Office of the Apes

1

The Evolution of Bonkers

––––––––

"Holy shit! The pussycat’s dead!"

Before I could utter another word, the gravity of this unwelcome news began to impose a timeline on me. Now what do I do? And how much time do I have to do it?

Never mind the deeper question: how does this happen? After all, I am the one standing over this furry mess with a hot, Raven Arms MP-25 Saturday Night Special firmly in my hand.

It happens all too fast. That’s how. Just a minute earlier I was standing outside my funky, 1920s era, little beach bungalow, in mild-mannered Hermosa Beach in laid back, wonderful Southern California. Only I was feeling viciously menaced (by bad guys I don’t even want to mention at this point).

All I know is that I fired a quick blast through the open back door, from the nighttime darkness of our small back patio, hoping to see them fleeing for their lives, scared shitless. Then I quickly retreated, stage right, to a strategic position on the other side of Chumley’s rusty Alaskan sportsman’s camper, parked in my driveway on the side of the house. It’s all fucking Chumley’s fault anyway. If his camper, or the aged Ford pickup that it’s perched on, takes a few stray bullets of return fire, it’s no sweat off of my lug nuts. And if he’s in there, he’s the one they really want anyway. He’ll have to fend for himself.

I saw something move in the window.

Bang!

I fired again from the safety of my camper barrier. I hit the stucco near the window. Did it go through the wall and hit one of the bastards? I never advanced my marksmanship qualification beyond broad side of a barn.

No return fire yet.

Feeling brave I ran back to the patio, crouched by the hedges and peered through the back door. Then I heard a rustle in the kitchen and then something smashed.

I fired blindly at the noise. I smacked myself in the face from the recoil, while simultaneously registering a hideous soul-releasing screech from Stinky, our orange pussycat with the huge lion-like mane. The King of the Kitchen was in danger of being deposed.

Then the place was strangely quiet. I waited.

I knew the buggers were in there. Or were they? This madness has gone on for four days now . . . I really don’t know. I should know. I’m firing bullets into my own house. But they weren’t here the past three days. Then again, if they are . . .

Lord knows I have good reason for this paranoia . . . Screw it. Stinky needs me.

With the gun quivering in front of me, I rushed in, bent over as if I were running underneath a helicopter (as if this would make me a smaller target or something; I don’t know what the fuck I was thinking – except, perhaps, that my brain was due for its 5,000-mile checkup).

Nobody to shoot. I passed the lifeless body of Stinky. Boy, nothing I could do for him – (but I might be eligible for a new marksmanship qualification: Pussycat at Close Range). I canvassed the small house quickly. I scouted out the living room and sun porch, then ran back around to the bathroom – which also had a second door connecting to our bedroom – and entered there and went on through into the bedroom . . . and to my horror.

Holy shit! The girlfriend’s dead!

Before I could utter another word . . . I heard something . . . yes! She’s snoring. She’s not hit. Fuck! She was supposed to be in San Diego visiting a friend. Why is Mirtha home early? Jesus, Mary and Fred! I could have whacked her! Whacked her . . . like if I run with the Sopranos. My street cred extends no further than deranged writers and musicians. At this point, I could probably intimidate Sylvester, Tom and Jerry, Top Cat and maybe Felix (hard to tell with him, he had a bag of tricks).

But I can see now why she didn’t wake up from all the ruckus. Sitting on the floor next to the nightstand was a broken 1.75-liter bottle of Stolichnaya vodka, like Russia, now just a shadow of its former glory.

She got into the damn thing and that was that.

She was sleeping off a binge. The only thing that would wake her now would be a syringe filled with adrenaline injected straight into her heart.

Safe for a second, I went back to the kitchen.

Eventually, she would wake up and, sooner or later, she would notice that the cat – whom she called Slinky – hasn’t been around much lately. I will tell her that it is all her fault. She never wanted to get him fixed, so he doesn’t come home for weeks at a time. Maybe this time it’s for good. The damn thing is impregnating every feline in town. He’s creating his own mutant army of cats preparing an invasion of the entire neighborhood – yet another reason for the neighbors to fear us. And he probably didn’t even remember that he was supposed to live here most of the time . . . well, when he was alive, that is.

