For a boy raised on biblical Platonism, the idea of being a good animal was not something I could easily grasp. I was as naïve as the young wife who constantly refuses to have doggy-style sex with her husband, no matter how he asks. None of her friends do it. It’s not something a lady should do. It’s undignified. But finally, one day, worn down by his begging and pleading, threatening and groveling, she relents. She doesn’t really want to do it doggy-style, but to keep him happy she will. But first he has to promise her one thing.
“Sure, sure, I agree. What is it you want me to promise?”
“No matter how excited you are, no matter how out of control you get when we are stuck together, promise not to drag me past the beauty salon where all my friends can see us.”
She was worried he was just another dog who’d lose his head over a piece of tail.
Hoping to lose just such innocence, I pored over the two sex books my mother left on my bed. I read them as I read all books then: I spread them on the floor at the foot of my bed and lay on my stomach on my bed with my head hanging off the mattress. One night I left the physiology text there when I went to sleep and didn’t think to pick it up before leaving for school the next morning. When I got home in the afternoon, I leaned my bike against the wall of the carport, gathered my books from the metal baskets hanging over the back wheel, and as I reached for the doorknob, the door flew open. Screaming, my mother grabbed my outstretched hand, jerked me into the house, and shoved the book in my face as I flinched from it.
“Do you see what you’ve done? Do you see? Do you know what this will cost? Do you have any idea what this means?”
The book was so close to my face that actually I couldn’t see what I’d done. Only when she threw it to the floor and stood in front of me, heaving with sobs, could I see that it had been eaten.
The terrier puppy we’d owned for two months had consumed the lower right quadrant of the book. The rest of the book was ragged and soggy. My mother could no longer, as she’d planned, slip it anonymously into the return slot by the front door of the library. Thanks to my carelessness, she’d have to stand at the desk, where the librarian—and every other bum with nothing better to do than hang around the library!—could see she’d checked out a book with the words
human sexuality
printed in black letters down what remained of its moist spine.
Within forty-eight hours, the terrier puppy went to live with “a nice family in the country who had room for him to run,” which means, as I know now and suspected then, that he got returned to the pound. It’s not much of a stretch into metaphor to say that, like the dog in the joke, he had also lost his head over a piece of tail.
All in all I received a profound education in Eros and Thanatos
from the little fictional dog that met his death by the railroad track, de-tailed and then decapitated by the Super Chief. Eros and Thanatos!—from the first moment of my understanding they were intertwined. Tail can kill you, the joke says. As I grew into a normal unhealthy obsession with girls, the joke, or at least its punch line, haunted me, though I knew little of sex beyond the primal impulse and the idea that fallopian tubes were involved. Implicit in the joke is the understanding, true enough, that love and lust are different, though occasionally overlapping, desires, and that lust is dangerous. This Aesop’s fable for pubescent boys also assumes, doesn’t it, that some women are tail and some are not? Or, dear God, is it that all women are tail and can fatally entrance you?
An urge that powerful terrified me. When I at last experienced sex, would logic, decency, and life itself be swept away by uncontrollable passion? Would I go crazy? Would I lose my head over a piece of tail?
The joke led me to an indispensable, embargoed truth that could smuggle itself into my consciousness only through the insinuating dreamscape of jokes. Inherent in the jokes were assumptions about sex that I’d taken in before I understood the jokes themselves.
Only in retrospect did I begin to understand a joke my mother loved, and it was a racy joke for a woman who could not bear to talk about sex. I’m pretty sure that she never told it when my father could hear. It began:
A woman is out swimming in the ocean when a wave sweeps in and washes away her bikini top
. The opening grabbed my attention not because it was titillating, but because at the pool on Seymour Johnson Air Force Base my mother wore one-piece bathing suits with little skirts on them. Bikinis were immoral and provocative. She didn’t want her eight-year-old boy to know about them, much less to imagine what was under them. But now, for the purposes of her joke, she was telling me non-judgmentally, even
gleefully, about a woman who not only wore a bikini but couldn’t keep it on. What was up with that?
The woman doesn’t know what to do, so she crosses her arms and turns her back to the beach.
