Author's note: Insert hyperactive Joker/Health Ledger sexual confession here.
The Day The Fun Died
Where should I begin? The traditional, maybe.
Tragic past.
How it all came to be.
How I met him.
OK.
Growing up, I had never been like most gals out there. I wasn't all that pretty, for one thing. I had all this ratty, dirty blond hair that I couldn't never do anything with. I tried trying it up in pigtails. Daddy said it looked cute. Made me look younger than I really was. I was too mature for my age. And ugly. Really, really ugly. In a cute sort of way, I suppose. But I had very low self-esteem. Girls need a lot of positive self-esteem. Because they're pressured by society to conform to the strict standards of beauty and femininity which have been set for them. And it's tough if you're born ugly-cute, with a loud annoying voice. Which I had.
I also had a cleft lip. But it might have been chapped lips and I was doing that thing where I see myself differently than most people because of all my low self-esteem. I think my nose is kind of big too. Is it big to you?
Woe was me! So ugly and lost in this cruel world.
I often cut myself to feel something other than the numbness.
Oh wait, no. I cut myself out of boredom because I don't really know how cutting works.
So I had given myself all these gross cut marks and scars on top of all my other body image issues. I was disgusting. Completely and utterly a hulking sack of useless human meat. Every time I looked in the mirror I saw a freak of nature.
So ugly. So alone.
I so wanted to die. Like, totally. But not today. Today was the season finale of GENERIC REALITY TV PROGRAM. It was going to be gripping.
But I was depressed.
I threw the knife down in the sink and cried so hard my mascara leaked off in thick black streams. I reapplied and powdered my face a little to enhance its whiteness. Then I went downstairs, plunked myself into a rickety kitchen chair and prepared to drown myself in a bowl of delicious Fruit Loops. My only comfort food. I was too fat to risk eating anything else. Fucking empty calories.
I poured the loops, watching them mock me with their bright and colorful happy flavors. How I despised them and their silent, inanimate glee. The spoon became my weapon of choice and I was going to shovel them into my mouth hole of sadness and let them forever rot inside my dark bowels.
But then I realized I needed some milk.
"Goddamn it," I muttered emptily to no one but the cockroaches.
Toucan Sam grinned his toothless grin as I grabbed my coat and exited the room. You can follow your nose straight to my asshole, you feathery bitch.
I headed out of my dirty little apartment in the slums and ventured toward the brighter parts of civilization, to the local grocery department, keeping my head down as I walked so as not to come in contact with the judgmental eyes of the more beautiful and well-to-do of society.
Now that I thought about it, I don't know why I grabbed my coat. It was 87 degrees out.
Whatever. I threw it over my arm and continued on in search of milk.
I was dressed in a drab grey sweater, drab grey sweatpants and drab grey tennis shoes. Overall I was very drab when it came to fashion. I was too poor to buy cool clothes like everyone else had. My parents were actually rich but they died in a golfing accident when I was five and all the money went to my evil uncle Phil.
I was tossed out on the curb and had to live in an orphanage doing hard labor until I was twelve. Then the orphanage caught on fire and everyone but me and the owner died. Considering me bad luck, the owner turned me over to a foster home where they treated me like dirt and made fun of how fat and ugly I was until I was sixteen.
Then I ran way to live on the streets. There I met a bum who taught me how to pick pockets and eventually I stole enough to buy myself a cheap little run-down one bedroom apartment in The Narrows.
You know, the place that's filled with crime and murder and escaped psychopaths at any given time of day or night. Lucky me. Can't imagine why the rent is so low there. That was joke.
Well, I managed. For a while.
On Christmas Eve of last year I was mugged and raped on my way home from the laundromat. They were these big guys wearing clown masks.
One of them asked me, "Hey, girl. You wanna see something funny?"
They laughed while they did it. I think I developed a complex after that. Possibly a fetish for latex and rubber noses. It helped me cope. Don't judge me, asshole.
I had reached my destination and pushed open the doors after a bit of struggling to comprehend that they read "PUSH TO ENTER" and not pull. I was also a dim child with many learning disabilities. I had trouble reading and paying attention and doing math and science because I'm a girl. Either that or I was very lazy. Lazy, lazy brain.
I moved towards the freezers to fetch my overpriced milk. I reached in and took the milk, feeling the frigid emptiness that mirrored my soul. I walked to the counter to be disgustingly leered at by the ethnically stereotyped cashier. I'm not racist or anything but that guy was brown as hell and twice as hairy. He rang me up and I pulled out my crumpled five dollar bill. I placed it on the counter, feeling a deep sadness as I parted with the treasured hunk of paper. Hard earned funds, lost to insatiable hunger and steadily increasing inflation. They were getting really hard to replace. Who invented money, anyway? I wanted to hit them with a sack full of dimes. Dimes that I didn't have enough of to waste or fill a sack with. Fuck my life.
I saw the cashier staring at my cuts.
I suddenly felt the urge to cut myself even more but I had no knife so I bought a Kit Kat. Gimme a break.
"Thank you, come again," he said throatily in his thick Pakistani accent.
I turned to take my leave away from his judging gaze but before I made it through the door somebody walked in and bumped me.
