Lab Girl (14 page)

I threw my backpack in the van and whistled for Reba. “Monkey Jungle it is. All aboard!” I called out to the group.

“Why not? It's only eight hours away,” growled Bill while staring daggers at me. I smiled sweetly in return, and once he realized that I was serious, we both got in the car.

Bill does all the driving when we go on the road; he is an excellent driver who merges onto the highway, gets behind the biggest truck he can find, and then follows it at a safe distance for as many miles as possible. I am never allowed to drive because I don't have the patience required by big landscapes; my mind wanders as I drive, and the asphalt road starts to seem more flexible than it really is. My job instead is to talk for hours and dream up scenarios outrageous enough to make Bill laugh, which becomes more challenging as the miles drag on.

I used to think that Bill habitually drove fifty miles per hour because of the responsibility he felt toward our student cargo. But after learning the life history of every motorized vehicle he had ever owned, I later realized he couldn't actually know that they were capable of mile-per-minute travel. Regardless, my attitude had become that I could go anywhere in the world, provided that I was willing to ride shotgun long enough. Once we had agreed to skip Stuckie, there was nothing for it but to get on the highway and drive south.

Ten or so exits north of the Florida border we saw a huge black billboard displaying only two words written in neon pink:
BUTT NAKED
. It bothered me that I couldn't figure it out. “What does that mean?” I mused aloud in my ignorance. “Is it a bar? Or a strip club? Or a video shop or something?”

“I think it's pretty clear what it means,” said Bill. “It means that if you get off the highway, there's something butt naked at or near the exit.”

“But I mean, is it a woman or a man or a mole rat or what? Is it even connected to something?” I mused. “Or does it imply that you have the opportunity to get yourself butt naked?”

“It's probably some kind of Gomer-code for something really sick,” volunteered a student who was notorious for his derision of all things south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

“Listen,” explained Bill, “if you're the kind of guy who's going to pull off of the highway after seeing a sign like that, you're probably also the kind of guy who doesn't
care
what's butt naked on the other end. As soon as you see the words ‘butt' and ‘naked' you hit the brakes and just go with it.”

One of the more politically conscious graduate students tried to stir the pot by asking, “Why are you assuming that it would be a
guy
who is going to a place like that?” Bill shook his head and continued to stare at the road, unwilling to dignify his question with a response.

Fortunately, it wasn't long before a better billboard caught our attention. “Explore Monkey Jungle!” it commanded us. “Where humans are caged and monkeys run wild!” We all shrieked in jubilation.

“We must be getting close,” suggested one of the students hopefully.

Bill shrugged. “Well, we are in Florida.” We had just passed a sign marking the border and welcoming us to the Sunshine State. The attraction we were headed toward was located near Miami, still about seven hours' drive south of where we were.

Monkey Jungle didn't appear quite so inviting when we pulled into its parking lot that night at 1:00 a.m., given that its lights were off and a heavy link chain bound the handles of the front door. Bill jumped out of the van as soon as he parked, to inspect the sign on the door and also to inhale dried
Nicotiana tabacum
leaves, as he had taken to describing it. The students spilled out of the van like an undone bag of marbles, a few rolling off and becoming unreachable as the majority congregated in place. Bill returned to the group and suggested that we set up our tents on the grassy patch in front of the entrance and sleep until the place opened at 9:30 a.m.

He took a drag of his cigarette. “I figure that somewhere during the course of opening shop they'll bother to wake us up,” he said.

Dumpling chimed in. “That way we'll be first in line!”

“I don't know if that's such a good idea,” I said. “Don't monkeys crow at dawn like roosters or something?”

“You tell us,” said Bill as he rubbed out his cigarette. “You're the one who's been sleeping with a monkey.” He was referring to my latest on-again, off-again boyfriend, who was indeed no Rhodes Scholar. I stood there with a smirk on my face while Bill unloaded the coolers and then went to work setting up my tent before unpacking his own, a signal that he had meant no offense. In order to signal back that no offense had been taken, I started digging through the cooler and tried to come up with an idea for dinner.