Mom clutched her elbows, hugged her chest, and half turned toward the wall, imitating the woman in the joke, and I refused the impulse to imagine my mother’s naked breasts. That is probably why the imaginary woman in the water is incised into my memory. She is tall, brunette, broad-shouldered, and tan. Her bikini top, which has been swept away, is red. Solid dark burgundy red—no dots, no flowers, no stripes. I didn’t have to create her; she appeared in my mind fully formed. My mother was short, henna-haired, petite, and freckled.
The topless woman stands up to her belly button in the ocean, her back still to the beach, and stares out toward the horizon. She doesn’t know what to do. While she’s considering her predicament, a little boy swims over, dog-paddles around in front of her, and stares at her breasts.
Mom always stopped and laughed here, and I laughed with her. She laughed, I think, because the boy’s curiosity and blithe bad manners seemed to her the epitome of boyness; maybe she was tickled at the woman’s discomfort as the boy studied her. I laughed because I imagined the little boy was me although he was nothing like me and I knew it. If I had ever tried to peek at Mom’s breasts she would have, in a phrase she was fond of, slapped me till my head was humming—or knocked me into the middle of next week, another threat she liked the sound of. I imagined I was the boy because, though he wasn’t real, he made her laugh.
“Hey, lady,”
the boy says
, “if you’re going to drown those puppies, can I have one?”
Oh, how we laughed then, our voices in near harmony, hers leading, mine following a quarter beat behind because I wasn’t sure why we were laughing. At eight, I thought the joke had something to do with death. I’d heard of people drowning unwanted animals
in lakes, rivers, abandoned wells, rain barrels, and buckets, and I figured the joke might be alluding to that, as of course it is. Or maybe it was about dogs. My mother was much more tolerant of the joke-boy’s desire for a dog than she was of mine. The book-chewing terrier was to be her only brief wavering.
I knew the boy’s ignorance was central to the joke: How weird to confuse part of a woman’s body with a dog! The boy was so dog-crazy that he saw puppies everywhere. If I’d ever seen a nipple, I might have grasped the image that makes the elements of the joke fall into place. To the boy’s eyes, the woman’s nipples, which she has obviously not covered as well as she thinks she has, look like dogs’ noses poking over her crossed arms. But I lacked that knowledge, the crucial bit of knowledge that makes the joke work, and my mother, with astonishing parental double think, both knew I didn’t know and hoped I did so she wouldn’t have to educate me.
The joke is about sexual ignorance that, like mine, does the best it can with the facts it has. Now I understand that my mother’s laughter was propelled by having a houseful of boys whom she knew would one day ask her about sex. In the joke, what seems to be the boy’s sexual curiosity and incipient desire are revealed to be the epitome of innocence: a boy’s desire for a puppy. Seeking to understand the joke without the tools necessary for the task, I made it even more disturbing. Since I didn’t know enough to mistake nipples for noses, I imagined a woman’s breasts covered with fur, the slightly coarse yellow-brown coat of German shepherd puppies. That picture in my head gave me the heebie-jeebies for weeks. I thought heebie-jeebies might be the point.
I’d received another lesson in sex education in seventh grade, but unfortunately it took place before I’d heard about the headless dog, so I didn’t have a firm educational foundation on which to build. But still I learned something. When the social studies teacher left the room, I leaned into the aisle and listened to a girl tell a joke
to her friends. I was so grateful to be allowed into the audience that I remember to this moment the California sunlight pouring through the high, transom-level windows near the ceiling and illuminating the girl’s thin face, which suddenly seemed older, almost mature, and slyly ingratiating. She, who had always been haughty, was now bending forward, eager for us to hear her joke.
A little boy comes home from the circus, hysterical. He can’t stop crying. The fortune teller at the circus had stared into her crystal ball and finally, sadly, informed the boy that his father would die before midnight the next day.
“Don’t worry about what some stupid Gypsy tells you in exchange for a quarter,” the father says, and laughs. The mother laughs too.
The father tries to put the prophecy out of his mind, but all the next day at work he worries about it. Maybe the old Gypsy knows something he doesn’t, so he drives home from work early to avoid traffic and eats supper chewing each bite thoroughly so he won’t choke. The later it gets, the more nervous he becomes, so he goes to bed at eight o’clock, figuring he’ll be safe there. As the night wears on and the clock on the mantel strikes nine, ten, eleven, eleven thirty, quarter of twelve, he grows more and more frantic. Finally, as the clock begins striking the twelve ding-dongs of midnight, he jumps out of bed, races downstairs in a panic, throws open the door, bolts across the lawn—and trips over the dead mailman.
