The Joker: A Memoir Read Online Free Page B

while remaining black and white. You could play with words, just as you played with marbles, yo-yos, kites, and Matchbox cars.
    Jokes were toys made of words. They were like the jack-in-the-box whose handle I spent hour after hour cranking, listening to the rink-a-tink tune of “Pop! Goes the Weasel” and then crowing with laughter when the clown shot out of his box, flung his folded arms wide, and bobbed at the end of his spring, idiotic and yet sinister with his huge hooked nose, bright red cheeks, and derisive grin. Frightening as he was, Jack was mine to control. I determined when he lunged out of his box, and once he did, I folded his hands across his chest and shoved him back down into his dark enclosure. I could spin the crank rapidly, frantic notes pelting from the box till the clown popped out. More often I turned the handle with obsessive patience, feeling the bumps on the roller inside the music mechanism flick over the tines, making “Pop! Goes the Weasel” unwind as a tinny dirge, until Jack’s spring overpowered the loosening latch and the clown once more launched to the end of his hidden spring. I loved the absurdity of the clown with his arms flying apart wider than the box that held him and his long black gown that, stretched over his uncompressed spring, made him look much taller than the box from which he’d leapt.
    The tune tinked out of the box, and I screeched along with it, reveling in the song as I conjured the unsurprising surprise of Jack’s appearance:
    All around the mulberry bush
    The monkey chased the weasel;
    The monkey thought ’twas all in fun,
    Pop! goes the weasel.
    A penny for a spool of thread
    A penny for a needle—
    That’s the way the money goes,
    Pop! goes the weasel.
    Half a pound of tuppenny rice,
    Half a pound of treacle.
    Mix it up and make it nice,
    Pop! goes the weasel.
    Up and down the London road,
    In and out of the Eagle,
    That’s the way the money goes,
    Pop! goes the weasel.
    I’ve no time to plead and pine,
    I’ve no time to wheedle,
    Kiss me quick and then I’m gone
    Pop! goes the weasel.
    To my ears the words were joyously cockeyed. I knew that weasels and monkeys didn’t belong together, and the two of them had no natural connection to mulberry bushes, which I had at least seen with my own eyes and not in picture books. The appearing and disappearing clown simply increased the mental anarchy that baffled, tickled, and intrigued me.
    I loved the slight, giddy menace in how “needle,” “treacle,” “eagle,” and “weasel” inexactly rhymed. There was something eerie in the way the tune forced me to pronounce the last syllables of the words with unnatural weight: Wee-ZUL, knee-DUL, ee-GUL, whee-DUL.
    The song changed a bit from songbook to songbook, class toclass, and even singer to singer. Did it begin “All around the mulberry bush” or “Around and around” or “Round and round”? Once, in a new class, I launched into the song, and when all the other kids, who had belted out “Round and round the cobbler’s bench,” turned to look at me, I felt stupid and flatfooted, betrayed by my full-throated devotion to the mulberry bush. Though I was perturbed by the unfixed lyrics and the unmoored world they implied, the exuberance of the song and the sheer pleasure it gave me made it easy to understand that all our versions were basically the same—and I learned that what I knew was not the only way something could be known. More crucially, I learned that pleasure can lead us to want to understand something and that understanding is not entirely necessary for pleasure.
    I had no idea that “Pop! Goes the Weasel” was a drinking song, the Eagle a pub, and that the beer mugs were raised and drained at pop! —as a teacher once told the class. Or, depending on whom you read, the weasel is a weaver’s shuttle, a tailor’s iron, a coat, or a stolen bit of silver—all of which could be “popped” at the pawn shop to pay for drink and food or a