“Well, it looks like dinner-on-a-stick,” I announced, having found extremely little with which to cook us anything.

“That's awesome,” Bill said supportively, having finished with the tents in record time. “It's my favorite,” he added without sarcasm, and then pulled out an armload of wood and got to work building a fire. It was our custom to visit the campus woodshop before each field trip and to load up the van with the scrap pieces of wood that had been otherwise destined for the pulp bin. Afterward we'd do the same with cardboard taken from the campus recycling center. On the way out of town we'd buy one Duraflame log for each day of the trip and a bunch of random food, and consider ourselves prepared for camping. We'd use these materials each night to build what I called an “Andy Warhol fire,” within which we'd use the ever-lit log to ignite a continuous stream of recyclable materials, and the emergent blaze always had a satisfyingly garish result. You could cook over such a fire provided that your sleeves weren't flammable and that you didn't mind if the middle of whatever you were eating was cold and raw.

Dinner-on-a-stick meant that each person found a stick and put whatever they wanted on it and then stuck it in the fire and ate it, and that was dinner. The only rule was that if you stumbled upon something really good, you afterward had to make enough for the whole group, or at least try to make it again and divvy up the result. Dumpling was on a roll during that trip and actually managed to poach pears using a Coke can that had been torn in half and ingeniously skewered on a stick. We all agreed that his Hershey's chocolate–drizzled creation was the absolute pinnacle of camping cuisine, except for his dumplings, of course, and everyone went off to bed happily.

Soon after falling asleep I was unceremoniously awoken by someone with a deep voice and an extremely bright flashlight. I stuck my head outside the tent. “Can I help you, officer?” I asked.

Puzzled to find a reasonably clean and articulate woman instead of a desperately unwashed and incoherent man, the patrolman inquired what we were doing there. I explained our field trip in detail, accentuating my pedagogical duty to fulfill one talented student's specific desire to visit the renowned Monkey Jungle in person before his brief youth had faded.

As so often occurs when I find myself in such situations, the officer's authoritarian skepticism melted into hospitality while I waxed rhapsodic over the rare and peerless Floridian soils. Within a couple of minutes he was offering everything from professional surveillance while we slept to a police escort when we chose to depart for Atlanta. I declined his assistance gratefully, assuring him that I would indeed call 9-1-1 on the pay phone down the road if I needed anything, and we parted on excellent terms.

After he drove off, Bill stuck his head out of his tent. “That was masterful,” he said. “You amaze me.”

I looked up at the stars and took a deep breath of the humid air. “Damn,” I said contentedly, “I love the South.”

The incomparable welcome peculiar to the southern states continued the next morning, when the admissions desk of Monkey Jungle waved our whole group through upon receipt of the insufficient sum of fifty-seven dollars, which represented every last bit of paper money that Bill and I could produce from our pockets. After we walked out of the foyer and through the doors that led to the Jungle we were immediately overwhelmed by the screaming. It emanated from a diverse population of monkey inmates as a large number of them turned their attention toward us.

“Good God, it's just like walking into the lab,” said Bill, his face twisted into what I recognized as his pre-migraine countenance.

The room we were in was actually a very large courtyard within the building complex, which had all the architectural panache of your average DMV. In a great arc over the top of the courtyard, long stretches of chicken wire were seamed together and appeared to have been repeatedly reinforced in certain places.
Homo sapiens
visiting the courtyard could walk through the space within a hallway bounded by steel mesh; hence the billboard slogan.

Monkey Jungle was indeed a doppelgänger for my lab, and the more I thought about it, the clearer the comparison became. Perhaps the ambiance had been amplified by a couple of orders of magnitude, but each of our research activities was represented by its simian equivalent within the enclosure. Three Java macaques that had been straining their brains over some problem that they could neither solve nor abandon propelled themselves toward us, supposing that we somehow represented an answer. A white-handed gibbon was draped limply across our walkway, either asleep or dead or someplace in between. Two small squirrel monkeys seemed to be trapped in their own private Samuel Beckett play, caught in a web made of equal parts dependence and loathing. In ironic proximity, two other squirrel monkeys were getting along very, very well by the looks of it.

