As the taillights of her taxi disappeared in the fog that night, I knew I wanted to hold on to the evening just a few moments longer. So I walked toward the church, and as I did, I wondered, had she just made all that up about being an hour and a quarter late this afternoon? Was she ever here at all?
I sat on the steps of the church. It was three in the morning. I was surrounded by fog.
On the steps at my feet were the shells of roasted peanuts.
Monkey Orphanage (Spring 1982)
I found out about the monkey orphanage while I was doing a story for a magazine about the Skunk Club. Briefly, I was a journalist in my twenties, although not a very good one. I didn't quite grasp the whole concept of accuracy. Whenever I needed a quote, I'd just make one up and attribute it to an “anonymous source.” On one occasion, I alleged that something had been stated “according to someone that would know.”
Fortunately,
American Bystander
magazine wasn't too concerned with accuracy. Mostly we went for the yuks. The
Bystander,
which was run by former
National Lampoon
editor Brian McConnachie, lasted for a year or two in the early 1980s; it was funded and sustained by a ragtag group of former
Saturday Night Live
performers, some writers from the
Lampoon
and
Second City,
and a handful of cartoonists from
The New Yorker.
The goal was to be “an American
Punch”
or, as we put it then, “a hip New Yorker.” This was long before Tina Brown and all that.
The other magazine being launched at the time was
Vanity Fair
, which had been defunct for many years and was now being brought back to life by Condé Nast. Over at the
Bystander
, we were skeptical about
Vanity Fair
's prospects. Oh, sure, like
that'll
last more than a couple of issues.
Being managing editor of the
American Bystander
was my first job out of Wesleyan, and to this day it is the best job I ever had, aside from the fact that I got paid only $600 a month. I rode around on UPS trucks in Manhattan; I had lunch with the
New Yorker
cartoonists; I went bowling with famous comedians. On one particular occasion, I was one of several people who tried to figure out how to float cartoonist Roz Chast across the Gowanus Canal with weather balloons. It would take a lot of balloons, we deduced, but it was doable, at least it was until Roz got wind of the caper and announced, “Listen, I'm
not
doing that.”
I lived in a horrific apartment in Spanish Harlem with bad plumbing and bugs and mice. I ate beans. My first roommate was a guy just out of NYU film school named Charlie Kaufman. He was finishing up a movie of his on a giant editing machine he'd rented and kept in a corner of his bedroom. Together Charlie and I put roach poison out for the roaches, mousetraps out for the mice. The mice liked to hang out in our upright piano, one of two pieces of furniture I owned. At night, we could hear their little tails brushing against the strings.
The apartment was on the second floor of an old West Side building, with high ceilings and wood floors. It looked out into the back of the block, where clotheslines were strung from building to building, and German shepherds patrolled the backyards. Downstairs from us was some sort of homosexual dungeon, where in the middle of the night I often awoke to hear the clank of chains from the flat below, one man crying out in orgiastic delight while another sobbed in a voice of almost unimaginable, mortal despair.
Big thick iron bars covered all the windows in the place. One afternoon, I was sitting on the radiator, eating a banana, looking out the window at the dogs and the clotheslines. I put one hand on the bars and with the other held my banana. Now wait, I thought. What do I feel like now?
Later, Charlie Kaufman moved out, and a friend of mine from Wesleyan, John Flyte, moved in. Flyte was a painter, and he sat for hours by the window, painting oils on a canvas.
Toward midnight, sometimes, Flyte and I would walk out into the night and close down various low dives, the two of us sitting at the bar as the tired waitresses put all the other stools in the place upside down on the tables.
Come on, boys, it's closing time.
Occasionally during this period I would go out on dates. Once I asked a girl I met in a bookshop if she'd “like to go and get some pie.” She found this hilarious and left the store, still laughing uncontrollably, as I stood there ashamed. I didn't think it was so funny, getting pie. On another occasion I tried asking out the bartender at a nasty bar just down from the Brill Building. I don't know what her real name was, but everyone called her “the Snail.” She had a buzz cut and tattoos. I tried the pie business again, and to my surprise, the Snail said sure. “You know, I don't know many guys like you, Boylan,” she said.
