Monkey Boy

by Francisco Goldman

  That same summer, often reading on the Boston Common in the mornings before I had to be at work on the Tea Party ship, and on the train home after, I finished One Hundred Years of Solitude, making my way through as if it were simultaneously a thronged maze and a picture illusion game where you try to find the hidden face, but none of the characters reminded me much of Carlota. When she’d left our house, Carlota still hadn’t read the novel. Aunt Milly soon after moved with Uncle Lenny to Florida. In the coming years, if she ever had any news about Carlota and the son of the florist, she never mentioned it. One hot, soggy night in Managua a friend who’d been a teenage Sandinista fighter took me to a sanctuary house for wounded Guatemalan guerrillas because he was thinking of bringing his combat skills to Guate and wanted to talk to a comandante who was recuperating from a leg wound. The sanctuary was in practically the shell of a house among the earthquake and war ruins of the old center. The grizzled comandante was sitting in a chair just outside the doorway to get some air, and as he and my friend solemnly conversed, I saw a woman inside on a cot against the rear wall raise herself up on one elbow, gauze bandages wrapped around her head and over one eye, and peer at us with her other eye through the murk of that stifling room lit only by a few candles. It didn’t even occur to me to wonder until later: Wait, could that wounded guerrilla have been Carlota?

  For most of that spring on mornings when I had to be at the Tea Party ship, my father insisted I drive into Boston with him, detouring in his usual route to let me off by the Common. We’d leave the house just past dawn though I didn’t need to be at my job until nine. He’d probably thought we were going to have conversations and repair our relationship a little before I went away to college but then realized he had no more to say to me than I did to him. He always had the car radio tuned to a Boston station with news and sports; on one of those mornings we heard about the fall of Saigon. Throughout my childhood, Bert had been in a rage over the Vietnam War, screaming at the TV: I spit on this country, I spit on this country! On weekend mornings in the Stop and Shop parking lot there used to always be middle-aged and old men in VFW hats, oddly mild yet mean mouthed, with their clipboard petitions to put Hanoi Jane in prison or demanding a new escalation or bombing campaign or a pardon for Lieutenant Calley or something about the MIAs, and my father would snarl at them: Get out of my way you warmonger you, and he’d stomp into the supermarket to buy his smoked mackerel and bagels. At the same time, he regarded hippies, even hippie war protestors, with rabid disgust and loathing. Now here I was sitting alongside him with a freaky bush growing atop my head.

  In the evenings, doing my round of closing chores, I’d crawl out onto the jib to tie up and fasten the furled sail, and then I liked to sit there straddling it, legs dangling, looking out over the gleaming water rippling in from under the Northern Avenue Bridge, flashing blue chrome hues at that evening hour, gulls swooping. I was so fortunate to have had that job on the Beaver II. It was like “my first ship” in a Polish Joe tale, one that had taken me away from home to a distant port where I could now catch another ship headed anywhere. As the end of that summer loomed, whenever I had to squeeze my Jack Tar seaman’s hat atop my ever-more-abundant ’fro, I’d be reminded of why I’d grown my hair like that, my rash secret plan, and feel a nervous tightening in my stomach.

  A few days before I left for college, I went with my mother to a hair salon in the next town. The hairdresser applied a smelly heated paste that burned against my scalp, smeared and tamped it into my hair with a plastic palate knife, and massaged it in with rubber-gloved fingers, up to her wrists in gooey tangles. This is a big job! she exclaimed. I sat under the hairdryer for a long time, then the hairdresser went to work with her scissors. The whole operation took a couple of hours, and my mother patiently sat there, sometimes idly leafing through a women’s magazine or staring primly at some apparently invisible point in space. When we left the salon, I had straight hair falling nearly to my shoulders, silky and thick. I remember how it tickled my collarbones and how thrilling that was. The hairdresser said I looked like a baby-faced George Harrison. I thought my hair was more like Todd Rundgren’s, but when the Godard movie Masculin Féminin was screened at Broener College on a weekend night early that fall, I realized it was more like Chantal Goya’s. After we came home from the hairdresser that afternoon my father’s disgust didn’t bother me because what did I expect? It didn’t stop him, the day I left for college, from giving me a present, a meerschaum briar pipe, with a tin of tobacco and pipe cleaners, from Leavitt and Peirce in Harvard Square, where he bought his own pipes, tobacco, and cigars. A college man has to have a pipe, said Bert.

  It’s almost noon, South Station, and I’m looking up at the schedule board for the track number of the train to Mamita’s nursing home when my phone vibrates, a text message from Lulú. It’s in English: “Tani want to know. More windows in the world or more children? So cute. I tell her that my friend know the answer! More windows or more children? Besitos.” I walk out onto the long platform with a bounce in my step. Pelícanos and now this. Is Lulú a poet? In little more than an hour I’ll be in Green Meadows, walking into the overheated dayroom on my mother’s floor, where I usually find her sitting in her wheelchair, often dozing like a dormouse, and I imagine myself shouting with such overflowing ebullience “Mamita, I’m in love!” that all other dementia- and Alzheimer’s-afflicted old folks in there, faces pale as frozen pie crusts, lift their heads to smile at me. Frankie, what good news, Mamita will say. Does that mean that soon you’ll give me a grandchild?