A single howler monkey sat high on a branch in the back, wailing out the entire Book of Job in his native tongue while periodically raising his arms in an age-old supplication for an explanation as to why the righteous must suffer. A red-handed tamarin crouched in paranoia, rubbing its hands together and scheming toward some sinister end. Two beautiful Diana monkeys meticulously groomed each other while psychologically adrift upon an ocean of boredom. An exhausted cadre of capuchins paced the perimeter, compulsively checking and rechecking the empty feeding troughs for the raisin that they were certain was right there a minute ago.

“Every monkey is some monkey's monkey,” I said out loud.

I then happened to notice Bill across the courtyard standing face-to-face with a spider monkey, separated only by a rusty screen. Both of them sported the same hairdo, a three-inch-long dark-brown shiny mop that stuck up in all directions, having been groomed with little more than a few vigorous scratches during the last two weeks. This same shag covered both of their faces, and their lithe limbs hung with an athletic readiness that was only weakly camouflaged by their affected slouches. The spider monkey's dark, limpid eyes were very wide open and his facial expression suggested that he was in a permanent state of shock.

The fascination between Bill and the monkey was so complete that it was as if the rest of the world didn't exist. As I watched I felt the cramps in my stomach that customarily foreshadowed the laughing that continues long past the point of being pleasant or comfortable.

Bill finally stated, without redirecting his stare, “It's like looking in a fucking mirror.” I doubled over into a series of helpless guffaws that eventually progressed into a sort of prayer for relief.

When Bill was good and ready, he and the spider monkey parted ways, and we progressed into the final chamber of the Jungle, where a huge gorilla named King sat in a cement hole not dissimilar to those used to impose solitary confinement upon the prisoners of my own species. King's three-hundred-pound frame slumped against the tile as he used one foot to listlessly rub a crayon back and forth across a piece of paper. The walls of the room from which we viewed him were plastered with his finished “paintings,” each of which had been executed by King using a similar technique; taken together, they expressed an impressively consistent artistic view.

“At least he's publishing,” I observed.

We read a plaque that described the heavy crosses that lowland gorillas must bear within their native Africa, which ranged from poaching to disease, yet it was difficult to imagine any corner of the Congo more dismal than the abject constriction within which King had been impounded in Florida. We read a second, rather apologetic plaque describing how King's overflow art could be purchased in the gift shop and that some of the proceeds were earmarked toward the remodeling and expansion of his enclosure. If King had had a handgun, I was pretty sure that he would have blown his own head off, but seeing that he was armed only with a crayon, he appeared to be making the best of his situation. While I waited for the students to run out of raisins with which to feed the monkeys, I inwardly vowed to stop complaining about my relatively bountiful lot in life.

“Well, I hope that poor son of a bitch gets tenure,” sighed Bill from his side of the room.

“Oh, I wouldn't worry about it,” I assured him. “It looks like his institution views him as permanent, and he is bringing in money.”

Bill looked at me. “I wasn't talking about the gorilla.”

While trickling through the gift shop we deposited our last coins in the Plexiglas donation box, but we refrained from using our credit cards to buy one of King's paintings. “I may not know art, but I know what I like,” explained Bill as he walked away from the display indifferently.

In the parking lot I instructed the students to use the bathroom now, as we had a long drive ahead of us, and in my head I fantasized about the day after my promotion, when I would commission a T-shirt for myself that read
I AM NOT YOUR MOM
and begin wearing it to work.

Once we were all loaded into the van and the doors were slammed shut, I took off my hiking boots and cracked open a Diet Coke for Bill. “We went to Monkey Jungle to learn about monkeys, and along the way we learned a little bit about ourselves,” I quipped in my most saccharine teacher's voice.