My First Dick Joke
From The Soaring Twenties Social Club Symposium on Nostalgia
🍆💦 My first Dick joke Nostalgia means you can’t go home again. Everyone knows it, there is even a book about it by some famous writer guy named Thomas Wolfe. Heck, I don’t even have a home to go back to. It is all up here. ( She taps her forehead with her index finger.) What I miss most are the jokes. My Dad’s jokes. He could tell a funny story the way it should be told. Not many can do that. Most people laugh at their jokes too soon or forget an important part or screw up the order. Heck most people don’t even bother to tell jokes anymore. Too afraid of offending someone. The kind of jokes he told were, I dunno, dirty mostly, I suppose. He told them at parties, grown-up parties. We weren’t allowed downstairs when the grown-ups were having a party. But sometimes we would sneak down the stairs and sit just a few steps up on the landing where we couldn’t be seen and listen in. In the chatter and clang of the crowd you could hear my Mom laugh and say, “Dick, tell them about the guy and his new suit.” “No, do the hairlip one,” Mr R might call out in a loud slurred voice. “Do zee one wit zee two Italian’s in zee bar Deeek,” Paulette would coo. We loved to hear Paulette talk most of all because she was French and the way she said Dick was just hilarious. After a few more asks my dad would start with whatever one he wanted no matter the requests and soon his voice would be the only one you could hear as everyone tried to hear (and remember for retelling) Dick’s latest. He was naturally funny but he practiced. When we were old enough he started to tell us jokes as he drove us to and from places, if my Mom wasn’t around to forbid it. On the way to a swim practice, with just me and my sister in the car he told the joke. I was 12. My sister was 13. Neither of us laughed. Neither of us got it. He did not explain. He was just practicing. There’s this old fashioned bakery shop, you know the kind with the goods on high shelves and a ladder that moves back and forth to reach the top shelves? We nod. So, on the top shelf they keep the specialty breads, cinnamon swirl, iced raisin bread and so on. Mmmm. The lady who works in the shop is a lovely young thing. Very pretty and curvy and she always dresses in short skirts to show off her long legs. And? She is in the habit of not wearing any underwear. So the local men are in the habit of visiting the shop to order raisin bread for the view as she climbs the ladder . Eeeww. After one particularly busy morning of climbing up and down the ladder to fetch the breads for the townsmen, the young lady, still up on the top of the ladder, looks down and sees an old man totter into the bakery leaning on his cane. Hoping to save time, she calls down,” I suppose it’s raisin for you too?” “No,” he answers, “but it’s a twitchin’ “ Silence. Fifteen years old now. My dad died a year ago. I’m in the middle of a Chemistry Lab experiment. I clasp the test tube with stainless steel tongs, hands begloved, eyes safely goggled. I carefully hold it over the burning gas flame. My concentration slips, I think of my dad and the joke. Now I get it! I chuckle to myself and then my goggles fog with tears. Nostalgia, damnit anyhow.