MONKEY JUNGLE

“Your mother,” starts Jeremiah. There is a long pause as he searches for an apt phrase. “I wasn’t expecting her to be so – so …”

He settles upon “quaint” in the same way he under-describes me as “troubled.”

Ironic that I, not he, should be classified as delusional.

Wherever would anyone get that idea from? My dead father’s ghost stretches his spectral frame out across the back seat of the car. He was always up for a road trip, so no surprise that he has joined us.

We are the descendants of Cain, my father says, thinking it makes him sound enigmatic.

My mother said much the same thing when I found him dead. There was no comfort, just accusations that I was somehow to blame.

Like Seymour Glass, my father enjoyed conversing with precocious young girls.

And like Jerome Salinger, he emerged from his war, Vietnam, having seen the nature of evil up close.

Death is easier to deal with because it is silent.

The screams of the not-quite-dead echoed through his nightmares. Situated somewhat more north than he should have been, he was associated with a program that took the emblem of a bird rising from flames.

Their mission was not as positive as the logo implied.

Tôi là một người đàn ông tồi. Tài năng của tôi là nỗi đau.

He told me that this phrase translated loosely to I am American, I am here to help.

It does not. Try this instead:

I am a bad man. My talent is pain.

Although officially the only role he played was supervisory.

Back then there was no name for the marks war carved into his psyche. Listening to him talk about his time in-country, I ate up the bad thoughts in his head, his child confidante, his personal sin-eater.

So many corpses planted in the garden at Thảm sát Mỹ Lai, ready to bloom.

I could not consume all his wrongs. His confessions scarred my soul. I let his psyche bleed. Perhaps I really was to blame for his death.

As a young man he made a pilgrimage with a friend to visit Ezra Pound. The old fascist had been caged by American troops for three weeks, awaiting trial in post-war Italy. By the time my father paid his respects, he was in an asylum in Washington.

Pound remained silent throughout the visit until my father turned to leave. All he had to say for himself, however, was: “I got it wrong.”

After his stint in military intelligence, my father would sum up his war experience in much the same way.

Jeremiah does not see or hear my ghost-dad. When I disassociate with the world, he is kind enough not to suggest the word schizophrenic. There is no official diagnosis because I took my father’s Ezra Pound story as a warning and made it my mission to never, never allow myself to be locked away with only regret and poor choices for company. I walk a jagged line of almost sane, but I have stayed out of the net.

So far.

There is a cacophony of noise in my head. The voices of pirate queens, sirens singing across the waves, ragged fingernails scrape my meninges, I hear the dying plagal cadences of hymns… There is no balance, it is an unorchestrated noise, an assemblage of whispers escaping from an underbelly of reality only I seem to hear.

Small comfort. My father is the only apparition that takes form.

My weight of grief and guilt has trapped my father’s spirit between worlds.

All the same, he shows no sense of urgency to find eternal rest. Or damnation.

* * *

Jeremiah has taken an unplanned detour, which surprises me. Spontaneity is not something I would typically associate with him.

Everything about Jeremiah screams earnestness, gullibility, and a desire to misplace his trust. He is a beige man. His hair is sandy-colored, his glasses shade light-brown eyes flecked with gold. He dresses in off-white like Lawrence of Arabia staring across the desert sand.

Yet here we are, miles off our planned itinerary, in the car park of a uniquely Floridian tourist attraction: Monkey Jungle.

“When your mother mentioned you had a pet monkey, I thought we should make a stop.”

To be clear, my mother didn’t mention I had a pet monkey. An amateur taxidermist, she had my pet stuffed and was wearing him on her Dynasty shoulder pad when we visited. She described him as “a divine accoutrement.” My monkey looked most aggrieved at this treatment.

As was I.

I ordered Mr. Tetra, the fourth member of our family, on a coupon printed on the back of a DC comic. He arrived in a brown cardboard box ten days later, covered with excrement and $4 postage due. He was angry at the world, bit my finger, and ate my hamster.

