Game of Thrones

   My partner, Tim, and I drove to San Francisco this morning to get haircuts by a stylist who works in the Kabuki Center, in Japantown.

   Once we arrived I was seized, as one occasionally is, with a pressing need to use the gentlemen’s facilities, so I peeled off into a men’s room. 

   Inside, a man occupied one of the three stalls; another  washed his hands at the sink. I found my way to the end stall, locked myself in, and sat down to rid myself of unnecessary waste. (Fittingly, I did so while reading news stories, on my phone, about Donald Trump.)

   Some time passed. People came and went. My attention was suddenly gripped by the sound of a loud voice, speaking as if making an important announcement to the assembled masses.

   “A white boy, a Chinese guy and a black dude walk into a bathroom,” the voice said, as its owner locked himself into the stall next to mine.

   I was given pause. Was he talking to me? To the other assembled men? Were there still other men in the bathroom? The voice sounded like it belonged to an African-American man, which would account for one-third of the joke setup’s population. Had he passed an Asian man on his way in? Did he know I’m a “white boy,” and if so, how?

   I had little time to muse. The joke, retailed for an audience of no one, continued.
   “The white guy says, ‘Look at that plane, up there in the sky,’” the voice boomed.

   You know that thing where you’re in public—on the bus or the subway, at a movie theater or, indeed, in a men’s room--and someone starts talking to no one in particular, in a voice too loud to be a self-involved mumble, and you do that thing where you don’t make eye contact, and you shrink your body so as to disappear from the vista of the talker’s perspective? Let me put it this way: I was grateful for the stall wall separating the jokester and me. (To be clear: I am not a “white boy” who fears “black dudes.” I am a reasonably sane person who goes on alert when crazy might have walked into the room.)

   “The black dude,” my neighbor continued, “goes, ‘Yeah—look at that plane.’ And the Chinese dude goes…”

   Here I flashed that perhaps the man was indeed telling this story for the dubious benefit of Asian men still occupying themselves in the men’s room. Uh oh, I thought.

   “And the Chinese dude goes, ‘Look at that plane—way up there in the sky.”

   What followed was silence.

   It was not the silence of no applause; one wouldn’t expect clapping in a men’s room. Rather, it was, at least on my part, the silence of utter bewilderment. Was that the punch line? If so, just what did it mean? Was it a slight based on the perception that Asian men are shorter than others? Was the “Chinese dude” in the joke so tiny that the plane appeared especially far away to him?

   Again my ruminations were short-circuited, this time when my neighbor made what was to be his final declaration.

   “It’s kind of a shit joke,” he said.

   Well, I thought but did not say, better a shit joke than a shitty joke.

   And with shitty jokes on my mind, I returned to my reading about Donald Trump.