddler who terrified her parents by crawling into strange doghouses and throwing herself across any canine she could reach. Even now she bolts through traffic on downtown streets when she sees a dog. As I cringe in embarrassment, she looks hulking, beleathered drug dealers and ferrety, deranged loners in the eyes and inquires, “May I pet your dog?” Sometimes they are amused and say yes. Few say no, though some gruffly mumble that their Rottweiler or pit bull is not that friendly with strangers, but if she really wants to, yeah, she can pet Spike. “Oh, you,” she warbles to the dog, stroking its head, “you are happy to see me, aren’t you? Yes, you are. You are happy to see me. That’s Andrew back there. Don’t mind him. He’s happy to see you too. He’s just shy.” One such encounter with a Bernese Mountain Dog ended with my stalking nervously around the emergency room on a Sunday morning, while Erin, with a bite on her neck and her T-shirt soaked in blood, sat and read magazines for a couple of hours while waiting to see a doctor.
One of the first stories I ever told to amuse her is a wonderful anecdote from Eileen Simpson’s Poets in Their Youth about Caroline Gordon and her dachshund. Gordon and her husband, Allen Tate, spent the winter of 1925 in rural New York State, living outside of New York City to save money, and they took in Hart Crane, who was even poorer than they were. As the long and very cold winter ground down the financially stressed writers, civility between Crane and the Tates wore so thin that they slipped notes under each other’s doors to complain about perceived transgressions. Once, when they were actually speaking to each other, though, Gordon reproached Crane for “being inconsiderate” and he “made the mistake of defending himself by saying he was ‘nervous and sensitive,’ and shouldn’t be held to the standards of behavior demanded of others.” Crane must have quickly come to regret indulging in that particular moment of haughty self-pity. Both in Crane’s presence and for friends over the next several decades, Gordon often held her dachshund in the air and, speaking for it, said, “I’m nervous and sensitive, aren’t I, Mama? Like my uncle Hart Crane.”
Through the twenty years and four dogs of our marriage, Erin has perched Rosie, Buddy, Max, and Sister on her lap, wagged their paws at me, and made them say, “I’m sensitive and nervous, like my uncle Hart Crane.” I like to think Caroline Gordon is looking down on us from heaven, a besotted dog-mama beaming with happy malice.
The most loquacious of all our dogs was Buddy, whom we met at a cocktail party on the veranda of Rebel’s Rest at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. A polite and handsome yellow dog with a fine black muzzle, he stood by the hors d’oeuvre table and waited for shrimp to fall from the plates of drinkers.
I held a shrimp out to him. He gravely nosed it and then with delicate reverence lifted it from my fingers. I next saw him two days later, nosing a dog biscuit held by the long fingers of the fiction writer Amy Hempel, with that same odd mix of gratitude and wariness. Amy travels with her purse and pockets stuffed with dog biscuits and pigs’ ears in plastic Baggies. During the course of the writers’ conference, she had already placed another stray with someone, and she was quick to notice Erin’s and my interest in the cheerful yellow dog with the black snout.
“He’d be a great dog for you guys,” she assured us.
“He seems more obsequious than I’m comfortable with,” I said.
“That’s how he’s made his living for the last couple of years, sucking up to people for food. He’ll adapt to however you want to do things.”
“I’m worried about that green puss oozing out of his penis. That could be something expensive.”
“Oh, that!” Amy said, laughing easily. “Don’t worry about that. It’s com
pletely normal. All my dogs do that.”
I gaped in admiration at the lie. It was hard to come up with another objection in the face of Amy’s determination.
Amy could tell I was weakening. If I were to adopt the dog, she said, she’d pick up half his first vet bill.
“I’ll pay for my own dog,” I said stiffly, and then laughed at how deftly she had set the hook.
Erin and I took Buddy to the vet, and when we picked him up—flea-dipped, neutered, and checked over—Erin asked if he’d had worms.
“That dog had every kind of worm there is to have, except earthworms,” the vet said.
The neutering incision became infected, and for a couple of weeks, Erin had to hold, three times a day, a warm washcloth over the wound and, by proximity, over his penis to draw out the pus. The dog mistook her intentions and insists that they now share an erotic bond stronger than the one between Erin and me, and frankly I think the dog’s got a point. Though I’ve asked—and asked repeatedly—I have never been granted that special treatment.