Now he was like an orange mop with a gushy red hole where the handle was, in the middle of a big red mess of tomato soup on my kitchen floor. If the neighbors called the cops, I needed to act quickly. Or, Mirtha could mysteriously rise too. Her odd rhythms are hard to calculate, some times you could shake her for ten minutes and not get a rise out of her and then other times, like a zombie, she’ll pop straight up in her bed/grave and be fully alert.

What to do with Stinky? I can now see that he had knocked the bottle of Kooky Kat Budz in a Bottle, top-shelf catnip, off the counter, and smashed it on the floor. That was the noise I heard. Looks like he had first tipped it over on the counter and proceeded to probably get high as a kite. Then he smacked it to the floor in some drug frenzy and chased after it.

He got into the damn thing and that was that.

That’s some strong shit, you don’t want your mouser experimenting with drugs at this concentration. Might get confused and try to drag home a pit bull terrier, rather than a mouse. You’re supposed to just spray it on a toy or scratching post, but with all of its contents just spilled on the counter for him, he was probably tripping on this shit. The company that makes it, the Kooky Kat Catnip Company, takes the flowering buds of the catnip plant containing the highest concentration of oil, and mixes that with pure spring water. They package this elixir in a simple glass pump bottle – they’re either catnip connoisseurs or sending a lot of pussycats off into some timeless hallucinogenic universes that only pussycats could understand.

At least he died painlessly . . . no, no, he didn’t, he took a bullet so hard it probably knocked all nine lives out of him at once. The best I could hope for is that he went down quick. And I’m sure he did. From the amount of blood on the floor, you’d swear I killed a fucking rhinoceros.

I picked up the Kooky Kat exposed pump, from the broken bottle, and sniffed it. Maybe I could catch a little buzz off of it. Nothing. What did he see in this stuff anyway?

I hadn’t even seen him in three weeks; he fucked every alley cat in town, now he came home to eat and put on a package. Like my girlfriend. Or me.

I touched his quiet, warm carcass. Yeah, you little bugger, partying it up all the time. Where did it get you? Don’t you know I run a fucking watering hole here? Animals come here to drink or be eaten alive, that’s about it.

Well, at least on the upside, the little carpet-pissing machine was turned off for good. Previously, I tolerated him coming around whenever he wanted to and get smashed on catnip, but he would have to sleep outdoors if he was going to piss on my carpet. He could come inside in the morning, have some breakfast and Mirtha could pet him.

But that’s all over now.

I grabbed Stinky and threw him in a black trash bag along with a coffee filter, filled with this morning’s coffee grains. I read somewhere that the grains can keep the smell down in your trash – and that’s what Stinky had become. And he would eventually stink big time because now I was stuck with this little Exhibit A of evidence.

Damn. My very first body bag and I didn’t have any real good plans for what to do with it. The garbage collection was earlier today, so I have another seven days before they come again. Maybe I could find a Dempsey Dumpster somewhere and secretively stash him in there . . . have any Chinese restaurants pissed me off lately? Hmm, no. But it doesn’t matter. What if Mirtha performs one of her rise-from-the-dead routines and comes wandering in here? And I’m standing here holding her dead pussycat – that I just shot. And there’s blood all over the goddamned crumpling linoleum. What if a neighbor heard the shots and called the cops? They could be here any second. I don’t have time for any elaborate plans.

I ran outside holding my kitty stash, a little stink bomb with a timer set to go off in about three days. What to do? I danced around frantically, like some deranged grave robber holding onto Abby Normal. Then I had a mad, mad plan! What if I take him out of the bag and just toss him over the spite fence in the back and let the Peterman’s vicious pit bull, Tyson, eat him? The Petermans would be so shocked and embarrassed when they spot the half-eaten orange corpse, they would dispose of the remains themselves. They’d never let us know what happened.

No! That won’t work. What if Tyson was just fed and only nibbles around the bullet hole? It would still be obvious what happened to him. Then the next day, the oh-so-perfectly tanned Mr. Peterman will show up at my front door, hiding behind his Oakley Half Wire sunglasses with Stinky in a box. He will inform me that he is sorry for my loss and that, oh, by the way, I’ve contacted the ASPCA, the Doris Day Animal League, PETA and the Hermosa Police, so that they can help you find the perpetrator of this criminal and inhumane act. I’m sure they’ll be coming around shortly to ask questions.