We were kindred spirits. I forgave him for devouring my hamster, but I never lost the feeling of resentment at having to scoop up his abundant monkey poop.

At Monkey Jungle the visitors are caged and the monkeys roam free. Vervet, spider, and squirrel monkeys abound in the grassy area around humans caged in a tunnel made of chicken wire winding through the park.

The monkey jungle rulers are rhesus macaques, the red-rumped primates. They watch humans wend their way through the wire cage tunnel, and I swear those red-assed mothers are laughing. Caging the visitors is an innovative solution, adding a disturbing Charlton Heston vibe to the whole experience.

The rhesus macaques shake the chicken wire walls and jump on the ceiling above our heads, demanding we purchase a twenty-five-cent bag of seeds.

“It’s a trap,” I warn Jeremiah. “They intend to bite your finger off the minute you are careless and get too close.” I nudge him out of the way of falling monkey fecal matter from the blushing ass of the primate stalking us along the roof of the tunnel. Rhesus macaques are riddled with herpes B. They use monkey shit as a biological weapon.

Jeremiah’s expression is crestfallen, no doubt imagining me as the Pirate King’s daughter Pippi Longstocking with her loyal monkey, Herr Nilsson, perched on her shoulder. The feral primates flinging their shit at gawking tourists have destroyed that misplaced illusion of a childhood he imagined for me.

Like Pippi, I did not have parents who cared for social convention or good table manners, but any resemblance stops there. Jeremiah is a testament to the power of denial, evidenced by his ability to imagine me as a pigtailed pirate princess—despite meeting my mother.

He mistook me for the strongest girl in the world. A girl whose creator, Astrid Lindgren, believed, “Give the children love, more love and still more love—and the common sense will come by itself.”

Maybe in Sweden, not so much Florida.

Pippi Longstocking? Bonjour Tristesse is closer to the truth of my girlhood.

My dead father’s ghost aligns himself on the side with the primates, sniggering at us walking through the human cage with the other tourists.

This is the way the world ends, he says happily. Let me hear you whimper, Pix.

It’s always the end of days in Florida. I lived abroad since I was sixteen, washing up in different ports across the globe until I found my way back with Jeremiah. Don’t let the bright sunlight in January fool you; in Florida it is always Apocalypse pretty soon. This is where the final seals will be broken. Damn straight.

* * *

“Stop!”

The sign reads The Tragedy in US History Museum.

The St. Augustine Chamber of Commerce has been campaigning for some time to close this museum of the American nightmare. They omit it from any tourist brochure and occasionally sue the owner for building violations.

My father considered the tragic history of America’s past an important part of my education, and I toured the museum with him over several weekends. He accompanies me now, bounding up the steps to revisit grotesque symbols of our country’s endurance. Jeremiah frowns unhappily, considerably less enthused than my father.

“Jayne Mansfield’s car? Lee Harvey Oswald’s bedroom furniture?” He blinks at me. “Torture machines.”

“For old times’ sake.” Good times. As good as it got, anyway.

Jeremiah opts instead to visit de Leon’s rumored fountain of youth several blocks over.

The last thing I want is to relive my youth. We arrange that he will pick me up here after his visit.

Careful what you wish for. Eternal youth is a sweet deal. My father’s spirit pops up in the doorway. I’ll show you fear in a handful of dust. Boo!

I ignore him and contemplate instead the mummy bearing the sign Lonesome? Take me home tonight and wonder how the St. Augustine Chamber of Commerce could have possibly considered this in poor taste.

The proprietor, LH “Buddy” Hough, informs me there are new exhibits since I last toured with my father.

“Unending tragedy is what makes us great as Americans,” says Buddy.

He should get that printed on a souvenir coffee mug.

America feeding on its own tragic decline, my father says. The man is a visionary.

To the right of Lee’s bedside table and situated next to James Dean’s leather jacket is a steel wire monkey.

The centerpiece of Dr. Harry Harlow’s experiments on the nature of love.

