Monkey Head
Originally published in Chicago Noir
On the hottest summer night I had experienced in Chicago or maybe anywhere, I sat on the front stoop and watched boys, perhaps signalled by dusk, assemble on bikes in front of the convenience store. Assemble may have been too orderly a word. Rather than formation, the group exuded an atomic feel, the promise that at any given moment, with the introduction of just one more boy, instability attained, movement would ensue. When that occurred, the boys began their nightly circling of the block. Leisurely pedalling their tiny bikes, designed for much smaller children, they could have been a circus act in the making, one in which jackals, without the guidance of a trainer, attempted the complicated task of filling time.
The boys gained with each pass the collective confidence of a mob, which provoked them to widen their circle to adjacent blocks until, I felt certain, they'd run into another group of boys, also out exploring the limits of circumference fate had provided. When the groups met, they might skirmish, a little bantering and shoving, but surely, I thought, they'd all get back on their bikes because it was too hot even to fight.
The heat had brought to my block the quietly festive air that accompanied imposed communal experience, in this case a hot cap of air which would not lift and under which everyone who could not get out of town was compelled to live. The entire neighborhood had moved outside. Standing or seated in metal folding chairs, in clusters or alone, the old, the very old, and women accompanied by their young arranged themselves and their provisions, coolers of drinks and food at their sides, as if preparing to lay siege to their own homes. The men stationed themselves alone, leaning in the contrapposto pose invented by Greek sculptors in a time before Pericles to invest stone with the off-kilter tilt of life. One hip supported all in a metaphor of what the men imagined themselves to be, what I had once imagined myself to be, a pillar upon which their families stood upright and off the ground.
Alone from each other and their families, at distances that looked prescribed, like sentinels these men smoked cigarette after cigarette. In the intermittent dark spaces between streetlights, they resembled solitary fireflies. Around them the neighborhood might have been lifted whole from an earlier part of America's short life, when people without TV or radio to separate them were reported to have mingled more, and with time not yet fractured into tiny bits were said to have been more amiable and languid, and generally, although they didn't live as long, were said to have had a better time.
Around ten that night a tribe of boys, kids from another neighborhood passed down the block on bikes and slowed. Dressed alike in white T-shirts and tan short pants, they had dyed their sneakers to look cut from the hide of a leopard or giraffe. With a quick thrust, one of the boys stuck a rubber monkey head, broken and roughly abused, on top of the decorative hood ornament lifted from a Mercedes that Bobby Pando, the block's drug dealer, had bolted to the nose of his Ford panel truck.
Everyone on the block knew Bobby Pando's love for his Ford panel truck extended beyond the Mercedes hood ornament. For its side Bobby commissioned a mural of a deer, or an animal with horns, standing atop a hump of green. I had developed a nodding acquaintance with Bobby, one predicated on the understanding that Bobby Pando did not live on my block; I lived on his. Often Bobby Pando strolled the block with his mate Stevie B or the fellow called Mr. Panfish, and whenever he saw me, he waved and called out, “Lou,” which is not my name.
“Yo, Lou, what's new with you?”
“Nothing Bobby, nothing's new.”
“Lou, if nothing's new, that's something.”
Once, gesturing me closer, Bobby cupped his hands to whisper directly into my ear.
“Lou,” he said. “From now on, and I've talked this over with the guys,” he thumbed air in the direction of Mr. Panfish and Stevie B., “you have nothing to fear on this block from anyone my age.”
I circled the day on his calendar, marking it: Limited Good News.
All that was left of the monkey head to let the world know it had been a monkey was one ear, a patch of raggedy black fur running across the crown of its head, and two near-enucleated button-shaped oogly eyes. There was its ear-to-ear toothy grin, but that could have belonged to any species, a bear, say, or raccoon. It was remarkably little evidence to go on, but someone called out, just after the kids left, “Look at the monkey,” and when no one disagreed, like the proving of many things, that first naming became what was thereafter called truth.
Coming back from whatever crime had recently engaged him, Bobby didn't see the monkey head immediately, but when he did, being drunk and happy and carrying an aluminum bat, he took a swing at it. He missed badly, swinging under the monkey head and smashing in one of his truck's headlamps and a chunk of its ornamental grill. All talk on the block ceased. The solitary men returned weight to both legs and approached the truck from all sides. I moved with them.
A drunk's mood is a delicate thing, and Bobby's, as he righted himself from his fall (he had taken a big enough cut to fall down, and he did), was no longer cheerful. Darkening, he turned to face the grinning monkey head. Always overeager at the plate—and elsewhere, too, some of the girls on the block muttered—Bobby swung again, this time harder, again falling and again landing his swing on the Ford's ornamental grill, more of it now in the street around him than on the Ford.