He’ll say this to me with the mutual understanding we share, that I would end up like some kind of sorry-ass OJ looking for the real killer. And all those nice people will help me find him. And, of course, all the while Peterman would be analyzing me from behind those Oakleys, wondering what kind of deranged idiot would shoot his own pussycat and simply throw him over the fence into his neighbor’s yard? What’s next, Chipmunks? Dogs? Humans? Has society fallen so far down the shithole that it’s now every many for himself? The Law of the Jungle?

So this notion wouldn’t work.

And the clock kept ticking.

Finally. Got it! Temporary disposal.

I ran behind the garage and picked my footing through discarded rusty garden tools, unused corroded garbage cans and old bricks tossed to and fro. Then I twirled the black bag and dropped him at the bottom of the hedges and threw a weather-beaten beer-case cardboard, that was lying nearby, on top of him. Not much of a burial ceremony for Stinky. Just for morals sake, I made the sign of the cross and mumbled here lies Stinky, I hope his soul doesn’t stink up the neighborhood . . . just yet. Maybe in a day or two I could either wrap him in a series of garbage bags and let the garbage men take him away next week or transfer him to a dumpster before then.

Chumley!

Ever since that incident with Chumley’s dealers, or as he referred to them, just some people I owe money to, I was paralyzed with paranoia every night when I got home. He wouldn’t admit that they were his heroin dealers that he had ripped off (Hell, he wouldn’t even admit that he was on heroin), until three of them showed up four days ago with baseball bats and started tearing up my place. For his sake, he was gone during the incident, but I wandered into this hornet’s nest protected only by unconvincing excuses: "no, for the last time, I don’t know where Chumley is and, no, I have nothing to do with him, he’s just living in the trailer for a little while until he gets back on his feet. I’m kicking his ass out of here. I’m not paying his ‘bill.’ I don’t have that kind of money. This is between you and him. I don’t know anything about it. I don’t deal with him. I have no idea what he does."

But when a message needs to be sent, it gets sent. And my house was the recipient. A clear Federal Express overnight, street justice, process serving, that absolutely could not be refused. Three psycho-eyed, future and ex-cons invading your house, smashing things at will is very hard to ignore. And I didn’t really have the luxury of losing what little furniture and tech toys that I had. And although I could spare the odd hole in the wall or broken mirror, what really bugged me was that one wrong move on my part and I’d be nursing broken kneecaps at the South Bay Hospital.

Drug psychos looking for money are basically soulless, but oddly, have a theatrical front to their presentation. A man with a bat will make a great show of this weapon, swinging it around and such, but will make sure he smashes a shelf of knickknacks right in front of your face, to get the maximum rise out of you. If one wanders into your bedroom, he won’t use the bat to clear everything off the dresser – unless he thinks you will hear it clearly and groan. Or he is bored. But the show is for intimidation. Yet being soulless means, yes, your kneecaps are expendable . . . and this is a definite problem.

But the worst part, the absolutely worst fucking part was that this energy should have been directed at Chumley’s trailer, but for some reason that didn’t occur to them. Maybe they felt I was lying and he really lived here, inside the house. But, at any rate, they were sending a clear enough message and I couldn’t redirect them to his pathetic truck-mounted trailer, because as soon as they would be finished taking out all of his lights and windows – the fucking thing would be undrivable –- another excuse for him to continue hanging on at our tenuous way station.

They stayed for an hour terrorizing me. Home alone. With vicious monsters who made it all very clear that next time I would have to make good on these bills, if Chumley didn’t. They didn’t seem to care that he didn’t live here, he lived in the trailer.

Nevertheless, for three nights afterwards, I had the Raven Arms MP-25 in hand, loaded, ready, when I slipped in through the back door.

Today was the topper, however. When I saw the black Ford Bronco outside, the same vehicle that these particular bill collectors drove, I had no choice but to act. I value my kneecaps and the bastards could give a flying fuck about any possible threats I might make about calling the cops. Without the bats, and the blood that might be on them, it would be my word against theirs. Besides, that’s after the fact – after a fact I didn’t want to experience in the first place. But people like these understand a show of force. After all, intimidation is their stock in trade.