“Guys like me?” I said.
“Yeah, like non-assholes? You don't see that many.”
It was a nice thing for her to say, I had to admit that.
A few nights later, I waited for her as she shut down the bar. When she finally finished, we walked out into the hot New York night to go and get our pie. A man was waiting for her, though, leaning against a brick wall, smoking.
“Where the fuck have
you
been, bitch?” he said to my date.
“Whoops,” said the Snail. “Sorry. I gotta run.” She walked over to the man and put her arms around him. “It's okay,” she said to him softly. “I been busy.”
“Who's this guy?” I said, and the Snail looked over at me as if unsure whether or not I existed.
“I'm her boyfriend, fuckwad,” the man explained helpfully. “And maybe you'd like a bullet in your ass?”
“Ah,” I said.
I took the number one train home.
Then, as throughout my life, I found myself attracted exclusively to women. I never even thought about men romantically; it never even crossed my mind. Still, my relationships with women were decidedly odd. “What's it
like
to have breasts?” I'd ask. “How does it feel?” It was a question women found baffling.
“It doesn't feel like anything,” one girl told me. “It feels like having an elbow, a nose, a toe. It just is.” I couldn't believe she expected me to believe this. Of all the things that I thought being female would feel like,
nothing
wasn't an answer I'd considered.
On another occasion I went out with a woman named Casey. She was tall and beautiful and worked as a fashion photographer. One Saturday we rode the Circle Line around Manhattan, and she took pictures of me, standing by the railing, looking at the Little Red Lighthouse beneath the George Washington Bridge. Casey's long blond hair was held in place with a New York Yankees cap, which she wore backward, catcher style. From underneath, I thought the George Washington Bridge was frightening, the distant roar of traffic high over our heads. I felt as if I'd never been that close to something so large before.
Afterward, Casey and I walked up through Riverside Park, looking at the Hudson. I reached out for her hand and held it. We paused at one place where a large number of people were fishing. A large culvert emptied gray water into the river.
“Who are those people?” I asked Casey. “What are they doing?”
“Those are people fishing,” she said, “for the fish that live on shit.”
“Ah,” I said.
We had dinner at a Chinese restaurant on the West Side. One of our dishes was entitled Two Kinds Meat. It was pretty clear to both of us by then that I wasn't quite in Casey's league. She knew lots of other people in the restaurant, many of them photographers or agents or models. Some of them looked at me, then her, then smiled.
“Listen, Jim,” she said finally. “You're sweet. But what's up with you? I mean, really? What's your story?”
“I don't know,” I said.
“Liar,” she replied.
Once a week I walked up to see Dr. Smegala, my psychiatrist. “Well, it sounds to me,” he suggested at the end of one session, “like you're a transsexual.”
“Don't say that,” I told him. “Please don't say that.”
My mother helped me pay for the shrink, which was embarrassing, since I didn't want to tell her why I needed one. I just told her I was sad. “That's okay, honey,” said Mom. “You'll cheer up.” Still, she gave me the money to see Dr. Smegala. I wasn't sure she'd keep paying for it if I told her what the problem was.
My mother's whole life seemed to be a lesson in the transformative powers of optimism and faith, and this lesson had not been lost on me. Even then, as I stepped over dead junkies en route to Dr. Smegala's, as I killed mice by dropping the
Columbia Encyclopedia
on their heads, as I interviewed the incomprehensibly bitter director of the Skunk Club, I still believed that somehow, everything would work out for the best. I wasn't depressed, most of the time. Instead I felt lucky and blessed, ridiculously grateful to be having such an
adventure.
The Skunk Club was a support group for people in Manhattan who had skunks as pets. The woman who directed it had black hair, tied back in a tight bun.
“Listen,” she said, infuriated by the mere suspicion that I seemed to think the Skunk Club was funny. “People shouldn't
have
skunks! They don't
make
good pets!”
Toward the end of the interview, she mentioned that skunks weren't the only pets that made their owners' lives unpleasant. There was a couple in Pennsylvania, she said, who had a monkey orphanage. They had about a score of monkeys down there, all of whom had been abandoned by their owners.
