Monkey Gone To Hell
“Not again…”
“Tell them the story.”
“I don’t… you tell them, man. You’ve heard it enough you must know it off by heart by now, surely?”
“Tell them.”
“All right, all right! Just… Jesus. All right – once upon a fucking time… once upon a time, there was a girl. Her name was Melissa, and the only shortened version of that name she accepted was Millie. Not Mel, not Missy, certainly not Lissa… though one of her friends did call her ‘Sa, but that friend was a bit of a dick, you ask me. I dunno, can a woman be a dick? Or is that a male-only insult?”
“Just tell the story.”
“Hey, man, you’re gonna make me tell this fucking thing over and over, at least let me editorialise, yeah? Otherwise, tell it the fuck yourself. I’m past fucking… OK, OK. So for a while there, Millie was knocking around with this loser Bruno. Now let me tell you – this Bruno, this Bruno was a dick, man. This guy was swinging in the wind. I mean, this guy opened his mouth and out came the pee-pee. And if you want to take that further, guy was also an ass – join the fucking dots, man. Guy played polo for a start. With ponies and everything. Like Prince fucking Charlie! Never did a day’s work, just lived off his grandpa’s trust fund like everyone else in his shitawful family. Old man was a big name in freeze-dried coffee, from way back. I mean, from way back when everybody thought instant was the future – before all this French Press shit and – I mean, before anybody’d even heard of Starbucks, you know? And he drove an Audi. Bruno, this is. Some top-of-the-range piece-of-shit – I’m telling you, this guy was like one of them guys in the shaving commercials. You know the sort I mean, right? Got himself all nice and smooth then stood and admired the job in the shaving mirror. Stroke that bristle-free cheek and bing! – little glint in his eye. I mean, god knows what Millie saw in him. Some chicks, yeah, obviously, some chicks would just see the dollar signs and be done, but Millie wasn’t like that. No way. She was way too proud to take a handout, ‘specially in return for – whatever. This girl stood on her own two. And she saw the best in everybody. Gave everybody the same – a square deal, you know? Respect an’ that. Which I suppose is how come she was hanging around with this rich deadbeat fuck in the first place. She saw something in Bruno that was worth – well, worth more than all the fucking coffee in Columbia – though I guess, after a while, whatever that was, it just wasn’t enough. So yeah, eventually Millie came to her senses and the two of them, they parted ways. Only Millie, being Millie, she was one of those chicks who went in for that whole amicable separation malarkey. Now I don’t know about you, but me – I ain’t amicable with a single one of my exes. Fuck that staying in touch, sending out Christmas cards, emailing round the holiday snaps bullshit – hell, most of my exes, we only communicated via the fucking lawyers, if we had to at all – but Millie… Like I say, Millie was a good person. Millie saw the best in you, even after she’d kicked your ass to the kerb. So Millie and Bruno, they stayed in touch. Even after both of them were well into seeing other people – which obviously didn’t take long in either case, ‘cos Bruno had the fucking Audi and all that, and Millie… Millie was just Millie. Hell, they both had queues. Only Millie’s should have been way longer.”
“So anyway, the lucky guy who managed to fight his way to the front of Millie’s queue was called Jimmy, and to this day I couldn’t tell you how Jimmy achieved this feat, seeing as how he certainly wasn’t blessed in either the movie star looks or the green folding department. But like I say, Millie had this thing, she saw the pearl in the oyster, and Jimmy – well, I guess Jimmy was the luckiest son of a bitch you’re ever likely to meet, and more so because this was the real thing. Jimmy loved Millie and Millie loved Jimmy and everything was ice cream on a sunny day. Everything was… say, man, how about getting me a drink while I tell this next bit, yeah? Throat fells like it’s got rattlesnakes crawling over it. Go on, man, just a little one?”
“When you’ve finished the story, then we’ll see.”