If, by some miracle, I managed to wing one of the bastards, I was legally within my rights to use deadly force. So I didn’t give a fuck. And, any eventual retaliatory attempts by their side, they are very well aware, couldn’t be made without them looking an awful lot like the prime suspects. Which, again, would also be something I would have to experience after the fact – after a fact I didn’t want to experience in the first place.

Best to just keep them at bay for now. Scare the shit out of them. That was my plan. That and forcing Chumley to conjure up the money somehow. The only other real hope would be that they end up in jail through their own machinations. And they usually did. Except for the very few. And, good God, those are the deadly ones . . . and why am I forced to think about these things?

All I really wanted to do was come home, swing open the door like Ricky Ricardo and yell, "Honey, I’m home."

Today was the last straw. Chumley would have to be dealt with – as soon as I saw the fucker. He disappears. I saw Stinky more frequently than him. But he would need to be given the Ultimatum. He had no choice but to start paying his under-the-table drug bills or move out of my driveway. I wouldn’t stand for it. Damn Mirtha’s twisted benevolence that he’s there in the first place.

Fortunately for me, the general decibel level of our day-to-day presence in this neighborhood had mostly numbed the locals into ignoring particularly loud noises coming from the direction of my house. After all, maybe it was just my crappy old car backfiring – damn thing sounded like a Fourth of July demonstration most times I started it up.

But, in any case, it just wouldn’t do to have the Hermosa police snooping around and pulling bullets, fired from my own Saturday Night Special, out of the plaster in my own walls. Jesus. Firing wildly into my own home, with my own gun. I’d have lots of ‘splanin to do, as Ricky might say.

As I contemplated this madness and the need to do some immediate kitchen cleanup work, I stared for a moment into the night sky. What goes on up there? Are they ever forced to navigate the intricacies of pussycide?

But I was then startled by the ugly demeanor of my bald, middle aged neighbor, Christian. He owns a party favor factory called Zowie Novelties and has a two-million dollar ranch home next to ours. Not a matched set, but beach real estate is a strange game.

I heard gun shots, they came from this direction. What’s going on Bonkiewicz? He looked at me accusingly. I wasn’t friendly enough with him, for him to call me by my nickname, Bonkers (the name I actually go by, although I haven’t changed it in a legal sense). That was the way I wanted it.

Must have been my car backfiring, I lobbed back at him.

His head was busy looking around my yard. Inspecting. Looking for clues. He didn’t believe me.

What are you looking at up in the trees? he asked accusingly, craning his neck to investigate. What did he think, I disposed of my most recent victim up there on the top of that palm tree? Hell, I can think of much better places for my victims.

Shooting stars, I offered

He looked at me weird. There was way too much light pollution from the city lights to see anything short of an Armageddon comet. I thought maybe I could say I was looking at a kite in the tree. Why bother? He can gather from my drift that there is nothing happening here. No gun shots. You can go home now. Scoot, get the fuck out of my yard.

I had no way of knowing that in a few days I would evolve in a manner that perhaps only I could understand. Maybe others could. It’s hard to tell. I had no possible roadmap to tell me that I would shortly have to contemplate the nature of time, man’s relation to God and the universe, free will, heaven and hell and everything in between. (And that even Stinky would play his own small part.)

Holy Fucking Shit! I shot the fucking cat!

Welcome to my world.

2

Essence is of the Time:

Bonkers in La-La Land

––––––––

Chase after truth like hell and you’ll free yourself, even though you never touch its coat-tails.

– Clarence Darrow (1857 - 1938)

I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought [re teaching Intelligent Design]. You’re asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes.

– George Bush (2005, yes, 2005)

The following Monday, 7:30 a.m.

You’re flapping your lips way too much for a man who isn’t performing oral sex, she said, dismissing my rant and grabbing at my head.

She was right, I was babbling like an idiot, ranting about politics and religion and things she neither cared about, nor cared to hear me rambling on about at 7:30 in the morning. What was I trying to flee from by engaging in this kind of incoherent morning gibberish? Time seemed short for some reason. Like it was closing in. But it didn’t matter now, I had this Get Out of Jail Free card that only needed to be laid down.