During a series of twisted experiments in the 1950s, Harlow stole baby monkeys from their mothers. His first experiment offered the babies a choice of fake mothers: a soft cloth monkey mother or a cold wire monkey mother with a baby bottle attached. The monkeys would forgo nourishment preferring to cling to a soft cloth monkey mother, sucking down warm maternal comfort in preference to milk.

Harlow’s central hypothesis was the power of love trumps child neglect.

Before long he began to contemplate the concept of “evil” mothers. He built wire monkeys that shook violently, flinging the babies into the cage corners as they reached for love. Another mother contained a concealed catapult, boomeranging any baby that clung too tightly, punishing them for their futile quest for love. A blast of cold air from a third fake mother was directed toward any babies seeking maternal warmth. Finally, the mother featured in Buddy’s exhibit, the cruelest of all the artificial monkey mothers, a monkey with hidden spikes. Without warning the spikes would stick any baby monkey clinging to the wire monkey, hoping for a maternal embrace.

Time and time again, trembling, fearful, and in pain, baby monkeys returned, looking for comfort. The more the monkey mother spiked them, the more they sought her comfort, hoping to ease their pain.

I’m your spiked monkey, not your mother. You only know how to seek comfort if it is coupled with pain, my dead father whispers in my ear. That boy you are with won’t withstand the pain that comes with loving the damaged. Run away, Pix. Spare one of us, at least.

* * *

A mummified chimpanzee dressed in a child’s space suit stands guard on the steps of the museum. Buddy claims it is Enos, the only chimpanzee to have orbited the Earth. The third great ape in space (if you don’t count Buzz), Enos was a member of NASA’s Mercury program. It is just remotely possible that at the end of his faithful service, the Nazis at NASA sold him off to Buddy’s little atrocity exhibition.

Enos proudly holds the Stars and Stripes as if about to claim moon territory, his mouth open in a silent hallelujah of patriotic fervor.

While I commiserate with Enos and listen to Buddy’s potted history of chimps in space, Jeremiah pulls up. He is delighted to find me with another stuffed monkey companion.

“A monkey spaceman,” he says happily. “Cute.”

Chimps in space were trapped in a capsule that held them like a straitjacket. Enos was trained to push buttons and pull levers in exchange for banana pellets, with a mild electric shock administered whenever he touched the wrong lever.

NASA’s word, “mild”; who the hell knows what Enos felt when his monkey paw was zapped? And “banana pellets”? Sure. Leftover LSD from CIA experiments is my guess. Typical NASA fuckedupdom.

Sometime during the second orbit, a malfunction saw Enos zapped regardless of which button he pushed. A well-trained chimp, Enos completed his third orbit despite the capsule temperature rising to around 100 degrees.

By the time the US Navy fished Enos out of his capsule, he was not quite the same laid-back chimp that had been accelerated into orbit. Outraged at his long, hot incarceration, he tore his catheter out, hurling it at his rescuers. He screamed monkey profanities strong enough to make a sailor blush.

Eventually the “banana pellets” calmed the chimp, and unlike most of the primates ejected into space, he survived his crash landing by almost a year. Although there is no official record to confirm what happened to him afterward.

I think it kinder not to inform Jeremiah of the truth, although my ghost-dad muses I might be more sympathetic toward my mother if she had been permitted to administer “banana pellets” rather than relying on electric shocks and sharp spikes.

“Did you drink from the fountain?” I ask Jeremiah. “Is there a portrait of you aging in an attic somewhere now?”

Confusion crosses Jeremiah’s face at the reference. My father heaves a sigh at his ignorance, although he had little time for Victorian literature. Modernists and the confessional poets were my bedtime stories. When he was alive Dad and I were often parked up together at Skunk Hour.

“I myself am hell,” I say out loud.

“I decided not to drink from the fountain,” says Jeremiah, ignoring my warning. “I thought it preferable we drift into old age together.”

Jesus, says my father. Cut him loose, Pix.

