A Horse Walks into a Bar

by David Grossman

  “What were we talking about, Netanya? What else do I remember? Oh, sure, I remember loads, I’m just now realizing how much I remember. Too much. Like after I finished pissing I did just like he taught me, ‘Shake once, shake twice,’ and then it occurred to me that he taught me quite a lot of things just incidentally, without making a big deal out of it, like how to fix a blind and drill holes in the wall and clean out a kerosene heater and unclog a drain and make fuse wires. And I also thought about how sometimes I had the feeling he was dying to talk to me about things, not just about soccer, which he didn’t really care about—I mean about other things between a father and son, like his childhood memories, that kind of stuff, or thoughts, or just to come over and give me a hug. But he didn’t know how to, or maybe he was embarrassed, or maybe he just felt like he’d left me with Mom too much and now it was hard to change, and then I realize I’m thinking about him again instead of her, and my head starts spinning with all that crap and I can barely climb back into the truck.

  “Good evening, Netanya!” he roars as if he’s only just burst onto the stage, but his voice is tired and raspy. “Are you still with me? Do you by any chance remember—who’s old enough in here to remember? When we were kids we had this toy, the View-Master? It was this little thing with slides, where you’d press down and the pictures would switch. That was from back in the golden age of cellulite,” he quips, “that’s how we saw Pinocchio, and Sleeping Beauty, and Puss in Boots…”

  Only two members of the audience smile—the tall silver-haired woman and me. Our eyes meet for a moment. She has a delicate face and thin-framed glasses.

  “So that’s how you can see me now. Me and the driver in the truck, click. Around us the desert, click. Every so often a military vehicle comes toward us and then there’s that zoom when you pass each other, click.”

  A group of five young men and women sitting close to the stage look at one another, get up, and leave. They don’t say a word. I don’t know why they stayed this long, or what made them leave at this particular moment. Dovaleh walks over to the blackboard and stands there. I sense that this abandonment is more hurtful to him than the others. Shoulders hunched, he slams the chalk down on the board: line, line, line, line, line.

  But then right at the exit door, one of the women stops, the one without a boyfriend, and despite her friends’ cajoling, she says goodbye to them and sits down at an empty table. The manager signals for the waitress to go over to her. She asks for a glass of water. Dovaleh lopes back to the board like a camel—a flicker of Groucho Marx—and makes a big show of erasing one of the lines. As he does so he turns his head back and gives her a big openmouthed grin.

  “And all of a sudden, without thinking, I say to the driver: ‘Tell me a joke.’ And his whole body folds over like I’ve punched him. ‘Are you a sicko? A joke, now?’ ‘What do you care? Just one joke,’ I reply. ‘No, no, I can’t do it now.’ ‘Then how come you could before?’ ‘Before I didn’t know. Now I know.’ He doesn’t even turn his head. Afraid to look at me. Like he’s scared he’ll get infected. ‘Forget it,’ he says, ‘my head’s exploding enough already from what you told me.’ ‘Do me a favor,’ I say, ‘just one joke about a blonde. What’s the worst that could happen? It’s just you and me in the car, no one will know.’ But he goes, ‘No, swear to God, I can’t do it.’

  “Well, if he can’t do it, he can’t do it. So I leave him alone. Put my head on the window and try wiping my brain out all the way, drrrr, no thinking, no being, no nothing, no she, no he, no orphan. Yeah, right. The second I shut my eyes my dad jumps on me, he’s turned into a commando now, doesn’t even wait a second. On Fridays, when Mom works the morning shift, he wakes me up early and we go out to the garden. I told you this, right? I didn’t? It was just ours, that garden, behind the building, tiny—maybe three by three. All our vegetables came from there. And we sit there wrapped in a blanket, him with his coffee and cigarette and his black stubble, me half asleep, kind of almost leaning on him as if I didn’t realize it, and he dips biscuits in the coffee and feeds them to me, and it’s completely silent around us. The whole building is asleep upstairs, no one’s moving in the apartments, and the two of us barely say anything.”

  He holds one finger up so we can hear the silence.

  “At that time of the morning, he doesn’t have the zzzzap in his body, so we look at the dawn birds and the butterflies and beetles. We throw biscuit crumbs for the birds. He can make birdcalls where you can’t believe it’s a human being whistling.

  “Suddenly I hear the driver talking. ‘There’s a shipwreck, and only one person manages to jump off and swim. He swims, he splutters, he swims. Finally, when he’s totally worn out, he drags himself onto an island, and sees that he’s not alone: a dog and a goat managed to swim over, too.’

  “I half open my eyes. The driver talks without moving his lips, you can barely understand him.

  “ ‘A week goes by, two weeks, the island’s empty, no people, no animals, just the guy and the goat and the dog.’

  “It sounds like the driver’s telling a joke, but it’s not a joke voice. He talks like his whole mouth is a pulled muscle.

  “ ‘After a month the guy’s horny as all heck. Looks to the right, looks to the left, not a female in sight, only the goat. After another week, the guy can’t take it anymore, he’s gonna burst.’

  “And I start thinking: Pay attention, this driver is telling you a dirty joke. What the hell is going on? I open another half eye. Jokerman’s got his whole body hunched over the wheel, his face is stuck to the windshield, dead serious. I shut my eyes. There’s something here that I need to understand, but who has the strength to understand, so I just draw a picture in my mind of the island with the guy and the goat and the dog, planting a nice palm tree, cracking open a coconut, hanging up a hammock. Deck chair. Beach ball.

  “ ‘Another week goes by and the guy can’t take it anymore. So he goes over to the goat and pulls his junk out, but suddenly the dog gets up and goes, Grrrrr! Like he’s saying: Watch it, brother, don’t touch the goat! Well, the guy gets scared, packs it up, and thinks: At night the dog’ll go to sleep and I’ll make my move. It’s night, the dog’s snoring, the dude quietly crawls over to the goat. He’s just getting on her when the dog pounces like a panther, barks like crazy, his eyes are like blood, teeth like knives. So the poor guy—what choice does he have? Crawls back to sleep with blue balls up to his eyelids.’ ”

  Dovaleh talks and I look around at the people. At the women. I glance at the tall woman. Her short-cropped hair is like a halo around her lovely, sculpted head. Three years. Since Tamara got sick. Total apathy. I wonder if women are somehow able to sense what’s happening to me, and if that’s the reason it’s been so long since I’ve picked up any sort of sign from a single one of them.

  “You gotta understand that I’ve never heard anyone tell a joke that way in my life. He squeezes out every word like if God forbid he skips a single syllable they’ll disqualify his entry and revoke his joke-telling license for the rest of his life.”

  Dovaleh imitates the driver down to the finest detail, his whole body hovering in front of us as he folds over an invisible wheel. “ ‘And it goes on like that another day, another day, a week, a month. Every time the guy gets anywhere near the goat, the dog jumps up: Grrrr!’ ”

  Smiles here and there. The little woman giggles and puts her hand over her mouth. “Grrrrr!” Dovaleh growls again, only to her, a variation on the drrrrr from before. She loves it. Her laughter rolls out like he’s tickled her. He looks at her tenderly.

  “ ‘One day, the guy’s sitting there looking out at the sea in despair, when suddenly he sees smoke in the distance—another ship is sinking! And out of the ship jumps a blonde, and she is fully equipped: everything’s in the right place, plenty for him to work with. The guy doesn’t hesitate for a second—jumps in, swims all the way out, gets to the blonde. She’s almost drowning, he grabs her, drags her to the island, lays her
down on the sand, she opens her eyes, and she’s gorgeous, she’s like a model, and she says: “My hero! I’m all yours. You can do anything you want to me!” So the guy looks around suspiciously and says quietly, in her ear, “Listen, lady, would you mind holding the dog for a minute?” ’

  “But me—no, listen, Netanya!” He doesn’t even let us laugh properly, the way we all very much need to. “I suddenly burst out laughing so hard, I was literally screaming in that pickup because of all the…I don’t know…because my brain was so fried from the whole situation, or from not thinking for two whole minutes about what was waiting for me soon. Maybe also because someone older than me had told me a grown-up joke, he’d given me credit for being in the know. But then my brain kicks in with its crap, and I’m thinking what does it mean that the driver thinks I’m an adult already? Maybe I don’t want to be a grown-up so quickly?

