Your Monkey's Shmuck
Flamingo paperback 1990, original paperback

YOUR MONKEY'S SHMUCK IS IN MY BEARD, PART I.

You may say that I am mad. Well, that's your privilege. The only story I can tell you is the one that's true. The events as they happened, no more, no less.

So much for introductions. To begin then: My name is Owusu, Lewis Kwame Owusu, Kwame as in Nkrumah, that's correct. I was born in Magudu village, north of Nairobi, Kenya. My parents, ardent Pan-Africanists, both died when I was young, and I was taken under the wing of my uncle, who had a civil service post in the capital. I graduated from High School, obtained my matriculation certificate, and then applied for, and received, a scholarship for veterinary studies to be undertaken at Glasgow University, in the United Kingdom. I was in the United Kingdom seven years, seven fat years, one might say, years of hope, which soon gave way to wordly cynicism, then a deeper disillusion. Europe, after all, was not the wide open gate to Opportunity and Fulfilment that I had naively imagined it to be. Racism, hypocrisy, the bitter cold soon took their toll of my ambitions. I returned, then, to Kenya in January 197--, uncertain and apprehensive of my future. My benefactor uncle, sunk deep in his bureacratic niche, peeked out long enough to arrange me a post at the Njoli Game Reserve, by the north-western border with our neighbouring Uganda. I was quite satisfied with this development. I thought, perhaps this job far out in the bush will help me clear my mind of its turmoil. And I was glad to be away from the crush of running, rushing, pressing humans. I always had preferred the kingdom of animals to that of man. But, to my increasing chagrin, there was, despite it all, a viper in that isolated nest...

Ugh! Kek! Ptah! This is not going to do at all, for God's sake. What the fuck do I know from Kenya? The Snows of Kilimanjaro. Mau Mau. Mzee. Jomo stoned at Mboya funeral. Owusu - that's a West African name, anyway... The Fuck. Escape by looking out the penthouse window. "Penthouse"! Do us a favour! One room, rotting chest of drawers, one fallen armchair, two rickety camp beds, books in cardboard boxes, frozenroaches in the fridge, open cartons of half and half, grimy plates stamped with congealed cornflakes, dollops of snow past the grimy french windows obscuring the great phallic architecture of Manhattan downtown. Out, from 79th Street, above Broadway and Amsterdam, way down to the Gulf and Western Tower, the Park, no doubt in picturesque snow. Kiddies walking on the pond ice, strawberry fields forever. Gimme a dollar man. So what was wrong with twenty-five cents, asshole? Two bits. Gott strafe our souls.

So what'll it be then? Back to the hard core magazines? Spot of grunting tool manipulation? The true authorial vocation? Ah, one day - despite it all - Fame! Yesterday, nobody! Today, nobody! Tomorrow - the nebisch reborn -

Dear Contributor,

We regret to inform you that the enclosed material does not suit the needs of PONCEHOUSE at this time. We are therefore returning it to you.
Please excuse this impersonal reply, but the volume of submissions we receive makes such a procedure a sad necessity. Many thanks for thinking of PONCEHOUSE.

The Editors.

Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. Tishman has left one spoonful of edible bran flakes in the kitchen cabinet. It is his place after all. I, merely a harmful parasite, standing between him and the domestic conquests of whatever piece of tail takes his fancy. Not that he would want to bring the ladies back up the Methuselah lift to this apartment anyway. The lower depths, up in the sky. Observe the male mysoginy above. Ah! the Balm of a Good Woman. No, that neither. The last piece of tail seen in this dump was the tip of a rat's dangler disappearing down the toilet bowl. The Fuck. Let us hie to cleaner pastures:

 

At first it all seemed perfect: The Njoli Game Reserve nestled in a thickly vegetated valley teeming with impala, wildebeeste, giraffe, monkeys of all sizes, a thousand different species of birds, leopards, zebras, hyenas, and a sturdy herd of elephants. There was not much doctoring to do - there were no facilities to keep sick animals except two cages in a tiny shed. I rarely had more than an antelope with a broken leg to deal with... (What is this shit? Well, Get on with it.) -