  More windows than children in the world or more children? As we pull out of the station, through a sunny concrete ravine, this commuter train, its grimy steel floor and scarred, brown leather seats, reminds me of a troop carrier, maybe an East German IFA truck like the Sandinistas used. I’d hitched rides in the back of a few, sitting squeezed on a bench between young soldiers and their AKs, smell of metal and grease, overheated bodies inside fatigues of heavy green cloth, overripe sweat and always a slight but pervasive odor of shit, a result of what constant fear does to churning adolescent stomachs already infected with jungle parasites. My hands, fingers intertwined, dangle between my knees. Really, you spend much more time looking at your own hands than you do at your own face. My hands probably resemble me more than my face does. I unclasp them and look at the mole in the middle of the left one. At Wamblán, a Sandinista special forces outpost by the Honduran border, the young commanding officer, Jacinto, was convinced it was a stigmata scar and wasn’t sure if that presaged good or bad. But for this mole to be credible as a stigmata, you have to imagine people worshipping a Christ who dangles from the Cross by only one arm. These are also the knuckles that crashed into the side of my father’s head, the second punch landing harder than the first as he fell forward, the appalling sensation of bone and skin through hair, a criminal punch in a way the first wasn’t. I can never recall it without a queasy lurch in my stomach. Could that first punch alone have been enough to make him never hit me again or was it the follow-up that put the fear in him.

  In a town like ours there were easily more windows than children. The house on Wooded Hollow Road, for example, had, let’s see, five downstairs windows, seven upstairs, plus the sliding glass doors onto the porch. The overwhelming numerical advantage of windows over children in Boston, New York, probably in any Western city, any city in China or Japan too. But what about Lagos, Mexico City, Rio, childless skyscrapers versus ever-spreading child-teeming misery belts, more children than windows—or close to a tie? Traditional Maya village houses of one room with mud walls or built from mud packed with grass and sticks might not even have one window, just a door, often a half-dozen children or more living inside; the rural poor’s residences all over the world, in Mexico for sure, the Amazon, too, in every jungle environment I’ve been to, way more children than windows. “Every child represents infinite windows, querida Lulú. So does love. Questions open windows.” I thumb these words into my ph
one, hit Send, sit back. Jesus fucking Christ, did I just write that corniness? Did I just tell Lulú that I love her? I quickly type: “80 percent of the world’s children live in poverty, so more children than windows. Though really, not sure.” And: “Miss you.” Send.

  Phone María Xum, I remind myself, here on the station platform where I’ve just gotten off. Find out what’s so urgent. In the middle of the first ring, she answers: Hello? Hello? I resist the urge to hang up. María, it’s Frankie. How silly yet automatic it feels to identify myself by my boyhood name to this woman I haven’t seen since I was about twelve. Frankeeee! María Xum responds. I’m so happy you phoned. I was worried you didn’t receive my message. I’m a little surprised that María’s accent isn’t so strong. Sure, she’s lived in the Boston area some forty years, but Feli has been here longer and doesn’t sound as fluent. I am at work in the laundry, she says. We listened to you on the radio last night, and oh, it was so interesting, Frankie. That’s why I had to phone the radio station. Frankie, do you want to come to my laundromat? We can speak there. It is in East Boston. Yes, I want to tell you something. I know you will be interested. Frankie, how is Doña Yoli? And Mr. Goldberg? I tell her: María, my father left us four years ago, but he had a long life. I’m meeting Feli tomorrow, so I agree to see her Sunday, in her laundromat. I’m the only person on the platform. A small redbrick station, which seems to have been locked up for years. Approaching on the train, you see old factories like bombed castles among the dead-looking swamplands on the outskirts of this town. Though it’s about thirty miles inland, this is the closest commuter train stop to where Lexi lives. There are no taxis waiting, but it’s only a half hour or so walk to my mother’s nursing home.

  Last night, at the restaurant, I told Marianne about Lexi buying that old ship captain’s house in New Bedford as an investment. Marianne thought it was eccentric of my sister to have bought a house there, even an old ship captain’s house; her impression was that it was a depressed postindustrial city, even its seafood business in distress. I told her that I didn’t know much about it, only that supposedly the commuter train is finally coming there and that yuppies who work in Boston and Providence are going to want to buy up the beautiful old houses.

  Grander houses, I imagine, than these I’m walking past on the uneven sidewalk of this long avenue into town, pulling my wheeled suitcase and carrying a tin of French butter cookies.

