HEADS AND TAILS
How and where to begin the end?
The Giz came into our lives some thirty-five years ago in 1989. I may have been forty-three years old at the time, but faced with the sudden prospect of getting a chance to spend some quality personal time with the cutest little monkey you could ever imagine…? Hey, Presto! I was a ten-year-old little boy once again.
And it’s no exaggeration to say that Gizmo turned my life (no, our lives) upside-down in oh so many ways.
First of all, during the first six or seven days of his “visit,” it being February school vacation week, finding adequate time to care for the little twerp wasn’t much of an issue. The vacation had been a key factor in our final decision to take Gizmo on in the first place. However it was also clear from the beginning that Gizmo’s stay would crawl “a few days” into the following week as well, meaning then we’d have to make some serious adjustments. I, Phyllis, and Missy had job obligations with specific times for getting to work, etc. and Chris was a student at Foxcroft Academy. I guess we figured we’d just deal with that when the time came.
Secondly our entire household was turned upside down. Every piece of furniture we cared about, which was all of them, was draped in sheets… ours looked like some home where the occupants had gone abroad for a couple of years after covering everything they owned to keep it dust-free until their return. Only we hadn’t gone abroad.
We were all still living there in what now looked like a furniture morgue. Hell, even the stairs were covered in a two or three tacked down sheets, as it turned out that the white paint on the wooden risers was ancient and had begun to chip off here and there; and little ol’ eagle-eye Gizmo (who, like any baby) wanted to put everything including the paint chips he’d break off straight into his little pie-hole.
Thirdly, didn’t Ol’ Giz just love my stacked stereo components: the receiver, the dual tape-deck, the amp, and the turntable. I mentioned earlier his fascination with movable parts, like buttons, knobs, and levers. Several often-recurring stereo-related occurrences included the following two, and more:
(1) Picture a perfect and blessed moment of peaceful, golden silence; Lyford family sprawled upon their sheet-draped sofa and stuffed chairs, soaking up a well-earned rest from all of their exhausting Gizmo-related exertions; Gizmo at the moment nowhere to be seen; the faraway strains of “Sergeant Peppers Lonely Hearts’ Club Band” suddenly beginning to waft in from the adjacent dining room; all the Lyfords eyebrows simultaneously raised with the immediate understanding that Gizmo has once again just switched on the stereo out there; then, hmmm, a slight increase in the volume and…
(JESUS H. CHRIST!) THE POWER-AMPED VOLUME CRANKING ALL THE WAY UP TO THE MAX… AND ONE SUPER-TERRIFIED CAPUCHIN RUGRAT JUST A-CANNONBALLING THROUGH THE LIVING ROOM FIVE FEET ABOVE THE FLOOR LIKE SOME FLYING SQUIRREL WITH JERICHO-JOSHUA’S BLARING WINDOW- QUAKING TRUMPETS HOT ON THE LITTLE GUY’S TAIL LIKE A FLASH JUNGLE-FIRE! (You’d think he’d learn…)
(2) And secondly… picture this little “Gizmo game”:
Tom, sacked out on the couch, engrossed in Stephen King’s Richard Bachman four-novelette anthology; everything quiet… too quiet; Gizmo, in his darling little pirate pantaloons, suddenly peering around the living room door; the little twerp then prancing jauntily into the room (skidding to a stop at a safe distance with arms held high to sportingly taunt Tom with the small object he was holding in both hands); Tom, duly eyeballing; Tom then ejecting himself up and off the couch with a roar; Gizmo, now a.k.a. the Looney Toons’ Roadrunner (mbeep mbeep!) having already rocketed off and away with Tom, his personal Wile E. Coyote, lumbering behind in his dust! in cold pursuit!
And that object? What was the precious little object that sent Tom barreling off on his fool’s errand of trying to tackle the little brat? Why, only one of his 500+ collected cassette tapes is all. And the one he’d just pilfered might have been Tom’s most sacred-of-all-time The Best of Leonard Cohen. Or perhaps his equally sacred Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home. It could have been his James Taylor’s Sweet Baby James. But it really didn’t matter if it were his prized Ricky Nelson’s Garden Party, Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young’s Déjà Vu, The Stones’ 12 X 5, Johnny Cash’s 1964 I Walk the Line, 1972’s Doctor Hook, or even Dr. Demento Presents the Greatest Novelty Records of All Time, Volume II. Tom had spent a lifetime up until that week in February, 1989 meticulously collecting each and every one of those damn titles, first on 33 1/3 vinyl LP’s and then all over once again on cassette tapes! It was his damn collection and each one of those cassettes was one of his hard-earned possessions.
All of his cassettes were sacred!
Now you might be saying to yourself, OK, but so what, Lyford? You’d get it back from Gizmo eventually, right?
No. NOT right! What you don’t understand is this: as Gizmo would run away with one of Tom’s tapes, as he did often, he’d deftly pinch up an inch or so of the strip of that shiny brown celluloid tape and start unspooling it! Yes! Imagine that! Just like some crazy cat in the bathroom completely and irritatingly unrolling an entire roll of Charmin off the dispenser for fun! There’s be Gizmo up ahead with the already-long, ever-lengthening loop of tape in his wake as they rounded corners through every downstairs room in the house! And what could Tom do about it?
