The Joker: A Memoir Read Online Free

trouble.
    “I don’t know.”
    “A newspaper,” he said, grinning.
    I closed my eyes, retreated into my mind to absorb the answer.I couldn’t do it. I opened them, looked at my father, my head cocked to the side—apprehensive, stupid, trying to think and failing. Nothing connected. This was not unusual in my relations with the adult world. I must have looked like a beagle instructed to determine pi.
    “I don’t understand.”
    “A newspaper is read,” he said and nodded. He was encouraging me to keep working at it.
    I conjured a picture of a newspaper painted red. I envisioned Dad painting the kitchen stool. He’d spread newspaper on the carport floor and then placed the unfinished wooden stool upside down in the middle of it. The paint often over-sprayed onto the Goldsboro News-Argus , covering much of the paper with a glossy coat of royal-blue enamel. In my mind I turned the blue paint to red. But that didn’t help. Where the newsprint was red, it was no longer black and white.
    “A newspaper is read after you read it,” Dad said.
    “But it’s not red . It’s still black and white.”
    “Listen to me! It’s R-E-A-D, not R-E-D. The same word means different things.”
    “That’s not fair! It’s cheating!”
    “It’s not cheating. It’s a joke.”
    “It doesn’t make sense!” I wailed.
    “It’s not supposed to make sense. It’s a joke , you stupid idiot!” he snapped, and marched out of the room.
    After he was gone, I remember sitting on the carpet, tapping one Lincoln Log with another. Read sounds the same as red . Now that my father’s expectant eyes were no longer locked on me, I got it. The joke had faked me out by leading me to think the sound meant one thing when it really meant another. If that wasn’t cheating, I didn’t know what was. But the margins in a newspaper, I thought, weren’t “read,” so it wasn’t actually read all over, was it?And what about the pictures? Did looking at them count as reading? I didn’t think so.
    A few minutes later, Dad came back in the living room—to make amends, I now realize—and asked me why the chicken crossed the road.
    “I don’t know,” I said. That seemed to be a safe answer to these joke things.
    “To get to the other side.”
    I nodded as if I understood, tried to smile, and he left the room again, appeased if not happy. In a way I did understand. The joke was a parable about simplicity. The chicken’s crossing the road was broken down to its simplest possible motivation, but one so fundamental as to be completely dull and unsatisfying. I’d come dangerously close to asking Dad what chicken we were talking about. The chickens in my grandmother’s grassless backyard waddled in circles, scratching the Georgia red clay for bugs and overlooked feed corn, and not a single hen had ever shown the least interest in crossing Vineyard Road. I had, though, seen plenty of others flopped dead by drainage ditches, their red and brown feathers erect in the backwash of air as our station wagon shot past, and I vividly remembered seeing a dead chicken humped at the base of a mailbox, a dog jabbing his muzzle into the carcass. Crossing the road was a skill in which many chickens were fatally deficient but maybe they possessed desires I was unaware of.
    I was a single-minded little literalist and these jokes seemed like annoyances made of words, not life, the way math problems at school were annoyances made of numbers. If you had two apples and Mr. Smith gave you three, Mrs. Johnson gave you four, and Miss Ingle gave you three, how many apples would you have? I understood the mathematics behind the silly question, but I couldn’t imagine a world where grown-ups I didn’t know stopped me one after the other and gave me more than I could eat of a fruit I didn’t like.
    Later, when I encountered more complex word problems in arithmetic, I believed them to be especially lame versions of jokes, dubious contraptions made of words that led to an