Monkey Bite

When I was three years old I got bit by the monkey.

I was with my dad. We were at looking at the animals at an
outdoor traveling circus in a small town in Texas. It was
nighttime, and as I remember it was really dark. There was
mud on the lower flaps of the red and yellow tents. It had
rained recently and the tents were dirty and mud-spattered.

The animals were all in their cages. Above and behind their
heads were these soft yellow lights, but because of the angle
of the lights, their faces were in shadow, and they were
hooded in darkness.

Circuses are supposed to be fun places, full of magic tricks, of
daring do, of hire wire hijinx and hurry-hurry-hurry-step-
right-up excitement, but I never saw it that way. I never wanted
to run away and join the circus when I was a kid. I had a
teacher say, "Most kids want to join the circus at some point in
their lives." Not this kid. Not once, even. Circuses are
supposed to have this atmosphere of cheeriness about them,
but I look at the people who work in circuses and they don't
look all that happy. They have dark circles under their eyes.
A lot of circus workers have cracked brown teeth, or gaps in
their mouths where teeth used to be. Lost in barroom fights.
Or they didn't care and just let them go. A lot of the women
have tired yellow skin and the men have big red noses jagged
with little tiny red veins that crawl into the whites of their eyes.
And have you ever noticed how many guys in the circus have
missing fingers and ears? It's got to be a hard life. They don't
really live anywhere. They have to move around from city to
city, from town to town every other week.

Which is kind of funny, because that's exactly what we do,
though not every other week. It just seems like that. My dad is
in the United States Air Force, and he is stationed in a
different city every year or so, so we are constantly moving.
We've been doing it for as long as I can remember.

If I were going to say my family was like a circus, I'd have to
say my dad was the ring master because the ring master is in
charge of everything and always calls the shots. That's not a
bad job anyway. You get to wear a long coat and a tall hat
and talk into a megaphone, and everybody shuts up and
listens to you when you start talking.

I'm tempted to say my brother older Wes would be the guy with
the broom who sweeps up the elephant poop, but there is
probably more to him than that. I don't like my brother Wes
much, as you can probably tell. Well, I do, but I don't. My
feelings are constantly changing about that.

If I have to give him a job in the circus, let's say he's the guy
who does tricks on horseback. He is one of those kinds of
people who gets angry when the attention is not on him, and
woe unto you if you look away from his magnificent
performance. He'd be likely to lasso you out of the audience
and drag you around the ring by the ankles.

I would have to be the clown. Don't ask me why. I think getting
hit in the face with a cream pie is funny as all get out. And you
get to wear white makeup and a big bulbous nose and big
rainbow hair.

My mom would have to be the lion tamer. That would seem to
make me and my brother Wes the lions, but it's not quite that
simple. My mom has had to tame a lot of stuff while we were
growing up. Mostly I think it's been about raising me and Wes
without my dad. I have a dad, but he is away most of the time.
I know, cry me a river. This one time at the circus when I got
bit by the monkey is one of the times he was around.

My sister Kay would be the trapeze artist. I can see her all
decked out in a one-piece bathing suit with sparkles all over it.
She would be going back and forth, back and forth on the
swing, high up over the crowd, getting her momentum up.
Then she would let go and do a three and a half back
somersault. She would be suspended in mid-air, (the light
hitting her just right) muscles flexed, her hair in a cute ponytail.
Reaching out, waiting for the swing to come back. And she
stays that way. Frozen. Forever.

My sister Kay never got old enough to swing on a trapeze.
See, she died when she was a baby. She had this thing called
spinal meningitis. This disease was going around the military
base we lived on. Even grown up soldiers were getting it and
getting sick, though for the most part they weren't dying,
though some of them did. One day she was fine, then the next
day she had a fever. My mother took her to the hospital, but
she died that night.

My dad was flying. He got the news over his radio that he had
an emergency situation and had to come back to base. That
happens a lot. He gets a lot of news about his family over the
radio while he is in the air. When my brother Wes was born he
was 70,000 feet over the Utah desert in a U2. A U2 is a spy
plane.

My brother and I didn't really understand what had happened
to Kay. We are only 14 months apart, so we're pretty close in
age, so that would have made him four at the time. We knew
something was wrong because she wasn't there but we didn't
understand why she wasn't there. We looked around the
house for her.

Wes went up to my mother, who was crying, and asked where
Kay was. My mother said Kay was gone and she wasn't
coming back. My brother said that he knew she was coming
back. Then my mom said that, no, she wasn't, that she was
dead and she was never coming back. Wes said he knew she
was coming back, and then walked away.

That's so much like him. He never listens to anything! That's
also the way he deals with problems. He just acts like the
problems don't exist.

So that's actually why my father was taking us to the circus.
Because Kay died. My mother was really really sad and really
unable to do anything except lie in bed. So that's why he took
us, get us out of her hair. This was in Del Rio, Texas. This
was nine years ago in 1968. Del Rio means "Of The River" in
Spanish.

The show was interesting. A lot of colors and noise. All the
adults looked strange, though. Like their heads were too big
and their clothes were too tight. At least that's how I remember
it.

After the show we went to look at the animals. My father had
me in arms, and was lifting me up to the cages so I could get a
better look. I saw the monkey and I reached out to pat it. I'm
not sure why I thought that was such a good idea. Monkeys
are ugly, vicious looking creatures, aren't they? They don't
look friendly. They look like short hairy sailors.

I reached out and curled my fingers around one of the bars,
and then the monkey opened his mouth, flashed his big teeth
hurled himself at the cage. His teeth dug into my fingers, and
ripped into my soft pudgy baby flesh. I jerked my hand away
and blood was suddenly everywhere, on my clothes, on my
father's face. The monkey made a lot of growling grunting
noises. Angry sounds coming from his angry lungs. My father
got blood on his face because I was trying to crawl over his
head.

Everybody started panicking. I remember a lot of crazy
cacophony. I was rushed to the first aid station. The circus
people took care of me. This was in the days before
everybody started suing everybody for any little thing, but they
must have been scared. They shouldn't have been. My dad
was never the kind of man who dealt with his troubles by suing
people. And trust me, he could have sued plenty of people.

They wrapped two big large cotton bandages around the
middle finger and first finger of my right hand. I went home
and showed it to my mother. I held up my fingers, flashed
them like a V. The peace sign. In bandages.