“Fucking taskmaster, man, fucking… fuck it: Jimmy. Now I don’t want you to think Jimmy was ignorant to his good fortune or nothing – he’d been looking all his life for a girl like Millie, and he wasn’t about to do nothing to mess that up. Jimmy didn’t have no great history with the women, every one of his past relationships had ended up in all-out war, and sometimes that was the woman’s fault, and other times, yeah, OK, other times it was Jimmy’s. He hadn’t been no saint or nothing, the way he’d behaved before Millie, but to be frank, none of them chicks deserved a saint. But Jimmy knew from the start, Millie was different, and he swore he was gonna change his ways in that regard. No more playing around, no more eyeing up the cheerleaders at the varsity bar, no more staying out late and crashing with the last chick in the club if he couldn’t get no taxi home. Besides, that was a young man’s game, and Jimmy knew he was getting on in the years – thirty-five was half his father’s lifetime (though his old man did die a drunk) – so it was well past. Well past time to find the right woman and leave off all that tomcat bullshit and settle the fuck down. And so yeah, Jimmy might not have been the most reliable dude in the past – though we’ve already established that Millie was more than capable of seeing beyond that quality in her men – but he sure weren’t no fool either. He knew a good thing when he found it, and Millie was all that, all that and more. Girl was perfect. Except for just that one thing… Bruno. Jimmy couldn’t get his head around the whole Bruno situation. How they could run into him in the mall, out shopping with his new bitch girlfriend – the fucking thong model, for Christ’s sake – and have to stop for a fifteen bastard minute catch-up. Or how they could be browsing round some store out in the middle of Bumsrushville, Nebraska – like that time on their way back from visiting Millie’s folks in Lincoln, stopping off in some shitty little roadside bargain shack filled with cheap-ass candles and those little china statues, sweets that tasted like soap and soap that smelled like sweets – and suddenly Millie would seize on something and squeal, ‘Oh, I must get this fake Tom Selleck moustache for Bruno – he’ll love it!’ as innocent as Tweety, like… and it was innocent too, there weren’t no… Millie didn’t… Jimmy didn’t think for one second that there was anything in that. He knew she loved him, and that she only thought of Bruno like an old friend, but still it got to him. It worked into Jimmy’s brain, and once it got in there it just gnawed away like – I dunno, whatever the fuck gnaws, man – and then when Millie started suggesting they go watch Bruno playing his fucking polo, some big exhibition match or shit – well, that was like the straw and the camel’s fucking asshole, man, and Jimmy couldn’t take it no more. Next thing he knew, they’d be double-fucking-dating! But what could he do? He couldn’t get mad with Millie, there was no point, she was just being sweet – and besides, he loved her too much, he didn’t ever want to fight with her. No matter what she did, like when she insisted on Tivo-ing American Idol, or that fucking supermodel thing, and watching it all day Sunday… like when she left his Pearl Jam CDs lying around out of their cases, or put them all back in the wrong… like when she’d spend the whole evening on the phone to some crazy-ass girlfriend she’d only seen the day before… like—“
“Get to the part with the monkey already.”
“Yeah, yeah, whatever. The fucking monkey, man – all you care about is the fucking monkey. Like you don’t want people to know the human drama that led up to…OK, fine, fine – the monkey. So Jimmy had this buddy, OK, name of Wombat, on account of… well, we’ll get to that soon enough, I guess. Wombat was part of one of them radical animal liberation groups, used to break into labs and set free dogs and bunnies and yeah, fucking monkeys, man – and OK, this one time he even found a fucking wombat, with its eyelids all pinned back and needles in its balls and – god knows what those fuckers do in places like that, shipping that poor fucking wombat all the way over from Oz just to see if it blinked when it got conditioner in its eyes or shit. Anyway, you can’t just let a fucking wombat loose in the woods round here, man – if it ain’t their native habitat, who knows if they’d be able to forage the right food or – not to mention you can just guarantee that every Charlton Heston Second Amendment motherfucker with a hunting license will be all over that critter like flies on—“
“The monkey.”
