The Joker: A Memoir Read Online Free Page A

answer that had nothing to do with life as I knew it. I couldn’t conceive of caring what time the train leaving Santa Fe at noon at forty miles an hour would pass the train leaving from Denver an hour later at fifty miles an hour. Maybe I’d care if I was on one train, my mother was on the other, and I could remember to look up at the exactly calculated minute and wave to her as we passed each other, but I doubted that would be possible. I’d get engrossed in reading a comic book, forget the time, forget to look for her, and then, later, I’d get fussed at for not paying attention.
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    At school, I met my father’s first joke again, and once more it flummoxed me. “What’s black and white and red all over?” asked the joke page of My Weekly Reader . Well, I know that one , I thought with jaded triumph. It’s a newspaper. Everybody knows that.
    Wrong! said My Weekly Reader . It’s a blushing zebra. That’s just dumb , I thought, enraged. Zebras don’t blush. What could make a zebra blush? And even if it did, it wouldn’t blush all over its body, just as people didn’t blush all over theirs. My Weekly Reader helpfully printed a black-and-white picture of a zebra, its head radiating squiggly heat-lines of embarrassment as it looked back over its shoulder with an abashed grin. Its white stripes were shaded gray, to suggest it was blushing. But the picture made me crazier than the joke. Even in the picture, the black stripes of the zebra remained black, which was— aha! —a clear refutation of the joke’s logic.
    What was this joking ? It was challenging my grasp of reality. Was joking like what my mother often said as she flipped off the bedroom light after tucking me and my brother into bed? Hand hovering over the switch, she sang, “Where was Moses when thelight went out?” Click went the light, and framed in the doorway by the hall light behind her, my mother, chuckling, answered her own question, “In the dark!” Other times the question had a different answer, one that made her laugh out loud: “Down in the cellar with his shirttail out!”
    “In the dark” was an obvious non-answer answer, like “to get to the other side,” and “down in the cellar with his shirttail out” was nonsense with a hint of naughtiness. Other than that, all I understood about these moments was Mom’s pleasure in the words. “Where was Moses when the light went out?” was, I discovered many years later, the refrain of a novelty song from her youth. In the song, Moses is courting Becky Cohen, and when the lights go out, old man Cohen is relieved to hear Becky keep playing the “pianer” in the dark while he leaves the room to find money to feed the gas meter. He is, he tells Becky, sure her Moses was courting her respectably—“loving in a Yiddisher manner,” but Cohen still wants reassurance: “Tell me, darling daughter, while I went to get the quarter / Where was Moses when the light went out?”
    The refrain broke free of its source, became a catchphrase, and people simply invented answers for it, including one I never heard at home: “Down in the cellar eating sauerkraut.” We Southern Baptists weren’t notable consumers of fermented cabbage, and the only Moses I’d heard of was the one who led the children of Israel out of Egypt. In my mind, he was the Moses in the dark with his shirttail flapping free. I wondered why he was not wearing the long heavy robe he wore in my illustrated Bible. My lack of understanding did not, however, keep me from absorbing (if not entirely appreciating) how my mother, after she had turned out the lights on another day that ended with me safely in bed, allowed herself a moment of carefree nonsensical pleasure imported from a time before I was born.
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    I slowly eased my grip on my natural literalism, and began to enjoy the unrealities that language made possible. Chickens yearn to cross roads, zebras blush, and newspapers are red all over