Jeremiah’s sincere expression holds me. The strength of his regard confuses me. I know my father is right. I will only drag him down full fathom five. I’m incapable of loving anyone. Let alone loving unselfishly. I move among the living and dead at a dull, meandering pace as though I am etherized on a table with J. Alfred Prufrock.

Yet Jeremiah’s unending dedication has won my respect. In a rare moment of optimism, it occurs to me it is a fine line between love and respect. Or something like that. Tolstoy wrote about it in Anna Karenina.

“Remember I went to the doctor last week?”

I have news and in this moment of glowing respect and admiration, I feel I can finally tell him, and the best way to prepare him is to paraphrase Pound.

“It’s all gone horribly wrong.”

Jeremiah’s eyes widen. “Is it cancer?” he asks, horror-stricken. I shake my head and, to his credit, his next guess is: “Are you pregnant?”

Bull’s-eye. A smidgen more positive than cancer or a brain tumor. However, I’m unprepared for the expression of delight that takes over his being. He spins me around as though we are in a stage musical. His eyes are shiny with happy tears. I have never seen happy tears before. I always thought they only existed in Hollywood.

There is no background music in this technicolor dance of joy, just the sound of my dead father howling in despair.

You want a monkey jungle? You try suburbia with this, this tax accountant and children! Run, Pix. Make for Nassau. You were destined to be a pirate queen. A sea gypsy. You should be Blackbeard’s consort, not trapped by this walking symbol of mediocrity!

Jeremiah is pre-med. Not an accountant. A small but quite important distinction that reminds me it could be worse. It occurs to me, not for the first time, my father’s take on Jeremiah is that of a jealous lover. I swiftly turn that rock back over and stomp on any anxiety that scuttles out.

Tentatively I try to temper Jeremiah’s excited response. “I wonder if I’m cut out for motherhood.”

At which point Buddy Hough, the owner of this little piece of American trauma, offers sage-like advice whilst shaking Jeremiah by the hand in sincere congratulations.

“Remember how those monkeys kept running back to be spiked.” He beams happily. “That is a get-out-of-jail-free card, sweetheart. Give yourself some leeway.”

Jeremiah, happily oblivious to Monkey Love experimentation, tells me I will be the best mother ever. His faith in me and Buddy’s understanding of the experiment differ markedly from Harry Harlow’s final conclusions.

Later Harlow’s interests moved toward experiments in depression. The monkeys were caged, like Pound, in a “pit of despair” (Harlow’s description), in solitary for months while Harlow pondered the black void and the effectiveness of shock treatment.

Harlow wrote his own bleak depression was like living “within a wall of steel.”

But, in truth, the monkeys and Pound, who were living within actual walls of steel, had it far worse than Harry. Solitude is no game. All lonely monkeys break eventually.

Enos the mummified chimp’s eyes light up. Remember, he tells me, primates are cannibals. They eat the weakest of the tribe’s young. Set yourself a low bar, and you will not be disappointed. Providing you do not eat your baby, you are better than nothing.

Not quite in line with the nuanced conclusion of Harlow or the therapists who followed, but, I suppose, allowing for the widest of interpretations, it is broadly correct.

The only happily-ever-after is to be found across the state in Orlando at Disney World. And that happiness is a fake package of squirrels and blue jays for tourists and the obstinately gullible.

Jeremiah won’t change me. You can’t change anyone. I am made of bad material. But like Enos the chimp, I will keep pushing the buttons and levers in the hope of treats, even with the occasional electric shock.

Enos the chimp’s anguished mummified jaw twists briefly into a supportive smile that is more uplifting than the expression on my irate dead father’s Skeletor face.

I climb into the car with Jeremiah for the last leg of the Floridian road trip and wave goodbye to Buddy and St. Augustine. We will drive along coastal highway A1A listening to the song of the mermaids.

I try to open my ears to human voices. Perhaps Jeremiah may yet drown out the prophecies of the dead.

“Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.”
―Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina