Tag: Monkey as Pet

GETTING THIS MONKEY OFF OUR BACKS

Last words from Chapter 5:

“OK. This little piece was supposed to have been the epilogue, but… damnit, apparently it’s not. There was a little too much to cover. So once more I must say, once again, “Gee Whiz, be sure to stay tuned for Chapter 6, The Epilogue!“

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So… FYI: something totally unexpected happened approximately nine days into Gizmo’s visit. I got a phone call from California. It was Sandy. Of course. I didn’t know anybody else out there at the time. And after all the hello’s and how are you’s and how’s Gizmo doing small talk, she got to the point: her return was going to be delayed for another week. Some technicality. But she was sorry.

And there it was: Gizmo was ours for another seven days or so. Just like that.

That sudden change in plans kind of rocked us, to be honest. A confusing, mixed bag of emotions. Confusing like, Oh my God… NO! and, at the same time, Yay! Because we’d come to love the little critter, no one (I believe) more than me. He was continually growing on us. All of us, not just me. He was  becoming one of the family. To me, a tiny baby brother. Still, a real handful though, for all of us.

What could we do? Obviously nothing, while Sandy and Brian were on the West Coast. So inevitably, we just rolled with the punch. We looked at our work schedules and set to figuring how we were further going to tweak our lives. We could do another week. We had to. And life went on with the little bugger.

Missy giving the Giz a drink

Chris entertaining Gizmo; Gizmo entertaing Chris…

I have to admit, the notoriety was still fun, albeit quite a bit taxing on our energy levels. The Giz had turned us into local, small town celebrities. Phone still ringing off the hook from families and individuals just dying to come over to have a taste of the Gizmo experience. Appointments still being pencilled in. So many of them, our home run was like a doctor’s office. And Gizmo himself was still fun. A barrel-of-monkeys fun. He had more energy than the Energizer Bunny, tearing around the house for three hours non-stop, wearing us all out. And then bless his little heart, all of a sudden, dropping straight to sleep in his tracks. Usually in one of our laps. And then he was so cute. And tiny. A little handful of silent sweetness. A joy to behold.

Sleeping against Chris’s belly…

Of course then unthinking someone in the next room would do something, like noisily pushing a chair back under the dining room table. Gizmo’s eyes would blink back open and then, bang! Look out. In a single second, he’d leap right up off your lap and be right back on his happy little warpath! The monkey naps lasted only fifteen minutes, that being all he’d need for his next Tasmanian four- or five- hour tour of deviltry. I have to admit, I’m grinning just thinking about it.

He loved games. Every day, quite a few times a day, Gizmo enjoyed his “egg hunts.” But instead of Easter eggs, he’d be searching all over for my empty, plastic 35 mm film canisters. Empty of film rolls,  that is. What they had in them back then were his favorite treats: raisins, grapes, and pretzels. He loved popping off those film canister caps for his “Crackerjack-type “prizes” within.

And boy, did that little rug rat ever love to wrestle!

Wrestling…

That was the fun that wore me out the most. I’ve always loved going at it with frisky little kittens and cats, to the point where my hands would always end up with happy those itchy little criss-cross cat-scratches all over.  But Gizmo never bit me. Often he would playfully close his teeth on my hands in what I knew were little love-bites. Just like cats do, only when they do it they’re signaling you to back off. Gizmo. He was a wrestling ball of electric energy!

Of course his favorite game unfortunately was still snitching one of one of my cassette tapes and absconding, with me the easy-to-escape posse humping behind on his trail.

So, all in all, entertaining our little guest wouldn’t be all that hard to endure for an extra week. Just gloriously exhausting

But… oddly, there was something going on with me that at the time I was consciously unaware of. Something subconscious, and psychological. It’s like I had fallen under a spell. So much so it was like Gizmo’s and my brains had practically merged. And I was thinking about him all the time, whether I was in school or at home. If I wasn’t talking about him with somebody, I was probably worrying about him. So OK, I guess I’ll have to call it what it was: co-dependence.

I didn’t know it before Gizmo came into our lives, but I was just a damn simian co-dependent waiting to happen. When he was happy, I washappy. When he was sad,so was I. And when he was very, very sad, as he was every evening when it was time for him to be put back in lock-up for the night like some little prisoner (which he literally was, which he had to be), oh man, I felt so terribly guilty. A lot of it was still the guilt hanging over me from shutting his tail in the door.