Turned out, monkeys didn't make good pets, either.
I got the phone number for the monkey orphanage, which was run by a couple whose name was D'Angelo. The husband answered. “Monkeys, sure we got monkeys,” he said. “Come down for a visit, we'll show you around.” To my surprise, they didn't live all that far from my parents' house. All the time I'd spent growing up in the Philadelphia suburbs, and I didn't know a monkey orphanage was just around the corner. It's possible to live in the same town as a monkey house, I thought, and never even know it.
A week later, I went down to Philly on the Amtrak train, stayed the night in the Coffin House, and drove off the next morning to see the destitute monkeys. Prior to leaving, I'd confirmed all the arrangements with the D'Angelos by phone. Just before I hung up, however, the husband said something peculiar. “Listen. Do you know about me? I've ...” His voice faltered. “Well, you'll see when you get here.”
Whatever it was that had happened to Mr. D'Angelo, it sounded scary. I imagined that he had third-degree burns all over his body. Either that or bite marks from the chimps.
I got to the D'Angelo house just before noon, and a large woman ushered me in. Her name was Samantha. Something about her suggested that she was a professional nurse, the nurse of the husband, I assumed. A woman hired to rub salve into his scars.
Samantha talked about monkeys while I wrote in my notebook. “You know what people think?” Samantha said. “They think they can give a monkey to the zoo.” She shook her head sadly. “You know what happens to domesticated monkeys in the zoo? They get
beaten.
They
starve.
”
At that moment another woman came in. Her name was Maria, and she had a thick eastern European accent. Maria and Samantha talked about monkeys for quite a while. As it turned out, the orphanage was limited to monkeysâno chimps allowed. “Ve had
vun
cheempanzee,” Maria said. “Zen eet suffocate in eets pajamas!” She shook her head sadly. “No more cheemps!”
I was sitting there wondering where Mr. D'Angelo was when suddenly it hit me. The big woman, Samantha. With the deep voice. And the huge hands.
That
was Mr. D'Angelo.
Okay, I thought. Focus. You're working for the American Bystander. You're doing a story about a monkey orphanage. One of the owners of the monkey house has had a sex change, just like you want to have. That shouldn't affect the story. Not much, anyway.
I tried to focus on the questions I'd written down, although these were now not the ones I wanted to ask. What do they eat?
Purina
Monkey Chow.
Where do they sleep?
They all sleep in the shed in the
backyard, except for Marbles, the vicious one, who sleeps in a cage in the
kitchen.
Can they do tricks?
No, mostly they try to get near your face and
bite you.
After a while the D'Angelos took me to a shed out back. There was a fair amount of screaming and swinging from trapezes. Other monkeys sat motionlessly, looking through the bars of their cage, their hands thrust through the bars and folded quietly in front of them. Some of those hands held bananas.
We went back inside and the D'Angelos asked me if I wanted a drink. “Yes,” I said very quickly. Samantha opened a bottle of red wine. “You know who I am?” she said after a while.
I nodded. “Sure,” I said nonchalantly.
“I wasn't sure if you'd be able to tell.”
Oh, I could tell all right.
I talked with Samantha and Maria for a while. It was the first conversation I'd ever had with another transsexual. “It's hard for people to understand,” Samantha said, drinking her wine. “But in the end, you are what you are. You fight it for your whole life. Eventually you accept yourself. That's really all there is to it.”
I nodded. The longer we talked, the more I began to recognize a certain bravery and dignity in Samantha. Still, she filled me with melancholy. Was this what the future held for me?
Maria seemed to accept everything about her husband with a certain sad grace. She just said, “Crazy vurld,” and shook her head. “Crazy, crazy vurld.”
Before I left the D'Angelos', I used their bathroom. There on top of the commode was a bottle of prescription pills.
Samantha D'Angelo
, read the label.
Premarin 2.5 mg/day. Conjugated Estrogen.
I opened the canister and shook a Premarin into my hand. For a moment I thought about swallowing it, just to see what it would feel like. I didn't, though. It would be eighteen years before I held another one in my hand. That time I
did
swallow it.