Despite the minor incarnational inconvenience of being four years dead, Buddy is a talking dog, with a bit of a formal bent. Buddy perceives me as a romantic rival. He constantly informs Erin that she deserves better than the Sir and that he’s the dog for the job. In Buddy’s voice I can say the kind of love words that, as a guy, I find it hard to say. Buddy’s a flirt. He has none of my romantic reticence, but as he fills Erin’s ears with elaborate courtly compliments, I get some of the credit.
A talking dog, it turns out, is an invaluable asset to a successful marriage. If I speak harshly to Erin, either from carelessness or moral failing, Buddy might say, loud enough for her to hear, “Sir, I don’t think I’d have used that tone of voice to address the lady, but maybe that’s just me.” Or “I’d never use that tone of voice to address you, ma’am. Because I’m better than the sir.” Or he might just whisper to me, “Iks-nay on the nger-aay, etard-ray.” (Lately he’s been into pig Latin.) And the sweet part is that Erin immediately takes my side.
“Buddy, we don’t use that kind of language in this house, and your sir is not a retard. He just made a mistake, that’s all.”
“Keep using that tone of voice while talking to my lady, sir. It’ll just drive her into my arms.”
“You don’t have arms, Buddy,” Erin says. “You have legs.”
“Into my legs then, ma’am. I’ve dreamed of the moment you’d say such a thing.”
Buddy’s a blowhard, if a charming one, much like the dog a man encounters when, driving down a country road, he sees a sign saying, TALKING DOG FOR SALE. An old, grizzled yellow dog is tied to the sign. The man pulls over and yells out his window, “You the talking dog?”
“Yes, sir, I am indeed,” says the dog.
Surprised that the dog really can talk, the man gets out of his car and walks up to the dog.
“So, what’s your story?” he asks.
The dog says, “I’m the result of secret CIA experiments to genetically modify dogs so we could talk, and I’m the only one who mastered the lingo. I went undercover as a fake Seeing Eye dog to a diplomat, who left me in the room while foreign diplomats and world leaders talked. Later I’d brief the CIA on what I heard. Soon the agency was jetting me all over the world, and the intelligence I gathered was so important that I was given over twelve secret medals for clandestine services to my country. But all the travel began to wear me down as I aged, so I moved back here and got a job in Homeland Security. I just wandered around the airport, sidled up to suspicious characters, and listened in on their conversations. In four years, working part-time, I made five major drug busts and broke up two terrorist plots. Then I figured it was time to settle down, get married, and raise a passel of puppies, so that’s just what I did.”
The man is so astonished he walks across the lawn, knocks on the farmhouse door, and asks the owner how much he wants for the dog.
“Ten bucks.”
“Ten bucks? That’s all? Why you selling him so cheap?”
“Because he’s a liar. That dog ain’t never done none of that shit.”
• • •
After the vet had to express Buddy’s anal glands twice, I asked the vet techs to instruct me in the procedure because I suspected, rightly, that impacted anal glands were going to be a persistent problem. I didn’t want to pay thirty-five bucks every few months for the rest of Buddy’s life to have someone squeeze them empty. The techs were surprised but amenable. Two months later, I caught the tell tale smell coming from under his tail, and a tentative and very self-conscious touch revealed that the glands were swollen and tender.
After talking it over, Erin and I decided she’d hold Buddy’s head between her knees, while I, wearing a surgical glove on my right hand, would do the job. As I was pulling myself together to insert my index finger into the dog’s rectum, Erin looked the trembling and unhappy dog in the eye, and said, her voice solemn with theatrical empathy, “I want you to tell me if Daddy ever touches you in a way that makes you feel funny.” Then we fell apart.
Erin and I rolled back and forth on the kitchen floor, slapping the linoleum in our hilarity, unable to stop. When we tried to stand, pulling ourselves up on kitchen cabinets, we got to laughing again and collapsed, and once I was down for the second time, Buddy, who’d been staring at us anxiously, raced away, picked up the first toy he came to—a heavy length of sawed-off cow’s shinbone—and flipped it at me. It smacked my forehead with a painful clunk that drove Erin to even wilder laughter, and her laughter reignited mine. How do couples without dogs survive?