But most of it was… well, he was just so damn human. So it was kind of like, Hey, is it humane to lock up a very human-like child alone in a cage every night? No! Of course not. Would I want to be locked up in a cage every night? No. I would not. And you know, if the damn cage had been a lot larger, I think I probably would’ve crawled right in there with him to keep him company and keep him from getting so damn sad and lonely. Yes, that’s pretty messed up exaggeration, I know.

Oh, Gizmo was an artist when it came to tugging at my heart strings. I mean big time. Because whenever he would finally allow himself to be placed back in the cage for the night, he’d drop heavily down into the bottom compartment of his cage; select one of his two security pillows (usually the Chicken, occasionally Garfield); pick it up and hug it in his arms ever so tightly to his little chest for all he was worth; and then begin his slow, tragic rocking. Back… and forth, back… and forth. And you couldn’t cheer him up no way, no how. I knew a lot about depression back then, and the word “depressed” would begin echoing in my brain. Gizmo seemed so depressed. I couldn’t blame him. And his depression began to osmose into my own head. Yes, unhealthy, I know but I was so wrapped up in him, I couldn’t think about me.

And the real kicker was, he’d make his face into the saddest mask you could ever dream up. The epitome of heartbreak. The Oh woe is poor old me! And nothing you might think of to do to try to cheer him up would have even a sliver of a chance of working. That expression would remain tattooed on for the night. It was his nightly night-time face and that’s all she wrote.

There used to be this very famous circus clown in the 1950s and 60s you might have heard of named Emmet Kelly. His signature “character” was the world’s saddest clown, “Weary Willie,” and his face was always SO sad, his audiences would be overcome with a sense of deep sadness even while they giggled at his antics.

I could swear that Gizmo was channeling Emmet Kelly. Yes, his Weary Willie’s face was killing me. And I was at a loss as to what ever to do about it. So that was it. On went his little life. Comedy during the day time. Tragedy during the night.

And time marched on…

Days later, the phone rang again. And yes, it was once again Sandy. So, I was thinking to myself as I picked up the phone, Wow, apparently the end has arrived. I said Hello,” with anxious feelings. Yes, I’d really become so attached to the little fellow but, you know, if he had to go… he’d have to go, right?

But that wasn’t what this call was about. At all.

Sandy, it turned out, was calling to let us know that, unfortunately, she’d just discovered she had been suffering all along from (wait for it) an allergy to Gizmo. While in California, all the hives and breathing problems she’d been tolerating for months had (poof!) just disappeared.

(Can you imagine what was starting to go through my brain at hearing this news?)

She went on. It was impossible therefore, she informed me, for her to keep on keeping the Giz. So therefore…

(Impossible? Again… can you imagine what was starting to go through my brain at hearing this news?)

…she was being forced to consider finding some alternate caretakers to assume the responsibility for not only caring for the little guy, but to also become active partners in the Helping Hands Foundation program, with all that might entail…

(By the way, back in 1989 the expressions OMG and WTF? had yet to be coined.)

… so, she went on, it would seem that the most likely candidates for this responsibility would be our family since Gizmo  had so successfully bonded with, and taken such a monkeyshine to, us.

Bing! Freeze-framed!

Say what!? I felt as if somebody had just buried an axe in my already-stove-in chest. But even so, old immature and caught-off-guard me (a guy I just loved to hate),I was actually already asking myself, Should I say No?

(Wait, had I just actually asked, SHOULD I? See? What was I thinking? What was wrong with me?)

Should I say Yes? Should I say Maybe? OK, my world, my life was spinning. And slowly picking up speed.  

On the one hand, I of course really loved little Gizmo. So much. But on the other hand, there were qualms. Lots of qualms. Tsunami qualms, without even considering the soon-to-come Phyllis Qualms. Oh, inside I knew I wanted to say No, of course not and say it right away. But…

I also somehow sorta wanted to give in and say yes, too. So there I was, standing in the center of a crossroads intersection with heavy traffic was barreling head-on at me from all four lanes.

I really needed to stall, obviously. Be wishy-washy about it, I told myself. The truth was I was honestly feeling awfully damned wishy-washy inside anyway. Plus, damnit, I was cursed as being one of those guys who, for whatever reason, always found it next to impossible to say no to most requests. Never wanting to hurt anyone’s feelings, you know. But meanwhile, my brain was playing ping-pong with Maybe this, maybe that… maybe I might even… really want to do it. I mean…? Agonizing that Jeez though, if WE don’t take him, then who will? Finding another caretaker for my little buddy wouldn’t be very easy, if not impossible. And even so, what would this mean for Gizmo? Getting bounced around again and again? How so unfair would that be?

So I stalled. “Uhmmm… not sure. Hafta talk to Phyl about it. See, I really don’t know, you know?”