The other students rocked in their seats with laughter, and I laughed too, but hesitantly, working my way through the joke. The dead mailman was the boy’s biological father, sure, but why was that funny? Since I didn’t understand sex, I couldn’t understand the shock of sexual betrayal. I understood the mechanism of the joke—that the father’s fatherhood, in the biological sense, was revealed to be a delusion—but the psychological power of the reversal was missing and thus, so was most of the humor. Not sure why I
should laugh at the joke, I tried to locate something funny in the unexplored future of the characters. How would the husband and wife explain to the police and neighbors the dead mailman lurking around their house at midnight? How would the man and wife get along now that her unfaithfulness had been mystically revealed? In my frantic and inadequate attempt to find the source of humor in the joke, I grasped for the first time that sexual infidelity was not something that happened only in the Bible, with David and Bathsheba. I was so scrupulously churched and vigilantly sheltered that I had not understood adultery could happen in suburban homes like mine, stucco or clapboard boxes to which uniformed government employees delivered the mail and maybe a little special-delivery loving too.
As the other students laughed, all these half-formed notions pinballed around my head, and the girl who’d told the joke noticed my half hearted laughter. “Don’t you get it?” she asked with theatrical incredulity. “The mailman was the kid’s real father!”
“Yeah, I get it,” I said. But by then I’d lost the point of the joke, caught up as I was in trying to fathom the reality it grew out of. Or was it fear? I was being educated about sex by unknowing teachers unaware of what they were teaching. I was being taught, through the oral culture of jokes, the terrors of the tribe. Long before I grasped the passion behind sexual betrayal and the mechanics involved in infidelity, I was learning that women were dangerously desirable and often untrustworthy. Men, in the millennia before genetic testing, could never know for certain they were really their sons’ fathers. Here was probably the oldest male fear and certainly the stuff of both great comedy and great tragedy in literature, as well as many billions of agitated nights and angry days off the page. Jokes like this one foster a deeply unhealthy suspicion and distrust of women, but in mocking the pain, laughing at it, they also suggest a philosophical and emotional distancing that may, in time, be
psychologically useful for cuckolded husbands. To laugh at the betrayed man is to rehearse for the moment you become him. Humor at the expense of others is always on the verge of becoming the rueful laugh of hard-earned wisdom. But the first time we hear the joke, our laughter at the dead mailman on the lawn is more atavistic than wise; it’s apotropaic laughter, laughter that since antiquity has been used to “turn away” or ward off (from the Greek
apotropaios
“averting evil”) any evil spirits the joke has summoned.
• • •
Over time I brooded over the implications of the many lessons I learned from jokes like the one about the decapitated dog. Frequently, ignorance had led me to mirth for the wrong reasons. When I was fifteen and my mother was pregnant with Tim, my youngest brother, I repondered the story of the Oof-oof bird, an ornithological curiosity I was much taken with when I was eight. On a remote island in Polynesia, scientists had just recently discovered this rara avis and named it the Oof-oof bird. Because it lays square eggs, and every time a corner of an egg emerges, the bird goes “Oof-oof!”
I’d assumed the joke was about constipation, a family affliction, and therefore the one bodily process we joked about. To me, at eight, the joke was about the visceral empathy I felt wincing in sympathy with the imaginary bird. I’m not exaggerating when I say that I could almost
feel
the eight sharp corners of the square eggs move through and out of my body. I understood the joke the only way I could.
But maybe that isn’t quite what it’s really about,
I thought, with my new knowledge of sex simmering. Watching my mother waddle around our military apartment outside Paris, her hands clasped under her belly as she moaned, “I’m forty years old. I’m too old to have a baby. I’m too old to go through this,” I wondered if the joke about the Oof-oof bird might just be as much about childbirth as constipation. At eight, I hadn’t comprehended the obvious fact that
any creature laying an egg has to be a female and the
oof-oofs
were avian birth pains.