Sometimes when Erin’s traveling and can’t find anything else to buy me for a remembrance, she’ll pick up a joke book. I’ll crack it open on the kitchen counter and every evening as we make supper, I’ll read a joke or two out loud. Every now and then we’ll find a new one, like this great joke about marriage. A traveling salesman has been on the road for three months straight, and one night at the bar in the Ramada Inn, he falls into an utterly delightful conversation with a beautiful young woman. After an hour, she mentions that she needs to move along; she’s not just chatting, she’s working.
“Wow, you’re a prostitute?”
“Yes,” she says with a hint of exasperation.
“That’s great. Hey, listen, if I gave you five hundred bucks, would you give me a mediocre blow job?”
“I do this for a living. For five hundred dollars I’ll give you the best blow job of your life.”
The salesman is horrified. “Oh, no, no, no! This isn’t about sex! I’m homesick.”
Erin isn’t fond of this joke, though I have repeatedly explained to her why she should be. Like every woman I’ve told it to, she hears a put-down of wives’ sexual prowess. Compared with those of a professional, their blow jobs are only mediocre. And they are right to hear that. They might also be right to suspect the man is deluding himself into thinking his garden-variety philandering is something more complicated, even nobler. But something oddly sweet lies underneath that obvious meaning. The salesman doesn’t desire meaningless sex with a stranger; he wants the beautiful prostitute to eschew her professional skills and simulate the less exciting, but loving, sex he has with his wife. In intention, his five-hundred-dollar blow job is an act of fidelity, but probably not one he’d care to explain to his wife.
Erin knows my fidelity is almost comically complete. I’m the guy who wakes up from a party with a huge hangover, no memory of how he got home, and vague memories of getting thrown out of the office Christmas party. God, I think, I’m going to get reamed by my wife. I’ll never hear the end of it. I open my eyes cautiously, and see a glass of water and two aspirin placed on the bedside table. At the foot of the bed, my clothes are laid out for me—cleaned and pressed—and on the floor sit my dress shoes, newly shined.
When I swallow the aspirin, I happen to glance in the mirror and see that I’m sporting two enormous black eyes and a fairly deep cut in my forehead.
But as I look at the mir
ror, I see Erin has written in lipstick on the glass, “Honey, breakfast is on the stove. I’ve gone to the store to buy steaks for dinner. I love you.”
As I’m sitting at the kitchen table, eating the enormous pile of pancakes, eggs, and sausages Erin has fried up for me, my son walks in. Well, in the original joke it’s the narrator’s son, but since I don’t have a son, it’s Buddy the talking dog who walks in. “What happened last night?” I ask him.
“You got home about four this morning, babbling about being fired, tripped over the coffee table, and broke the glass top. That’s when you cut your head. Then you staggered off down the hall, tripped again, and smacked your face on the door handle to the bathroom. That’s when you blackened both eyes. Then when the lady tried to pick you up, you puked on her bedroom slippers.”
“Then why is she being so nice?”
“Well, she dragged you upstairs to the bedroom, and when she tried to take your pants off, you kept yelling, ‘Leave me alone, lady. I’m a married man.’ ”
For the twenty years we’ve been married, I’ve been so happy I can barely conceive of happiness without marriage. A good-humored wife who appreciates most if not all of my humor—her price is far above rubies, as the book of Proverbs doesn’t quite say. How good is this marriage? The day before trash day, we compete to sneak the trash can and recycle bins to the curb before the other notices. We alternate making dinner and have an iron clad rule that the one who didn’t cook cannot criticize the meal. Usually the cook is the tougher critic anyway. Most of my joking now is centered on making Erin laugh, and one of my great pleasures is e-mailing her a joke and then hearing from her office, which is on the second floor directly above me, a guffaw reverberate down through my ceiling. As Erin and I grow old together, I hope Mikhail Bakhtin, the literary theorist, was right when he wrote, “Death is inseparable from laughter.” He must be, judging from the jokes about aging, decrepitude, dementia, and death e-mailed to me by friends my age. Of all the logical impasses, unknowings, paradoxes, and terrors that provoke laughter, death by its finality and unsolvable mystery is paramount. I am older than Erin by seven years, and we both know she is likely to outlive me. Her grief and the life she’ll live will be a blank to me. (Andrew: My wife’s an angel. Some other guy: You’re lucky, mine’s still alive.)
The Joker: A Memoir Page 31