Before it all, they didn't know what to call me.
Before it all, I was just a face.
The Joker was born in Nepal. Two clicks north of a human smuggling operation. It was raining. We were soaked. We didn't acknowledge it. That wouldn't change things.
Wouldn't make a difference.
His name was Cal. Charles Cal. He was the first one to call me Joker.
You could say it stuck.
They'll never tell you, because they never knew, but I thought that the Wayne Tower was a star. For years.
It was far enough away from our apartment and the dirt on window was thick enough that I had pressed my nose up against the glass and I thought it was a star. I thought it was my star. The other stars, they moved. They left.
This one was always there.
My aunt never corrected me.
She died when I was fourteen and despite what the detective thought, I wasn't the one who killed her. I'd seen the kids in foster care. Living with Carol wasn't great, but at least I knew what I was going to get.
There was a girl in school.
Allison.
Probably one of the only peers I'd ever liked.
When we were thirteen, she tugged on my sleeve during passing period and leaned forward, grinning, thin blonde hair falling into her face. "Hey, I popped some cigarettes from my foster-asshole. Skip fourth and come with me."
Fourth was a math class.
I don't remember which math.
But I know that I'd hesitated. I thought for a second. I liked math. Numbers made patterns, they were predictable. They could be controlled.
I still like control.
I went with her.
We went to the park and popped up in the men's restroom, flipping the lock on the door. We smoked a cigarette before she slipped her hand down my pants.
I didn't react.
They didn't call me by my name back then either. It was Stony. Rock. Dipshit.
It always confused me that the masses assumed that quiet people were quiet because they weren't intelligent enough to think of something to say. In fact, in my experience, it's always been the opposite.
"What are you doing, Allison?"
She looked down.
Blonde hair falling across her face. "I just- I-"
Her eyes were thick with tears. They gathered, swollen, on her eyelashes.
Her lips tightened, she unwrapped her fingers from around me. Her eyes steeled and she lurched forward, kissing me and knocking me against the tiled dingy wall. I kept my eyes open. She'd later tell me that they were supposed to be closed.
I didn't like closing my eyes around people.
She pulled away, breathing hard, cheeks streaked. "I'm suh-sorry. It's just… I wanted to know what it was like. To… to do that with someone when I wanted to do it."
In short, I didn't want to go to foster care.
Allison overdosed when we were twenty and I was on a job in Brazil. When I found out, I went out to one of the dancing clubs. None of the other men expected it. They sounded like apes when they watched me leave, hand wrapped around the wrist of two different women.
One had dark hair. One had blonde.
It wasn't the right blonde.
Not like hers. It was thick and full and curly. It didn't fall in her face when she looked down. Her body was full and healthy, and her bones felt different than the bones I remembered. She made soft cooing and moaning sounds when I kissed her. She whined and pouted when I was gentle to her.
I hated her for that.
The dark haired one didn't enjoy the pain as much.
She bit her lip and squirmed.
She never told me to stop. I just knew she didn't like it as much as the other would have. But I couldn't do it to the blonde.
I couldn't.
In short, it was very inconvenient when my aunt, Carol, died. She was stabbed on the stairwell two floors down from our apartment. But the illusion of Wayne Tower being a star had been broken long before then.
Carol was just too high to tell me.
An eight year-old, while we were on a field trip. Allison was standing next to me. Even in the poorest public school in the city, there is segregation. Haves and have nots.
Allison and I didn't have anything, and we were standing in front of one of the haves.
I stopped walking and stared up at the tower.
The big W that I could recognize even in the day.
The have walked into me. He complained a lot. "What are you stupid, idiot? What are you looking at? It's just Wayne Tower."
(My star.)
Allison pushed him. I only stared.
He didn't like that.
I could tell by the look on his face.
He would've rather had Allison push him again than to have me stare at him like that. When I went home that night, Carol was on a bender. She was angry. I was home late. She wanted to know where I was. She thought I was talking to someone. Get her in trouble. Get her sent up state.
Carol was schizophrenic.
She tightened her bony hands around my arms and twisted. "Where were you, you little fag? Where did you go? Who did you talk to?"
I didn't talk to anyone.
I went to the park with Allison and we threw rocks at the shed that kept all of the maintenance equipment. I remember now that she had a bite mark on her leg. About midway up the thigh. I remember because I pointed it out to her. She looked down and her blonde hair fell into her eyes. She shook her head and said something about it being stupid that grown ups were so much bigger and stronger than children.
I'd already told Carol that I was with Allison.
She didn't believe me.
"Who were you with?" She shook me. She dug her claw-like nails into my arm.
I hadn't been with anyone.
She didn't believe me.
She shoved me backwards and I hit my head against the wall. I fell. She picked me up by the front of my shirt and shook me again. But I couldn't see straight. I'd hit my head. I couldn't focus. Who was I talking to? Was I with-?
Allison. I was with Allison.
I stared at her like I stared at the boy earlier.
I tried to make her face come into focus.
And I stared at her.
Carol's hands fell from my arms. She took a step back. Her mouth opened and then closed like a fish at the aquarium. She stepped away again, pulling a hand up to massage the pit of her elbow, bored with holes like a cheese grater.
"Fucking psycho," she muttered. "You fucking psychopath."
When she died, I got put in with a family that wasn't too bad. No one ever touched me like they touched Allison. There were a couple of bigger boys there who thought that they could push me around.
I let them hit me once.
I was moved away from that home pretty quickly. They tried to put me in a juvenile detention facility, but there was the bruise on my face. It looked a lot worse than it was. I was able to say it was in self defense. Neither of the other boys could argue with me.
One was still recovering from his concussion. It took the other three months to wake up from the coma.
The second foster home took me away from Allison.
The other side of the city.
We rode the max together. By then, if we were alone, I would close my eyes when we kissed. She would drape her legs over mine. I would hold her little hand in my bigger one and I would rub my thumb over the small blue veins running under her skin.
This lasted for two years.
It doesn't seem like very long now. A blink.
But I think about those two years sometimes.
When she was sixteen, Allison killed her foster dad. She hit his face so many times with a cinder block that the body didn't even look like a man. His dick was hanging out of his pants, soft and unassuming. She went to jail. Maximum security for women. I visited her until I was eighteen.
She told me that it was better in prison.
"No one touches me like that anymore," she smiled, pushing her blonde hair back. "In fact, it's happened to a lot of women here. We've talked to each other about it. They taught me some things."
She stopped. Her smile softened. Her eyes softened.
"It's not that bad in here," she murmured. "I mean, I don't really get to have you. If you were here, it would be perfect."
I didn't like that.
I wanted to be back on the max.
If she hadn't killed her foster dad, this wouldn't have happened. I would still be in Gotham, riding the max with Allison.
Coming back was like coming home, but without her.
She'd been dead for seven years by then.
No one even remembered my name anymore.
They all just called me: The Joker.