Ever since Adam got the part of Mister Monkey, it’s been monkey 24/7 at his house, where Adam is being homeschooled by his mom after he and his best friend, Derek, got kicked out of private school for setting a trash can on fire in the hall behind the gym.
Adam’s dad was secretly proud of him. Dad said the school had no sense of humor. Dad was also relieved. He’d been paying Adam’s tuition. Dad’s supporting two households now: Adam and Mom downtown, and Pushy Heidi and baby Arturo in Park Slope.
Adam’s life hasn’t changed all that much since he stopped going to school. Derek is still his only friend. Adam just sees him less often. And now Adam gets to sit at the kitchen table in their uncool Battery Park City apartment with its view of New York harbor, its unobstructed front-row seat at the coming sci-fi apocalypse film that plays in Adam’s head when he can’t sleep, which is practically every night. In fact that’s how he puts himself to sleep, imagining the wind and waves, the lips of water frothing with spit as they rise to swallow the pavement, the lobbies, the little dogs whose owners thought they’d take them out for one last poop, and now there’s no need to pick it up with those plastic gloves, cold salt water’s pouring into the first-floor windows, the second floor, the third, it’s hypnotic and almost comforting now that it’s finally happening, until a flash of green lightning jolts Adam awake and he has to run to the window and make sure that his nightmare isn’t real. Yet.
The main difference between school and no school is that now Adam has to listen to his mom talk about whole learning, which in Adam’s case means that if he’s going to play a monkey, he has to study monkey biology, primate behavior, monkey literature, monkey myths, jungle climate, flora and fauna. He has always liked going deep into subjects, finding out everything—every trivial and even sometimes annoying fact—that he can. For a while he was obsessed with dinosaurs, then spiders, then the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., then the 1970s punk rock scene.
Now the bookshelf beside his bed is his personal monkey library. For a while his favorite book was a graphic novel called Journey to the West, about a Chinese superhero who travels with his helpers, among them a monkey whose name—Adam loves this—means “awakened to emptiness,” and who is so aggressive that the only way to calm him down is to put a gold ring around his head. But the first prize for monkey violence goes to the orangutan in Edgar Allan Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue.” That monkey slits an old lady’s throat with a straight razor (he’s pretending to be a barber and screws it up) and then strangles her daughter and stuffs the daughter’s battered corpse up the chimney, upside down. Adam loves it that his mom told him to read this. How hilarious that (Mom’s phrase) “an American classic” should be so totally gory and sick.
Does his mom have any idea what’s in these monkey books that she’s so happy he’s willing to read? Actually he likes them a lot, he’s read Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey and a new book whose title he keeps forgetting, all about bonobo sex. It’s always the same story, the scientist getting down with the monkeys, overjoyed to make friends with them and be accepted in their gang. And then things start to go south . . . A mother and daughter monkey turn into psycho serial cannibal killers, kidnapping and murdering monkey children. The chimpanzees in one habitat divide themselves into groups based on bloodlines or kinship or whatever, and start bloody wars that involve killing and eating each other’s babies. When Adam read that, he’d wanted to give up. What was the point? The really bad shit that people do is still there, always there, deep in our brains, from way back when we used to be monkeys.
Maybe just because he’s not supposed to think about it onstage, evolution has become Adam’s favorite subject. He Googled it, and then, just for fun, hit NEWS. He found some photos of brain fossils, then returned to the Web and dug harder and found a series of articles about legal trials to determine the content of public-school science textbooks.
At least he doesn’t have to read those crap books! He was, however, interested in the stories of how those decisions were made, how those battles worked out, how in 2005 a case reached the Pennsylvania courts because some parents wanted their kids’ schoolbooks to say: evolution is only one of many theories about the origin of mankind.
Evolution is not a theory! What part of science do they not get? Humans evolved, they are still evolving. Adam just hopes it happens fast. Fast enough to save him, to include him among the humans who breathe greenhouse gases and surf the tsunamis.
At bedtime, Adam has been reading On the Origin of Species. He hasn’t gotten very far. He reads pages without understanding one word and then has to read them all over again. He likes how the book begins: “When on board HMS Beagle as a naturalist, I was much struck with certain facts in the distribution of the inhabitants of South America, and in the geological relations of the present to the past inhabitants of that continent. These facts seemed to me to throw some light on the origin of species—that mystery of mysteries, as it has been called by one of our greatest philosophers.”