  So, doing that to my hair, did it really change my life? I have to say that it did. Having long, straight hair really suited me. Suddenly I was at least a little bit good-looking, and that was confusing, partly because it was a lie, partly because I was still me. It was the first weekend at Broener College after the orientation week, our first football home game, the only one I ever went to. I was sitting in the stands that weren’t any bigger than those at my high school, though these, on the home side of the field, were packed with students. The stadium was located behind the hill where the girls’ dormitories were. The boys’ dorms, including mine, were on the other side of campus around the quad. A pretty girl, fairly petite, with a head of shimmery blonde ringlets and nearly sapphire-blue eyes sitting in the next section of the stands seemed to be keeping her gaze fixed on me, and every time I glanced her way her smile widened. Needless to say, I could hardly believe this was happening. Her father was an executive at Bloomingdale’s, and she was from Syosset, Long Island, a classic JAP, Frecky Papperman from my dorm told me. He’d already scoped Abbie Schneider out, thought she was one of the prettiest girls in the freshman class. What do you mean a classic JAP? I asked. Frecky explained about Jewish American princesses. I’d never heard Jewish girls called that in my town. Broener was known as a JAP school, Frecky told me. By that night, Abbie was my girlfriend. For the first time since Arlene Fertig I made out with a girl—on a lawn and in the dark again—on the quad. Abbie was sweet natured and fairly reticent, a conventional suburban teenager of the sort I would have stood no chance with in my town. She had a strong Long Island accent and was a chain-smoker too. I filled many of our silences with made-up stories, total lies, about what I’d been like in high school.

  We’d been going out a little more than a month on the afternoon when her roommate, a WASP preppie, a severe beauty with a flinty stare, intercepted me on the autumn-foliage-carpeted lawn outside their dorm and told me that Abbie didn’t want to see me anymore. She asked me to tell you, said the roommate, and also to please just leave her alone. Her Clint Eastwood squint, flickering with disdainful comprehension, had fastened on my straightened hair, which was beginning to lift at the sides like desiccated wings, pushed out by the not-yet-quite-visible new growth of curls underneath. Imagine the conversations Abbie and her roommate must have had about me: How’s the sex going? Is he good in bed? Well, no. He hasn’t even tried to touch me … my … Oh God, please stop, I promise to dig a deep hole in a shit yard, bury myself, and never come out again. Our campus suffered from the usual horrendous American segregation, the small number of black students as defiantly isolated as a survivalist group except for a few athletes in frats. There was also a pair of scholarship Puerto Ricans brought to Broener, both probably from somewhere in the Northeast megalopolis. They became inseparable, he with a big afro and she with straight, glossy black hair, ash-brown skin, large eyes like shadowed ponds. They’d sit together on a hill behind a dorm while he played his bongos for hours. I used to spy on them from afar, longing to go up, say hello, and speak in Spanish, of course I didn’t dare. In my dorm there was a boy who lived down the hall, a lacrosse and basketball star, the classic Adonis. He took ten showers a day, briskly parading his muscular alabaster physique back and forth from the shower room with a towel wrapped around his narrow swivel waist. Within weeks he was Abbie’s new boyfriend. In our dorm we could hear her cries of ecstasy up and down the hall. They sure seemed happy; for all I know they’re married now.

  But it wasn’t as if my classes weren’t interesting or as if getting good grades wasn’t a novelty, auguring that I’d be able to transfer to another college, one where nobody knew me, and start over. I took a lecture course taught by a fortyish gentle genius who spoke like a hypereducated five-year-old, in which we studied Egyptian hieroglyphics, The Epic of Gilgamesh, the pre-Socratics, Bach’s fugues, and Alice in Wonderland, and wrote essays in Egyptian hieroglyphs with colored pencils, all to help us recover the amplitude of our lost mythopoetic brains. In Modern Day Prophets, taught by an old Scottish Marxist, we read The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Marcuse. Instead of an academic final paper, students could do a participatory project, and the one most students chose, arranged by the professor through his friendship with a comrade infiltrator of the police state, was to spend a weekend in a prison cell in Buffalo, though you had to pay room and board. I decided for my project to become a modern-day prophet, jumping freight trains and riding them to Finger Lake towns to turn up in supermarket parking lots handing out leaflets on behalf of the United Farm Workers. My reputation would spread, the skinny, long-haired boy with a Dolores Huerta button on the front of his black watch cap who hands out UFW leaflets, then vanishes! Knapsack stuffed with mimeographed leaflets, I descended the steep bluff at the edge of our campus to the railroad tracks by the lakeside and, running alongside one of the boxcars of a slow-moving freight train, hauled myself up through its open side doors. I got off in Penn Yan, handed out my leaflets in an A&P parking lot, and after—whoosh!—vanishing, took a bus back to Broener, heart drumming with honest pride.