She’d hold her hand, palm upward, fingers spread and curled as if cradling a softball. “What’s this?” she’d say. When you said you didn’t know, or simply hesitated long enough, she’d invert her hand, and make a frantic crawling motion toward your face. “A dead one of these.”
She’d put her two hands together, one atop the other, fingers spread and curled the same way, then push them together as if squeezing moisture out of a ball of mozzarella. “What’s this?” Before you could speculate she’d say, “One of them doing push-ups on a mirror.”
The pleasure in the joke was in “one of these” and “one of them.” The omission of the noun.
The suggestion lingering in the push-ups-on-a-mirror was that there might be a dirty thought in your mind, one she was delighted both to have cultivated by implication and to stick you with credit for having entertained.
She was dirty but not filthy. There was an emphasis on pleasure.
“How do you titillate an ocelot?”
“What?”
“How do you titillate an ocelot?”
“How?”
“You oscillate its tit a lot.”
She loved Chinese food. My parents had a joke between them, leaked half advertently more than once, that the texture of cooked shitake mushrooms reminded her of something.
She wore a T-shirt from a tennis racket company that said, simply, head. She didn’t play tennis (or any other sport).
They had two white ceramic pieces on a shelf in the kitchen, one unabashedly phallic (in its proportions it could only have been passed off otherwise as a mushroom; the head was gigantic) and the other vaginal, vulvic. Is that a word?
Many hippies had such things, it should be said.
Left alone with these, I experimented. It troubled me that they couldn’t actually be fit together.
Later, at her encouragement, we nicknamed her younger boyfriend “Charlie Mushroom,” because of his love for Chinese food. The dots were never overtly connected. The earlier joke had been with my father.
She and Charlie Mushroom ate at a Chinese restaurant in Brooklyn Heights with a large traditional bar that could make any cocktail. She and Charlie seized on an ironic favorite, a cocktail enjoyed in scare quotes: the Grasshopper. An alcoholic crème de menthe milkshake, it came in a martini glass. I craved a sip. I was granted one, once.
I have never ordered a Grasshopper.
A drunk is sitting at a bar alone, eyelids three-quarters closed, almost sliding off his barstool. A group beside him are having a wonderful time, and they find him amusing. Suddenly the drunk gets up and announces to no one in particular, “I’ve gotta take a pish.” (All of the drunk’s lines are done in a superexaggerated “drunk voice.”)
One of the revelers says to him, “While you’re in there, go for me!”
The drunk surprises him by saying, “OK.” He wobbles and weaves his way into the bathroom.
A few minutes later he emerges. As he picks his way across the floor back to the sanctuary of his barstool, the heckler says, “Hey, you forgot to go for me.”
The drunk widens his eyes, says, “Shorry, jusht a minute,” and, to the astonishment of the laughing group, reverses his course, disappearing again into the bathroom.
Fifteen or twenty minutes go by, during which time the revelers forget about the drunk completely. Suddenly he emerges from the bathroom, weaves his way back to the group, and with a stern look in his eye, says to the heckler, “You didn’t have to go!”
The drunk in the bathroom was a theme. The joke she might have told most often was one of the least funny: “Why does beer make you have to pee so quickly?” “It doesn’t have to change color on the way down.” The riddle’s value, I think, was in its worldliness. The evocation of places she’d been, and times she’d had, specifically at McSorley’s Old Ale House, a place she mentioned often. Not much earlier, McSorley’s had refused to serve women. She’d gone there with her folk-singer friends, who included the Clancy Brothers and Dave Van Ronk. She wasn’t Irish. In some obscure way, she and her friends wanted to share in the credit for breaking the gender line at McSorley’s.
An Irish friend of hers, a young man named Ed, who was both tall and very heavyset, once got up from our kitchen table to use the tiny downstairs bathroom, which contained only a toilet, a small sink, and a framed Japanese print. Ed barely fit into this bathroom. He took some kind of tumble while he was standing at the toilet, and reached for the small towel rack, and yanked it off the wall, and then a cigarette he was smoking set a towel on fire and singed the print’s frame, and left a halo of smoke on the print itself. Ed’s rapid-fire drunken destruction of the small bathroom became a regular story told, a legend. It mingled Irishness and drunkenness and urination, so it converged with the story of the drunk who tries to go for someone else and the riddle about the haste with which beer becomes pee.
Ed didn’t have a nickname, but another younger man of Irish lineage, named Tom, she dubbed “Captain Vague” in honor of his digressions and tendency to become confused.
Not in the form of a joke, more a hard-boiled New Yorker’s assessment I heard her make more than once, and which came with a punch line: in considering someone who presented enormous difficulty, but also evoked sympathy in some observers because of the evidence of mental illness, she’d say, “The problem with helping someone like that is if you cured them of being crazy, you’d just be stuck with a sane asshole.”
My grandmother would tell a story about my mother’s first day at school. It was stated as an anecdote that proved my mother’s compassion and sensitivity to the pain of others, though it was transparently an excuse for saying aloud the story’s punch line, which titillated my grandmother endlessly. (It wouldn’t have meant much to an ocelot.)
My mother came home weeping from the first day of kindergarten and wouldn’t explain what was troubling her. At last my grandmother was able to console her, and my mother said that she felt bad for a boy in school because his name was so terrible. When my grandmother asked further, my mother supposedly said, “I can’t say it, it’s a bad word, you’ll be angry.” My grandmother assured her that in this case it would acceptable to say the word aloud, in order to explain the problem. My mother supposedly said, “Oh, Mother, it’s so terrible, his name is Shitlips.”
A stray punch line to a lost joke extends from this same Jewish surname: “If your lip shits, what does your ass do?” The existence of the joke, which can hardly be specific to my family, may or may not cast doubt on my grandmother’s anecdote.
She didn’t speak with a Queens accent but the attitude was implicit in her idiom.
Both she and my grandmother would say, in trying to get us to tie our shoes and gather our belongings to go out on an expedition of some kind, “Consolidate your Edison.” This was a reference to Consolidated Edison, the city’s power company, which at that time was generally shortened in use to “ConEd.” So, the expansion to its full name in the witticism felt antique, a New Yorker’s legacy, like calling the Lexington Avenue subway “the IRT.” The spin given this line allowed it to mean “Get your act (or shit) together.”
My sister and I had for years both assumed that “Consolidate your Edison” was some common parlance that my mother and grandmother had picked up for use, but an Internet search proved fruitless. We could find no citations, no other instances. My grandmother may have invented it—which is funny to write, because Thomas Alva Edison was an inventor, but also a theft of credit for the inventions of others. And jokes, famously, go uncredited.