That mystery of mysteries! Seriously? What’s the mysterious part? Look at a monkey for five minutes and you know we used to be them. There’s a sentence from Darwin that Adam loves, something about how humans would never have been classified as a separate species if humans hadn’t been the ones doing the classification. The only thing that’s supposed to make us superior to the animals is our moral conscience, and from what Adam has seen and read about his fellow humans, he’s not so sure we have that. Although Roger told them they’re not supposed to think about evolution, that’s how Adam plays Mister Monkey—as an intelligent animal a few generations away from becoming human. In one of Adam’s dreams, a worm crawled out of the mud and turned into a baby. A cute little baby boy!
The first time Derek saw Adam’s monkey costume, he’d closed his eyes and said that he was receiving a communication from beyond the grave: an old lady had died of bowel cancer under the same shit-brown bedspread from which Adam’s costume was made. Derek’s just jealous; he’d read for Mister Monkey and didn’t get the part. Adam wishes his mom hadn’t mentioned the dust mites inside the monkey suit, which, unlike Derek’s psychic message from the afterlife, probably is true.
Adam sings, “Mother, I threw you a coconut and you threw me back the moon.” He doesn’t mean his mom, Giselle, but the beautiful monkey mother who was so sweet to him, who fed him delicious bananas, and who loved him with a perfect love until she was killed (like the gorillas in the documentary Roger showed) by poachers, right in front of his eyes.
Adam shuffles across the stage with a sad-funny old-man walk he learned from the gorilla at the Bronx Zoo. When Adam got the part in Mister Monkey, his mom let him go to the zoo with Derek if he promised to call home every forty-five minutes and write a one-page paper about what he saw.
For almost an hour they watched a gorilla masturbate and sulk. Darwin used to spend hours at the zoo, giving monkeys snuff to see if they closed their eyes when they sneezed, giving other monkeys a doll and a mirror to find out what they’d do with that. In one of Darwin’s books there’s a story about a mandrill in the zoo trying to seduce the youngest and prettiest girls on the other side of the bars; Darwin thought it was so scandalous he put it in a footnote—in Latin!
ADAM CALLED HIS mom in the middle of the solo gorilla jerk and said that he and Derek were fine and having loads of fun. The monkey kept pulling on his dick until Adam and Derek were beginning to get a little bored. More surprising than the gorilla’s lack of interest in privacy was the fact that none of the other zoo-goers seemed to notice what it was doing. Look at the funny monkey! One dad wondered aloud if he could get a DVD of King Kong. He wanted the kids to see it. Adam sensed a lesson—but about what? People see and don’t see what they want and don’t want to see. If only he knew how to use that, playing Mister Monkey.
Adam and Derek finally left when a well-dressed, middle-aged Latin guy in a hipster fedora came and stood in front of the monkey cage, his body wracked by spasms that at first made Adam thi
nk that he was masturbating too, until Adam looked more closely and saw that the guy was weeping. A masturbating, sulking three-hundred-pound gorilla was one thing, but the crying guy creeped them out, and they quickly moved on.
What Adam would really like to do onstage would be to go all the way monkey, deep monkey, and show the audience that Mister Monkey has a penis. The smelly monkey costume doesn’t have a penis. But Adam does; it’s growing hair, like the masturbating gorilla. Isn’t that what monkeys do? Monkeys wank and spit. And sulk, when they’re in captivity. Except for bonobos. Why couldn’t Mister Monkey be a hot sexy bonobo instead of a stupid, people-pleasing chimpanzee?
“Father, you watched me climb the tree, your arms outstretched to catch me if I fell. But when you fell I couldn’t catch you.” Adam stretches out his arms toward his lost monkey dad.
The audience isn’t feeling it. Adam can sense their remove, their restlessness, the children’s itchy boredom. He doesn’t blame them. He moonwalks backward across the stage and does a double flip. His mom has told him to play Mister Monkey like a cross between a Romanian gymnast and Michael Jackson in Thriller. She showed him the clip on YouTube.