  “But the point is that I laughed until tears came from my eyes, I swear, the tears finally came, and I hoped that counted. And with everything so fucked up I start feeling like it’s actually good for me to think about the blonde who almost drowned, and about the dog and the goat, and I see them in front of my eyes on their hammocks with the coconuts, and it’s better than thinking about anyone I know.

  “But the driver, I could see it was stressing him out to hear me laugh like a nutcase, maybe he was scared I was losing it, but on the other hand he was also tickled that I liked his joke, how could he not be, and he sat up straight and licked his teeth quickly, he had this kind of mannerism, actually he had all kinds of mannerisms, I still think of him sometimes to this day, the way he kept shifting his sunglasses on his forehead, or pinching his nose with two fingers to make it smaller. ‘Ben-Gurion, Nasser, and Khrushchev are flying in a plane,’ he says quickly before I can go cold on him. ‘Suddenly the pilot announces they’re out of fuel and there’s only one parachute…’

  “What can I tell you, the guy was a walking jokebook. He knew a helluva lot more about jokes than about driving, that’s for sure. And I figured, What do I care? Let him go on like that all the way to Be’er Sheva, where they’ll tell me, they can’t not, that’s where the orphan thing will really start, but until we get there I have a reprieve, like I got pardoned, that’s how I felt, like I got a stay of execution for a few minutes.”

  Dovaleh holds his head up and looks at me for a long time, nodding. And I remember how alarmed he was, horrified even, when I asked him on the phone if he was asking me to judge him.

  “And the same goes for him, the driver. I think he was happy to keep going with the jokes, partly because of the stress about me, but maybe also because he just wanted to make me feel good. Either way, from that moment on he didn’t even take a breather, lit each joke with the last one, just filled me good and well with jokes, and honestly, I don’t even remember most of them, but a few stuck, and the guys sitting at the bar—Hey, guys! You’re from Rosh Ha’ayin, right? Oh, sorry, of course, Petach Tikva. Respect!—they’ve been with me for fifteen years at least. Cheers, muchachos! And they know that those are the two or three jokes I work into every show, whether I need to or not, so now you know where they come from, like that one about the guy who had a parrot who wouldn’t stop cussing? Listen to this, you’ll like this one. From the second he opened his eyes in the morning until he went to sleep, he let out the juiciest—

  “What’s the matter?” he bites his lip. “Did I screw up? No, wait, don’t tell me I already told you that one tonight?”

  People sit there motionless, eyes glazing over.

  “You already told us about that parrot,” says the medium without looking at him.

  “No, it’s a different parrot…,” he mumbles. “Just kidding! Psych! Sometimes I like to test the crowd to see if they’re awake. You passed! You’re an outstanding audience!” He grimaces and his face falls in fear. “Where was I?”

  “With that Jokerman,” says the little woman.

  “It’s the meds,” he says to her and sucks thirstily from his thermos.

  “Side effects,” she says, still without looking at him. “I have them, too.”

  “Listen, Pitz,” he says. “Guys, look, I’m almost done, just stay with me awhile longer, okay? So the driver’s churning out jokes and cracking himself up, and my head is one big fustercluck, the priest, the rabbi, and the prostitute, and the sheep who sings from the mohel’s stomach, who accidentally switched backpacks with the lumberjack, and the parrot—the second parrot, I mean—and they all get mixed up with the whole day’s craziness, and I guess at some point I fell asleep.

  “And when I wake up, what do I see? That we’re stopped in some place that is definitely not the Be’er Sheva Central Bus Station. Just a yard with chickens clucking around, and dogs scratching themselves, and doves in a birdcage, and next to the car stands this thin woman with a pile of black curls, and she’s holding a thin baby in a diaper. She stands next to my window looking at me like she’s seeing a two-headed beast. And the first thing I think is: What’s on that chick’s face? What’s she got painted on? And then I realize it’s tears. She has actual tears coming down in straight lines without stopping, and the driver stands next to her with a sandwich in his mouth, and he looks at me and says, ‘Good Morning, America! This is my big sister. She’s coming with us. Can you believe she’s never been to the Wailing Wall? But first we’ll get you where you need to go, don’t worry.’

