Shouting through the Bars
An abused bird reflects on the murder of a monkey…
My mother grabbed the knob of the royal blue front door. The flower stencil lining its sides was crooked to the point of dizziness. The once vibrant pinks had dulled to smudges, adding to the tackiness and illustrating our family’s overall disregard for appearances.
The door opened and I was smacked in the face with a wall of gray cigarette smoke — like being punched with cotton that made your eyes water.
A blanket of cancer lifted and lowered with every obscenity that was being shouted.
The whole room looked like it was breathing.
Noise shot out from the kitchen — clangs of plates and silverware being tossed into a sink.
“Is he out there? That son of a bitch. Tim, it’s time to get up! Ackkkk Ackkk.”
The raspy voice belonged to my grandmother — assertive, with a twinge of sultriness … like an old night club singer fending off drunks.
She ended the sentence with her signature coughing fit.
“Ackkk Ackkk.”
Several couches sat in a semi-circle. The walls of the living room were hung with four framed paintings of my mother and her siblings — commissioned when they were children. The artwork had faded to a monotone sepia — years of sticky dust covering the glass of the frames.
I went to look for Uncle Tim, making my way past the depressing art and down the dark hallway which led to the bedrooms.
I think the last person to change the bulb in the hallway had been my grandfather who had died at least five years ago.
The hallway was always pitch-black and carried a hint of mold with it, the way laundry smells when left in the water too long. It felt like I was walking down the mouth of a pit viper.
The first room was usually locked but I knew it was filled with stacks of books and old magazines.
I’d seen a Hustler magazine peeking out from under the door on one occasion. I don’t remember anything about what I saw but I was yelled at and slapped, only intensifying my intrigue.
I twisted the locked brass knob and it let out a creak.
“Crap,” I said out loud.
This startled me. I looked back to make sure no one heard me.
I was in the clear and continued my journey.
The second room was open and packed to the brim with bags of clothes and collectibles — this was where Granny’s seasonal animal purchases came to die.
There was a wooden mallard duck head with a set of my uncle’s underwear draped over its head and old pizza boxes stacked atop one another.
Two doors lay across from each other at the end of the hallway.
My uncle’s room was to the left. I could hear the movie “Weird Science” playing. (It was a bootleg VHS tape we’d seen countless times the previous summer, after Ray had stolen it from his brother, Arnold.)
I didn’t question why my uncle had the movie now, as this was how all our stolen goods were treated. We always shared our spoils.
Granted, the spoils were usually broken and often unwanted, but it illustrated the depth of our dysfunctional bonds.
I was about to choose my uncle’s door on the left when my mother screamed.
“Gregory! Don’t look at any pervo magazines!”
I didn’t understand what she meant but I was embarrassed and hurried back to the living room.
I sat down on the plastic-topped furniture and tried to get comfortable on the stiff couch, listening to the commotion in the kitchen. My mom was talking to my grandmother.
“Hummm. Acckk. Hummmmm ACK!”
The sound of Granny’s coughing was disturbing, but it had become white noise in this home. As did the verbal abuse of the Parrot.
“Oh What oh what! George!”
The bird was upset.
“Shut up Shimmy!”
My granny shouted from the kitchen at Shimmy — the aged parrot.
Shimalene, or Shimmy for short, was a macaw parrot that my grandfather had brought home from one of his naval assignments in 1960’s.
She had been beautiful in her prime; turquoise feathers like wisps of clouds and a green belly the hue of fresh leaves.
Parrots like her were tokens from a rainforest, as if they were plucked from paradise.
She had been quite the gift for the family.
Shimalene would sing choruses from popular songs. She would dance and do tricks for sunflower seeds. She’d even greet the children by name when they came home.
But now, the old bird sat in the cage before us, shivering and nervous.
She was no longer the majestic specimen she had once been, nor did she sing the same tunes. Her feathers no longer held the same luster, the turquoise having faded to a dull gray. Her belly was now sparsely covered with empty feather pores.
The token from paradise, now looked more like a naked rat with a beak.
I wanted to say hi to her. I stood up and stepped onto the protective vinyl tarp that lay over the carpet.
The clear cover was lined on each side by a layer of soot and the contrast between the protected carpet and the parts that had been exposed over the years was significant.
The vinyl walkway led to the Florida Room (another word for the outdoor patio that had a ceiling and insulation).
This was where they shoved the bird most of the time.
The Florida Room.
Shimmy was about 60 years old when she bit me for the first time.
Walking up to her, I saw that her eyes were closed. By closed, I mean a thin layer of veiny skin covered her milky eyeball.
I stuck my small, chubby finger in between the bars of the cage to touch her forehead. A squawking bark shot into the air, paralyzing me.
“Oh what oh what! Oh what oh what!”
The bird had sensed my finger coming, or maybe had seen it through one of her disgusting eyelids.
She bit into the base of my index finger’s cuticle and a crippling pain ran up my arm.
Shimmy continued.
“Oh what oh what! Oh what oh what!”
That was the phrase she screamed when she was afraid.
Out of the vast catalog of speech she had learned over the decades, only a few words and phrases remained.
She held on to the classics.
“Heart, heart of my heart…” was sung when she was hungry.
My mom told me it was her parent’s wedding song, but my granny dismissed that notion immediately.
“Terry you idiot. We didn’t have a wedding song. Who told you that? It’s that damned song Bridgette had to learn for her recital.”
But Shimmy’s main go-to was simply to scream.
“George!”
She did this whenever she heard arguing. Even a raised voice could get her going. Everyone would yell at her to stop, but his just made her yell it louder.
“George! Geeeeorrrrge!”
Someone would shake the cage or throw a shoe at it to scare her.
“Oh what oh what!”
The yelling would intensify.
“Shimmy! Shut up!”
The family would join in unison — a moment of rare harmony.
No one ever addressed why she had hung on to that name for so many years.
All the names she had learned — the children, the relatives, the fresh faces — my grandfather would try to impress them with Shimalene’s impressive memory and lexicon.
But all of the names, except one, had fallen victim to an aging brain.
George.
The issue was that no one knew who George was.
One day, she blurted it out (presumably after a mild stroke) and never stopped.
Shimmy was mean.
And like a tongue pressing on a toothache, I couldn’t help but mess with her. I approached the rusted faux-Victorian-era bird cage.
She sat perched atop a bar with her two elderly, sagging feet, loosely holding her grip.
The black metal enclosure was lined at the bottom with soggy issues of the National Enquirer and long-expired TV Guides.
I made a clicking sound to rouse her.
“Shhh Shhh. Hey there, Shimmy.”
The trembling bird turned her gross head and opened one eye with a piercing, icy stare.
(Her pupil would shift and dilate as she looked at me — thinking, calculating … contemplating ways to bite me.)
She was like a prisoner of war, hardened by the decades of domestic chaos her frigid, bird skeleton had witnessed.
Years ago one of her cellmates had taken the easy route to exit the Friel home — a timid spider monkey, far too sensitive for this world.
His name was Pepe, and his murder would add to my mother’s distrust of her family.
Next…The Monkey Murder theory gains credibility…
Visit to Granny’s Part 1:
Visit to Granny’s Part 2:
Join from the Beginning of the RACE!
CHASING CRAZY!