I found myself staring into the chest of a man wearing a purple and green custom tailored suit. It was dirty and tattered and looked like it had been set on fire a few times. Maybe it was the fluorescent lighting that made it look that way. My huge nostrils took in a scent of cigarettes and baby powder from it.
I looked up, confused, and saw a familiar face staring back at me with hidden eyes: A clown mask.
It both comforted and terrified me.
The mouth was dropped into a sad, sad frown. It spoke to me. "I feel your pain," it said. "You can laugh and I will cry instead," it said. And I wanted to believe it.
"Hello, Beautiful," the man spoke through the mask.
And then he hit me with a shovel.
Hours later I woke up in handcuffs, on a dirty mattress in a dark basement filled with rats. Without my milk. And a really bad headache.
But an overall positive outlook.
After all, what could be worse than how my life was going at the moment? He would have to dump gasoline on me and set me on fire.
He came back with a tank of gasoline.
For a moment I had thought I had jinxed myself. I held my breath as I watched him stand in the doorway to the room, pondering behind that second face of his. What was he thinking? I hoped it wasn't about how fat and ugly I was. Or how flammable.
"Be back in a minute," he said. Then he walked away.
I heard his footsteps doing down the hallway, as well as several others. First there was angry muttering, then yelling. Then dogs barking. Then screaming. A lot of screaming. Then silence.
Then laughing.
I counted the number of rat droppings on the floor next to the mattress out of boredom. I had reached thirty-seven before Mr. Sad Clown came back. I took note of a distinctive splash of dark red that now complimented his purple suit. And the faint scent of burning hair and baby powder.
"Why did you kidnap me?" I mumbled, finding my voice. My ugly, ugly stupid voice. I regretted it immediately. But I also felt like being fierce and showing my captor that I wasn't going to be his willing victim.
He cocked his head to one side.
Ha, cocked.
"Why do you wanna kill me?" I demanded in a firmer voice, glaring at him with my half-violet, half-turquoise eyes.
And by that I mean one was colored violet and the other was turquoise, not a blend of both. I had heterochromia. It sucked and made me even more of a freak. Like I was a real life Mary-Sue or something.
Mr. Sad Clown Face snorted, obviously amused. He walked over to me and crouched down beside me.
"I don't wanna kill you. I need you," he said darkly.
He pulled off the mask.
My heart fluttered and raced. I never thought I'd hear those words. Even if they implied devious sexual things of a perverted nature. Which they probably did.
I sort of hoped so because I realized that I was looking into the makeup covered and scarred face of the one, the only, THE JOKER.
"You're going to help me kill Batman," he said, his perpetual grin widening.
My mouth dropped open. A rat attempted to leap inside it but I jerked my head away. God damn! That would have been gross.
Back to the topic at hand, how the fuck was I going to help the Joker kill Batman? My mind immediately jumped to a single conclusion: I had been kidnapped to be recruited as a henchgirl. For the Joker, Infamous Clown Prince of Crime of Gotham City.
Suddenly my miserable life had meaning and purpose.
Horrible, horrible purpose. But purpose none the less.
My heart soared with joy which I hadn't felt in too many years to count. Not since my dog Muffins was run over by the mailman while trying to fetch a thrown stick. I swear, the mailman hated me. The fat, ugly little blond girl of the neighborhood. I was subscribed to Tween Beat Magazine so I could compare myself to the normal girls of society and it always was suspiciously dropped into the nearest mud puddle before it made it to the mailbox.
I snapped out of my traumatic flashback and realized Joker was undoing the handcuffs. Once freed I rubbed my delicate fat wrists and stared at him, taking in his clownish visage, caked on makeup, smeared lipstick, scars and all.
He was kind of cute if you looked at him a certain way. But I shouldn't have been thinking things like that.
He smacked his lips a couple of times and ran his fingers through his long, scraggly green-tinted hair.
"So. What do I call you?"
I blinked at him, trying to remember my name. What was it again?
"I think my parents named me Bethany," I mumbled.
"Well, nice to meet you, I think my parents named me Bethany," said Joker sarcastically. He looked away and made duck-lips.
"I mean, just Bethany. My name's Bethany," I said, feeling super stupid.
"Bethany," he repeated, looking at me with squinty eyes and hunched shoulders, like he thought I was the crazy one here. "You think Bethany is a good name for a henchgirl? I asked what I should call you. You can pick anything. Anything at all!"
He leaned over closer to me, lowering his voice to a whisper.
"Now, I'm not trying to force you here but I was hoping for something, you know, more dynamic. More interesting. But, ah, if you want to be called Bethany," he shrugged and trailed off.
Oh! He wanted me to pick a henchname.
That was kind of awesome. But I flubbed it and now I looked like an idiot. I had to come up with something good to regain his faith. My mind raced, drawing blanks everywhere.
Everything was suddenly riding on this moment of namesake. My nonexistent reputation could be tarnished before it began if I screwed up. Oh, the pressure. I had to wrap up my entire being into this new nickname.
This alias, this persona. It would encompass all and everything, that which I was destined to become and go down in history as.
All at once it came to me, like a shovel to the temple.
"KillJoy," I blurted out, feeling high as a kite.
Joker smiled approvingly.
I'd done it.