Nov

30

Growing up in Orange County, California, 30 miles southeast of Los Angeles you can imagine it was a pretty rare sight to see a monkey.

We had plenty of orange and lemon groves, strawberry patches and bean fields but not much in the area of a rainforest that would be a friendly environment for monkeys.

So, imagine my delight when my neighbor, Donny, somehow talked his folks into getting him a real live monkey.

Even by baby monkey standards JoJo was cute. He had soft brown fur, big brown eyes and he made a little chirpy noise when he wanted something. It was great fun to feed him bananas, grapes and nuts, even more fun to give him peanut butter or toasted marshmallows. For hours we watched him hop around his cage, swing from the ropes, jump up and down and, well, generally make a monkey out of himself. We laughed so hard we cried at times, good clean fun and great entertainment.

Then one day it all changed, Donny, with his mother away, thought it would be a hoot to take JoJo out of his cage and bring him inside the house, just like the dog.

So we did.

Not a great idea, in fact an extraordinarily bad idea.

JoJo immediately jumped out of Donny’s arms and started swinging on the curtains then jumped to the chandelier then to the couch and back to the curtains again. JoJo’s charming little chirpy noise had turned into an ear piercing squeal and his cute round eyes had the devil in them.

So there we stood, Donny 12 years old and me 10, watching this cute, adorable creature turn into a monster before our very eyes and all in fast motion, in fact, almost dizzying motion as JoJo went round and round and round again.

Just when we thought that it couldn’t possibly get any worse, it did. After several minutes of this jumping, swinging and squealing JoJo seemed to be tiring and he perched himself atop the curtain rod. From his vantage point he seemed to be admiring his handy work, the torn curtains, chandelier bulbs broken, sofa cushions askew and the dog, well, Molly was a complete wreck having tried to keep pace on the floor with what was happening above. She was laying there panting with her tongue hanging out.

JoJo looked at Donny, then at me, then at Molly and then back to Donny and in the blink of an eye heaved a perfect little pile of monkey poo right at Donny. The foul fastball caught Donny just below his left ear with a very cool and funny splat-thud sound.

I don’t remember what happened to JoJo but I DO remember that he didn’t live inside, or outside for that matter, at Donny’s anymore.

So, at the tender age of ten I learned a valuable lesson, one that I still use to this day, almost every day. The lesson I learned that day was;
enjoy the monkey, be entertained by the monkey, laugh at the monkey, BUT keep the monkey in his cage and never, ever bring the monkey into your everyday life, because if you do, if you do…well, read on and you’ll discover why I say, Beware the Monkeys.

 

To be continued,

www.michaelontheair.com

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