With difficulty, he picked himself up, and the foreign tribe of boys, back from some skirmish, set their bikes down and cautiously—Bobby still had the bat—joined the loose circle of men around him.
When Bobby Pando looked from boy to man to boy to man, I looked with him and saw faces made even more passive and blank by the intensity of their curiosity about what might happen next. Bobby turned from them to what was left of the rubber monkey's head, and looking into that face, pondering those oogly eyes and that ear-to-ear grin, appeared to be attempting to stick a finger in and take the temperature of the depths of some unfathomable confusion, perhaps his life.
There was just so much time a drunk needed to reflect on confusion, and Bobby, lunging sideways, took another cut, a good one, not at the monkey, but at the inner ring of boys. They easily danced back, swelling with a collective laugh, then settling, their mood now darkened, as they focused on the threat that was Bobby Pando.
But the gyro in Bobby's head had gone all topsy. It spun him and he went down hard, bat skittering free with a diminishing sound, a clank, clank, clank of aluminum on asphalt that drew the outer circle of men closer together. If they wished they could have reached out and grasped each other's hands.
I checked my watch. It was close to ten-thirty, and Bobby, flat on the street, groped through shards of his ornamental grill and glass from his headlamp for the bat. Right then is when I heard, and men standing around me later confirmed, it a kind of hissing sound. The sound came from Bobby Pando. Some men said later, when they tried to explain, that it sounded almost like a song. “It undulated,” one fellow offered, “sort of like a song.”
Bobby tried to right himself. He was just beginning to assemble the complicated series of activities that would eventually, if accomplished in the correct sequence, enable him to stand, when a meaty kid, larger than the rest—evidently starting from down the block because by the time he reached Bobby he was traveling that fast—drove his bike over Bobby Pando. It was quick. A thump-thump as the bike passed over Bobby's back. And the song? Then everyone heard it. To me, it sounded uncomplicated as death might turn out to be, just a quickly diminishing gush as something sang itself free from Bobby Pando's chest.
Panfish and Stevie B. assisted Bobby into his van, and Panfish slid into the driver's seat to squeal away not with anger or urgency but insolence. They peeled off, the monkey's head still in place, its one near-intact oogly eye facing forward.
When it was quiet again or a city block's equivalent of quiet, the women, first one, then all, gathered their children, folded chairs and closed coolers. They moved slowly because it was far too hot to move otherwise, but they moved, retreated inside or to screened front porches, and I did, too, a shadowy shape joining other shadowy shapes looking out.
On the hottest summer night I had experienced in Chicago or maybe anywhere, I sat on the front stoop and watched boys, perhaps signalled by dusk, assemble on bikes in front of the convenience store. Assemble may have been too orderly a word. Rather than formation, the group exuded an atomic feel, the promise that at any given moment, with the introduction of just one more boy, instability attained, movement would ensue. When that occurred, the boys began their nightly circling of the block. Leisurely pedalling their tiny bikes, designed for much smaller children, they could have been a circus act in the making, one in which jackals, without the guidance of a trainer, attempted the complicated task of filling time.
The boys gained with each pass the collective confidence of a mob, which provoked them to widen their circle to adjacent blocks until, I felt certain, they'd run into another group of boys, also out exploring the limits of circumference fate had provided. When the groups met, they might skirmish, a little bantering and shoving, but surely, I thought, they'd all get back on their bikes because it was too hot even to fight.
The heat had brought to my block the quietly festive air that accompanied imposed communal experience, in this case a hot cap of air which would not lift and under which everyone who could not get out of town was compelled to live. The entire neighborhood had moved outside. Standing or seated in metal folding chairs, in clusters or alone, the old, the very old, and women accompanied by their young arranged themselves and their provisions, coolers of drinks and food at their sides, as if preparing to lay siege to their own homes. The men stationed themselves alone, leaning in the contrapposto pose invented by Greek sculptors in a time before Pericles to invest stone with the off-kilter tilt of life. One hip supported all in a metaphor of what the men imagined themselves to be, what I had once imagined myself to be, a pillar upon which their families stood upright and off the ground.
Alone from each other and their families, at distances that looked prescribed, like sentinels these men smoked cigarette after cigarette. In the intermittent dark spaces between streetlights, they resembled solitary fireflies. Around them the neighborhood might have been lifted whole from an earlier part of America's short life, when people without TV or radio to separate them were reported to have mingled more, and with time not yet fractured into tiny bits were said to have been more amiable and languid, and generally, although they didn't live as long, were said to have had a better time.
Around ten that night a tribe of boys, kids from another neighborhood passed down the block on bikes and slowed. Dressed alike in white T-shirts and tan short pants, they had dyed their sneakers to look cut from the hide of a leopard or giraffe. With a quick thrust, one of the boys stuck a rubber monkey head, broken and roughly abused, on top of the decorative hood ornament lifted from a Mercedes that Bobby Pando, the block's drug dealer, had bolted to the nose of his Ford panel truck.
