Joker: Intake Interview (excerpt)

D: What is your earliest childhood memory?
J: i remember...just being surrounded in darkness, just, trying to get out, pushing, screaming, inching towards the light, and this hand just...pushing me back, pushing me back into the darkness...these long, crooked, green nails, scratching at me..jabbing at my face, in my eyes, scratching up my mouth...so i reached for the fingers, grabbed it, it was hard, i remember, i had poor coordination and it was dark, but i managed to grab one of the fingers and i...i put it in my mouth and i...i bit that finger clean off, chewed it up, spit it out, crawled out into the light, and then...i just started laughing!

D: do you have any very positive early childhood memories?
J: Oh, you know, just yr typical idyllic Gotham childhood...I remember playing in the boneyards, hustling on the corner for bread, getting dizzy off the fumes in the river, where we usta fish. I had a rat farm, collected teeth from neighborhood children and sold them at a discount, mixed gin in the basement, I remember one year my daddy gave me a slingshot for Christmas and i shot my sister fulla holes as a demonstration, but I think my fondest memory is when I killed my first rat. i remember i had just begun to crawl...and the damn thing was near as long as i was, this big, hairy, whiskery, bitey rat- and i just- choked the life out of him. good times.

D: how was school like for you?
J: i got straight As. when i attended class, i mostly studied the teacher. i hated school. all that paper work. it's like a moron factory. an assembly line for traffic cones. and everybody in there believes in it so hard. paper dollars, dullards, bricks in a wall. or else they're imprisoned. i didn't go for very long. i got a job at the local corner store to help my mama buy groceries. then my sister had the cholera and i had to help ma mind the iron lung. we ate stale bred dipped in curdled milk. that's when i started stealing.

D: so you never finished school?
J: I pursued independent studies. chemistry, military history, the theatre- i have a PHD in french tapestries or something...my memory of those years is a bit...fuzzy...ever since the narcoleptics...

D: any medical concerns?
J: wouldn't know. don't have insurance.

D: have you ever been unconcious?
J: seemingly...

D: what do you do for fun?
J: everything. everything i do is for fun. especially, you know, the homicide.