There was a human snake, however, in this Eden - the supervisor, one Geofrrey Edwards. He and I were the only resident specimens of homo sapiens in that open zoo. Now Edwards was the sort of white man who never forgives or forgets that he was once Bwana Edwards, Big white Chief, resenting you like hell because he can no longer call you Boy, or Hey There Johnny, and has to bow to blacks who are his bosses now. He won't return to England because the nig-nogs and reds have taken over there, better to stick it in the bush, where men are men. And when he's drunk, blind sodden with the booze, he'll hark back to the Good Old Days, howling at the sun that set over the British Empire. My own education in the Old Country was a red rag before his eyes. I was everything he hated in a nigger, and in no time we were each a jagged thorn in the other's flesh, sunk in a quicksand of mutual loathing. Only when he drove off for a five day binge in the nearest whorehouse eighty miles away at R--- did I have any real tranquility...

("Wanna date, man?" "I'm afraid I'm not in with the readies these days, lady." "Any time." Its true, the friendliness of the natives. Nice warm vomit in the IRT. "Jesus sucks! Jesus sucks!" "Well, let him suck somebody else today..." Aaargh!)

But I am rambling, and I should get back to the affair at hand, that leads me to appear before you gentlemen today: the elephants. They were the key. I took a special interest in them, from my first days at Njoli. Within three months I'd come to know them well, seeing them as rather ponderous children placed under my care. (Why the fuck am I telling this story? Better tobeat one's brains against the wall...) They always gave me the feeling of a sort of caste of bush philosophers, taking their time to unravel some obscure elephant creed evolving since the depths of time. I daydreamed of winning their confidence, following them around, almost in the foolish hope that one would step on a painful thorn, which I would then, like Androcles, draw out, gaining eternal gratitude...

But let me set the scene: Night coming on. The golden African sunset. Shrill chirp of crickets. Old Edwards, last bastion of the English Master Race, snoring off the day's consumption of Teachers. I, awake on my hammock, listening. The sounds of the jungle, day grunts abating, night creatures gearing up for their turn under the moon. The dying away of elephants' lowing. Only this night it did not. There seemed a loud agitation, off by the water hole, as if something has scared the pachydermal herd. (What?!) I thought, were poachers in the area? this was a congential scourge of our area, the blasted ivory thieves... I took my rifle and moved off into the bush.

It was a hot, stifling, night. (Fuck! the cold! the radiators like a witch's tit! House Super, where is thy steam? Motherfuckers!) I crawled through the underbrush, silent as I could towards the water hole. Monkeys, awake, screeched in the trees. My palms were sweating. Something was clearly amiss. I crept warily on, till only a single row of trees stood between me and the open glade of the water hole. Then I poked my head, carefully, above the scrub.

Now I'm a rational man, I must re-emphasize this. (Jerk! jerk! Jerk! Hunh! Hunh! Hunh! Timber! Godammit!) No doddering village illiterate clinging to outmoded superstitions and beliefs. An edcuated Christian, with a degree in Veterinary Medicine. (Bully for you, Sambo!) But still, I say to you and all who seem so smug and all knowing that you do not know everything. That's for sure. The cleverest philosophers say: Doubt. Do not be choked by your own certainty. (Get on with it, for God's Sake!) -

Thank you for the opportunty of examining the enclosed material for publication in TAGALONG. We regret that we cannot make use of it at this time. Since TAGALONG is a science fiction magazine, we consider only science fiction manuscripts, that is, stories in which some aspect of realistic science or technology plays an integral part in the story's development. We do not publish fantasies or stories in which the scientific aspect is merely peripheral to the plot or totally absent.

Baa! Baa! Baa! Well, to stall no more, this is what I saw: The elephants were clustered at the furthest edge of the glade, where the trees were thickest, huddled together in a close pack, their trunks writhing, curling as they cried out, lowing and bellowing like mad.