In the essay for his mom, Adam wrote that at the zoo he saw a baby chimpanzee sleeping, and he wondered if the monkey was dreaming and what he was dreaming about.
“I love this,” his mom had said, rattling the paper near his head, almost whispering, as if she and Adam were sharing some intense private communication. His mom gave him an A plus. What could be more pathetic than being graded by your mother on an essay that (a) is totally made-up and (b) you wrote in twenty minutes, late, in your bedroom, while watching porn on your computer?
Adam sings, “Mother, are you up there, can you see me?”
Obviously she can see him. Giselle is sitting in the second row, where she sits every night. How can she stand to watch the play so often? Adam can hardly bear it, and he gets to do somersaults and climb the scenery.
Despite himself, pity for his real mom, not his monkey mom, plucks lightly at something taut and ropey deep down in his chest. Are heartstrings actual body parts? Anatomy is another subject his mom never gets around to.
Poor Mom! Underneath the flowing scarves and skirts, she’s just this side of a serious weight problem. It will only make things worse if he mentions it, so Adam confines himself to glaring furiously at the little snacks—cupcakes the color of dried blood dusted with rainbow sprinkles—with which she comforts herself. As if it’s the cupcakes’ fault for jumping into her mouth! What if his mom has a heart attack? What will happen then? Someday Mom is going to die, definitely before his dad.
Then Adam will have to live with Dad and Pushy Heidi—who wants him dead, though she’d never admit that, not even to herself—and with his baby half-brother Arturo, whom he’s not allowed to hold. Heidi is scared that Adam will give the baby a monkey disease or drop him, which he would never do. Heidi is a lesson sent to teach Adam that you have to be careful about people, especially women.
On opening night, Dad and Heidi elbowed their way backstage before anyone else. Heidi knelt and hugged Adam so hard that it hurt, even as he was still struggling out of his monkey suit. When his mom showed up seconds later, she said to Heidi, “Really? Do you have to get down on your knees in front of every male in my family?” And everything stopped. Just stopped. The cast and crew quit laughing and high-fiving each other, and everyone stared at the picture they made: Adam, his parents, and Pushy Heidi, kneeling, glaring up at his mom.
As Adam sings the final notes, he tastes, at the back of his throat, the vinegar bite of loss and, all right, yearning he’s supposed to pour into the song. He thinks about Mom drowning in the science-fiction flood. He thinks about how she can’t stop herself from mentioning all the famous child stars who flamed out and died young and how important it is that Adam not wind up like that. He tries to think about the time when his parents were still together, but he can’t remember one thing from when they were a family. He can’t imagine his mom and dad happy and in the same room.
Now he really is sad. He’s singing Mister Monkey’s song as if it happened to him.
So he’s unprepared when he finishes on a big note, a huge note, and the applause is thin and sad. Well, fine, it should be sad. It’s weird to sing a tragic song and have everyone clapping their heads off, loud and fast and . . . happy!
Jason and Danielle skip out onstage, grinning like shrunken heads, unaware of how narrowly they missed getting the gift of monkey spit and snot. They grab Adam’s hands and half-dance, half-pull him around, so he can pretend to be cheered up until their wannabe stepmother, Janice, accuses him of stealing her wallet, and Lakshmi, in her police clown outfit, escorts him offstage. Janice is a little like Pushy Heidi. Why did Adam never notice that before? The difference is, Adam sort of likes Eleanor, who in real life is nothing like Janice. Eleanor is a nurse.
Lakshmi’s only pretending to drag him as Adam fakes being dragged. Lakshmi is a nice hardworking person, yet everyone’s always dumping on her, including Adam’s mom, when really it’s Roger, not Lakshmi, who makes them wear disgusting uncomfortable costumes: a purple suit, a rainbow wig, a dying grandma’s mite-infested bedspread. Lakshmi is Roger’s bad cop, so it makes sense that she plays one.
Adam remembers one rehearsal at which his mom raised her hand and said in her scared little rabbit voice, which gets even smaller out in the world, “Wouldn’t the police department send two officers to arrest a monkey?” And Roger had talked right over Mom as if she hadn’t spoken.
Adam gets a break while Portia and Carmen, his lawyer and the family maid, do their sexy rumba duet. Rita is younger and prettier, Adam knows. But weirdly, he thinks Margot, the older one, is the hot one.
