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

You mean like the guys who did “Jump Around”?

Yeah, I was already using that title before I ever heard about that group.

Sure sounds like it was a house of pain, she says. So you were talking about José Martí on the radio tonight?

No, I answer. They wanted to talk about General Cara de Culo. I explain a little about Cara de Culo, the bishop’s murder, the general running for president. I don’t tell Marianne that it was as a consequence of my writing on that case that I had to leave Mexico City. Now I’ve been exiled to New York City, too, in a sense, like Martí. I didn’t want to leave Mexico, but I fled, there’s no other word for it, heeding that warning from the consul. Then I vowed to try to live in the here and now of New York, and now Boston, USA. “What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods.” Thoreau wrote that. I’ve tried to think of it as a motto. Though my past isn’t exactly a fantasy novel either. It’s not like I can just pack it up in a cardboard box and leave it outside Housing Works.

We’re into our second bottle of wine when Marianne begins to tell me about the last class reunion, about Ian Brown, why he’s as much an asshole as ever. Ian’s become a big deal contractor around Atlanta, building McMansions and shopping malls. According to Marianne, he got his start backed by his wife’s family money. But Ian is a fellow alumni of our middle school underachiever program, why should his success surprise? Artie Kaplan, another of his old neighborhood friends, was at the reunion, says Marianne, and he sat at Ian’s table. An early investor in some of those Route 128 tech start-ups, Artie is now a wealthy man too. Artie told Ian that his wife had left him for another woman, and Ian couldn’t get over that. For the rest of the night he kept shouting: Artie, your wife left you for another woman, jabbing his finger at him and laughing until finally Artie would shout back: She did, that bitch! Same Ian as ever, says Marianne.

The Sandy Koufax of Jewish bullies, I say.

She responds with an uncertain grin. I don’t think she gets the joke.

Ian gave me the name Monkey Boy, I say. Do you remember that?

I do, she says. He’s such a jerk.

I was called Gols too. Remember that one? I give her a fake smile.

Ian and his friend Jake used to call you Pablo too. Pablo, Monkey Boy, it was a racist thing, wasn’t it. I didn’t realize that back then. Now it seems too obvious.

You probably always thought of me as just another Jewish boy, I say.

Even a word like “halfie” wasn’t around back then. You were categorized as the one thing you most obviously might be and that was that, not that it’s changed so much since. Mexicans are always surprised that gringos have no word for or concept of “mestizaje.”

I knew your mom was foreign, she says. But I remember being surprised when I walked down your street and all the windows had those electric menorahs, except your house. You had poinsettias in your picture window. Am I remembering right?

Plastic poinsettias.

She laughs. I told Lana that I didn’t know poinsettias were a Chanukah flower too. I was a St. Joe’s girl, what did I know?

Monkey Boy, Chimp Face, that all started back in middle school, I say. But what if I did look kind of like a monkey back then? You know how teenagers are.

Marianne gives me a skeptical look.

Seriously, I say. I’ve given this a lot of thought over the years, and I’ve concluded that probably nobody in middle school looked more like a monkey than I did.

Okay, she says. You have curly hair, your ears aren’t small, but I really don’t think you look like a monkey, and I didn’t think so back then either.

I greatly resent that you consider curly hair a simian feature, I say. That’s a totally false stereotype, Marianne. When was the last time you actually went to the zoo and looked at monkeys?

After a few seconds of near panic in her eyes, I mime a theatrical guffaw, and Marianne bursts into laughter, then shakes her head, an affectionate shine in her eyes. Abruptly, her expression goes still, her brows lift, and she says, But you went through all those years thinking that what Ian and those kids said was true, didn’t you? Oh Frank.

I shrug and say, I guess. Well, who cares now.

A memory from high school of standing in front of the bathroom mirror and in a spasm of self-loathing punching my own face as hard as I could, blood from my lips smudging my cheeks, smearing it with fingers, punching myself in the face again, spitting at the mirror.

But as soon as you got away from our town, she says, did you stop thinking of yourself like that?

I take a drink and say, Pretty much. Then I ask, That day when you walked down my street and saw poinsettias, was I with you?

She looks like she’s quickly calculating a sum. No, she says. But I wanted to talk to you. I walked over to your house, and I was trying to work up the courage to ring your doorbell, and at that exact moment, your father pulled into your driveway in his car. When he got out he looked at me like I must be a drug dealer, there to sell his son drugs. I was afraid of him, so I just kept walking.

You were afraid of my father?

Of course I was, she says. You used to tell me horrible things. He was abusive and violent with you, right?

Yeah, I really hated him.

You used to tell me that too.

But it’s not like you had an easy time with your own dad, I say.

But I never thought I hated him, she