Whatever! Damn, why hadn’t Phyllis picked up the stupid phone? I said goodbye and hung up, my stomach one big, churning, gastrointestinal merry-go-round. But at least I hadn’t said yes. At least there was that. But neither had I said no. I’d just bought me a little time is all. But after that call, it was Should I or Shouldn’t I? rolling around in my head. And… could I even sayI maybe even might… actually want to take on Gizmo for two or more years? Which is what the Helping Hands Foundation required.

Surprisingly Phyl did not automatically scream NO! ARE YOU CRAZY!? right in my face when I told her what the call had been about, which is what anybody who knew her would have expected her to do. That, in itself, unnerved me. I mean, what was going on in her mind? Everything would’ve been so simple if she had just put her foot right down then and there.

Then again, she hadn’t exactly said yes either, had she. Nope. It was like she was coming across as, OK, let’s take some time and think about it, me being like…What, really? On such a possibly life-changing decision as THIS? Just, what, up and suddenly increase our family by one more, that one being a hairy little mammal-with-a-tail to boot, and Phyl not even liking any animals one bit (except me, maybe)?

But wait just a minute. Maybe her game was Hey, if I just bide my time a little, the odds are that Tom’ll come around to his senses by time the final bell rings. So sure, let him paint himself into a corner and then, when the stark reality of just how much hard WORK for him a yes vote is going to mean (him being the totally lazy one), and how many drastic changes in his good-old, laid-back lifestyle a yes vote will require (heh heh), HE’ll be the one ending up saying no himself. So then it won’t be on MY conscience: he’ll have made the decision himself, not me.

It’s true, Phyl did have that wily side sometimes…

So much to think about! So hard to decide! Jeez! If I were the type of writer who was into clichés, right now I’d probably be tapping away, “I was between a rock and a hard place, the devil and the deep blue sea. I didn’t know whether to fish or cut bait.” Fortunately, I never use clichés, so I’m not going to do that.

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Back to the dilemma. So, I could say No, we can’t keep him and… then what? Poof! Life would simply go back to normal…? Well normal, except for the part where then I’d have to live with this painful hole in my heart and guilty soul for having heartlessly kicked the Giz to the curb. Could I live with that?

And if I said OK, we’ll keep him…? What all would that actually mean?

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That night my guilty feelings doubled when faced with Gizmo’s sad Emmett Kelly face once again. And sure, how much sadder would his face become when I coldly showed him the door? I’d already been staying up later and later with him, but that night I lasted into the near-morning. Me, just inches away, just outside the cage for company; rocking in my rocking chair and reading Stephen King to myself (often aloud so he’d have a hopefully comforting  voice); and Giz, rocking his woe-is-me chicken pillow back and forth down there in the basement of his living quarters.

Tom and Gizmo. The odd couple.

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Finally. The hard decision came three days later. It had been a gut-wrenching, eternally long three days. There had been so much discussion pro and con, pro and con, ad infinitum, during which it had become more and more impossible for me to think. And damn, the onus had been placed on me and me alone to make the decision. Meanwhile, I could feel the family holding its collective breath. How nice of them to wait so patiently for me to see the light.

I remember sitting disconsolately on one of the sheet-covered steps one morning, half way up the staircase, and no doubt channeling Rodin’s The Thinker. I made myself take a good look around, all around, at my surroundings. And what did I finally allow myself to see? A home that now resembled the Badlands of the South Dakota hills. A desert of white-sheeted chair-sofa-and-dining-room-table “dunes.” Random monkey-toys spilled helter-skelter over the floors like random sprouting clusters of cacti.  A traveler would do well to watch where he stepped. And behind and before me at the top and base of the stairs, my two foolish attempts at monkey barriers fashioned from anything and everything I could lay my hands on (short of barbed wire), both barriers with the same likelihood of keeping Gizmo out of our upstairs bedrooms as Trump ever had of getting the Mexicans to pay for his equally ineffective wall.

As hard as it was for me to admit, I realized I was suffering from Reverse Stockholm Syndrome. I, the captor, had totally and helplessly identified with, and surrendered to, the captive, rather than the other way around. Gizmo had made a monkey out of me! As joyful as it always was to be in exuberant Gizmo’s company, I’d become an exhausted but happy sad-sack. And for one brief, flickering moment, I knew what I needed to do.

And I knew I’d better do it in one hell of a hurry, lest I lose my focus and fail. Which was still somehow a naggingly tempting possibility.