Everyone on the block knew Bobby Pando's love for his Ford panel truck extended beyond the Mercedes hood ornament. For its side Bobby commissioned a mural of a deer, or an animal with horns, standing atop a hump of green. I had developed a nodding acquaintance with Bobby, one predicated on the understanding that Bobby Pando did not live on my block; I lived on his. Often Bobby Pando strolled the block with his mate Stevie B or the fellow called Mr. Panfish, and whenever he saw me, he waved and called out, “Lou,” which is not my name.
“Yo, Lou, what's new with you?”
“Nothing Bobby, nothing's new.”
“Lou, if nothing's new, that's something.”
Once, gesturing me closer, Bobby cupped his hands to whisper directly into my ear.
“Lou,” he said. “From now on, and I've talked this over with the guys,” he thumbed air in the direction of Mr. Panfish and Stevie B., “you have nothing to fear on this block from anyone my age.”
I circled the day on his calendar, marking it: Limited Good News.
All that was left of the monkey head to let the world know it had been a monkey was one ear, a patch of raggedy black fur running across the crown of its head, and two near-enucleated button-shaped oogly eyes. There was its ear-to-ear toothy grin, but that could have belonged to any species, a bear, say, or raccoon. It was remarkably little evidence to go on, but someone called out, just after the kids left, “Look at the monkey,” and when no one disagreed, like the proving of many things, that first naming became what was thereafter called truth.
Coming back from whatever crime had recently engaged him, Bobby didn't see the monkey head immediately, but when he did, being drunk and happy and carrying an aluminum bat, he took a swing at it. He missed badly, swinging under the monkey head and smashing in one of his truck's headlamps and a chunk of its ornamental grill. All talk on the block ceased. The solitary men returned weight to both legs and approached the truck from all sides. I moved with them.
A drunk's mood is a delicate thing, and Bobby's, as he righted himself from his fall (he had taken a big enough cut to fall down, and he did), was no longer cheerful. Darkening, he turned to face the grinning monkey head. Always overeager at the plate—and elsewhere, too, some of the girls on the block muttered—Bobby swung again, this time harder, again falling and again landing his swing on the Ford's ornamental grill, more of it now in the street around him than on the Ford.
With difficulty, he picked himself up, and the foreign tribe of boys, back from some skirmish, set their bikes down and cautiously—Bobby still had the bat—joined the loose circle of men around him.
When Bobby Pando looked from boy to man to boy to man, I looked with him and saw faces made even more passive and blank by the intensity of their curiosity about what might happen next. Bobby turned from them to what was left of the rubber monkey's head, and looking into that face, pondering those oogly eyes and that ear-to-ear grin, appeared to be attempting to stick a finger in and take the temperature of the depths of some unfathomable confusion, perhaps his life.
There was just so much time a drunk needed to reflect on confusion, and Bobby, lunging sideways, took another cut, a good one, not at the monkey, but at the inner ring of boys. They easily danced back, swelling with a collective laugh, then settling, their mood now darkened, as they focused on the threat that was Bobby Pando.
But the gyro in Bobby's head had gone all topsy. It spun him and he went down hard, bat skittering free with a diminishing sound, a clank, clank, clank of aluminum on asphalt that drew the outer circle of men closer together. If they wished they could have reached out and grasped each other's hands.
I checked my watch. It was close to ten-thirty, and Bobby, flat on the street, groped through shards of his ornamental grill and glass from his headlamp for the bat. Right then is when I heard, and men standing around me later confirmed, it a kind of hissing sound. The sound came from Bobby Pando. Some men said later, when they tried to explain, that it sounded almost like a song. “It undulated,” one fellow offered, “sort of like a song.”
Bobby tried to right himself. He was just beginning to assemble the complicated series of activities that would eventually, if accomplished in the correct sequence, enable him to stand, when a meaty kid, larger than the rest—evidently starting from down the block because by the time he reached Bobby he was traveling that fast—drove his bike over Bobby Pando. It was quick. A thump-thump as the bike passed over Bobby's back. And the song? Then everyone heard it. To me, it sounded uncomplicated as death might turn out to be, just a quickly diminishing gush as something sang itself free from Bobby Pando's chest.
Panfish and Stevie B. assisted Bobby into his van, and Panfish slid into the driver's seat to squeal away not with anger or urgency but insolence. They peeled off, the monkey's head still in place, its one near-intact oogly eye facing forward.
When it was quiet again or a city block's equivalent of quiet, the women, first one, then all, gathered their children, folded chairs and closed coolers. They moved slowly because it was far too hot to move otherwise, but they moved, retreated inside or to screened front porches, and I did, too, a shadowy shape joining other shadowy shapes looking out.