Escape from Madness
A monkey makes a noose
Behind the aluminum supports of the patio sat a concrete building. The empty holes in the walls served as windows. It was a greenhouse but the only thing that grew in it now were weeds and long grasses.
I remember seeing the building in an old photograph my mom kept. The picture was blurry at the corners, but my mother was in focus, sitting on the greenhouse doorstep. On her shoulder sat a monkey — Pepe the spider monkey.
My grandfather had given it to her for her fourteenth birthday after he took it from a cargo ship in Homestead where he was based. Pepe was timid, even for a spider monkey.
My grandfather drank a good amount, and with that came a temper and a propensity for screaming and fighting with members of the family.
Pepe hated loud noises. He didn’t have a vocabulary like Shimmy, though. so he kept his emotions tucked away.
My mother would come home to her father racing after Pepe, grabbing him by the scruff and throwing him across the kitchen.
My grandfather would stand in his underwear, holding his military boots screaming obscenities out the patio door.
“Get that damn thing out of here, Terry! He’s shitting in our shoes!”
Pepe grew old fast, and soon he was cage-ridden as he could no longer control his bowels. The nerves just got to the little monkey. He would sleep in his cage with a flimsy yellow baby blanket my mother had given him.
One Autumn afternoon, after school, my mother looked into the cage and saw Pepe swinging from the yellow blanket.
There was no note of course, but it was apparent that Pepe had hanged himself.
My mother would tell people that there was a large knot in the blanket.
According to her, my grandfather had been drunk and murdered the monkey.
No one believed her.
That was the conspiracy she would share with anyone who would listen and she would often end the disclosure by screaming.
“There was a knot in the blanket!”
Pepe had simply gotten caught in the blanket. Or he had been murdered.
Knowing our family dynamics, I could see either scenario being plausible.
About 7 hours later, well past midnight, I saw headlights illuminating the living room curtains.
Uncle Tim fell through the front door, tripping over my sneakers. One Reebok shot across the room, landing in front of my mom.
Ray walked in right behind him, staring straight ahead. But when my uncle’s back tripped out of his view, Ray’s new surroundings finally seemed to come into focus.
His head jerked up and his eyes shot open as if he were being unplugged from a machine.
He hadn’t been expecting us to be awake, let alone sitting on the living room sofa sliding around on its uncomfortable plastic.
My mom began talking to my Uncle Tim, ignoring Ray entirely. This was a common tool of hers. It was either sheer pandemonium or dead silence with the two of them. This was the latter.
However, Ray took my mother’s silence a different route this time.
He had assumed, in his stoned stupor, that none of us could see him. His upper body remained still, his eyes locked into the ether behind us, while his stocky legs gradually slid out from under him.
There wasn’t even an attempt at grace. He almost fell through a glass end table, bumping it with his knee.
“Pinche chit,” he grumbled to himself.
His legs kept buckling as if his feet were falling asleep or he was missing the step of an invisible ladder. He was like a baby deer learning to walk.
He kept going, though — never breaking his stride, never making eye contact with anyone. No one had any idea what he was doing but we were all well aware of his presence.
He made his way into the Florida room and disappeared behind Shimmy’s cage.
“Tim! You Son of a Bitch!”
Granny was awake.
“George!”
Shimmy was awake.
Uncle Tim perked up and sprinted to the Florida room, falling into the pull-out couch, happy to have made it home.
I sat on the sofa next to my mom, resting my cheek on her sweater as I started to drift off. My eyes were beginning to glaze over when I saw a shadow pass by the cracked oriel window sitting behind my grandmother. I stepped up discreetly so as not to draw attention.
I pulled back the thin curtain and noticed what appeared to be a man pushing our station wagon from the back.
The car was picking up speed down the driveway while the man sprinted and then dove through the driver-side window.
The car jolted back and kicked forward with a bang, as it peeled out of the gravel driveway and onto Old Cutler Road.
Tan debris and tall dirt clouds filled the yard as Ray left us at granny’s.
My mom said nothing, but her jaw started to clench and pulsate.
I hated it when she did that.
It was silent — the smoke like a fog, sleeping on the surface of the carpet now.
A voice shot through the air.
“What was that?? Was that Ray?! Well you sure can pick em Terry!”
Granny yelled from the kitchen, grabbing another beer and pouring it into a plastic tumbler — the beach shells and glitter trapped within its sides.
Shimmy could sense an argument brewing.
“George! Geoorrrge!”
Granny threw in some ice and a dash of salt and let out another scream, this time even more irritated.
“Tim you son of a bitch! If you stole my China, I’m calling the police!”
Shimmy heard the increase in volume. She readied her feathered skeleton to shriek.
“George! Geeoorrrge!” Squawk.
A loud crash rang out from the Florida room.
Uncle Tim had thrown the television remote at her cage, startling the poor bird.
“Oh what oh what! Oh what oh what!
Then again.
“Oh what oh what!” Squawk.
I hated Shimmy. We all did.
But somehow that phrase summed up her life and what she had been forced to see over the past few smoke-filled decades.
The imagery was depressing. Poor Shimalene, shivering and confused, singing through a rusty cage to a room full of insane people.
I heard another object thrown at her cage.
“Oh what oh what!!!”
The family yelled as one at the poor bird.
“Shimmy! Shut up!”
I nestled back into my mom’s shoulder and drifted to sleep with a new question.
How did a spider monkey learn to tie a knot?
NEXT UP…my mother gets in a physical altercation with airport security…
Please feel free to read about the entire visit to Granny Friel’s:
Part 2:
Part 3:
Part 4:
And then Join from the Beginning of the RACE!:
“CHASING CRAZY!”