  “What the hell?! Where am I, what am I, what Wailing Wall—that’s in Jerusalem! Where’s Be’er Sheva? How did we get here?

  “The driver laughs: ‘You were out cold half the way here. I put you to sleep like a baby with my jokes.’ And the woman says, ‘I don’t believe it—you’ve been torturing him with your one-liners, you dipshit? Aren’t you ashamed to tell him jokes in his state?’

  “Despite the tears, she has a tough, irritable voice. And the driver says to her: ‘Even when he was asleep I told them. I didn’t leave him jokeless for a second. Man-to-man defense, I gave him. Now get in.’ She sits down in the back of the truck with the baby and a big bag. ‘We passed Be’er Sheva ages ago,’ he tells me, ‘I’m not letting you make this trip alone, kid. You got into my heart, I’m taking you door-to-door all the way home.’ ‘But do me a favor,’ his sister says, ‘no more jokes. And don’t look, I have to nurse him. Turn that mirror away—pervert!’ She gives him a little slap from behind, and I sit there like an idiot and think: Why the hell won’t they let my orphanhood start? They keep putting it off. Is it a sign that I’m supposed to do something? But what?”

  He slowly walks to the red armchair and perches on the edge. You can see that his eyes, behind his cracked lenses, are looking inward. I scan the club on his behalf. Maybe fifteen of us are left. A few of the women stare at him with a look both distant and focused, as if they’re seeing through him to another time. It’s hard to mistake that look: they know him intimately, or once did. I wonder what made them come here tonight. Did he phone each one of them and invite her? Or do they always turn up at his shows when he comes through town?

  I realize there’s something missing in the picture: the two young bikers’ table is empty. I didn’t see them leave. I guess after his barrage of punches they assumed that was the most they’d get.

  “So I sit there with my face to the windshield. Dying of fear that my eye will roam to the backseat. I mean, at least she was sitting in the back, but this new thing where every other woman starts breast-feeding in public…? I mean, think about it, it’s not funny at all, you’re standing with a woman, she looks totally normal, normative, as they say, and she’s got her baby on her hip, and never mind that to you he looks eight years old, he’s already got stubble—”

  His voice sounds hollow, almost toneless.

  “—so you and she are just chatting about current affairs, discussing the quantum theory of relativity, when all of a sudden, without batting an eyelid, she pulls a breast out of her sleeve! A real breast! Manufacturer certified! And she sticks it in the baby’s mouth
and keeps on talking to you about the electromagnetic particle accelerator in Switzerland…”

  He’s saying goodbye. I can feel it. He knows this is the last time he’s going to tell these jokes. The girl who was about to leave but came back leans her head on one hand and gazes at him vaguely. What’s her story? Did she go home with him after a gig one night? Or maybe she’s one of his five children, and this is the first time she’s hearing his story? And the two bikers in black—were they somehow connected to him as well?

  I remember what he told us before, about how he used to play chess with people walking on the street. They each had a role, even though they didn’t know it. Who knows what complicated chess game he’s conducting simultaneously here tonight?

  “And the girl, his sister, keeps nursing the baby, and at the same time I hear her digging around in her bag with one hand, and she says to me: ‘I bet you haven’t had anything to eat all day. Give me your hand, kid.’ I reach my hand back and she puts a wrapped sandwich in it, and then a peeled hard-boiled egg and a little screw of newspaper with some salt for the egg. As tough as she looks, her hand is really soft inside. ‘Eat,’ she says. ‘How could they send you off like this with nothing to put in you?’

  “I scarf down the sandwich, and it has delicious, thick salami and spicy tomato spread that burns my mouth, and it’s good, it kicks me awake, puts me back in the game. I sprinkle salt on the egg and finish it off in two bites. Without talking, she passes me a savory cookie and takes a family-sized bottle out of her bag—I swear, this chick was Mary Poppins—and gives me a cup of orangeade. How she does all that with one hand, I cannot understand, and how she manages to feed the baby and me at the same time, I understand even less. ‘The cookies are a little dry,’ she says, ‘wash them down with the orangeade.’ I do everything she tells me.”