NOTHING! The Giz was just too fast, too wily! All Tom could do was give up eventually, sit in the living room, and wait for an hour to pass for Giz to grow tired and finally abandon it somewhere. And then later, after Tom finally did retrieve it, you’d find him toiling away at the dining room table with the cassette in his left hand, a #2 pencil in his right, and practically getting carpal tunnel syndrome re-reeling the whole damn tape back inside the plastic cassette once again. And looking as pathetic as some chimpanzee digging ants out of an anthill with only a twig for a tool!
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Oh, the things that can happen when you home’s been turned into a monkey house! One of those things I still feel pretty badly about to this day, by the way.
See, Phyl and I have three children: Missy, the oldest; Kathy; and then Chris, the youngest. Kathy hasn’t been mentioned in this little memoir yet, due to the fact that she wasn’t home with us when Gizmo arrived. Instead, she was a student at Colby College in Waterville, Maine which was still in session. She was, however, due to return home nearer the end of Gizmo’s stay.
And me… I’m the idiot who came up with the this great idea:
Let’s not tell her about Gizmo! Let’s let it be a surprise! She’ll be so excited! It’ll be great!
The reason I was so sure it was a great idea is that, surprisingly, Kathy had a real thing about monkeys and gorilla’s already at this point.
When she’d been a lot younger, I’d read aloud the Michael Crichton’s sci-fi novel, CONGO, to all three of our kids. Although it had a very scary, and almost-Indiana-Jones-type plot, the book had a big impact on Kathy. This is because the story’s heroine, one Karen Ross, is a primatologist working with a female mountain gorilla named Amy, who has been trained to communicate with humans using sign language. (Michael Crichton admitted that his Amy was inspired by the famous Gorilla, Koko, who’d actually been trained to do the same thing.) Anyway, the novel was really inspirational for Kathy, leaving her at a very early age looking up to the likes of Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall, and even talking about considering a possible career in primatology herself.
That’s why I just knew Kathy would be delighted to experience the wonderful surprise of finding a cute little capuchin monkey in her very own home. Everybody loved Gizmo. Everybody! So Kathy was sure go nuts over him.
Finally the day arrived. Kathy came home to find me (for some reason) grinning like an idiot, I’m sure. (Wait, did I only say like an idiot?) She came shuffling in through the kitchen carrying a little luggage, passed through the dining room, and headed straight for the living room staircase that leads up to our second-floor bedrooms. Unbeknown to our daughter, Gizmo was perched on the stairs above her. I remember him looking like a silly little jailbird up there, peering down upon her through the railings as if through the bars of his jail cell.
I also remember me holding my breath for the big surprise when she’d see him and possible break down in tears of joy, saying something like, “Oh my God, we have a monkey? And look! Why, he’s so cute!” It was a beautiful scene. In my MIND, that is. (My dumb bunny mind.)
Reality? She screamed in terror! Something big and alive had just landed on her head! Probably it felt to her like an 8-pound spider in her hair. Her hands flew to her head! She muckled hard, violently gripped whatever it was, and started trying to yank it free!
Problem? To Gizmo it felt like he was the one under attack! He too was terrified! So he did what animals do when attacked. He sunk his two canines (Dracula fangs) into the back of Kathy’s hand! (Yeah. That’s what he did.) She screamed, of course! He screamed! We all screamed! It was a train wreck! My train wreck.
And when it was over, Kathy was hurt! Infuriated! Livid! Mad as a wet hen! And she immediately crossed Primatology right off her future career dreams list. Just. Like. That. Monkey? Monkey not good! Monkey, bad! Dad? Dad, bad as well. Dad, not good!
So, Iapparently that was day-one of Kathy beginning to switch “majors.” Kathy, no longer the primatologist. Kathy, the future chemist. Dad, in the dog house.
The whole thing made me so sad. And rightfully feeling guilty.
And Gizmo? How did Gizmo feel? Oh, he was pretty much over it in a half a minute. I’m pretty sure that from his point of view, he was like, “Jeez. What’s her problem? I mean, OK, I jumped on her head. What’s the big deal? That’s what I do. That’s how you get around. That’s how you meet people. And heads? They’re like stepping stones for crossing a brook anyway, right? Come on. I mean they’re there, aren’t they. Might as well use’em. And hey, that’s how I met Tom Lyford, right? And look how well that’s turned out. Well, other than him slamming my tail in the door…”
My brother Dennis is a photographer. When he learned we had a monkey, he asked if he could come over and do some videotaping. I said, “Sure. Why not?” So he came over. And while he was getting his video-camera out of its carrying case and set up, I pointed out Gizmo way over in the living room on the floor “wrestling” vigorously with Chris. But by the time Dennis had the cam up on his shoulder and was ready to shoot, Gizmo had spotted him! A stranger in the house! Someone new to get to know! So the little guy had already bounded through the dining room and had launched himself in a leap heading for Dennis’s head. Honestly, Dennis caught him in his lens as a head-on shot of the little Superman incoming, and only microseconds from impact!
The resulting video was hilarious. There’s the split-second HERE COMES GIZMO! and then for six or sevens seconds Dennis, not accustomed to wearing a live monkey hat, instinctively began to spin wildly around, the resulting video becoming a blurred ride on the Tilt-a-Whirl at the County fair! You almost needed a Dramamine to watch it.
But yeah, heads
Heads were the preferred Gizmo way of saying how do ya do?
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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 Six, The Epilogue, coming soon to the screen on your preferred device!”
NEARING THE END OF THE LINE 