He likes the tight sleazy purple suit, though he knows it’s supposed to be tacky. Both Rita and Margot have tried to be friendly to him in that robotic way adults talk to kids. But his mom had frightened them off, just by looking at them. Eleanor is the only one who actually talks to Mom or even acknowledges her existence.
Rita and Margot are actors, Adam’s coworkers. They have come to respect him for hitting his marks and not upstaging them (too much!) and being professional. Portia and Carmen are on his side. But it’s Margot—Portia—who saves him from chimpanzee prison, which probably doesn’t exist. No one admits that what Mister Monkey’s facing is probably euthanasia. The thought has definitely occurred to Adam, and he uses the queasy feeling it gives him to make Mister Monkey even more frantic when he fears that he is in danger. Lots of times, real monkeys shit when they are afraid.
Adam’s got a few minutes before he has to go on. You’d think he would be present at his own trial, but here in Mister Monkeyland, animals aren’t entitled to due process. His mom has made him read a boring book and some online articles about courts and legal procedures, all of which he already knew about from TV.
When Giselle first told him that the play was holding open auditions, he’d hoped that it wasn’t based on the Mister Monkey book he read in his fourth grade class. It had practically made him sick, the way Miss Julia said certain things about the book and made the class repeat those things, either because she believed them or because she had to.
What is a stereotype, class? Mister Monkey shows us that the stereotypes aren’t true. The brave Latina housekeeper. The crusading woman lawyer. Animal rights. The high point of Adam’s educational career was asking Miss Julia, in front of the whole class: If the writer cared so much about animal rights, why didn’t Mister Monkey get to testify at his own trial? Even Miss Julia had to agree that Adam had a point.
Adam would still like to know the answer to that one and a lot of other things in the plot, like the detail about Janice’s missing fingernails that Roger has told them to ignore.
Adam waits for his cue: “Mister Monkey is innocent!” Then he’s supposed to run onstage and, after shooting rapid crazy-monkey looks at his human dad, his siblings, and the maid, to jump into his lawyer’s waiting arm
s. He’s read that when chimpanzees are happy, their eyes sparkle, like human eyes, so he has worked hard to make his eyes extra shiny even inside his monkey suit.
Adam scampers on stage. When Margot’s purple skirt rides up, it nearly drives him nuts.
This is weird: he’s got a hard-on. He hopes it will subside as he takes a flying leap at Margot. But it doesn’t. Margot catches him and holds him. He’s way too heavy for her, and he tries to make himself lighter.
He rubs his penis against her hip. Does the audience notice? People see and don’t see what they want and don’t want to see.
How did he get from there to here, from not doing this to doing this? It was as if some force picked him up and threw him into her arms. Against her. But now that he’s here, with his crotch touching some part of Margot’s body that is maybe her hip, maybe somewhere near her hip, he can’t believe how good it feels, even with the woolly monkey suit and the polyester skirt between them. Maybe that makes it better. How can anything wrong feel this right? He is in danger of floating off in some warm delicious broth of pleasure and bliss when Margot drops him as if she wants to smash him flat against the stage.
Adam lands on his feet. He tries to smile an apology at her through the ragged holes in his monkey face. He’s sorry, deeply sorry. And yet he would have done anything, risked everything, to feel what he just felt. A sensation rising up from his toes tells him it was worth it. How can these happy sensations be bad, even though Margot’s pinched little face has gone white with shock?
What Adam did was wrong. Forgive him. Was that . . . was that rape? Could he be arrested? Margot looks flash-frozen, her dark eyes turned to marbles and her pretty teeth to icicles.
Maybe she’ll snap out of it when dorky Eric—who’s always trying to act young and hip, calling Adam “bro” and “homes”—sings, into his pretend cell phone, that he loves Portia. One afternoon, before a show, Eric showed Adam a newspaper clipping about a crazed chimpanzee that ripped his owner’s face off because the guy wouldn’t give him a slice of birthday cake. From the way Eric laughed, Adam could tell that Eric thought it was super cool to be showing something like that to a kid. Adam had been pretty sure he’d smelled alcohol on Eric’s breath.
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