“Hey, man, I’m just giving a little background here, all right? I’m sure the people want to know why a fella chooses to go by the name of Wombat – though I suppose you folks can pretty much work out for yourselves by now that Wombat – whose real name was Gus, by the way – went and adopted that cute little marsupial fuck, used to take it out walking on a lead like a dog, or like those Hollywood assholes with their pot-fucking-bellied hogs, and that’s why… that’s why…”
“…”
“Yeah, OK, so the point, the point of all this is that one night, one night Jimmy’s pouring all his troubles out over at Wombat’s place – they’ve been playing one of those fucking Wii games where grown men dance round like fucking ballerinas in the name of bitch-slapping some ninjas or what have you – and the subject turns round to Millie, and how she’s the perfect girl for Jimmy, perfect in every single way, man, except for… except for the whole fucking Bruno deal, yeah? Which with hindsight, if Jimmy were here with you right now, he might well look back and say, yeah, OK, he had that a little out of proportion, you know? ‘Specially given what… but jealousy’s weird mojo, man, there ain’t no fucking logic to it, and once it has you by the fucking testes, I guess it just twists and twists ‘til you gotta do something about it. And right then and there, Wombat came up with the something that Jimmy could do – well, if not to take Bruno off the board completely, then at least to wipe that smug, Audi-driving grin off his face. See, Wombat had these friends, yeah, who’d broken into this lab up in the Catskills where rumour had it this bunch of pizza-faced geeks fresh out of NYU were working on all kind of bio-warfare horseshit for the fucking government, man – see if you wanna pin this whole thing on Jimmy, then be my guest, but let’s not forget who made this fucking virus in the first place, man, or who they were working for – the United States Fucking Government, man – the United States Fucking…”
“All right now. You’re nearly done.”
“Yeah. Yeah, sorry, people – I just get… Hell, you can probably piece the rest of this jigsaw together yourselves by now, yeah? So Wombat brings Jimmy a monkey, one of the few surviving monkeys these dudes’d liberated from this place up in the Catskills – and see, in case you’re wondering, there’s no risk of any of this being tied back to Jimmy, because he’s the only one in his circle knows anything about Bruno’s… associations. Certainly Millie never… Well, Jimmy wouldn’t have wanted Millie to know he hung round with any felonious types – even those who might have occupied the higher moral ground, say… Yeah, she saw the good in people, but she also had a very black-and-white view on the world, and though she’d no doubt have felt bad for those poor little animals, her conscience wouldn’t have allowed her to stay quiet if someone she knew was involved in – well, the sort of shit Wombat and his buddies were involved in. But as I say, there weren’t no risk of any of this getting tied back to Jimmy, and not even to Wombat, since Wombat had a cast iron alibi for the night of the Catskills raid, having been all the way over in Chino at the time, visiting his sister and her kids. And so Wombat brought Jimmy the monkey, and Jimmy took that weird-eyed little fucker round to Bruno’s pad in the dead of the night, let it out its cage and straight in through the kitty door, then ran back to Millie’s and climbed back in the sack without her ever even noticing he’d been gone. Clear conscience, see, Millie always slept like a baby. Not Jimmy, who laid awake the rest of that night… and has done pretty much the same every night since. Not that he had any idea how quickly that whole thing would spread – how could he? He just thought the monkey would bite Bruno, maybe chew the skinny ass off Bruno’s fucking thong model girlfriend, a couple of their servants… He had no way of knowing that by the time Millie woke up, 7am, half the city would be ripping each other’s intestines out and devouring ‘em on the sidewalk like some fucking horror movie come to life. He had no way of knowing that when he kissed Millie goodbye that morning, that’d be the very last time he ever saw her. And by the time he turned on the radio, by the time he heard the extent of just what was going down… by that time… And even then, he still didn’t know he was the one responsible… how could he, man? How the fuck could anybody comprehend that one little monkey could do all that shit so soon? I mean, you can’t… you can’t… How could…?”
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
“Here, there’s water for you.”
“Thanks, man.”
“That’s the first time, you know. The first time I think you’ve shown any kind of remorse. For, well—“
“Remorse? Fucking remorse, man? Don’t you think I–? Fuck me, man, you think I make light of what I did? You think I trivialise it, talking about Bruno’s fucking polo ponies and Millie buying him that fucking Tom Selleck moustache and… you think all that shit is some kind of mitigating…? Fucking remorse, man? You let me out of this fucking cage right now, man, I’ll show you fucking remorse. I’ll bash my head against the nearest blunt object, and keep on bashing ‘til I’ve put this whole world out of its— Fucking remorse, man? I killed the whole fucking human race, and you – don’t you think something like that goes a little bit past fucking remorse? Don’t you think…?”
“Get some rest, Jimmy. They just brought in another group of survivors who’re gonna want to hear… they’re gonna want to hear your story.”
“Yeah, man. Whatever. Bring ‘em in… bring ‘em in whenever you like. I’m OK. I’m OK, man. What else have I…? You just bring ‘em in whenever, OK?”