Then something happened. Mirtha changed gears. She was still in control of the vehicle, as it were, only now turning right instead of left. She had that what are you thinking? look on her face. She wasn’t worrying about what I was just ranting about, she wanted to know what I was thinking.

I get nervous when she looks at me like that but I was busy thinking – men’s thoughts: sports, sex, beer, science fiction, explosions, the universe, fireworks, pizza, sex, aliens, politics – all at once. A non-stop, merry-go-round of nonsense. It’s clearly impenetrable. Why would a woman try? And even if she could drag a dredge through the muck in a man’s skull, would she really want to know what’s inside? I mean, a man watching the Weather Channel may look like he cares deeply about a snowstorm in Kalispel, Montana, but in his distorted mind he’s really sodomizing the weather lady – not mentally undressing her, he’s imagining using his throbbing weathervane to have crazy monkey sex with her right there on the studio floor. And these are the thoughts of normal men. The lethal types are not those uttering crude scatological banter – the truly dangerous types turn on the Ted Bundy charm, buy dinner, pick the appropriate wine, smile effortlessly and then leave a half-eaten corpse in the dumpster.

She pulled on her hideous aged kimono, a birthday gift from a cousin who probably didn’t really like her, and sat at the edge of the bed and flicked her cigarette near the glass ashtray on the nightstand. I watched every move of her hand near that ashtray. Once, in a whisky frenzy, she threw it and it whizzed right by my head. It weighed a good pound. If it hit me, it would’ve killed me.

The room was dimly lit from a small lamp, with a yellow-stained shade. I was admiring her left breast peeking out of this loose, ragged robe in the dim light. She held together pretty well despite the heinous abuse she heaped on her body in unhealthy daily doses. We have to talk. She blew out a dragon-sized puff of smoke.

I’ve never had much luck when a woman starts a conversation with, We have to talk. In fact, I’d rather shove M-80s up my ass and squat over a flaming hibachi.

Yipes!, I’m late for work.

I ran. Dressed first, of course, but ran. Made my escape. We can talk later. Got to earn a paycheck for this place. You understand.

Tuesday, 7:45 a.m.

I look out one of the windows on my sun porch in the front of my house while I eat breakfast. I see Mrs. Beasly in her window, across the street.

Every day she sits and looks out her window and registers disgust at the cactus plants lining the sidewalk of my beach-bum house. They have grown too long and too big and have hideous pointy barbs on them that now stick out onto my sidewalk, at about neck level for the average passerby. She waits and she watches as, at this time of the morning, a surfer is heading down to the beach. She doesn’t care much about surfers, except that they must walk past my evil plant. Usually it is ordinary beachgoers carrying their beach chairs and coolers, and she thinks, When will that lazy bastard clip that dangerous plant back, so somebody walking by doesn’t get stuck with it? It could take an eye out for Christ’s sake.

Every day, I spy her out of my window, looking at me out of her window, and we have this battle of the wills. Will she be able to take it? Will she think that today might be the magic day that even I can take it no more and must move with all deliberation to clip away the evil tentacle of this villainous cactus plant? Will she break under the pressure and exert her Gladys Kravitz instincts and come over with a big clipper and clip the damn thing herself?

As for me, I want all the cacti around our house to grow real big. I feel the need to create a fortified zone around my beach facility. Maybe after getting stuck a few times, regular pedestrians will cross the street, before they get to the block on which my house is located. Does she have the balls to venture into this mysterious free-fire zone, viewed on alternate days as either an inner city crack house transported through time and space like the farmhouse in the Wizard of Oz or other days as Dr. Moreau’s Island filled with unholy creatures? Will she hold out for another battle? On another issue? On another day? Perhaps over a heroin addict living in a beat up trailer in my driveway?

Every day we have this battle of wills.

Wednesday, 8:00 a.m.

I woke up to rocks tapping on our bedroom window. I opened the window and looked down in the driveway to see the bulk of Chumley, desperate . . . scared. The first time I’d seen him in at least a week (and he looked like something the cat dragged in while tripping on catnip).

"Mexicans! They’re everywhere! Call the fucking