In the center of the glade was the female I knew as Maisy, easily identifiable by the long split in her left ear which distinguished her from the others, the result of some calfhood fight. She stood on the brink of the water hole, her front legs buckled under her, her head lolling about, trunk tossing, lowing too, but in a different tone from all the others. And she was not alone. And it was at this point that I felt I had taken leave of my senses, or that all that seemed to anchor me to a normal, conventional idea of life and truth had slipped, leaving me... blah blah blah... gazing at that terrible shape that towered and loomed and strained and heaved at the poor beast's rear -

In short, it was a giant ape. King Kong, just as the movie shows him, but no model, cobbled together by leather fur and seams and movie magic, but a true, massive great ape, a brown gorilla, big, man, big, in every way.... given that an elephant stands ten or twelve feet high at the most, he must have been all of twenty five foot tall. I would confirm that later, but we'll come to that. And there he was, behind our Maisy, his massive hairy paws clamped on her flanks on either side, and on his frightful face, clear in the full moon light, an expression all the more terrifying for being one of a glazed calm, and peace, his eyes turned up, whites showing clearly - poised there, panting behind the elephant, grunting and puffing like a gargantuan steam train. Yes, there can be no beating about the bush - the giant ape was fucking the poor pachyderm! I could clearly see his great black thing - his penis, glistening in the moonlight, ramming it in, wham wham, wham wham, like some gigantic piston. And Maisy, whose cries, first misconstrued as terror, now obvious as an ecstatic, happy squealing as she wiggled her immense posterior in rhythm with that hairy hulk, going at it hammer and tongs, hammer and tongs...

Knock knock knock.

Ben Tishman enters. good of him to give me warning before he turns his keys. Who knows, I might have Marilyn Monroe in here, score of the century, who can tell, this is the land of opportunity. You never know what's round the next corner, the big banana, the little pot of gold, or that real dose of bad luck that makes you tender your contribution to the overpopulation reduction. I want to be a beauty stylist, an aerobics instructress, a statistic, a dot on the medical graphs. Or I might be just spilling my seed, and Tishman is a true gent.

" You won't believe what happened to me today."
Oh yeah?
"Synchronicity, its the real thing. You gotta have faith."

Tishman has been trying for years to raise cash for a film project which is the apple of his eye. He goes around the city, with a 16mm Bolex and a tape recorder, filming incidents at random. Parks, hotel lobbies, diners, bars, the subway, they are all Tishman's stalking ground. He cadges favours off friends in various cutting rooms around the town, who allow him free time on editting machines. He wishes to avoid the cliche of Rhythm of The City films by going about his task with merciless rigour. Seven hours of footage are already stacked in cans, but he wishes to reach the magic figure of two hundred hours, on a one-and-a-half to one ratio. The project has lasted four and a half years to date, and a succession of good natured patrons of the Arts have bankrolled him for varying periods. He has applied for grants to every Foundation in the country, but received only one so far, from the Yiddish Territorialist Society in the geriatric ward of Mount Sinai Hospital.

" Do you mind if I bash on with the keys a little?" I ask him.
"That's no problem." he said. "I'll just lie there." Which he does, on his camp bed in the far corner, lighting up a succession of Malboros. Smoke wreathes the room, filling it like a gas chamber.

...I didn't watch that scene for long. I dropped my rifle on the spot and ran like crazy, certain that the heat had boiled my brains. I must have woken old Edwards from his beauty sleep, for he came ranting and roaring out of his hut and stood over me, bleary eyed and stinking, unshaven and sweating like a pig in his filthy vest and underpants. "Lewis, you fucking kaffir," he bawled, forgetting himself, "what the fuck is going on?"

I was not going to take that tone from anyone, least of all a wreck like Edwards. I was about to take a swing at him when he reeled round, suddenly appearing to notice the lowing and bellowing and jungle night panic ensuing from the moonlit bush. "What the fuck is that?" he yelped, "what is going on out there?"

" If you really want to know," I sneered at him, "King Kong is out there, fucking the elephants."

That really made him flip his lid. "Don't you make fun of me!" he shouted, spitting bile, "you're not going to make me small, I'm not in my grave yet, you black bastard, I will show you that!" He jumped me, but he was weak and helpless from the booze, I just held him off with one hand. "If you don't believe me, just come and see for yourself."

