Monkey Boy by Francisco Goldman (free ebook reader for pc txt) 📗

It happened so often, all the different times blend into one long memory like the loud blur of a fast train passing on the opposite track.

HaHaHa—that roared fake laughter of his that I hated. Is that what they call you, Monkey Boy? I can hear him snarling; his voice inside me always ready to mock, even though I don’t remember him ever saying exactly those words.

Whenever I think about the one beating, when I was about ten, that must have shattered a barrier inside of him and led to all the others that came after, I remember the blind coin collector. It wasn’t his fault, but the blind coin collector seems so intrinsic to how it happened, like in a fairy tale where an old hermit deep in the forest gives the young man passing through on his way to the king’s castle something with magical powers that will later either help or doom him in the completion of his task. My father knew every corner of Boston and took me to neighborhoods as a boy that I haven’t seen since. The one where the blind coin collector lived was a street of formidable but drab yellowish apartment buildings, no green growing anywhere, parked cars, windows giving off a gritty glare in the cold sunlight. That was during the early stages of my fixation with Matchbox toys. The minutia of detail in every small, painted die-cast car and truck entranced me; whenever I remember the detachable plastic ladder that came with the fire engine, its minute yellow rungs and rails, I still feel a pang of pleasure. The military ambulance with a Union Jack on top. All those diminutively armed and weaponized tanks, missile launchers, troop carriers. The trailer truck with its two dozen tiny cages holding minuscule white ducks with just perceptible orange beaks and, on its white cab door in green print you practically needed a magnifying glass to read: campbell canards ltd. I have a sense now that certain kinds of personalities are drawn to small, intricate things, a smallness that focuses fantasies or that fantasies fit easily inside of, shutting out the world’s terrors, even as, “playing,” you reenact some of those terrors on a tiny scale.

At the Music Box in the town square a Matchbox toy cost forty-nine cents. In his bedroom closet my father kept cardboard banker boxes in which he stored tax and financial records, family home movies never watched by anybody, and in one box his coin collection, comprised of stacked rows of clear plastic-capped tubes, each tube filled to the top with silver John F. Kennedy half-dollar coins. The blind man was a professional coin collector who sold coins from all over the world out of his bare little apartment, coins he could identify by touch and kept catalogued by memory in cabinets. He was who’d advised my father to invest in newly minted JFK half-dollars. My father always had these local expert connections that only a veteran insider Boston guy like himself could have. But I’ve never heard or read anywhere that people who were astute enough to collect JFK coins made a killing.

Every JFK half-dollar coin, though, was worth one Matchbox toy. All I had to do was sneak into my parents’ bedroom, pilfer a coin from one of those tubes inside the box in the closet, walk up Namoset Avenue to the square, and go into the Music Box. The Matchbox toys were displayed behind glass on two shelves beneath the cash register. I’d crouch down, choose the one I wanted, and slide a shiny JFK fifty-cent coin over the counter to the shop owner, who in return would hand me the boxed toy inside a crisp brown paper bag, and a penny in change. Over and over, for a few months, we repeated this transaction. The mind-his-own-business shop owner never asked why I always came into his store carrying exactly one JFK half-dollar. But my father finally made the connection between his disappearing coins and my growing fleet of Matchbox toys. One evening he burst into my bedroom, roared a couple of questions, then beat me up in a way he never had before. I retain a visceral memory of shock and terror, screaming while frantically crab walking and being kicked across the floor, my head swatted off and spinning in a corner.

Bert could get into trouble for some of those beatings now. The time I forgot we were supposed to go to Aunt Hannah’s for Rosh Hashanah dinner and came home late from playing yard football is one. Just inside the front door, he kneed me so forcefully in the small of the back that my legs were left paralyzed—only temporarily it turned out later. The emergency room doctor, with a sharp look, tersely asked how I’d become injured, and when my father answered that I’d hurt myself playing football, his mouth tightened and his somber eyes settled on my face for a moment and looked away.

I was the only one Bert ever hit. With my mother and sister, it was insults, bullying, berating, derision. But he did more harm to them than to me. Oh yes he did, I think.

One snowy evening almost exactly three years ago now, after one of those rushed trips to visit Mamita when I was up from Mexico for a few weeks, I splurged on the Acela back to New York, hoping to arrive in time for a book presentation at NYU. José Borgini, a Mexican writer I knew, had invited me, along with a couple of other writers, to talk about his novel, now out in English translation. It was right around here, not that far past Route 128, that snow started to fall pretty heavily, but that wasn’t why the train came to a halt. A teenage boy had committed suicide by throwing himself in front of the Acela’s sleek locomotive. Soon I saw rescue workers and police and overheard a conductor standing on