I immediately stood, made my way down the stairs, struggled my way over the comically useless Gizmo barrier and, with a heavy heart, picked up the living room phone…

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Now, I need to explain something about the layout of our house, before I begin moving along in this next memory…

Beside the kitchen’s main-entrance doorway from the outdoors, our rectangular kitchen had two more, one each on opposite ends. Now, these were doorways; that is… doorways without actual doors— I guess you could call them passageways. Anyway both passageways opened into the dining room. This made it possible for anyone to be able to walk in a loop, passing from the dining room into the kitchen through doorway #1 on the right, traversing the kitchen, and then exiting the kitchen back into the dining room through the left doorway. Doorway #2.

Over the years, we’d enjoyed watching our grandchildren furiously pedaling their tricycles in their little Indianapolis 500 around that loop, before zooming back through the rest of the house and then wheeling back around to do the loop again. And Gizmo loved that loop too, as it gave him escape options when running evasive action ahead of me, him usually unreeling one of my prized cassette tapes that he’d cruelly absconded with.

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OK then. So Phyllis had met Sandy and Brian, finally back from California, at the door and invited them in. Me? I was otherwise temporarily engaged, but it would only be a matter of fifteen seconds or so before they’d witness what I was up to with their own eyes.  And I have to say, the scene that welcomed them as they stood in our kitchen, waiting to retrieve their little man, was a bizarre one to say the least.

Before Phyllis and company could get their Hello’s and So how was California’s out of the way, here I came! Barreling recklessly into the kitchen through door #1 (nearly colliding with them), skidding in my stocking feet on the floor as I rounded into a wide turn, then gunning t across the kitchen floor, skidding into yet the second turn, and zip! disappearing out through door #2 in a flash!

I’m sure it must’ve taken them a few moments to reassemble in their brains just what in Sam Hell it was they’d actuallyjust seen.

What they had just seen was me with a long white bedsheet tied around my waist like a belt. The rest of that bedsheet had been dragging out behind me on the floor like the train of a wedding gown. And standing upright on that rear end of the bedsheet, and holding tight to side edges of the sheet in his clutched little fists, was our bold little Gizmo the Surfer, hanging ten, with the wind slightly feathering his hair as he’d beach boy’d past (artistic license here—The Giz didn’t really have long enough hair to feather).

And then before you’d ever have guessed it possible, the Giz and I were back once again, performing yet another skidding-across-the-kitchen-floor looptey-loop! And as we bombed our way back out of the kitchen through door #2, I heard Sandy yelling sarcastically at my back, “Oh, thanks SO very MUCH, Tom! We’re just SO DELIGHTED YOU DIDN’T SPOIL HIM while we were gone!”

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You know, Shakespeare was right. “Parting is such sweet sorrow.”

After Brian had loaded The Famous Cage With The Infamous Tail-trap Door into the bed of his pickup and had trucked it off and away… and after Sandy had bundled up her little Gizmo all safe and warm inside the front of her quilted parka (with just his doll-like little head peeking out with those big dark eyes peering back at us… we closed the front door behind them, symbolically closing that door on our wonderful and heart-breaking month-long little odyssey. The little Giz was off to his homecoming. And as we surveyed the left-over hurricane clutter around us that would be taking us a few days to rake back into order, we collapsed in bittersweet “homecoming” that was awaiting us as well.

I was of a heavy heart for days. But as days went by, and the come-back-and-go-away-again heavy heart pangs lessened, the knowledge that I’d done the right thing in letting Gizmo go became so much more obvious. My relationship with the twerp had been way too emotional for me to endure for two more years, and I still can’t imagine to this day what the chaos of our daily lives would have been like. I seriously doubt that I would ever have made it. I mean, I practically had myself a P.T.S.D. flashback after re-reading aloud my entire 1989, 80-paged Gizmo daily journal to Phyllis, only just a few weeks ago.  Yes I so wanted the adventure then, and that’s exactly what I’d received.

I can’t imagine now, at 77 years of age, how we ever managed a month of it. Youth is made of sterner stuff. But all in all, I’m happier that I took the adventure on for as long as we did. Better that than kicking myself for having passed it up and then looking back in regret. It remains one of the great little memories of my life.

So we never found out who received the joys of Gizmo’s personality after us. Only that it was some nameless and faceless family in some other county in Southern Maine. I sincerely hope it all went well for our little critter.

 In the weeks following his departure, I’d grin bitter sweetly to myself whenever I’d find another one of my missing, unraveled cassette tapes hiding behind or under the chairs and sofas, and that one I found by finally spying just one corner of the thing barely poking out from under the refrigerator…

Gizmo.

He was such a good little friend.