" I will at that, clever Johnny," he snarled, "I bloody will at that." He staggered back and emerged with his rifle. "Lets see what's scared you out of your ju ju wits, jungle boy. Come on Mowgli, lets go." And he crashed off through the bush towards the source of the noise. I had no option but to follow him, my heart rising to my mouth. I'm not sure what I was expecting when we finally reached the glade of the water hole, but if I thought I would wake up from my nightmare I was very sorely shaken. The bush was still alive with squawking monkeys leaping and gesticulating, fleeing rodents and night creatures, and there, in the glade, the elephants, still bunched in fear, and bingo! - the great ape still there!

He had now backed off Maisy, done with whatever bang was underway. Crouched, arms across his knees, back against one of the larger trees (look up arboreal dictionary, Goddamit!), Maisy down folded on the ground just by the waterhole, her trunk waving lazily in the muddy water.

Edwards stood, and I could guess what vows of abstinence were passing through his sozzled brain. But then the giant ape stirred, almost as if he's sensed our presence, sniffed the air, then rose and crashed off through the trees.

" Come on," I jeered at Edwards. "White hunter make big kill, no? Lets see where the bugger goes."

I don't know why I said that, it was the last thing in the world I would have dreamed of wanting to do, but I did enjoy his open mouthed, sheer, total terror. "What's the matter?" I went on, "not scared of big ju ju bogeyman, now are we?"

" I'll show you who's afraid of what, kaffir!" he spat, and staggered off across the glade. In as much a daze as he was, I rose up off my haunch and followed...

"I'd like to take a nap now, Danny." Tishman said. I took my fingers off the keys. He turned over on his side. The snow flakes seemed to have taken a break too outside the grimy french windows. I took my coat and made for the door. "Need anything, Ben?" "Two garlic bagels." he said. "Maybe check the milk and sugar." I checked out of the apartment and pressed for the lift. It came, creaking slowly as if drawn up from the lowest circle of Hades. The small double porthole and the door clanking open. Safety instructions. Posted warnings. Tenants who leave laundry unattended will have only themselves to blame!!! Aye aye, mon Capitan. The doorman tips his thin eyebrows. "Hey, thats a pissing day out there!" "Yeah. But we can't hide forever." "You said it." So I did, so I did. Out, down 78th Street, across Amsterdam and the bucking yellow cabs through to Broadway and the Manhattan Restaurant, rock of ages, balm in all seasons. These Alice in Wonderland menus. Cornucopia of choice. Breakfast 1, 2, 3 and 4. A little late for that. But save my life, Doris, a coffee and an english muffin, no jelly. She brings the jelly. You can't have too much of a good thing. The bustle and clutter behind the counter. Steam from coffee machine. Burnt toast. French fry grease. Hubble-babble, the City's banter, the writer's boon. What the hell. Masochism always prevails. I take out the morning's fresh rejections:

Dear Writer,

Although this manuscript was not selected for publication, we hope that you will continue to think of ARCHAEOS as a magazine interested in all writers, published and unpublished. In order for literary periodicals to continue, we depend upon your support as writers and readers as you, in turn, depend upon us as potential publishers of your work. We hope you will consider subscribing to ARCHAEOS, or any other literary magazine to which you submit work.

The Editors.

The word chutzpah doesn't even begin to do justice. The nerve of these guys - they are after my money! My fucking thirty five cents! Lord, how long will ye accept the counsels of malefactors? The second piss off note is no better:

Sorry, no can do. This story suffers from an overdose of cuteness. Funny names and dialect comedy are just not what our readership wants. Jewish S-F - I should say you nah? But not quite so determinedly Jewish, please.
Jacob Akimbo's Science Fiction Magazine.

What these people need is a second circumcision. By a defrocked mohel. I thought that fucking story was not bad. It had certain qualities I've always strived for: terseness, drive, provocation. Wake the punters up from their slumber. Give them a kick for a change. But who should want to write science fiction? Its a mug's game, patronised by pimply faced adolescent fascist male youths, maximum age 17, mental age one doesn't even want to think. No wonder Jake Akimbo frothed. I take out the rejected manuscript. Its dog eared now, splattered with the coffee, cocaine, drool, semen, pus, God knows what these "readers" deposit on there, apart from the rubber stamps and scribbled file numbers, like an FBI exhibit:

NRB/T/547.
JJ/BB/WW.
XXX-75/3-HGFT/4.
RETURN TO ADDRESSEE:

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