Trigger warning : Suicide

“Your mother,” starts Jeremiah. There is a pause as he searches for an apt phrase, finally describing her as “quaint” in the same way he under-describes me as “troubled”.

Ironic that I, not he, should be classified as delusional.

Wherever would anyone get that idea from? My dead father’s ghost stretches his spectral frame out across the back seat of the car. He was always up for a road trip, so no surprise that he has joined us.

He has haunted me since he killed himself with a tanto knife. Seppuku. A samurai warrior’s death. I found him and I can say with some authority there was nothing honorable about it. It was bloody, horrific and my life stopped at that moment. In this state of limbo, perhaps I haunt my father rather than the other way around.

My mother was enraged rather than struck with grief. “This is a hereditary thing,” she told me. “Same thing will probably happen to you. You are made of the same bad material as him.Peas in a pod you two. Where do you think that’ll get you?

Since I was eleven, I understood it was my fault. The weight of my grief and guilt traps my father’s spirit between worlds.

All the same, he shows no sense of urgency to escape to eternal rest.

Or damnation. Anyone’s guess.

Jeremiah does not see or hear my ghost-dad. He’s used to my occassional disassociation with the world. There is no official diagnosis. I dance a jagged line of almost sane.

So far.

There is a cacophony of noise in my head. The voices of pirate queens, sirens singing across the waves, ragged fingernails scrape my meninges, I hear the dying plagal cadences of hymns … An unorchestrated noise, an assemblage of whispers rising from an underbelly of reality only I seem to be aware of.

My father understood there was wonder in the world that others didn’t see. He was my best friend and like Seymour Glass, he enjoyed conversing with precocious young girls. Similarly like Jerome Salinger he emerged from his war, Vietnam, having seen the nature of evil up close.

I know this because he was in the habit of confessing his regrets to me on our many weekend road trips. He would forget I was a child and half way through a bottle he woud relive his time in-country with me.

Death is easier to deal with because it is silent, he said more than once.

The screams of the not quite dead echoed through his nightmares. Situated somewhat more north than he should have been, he was assigned to Military Intelligence.

Tôi là một người đàn ông tồi. Tài năng của tôi là nỗi đau.

He told me that this phrase translated loosely to I am American, I am here to help.

More correctly it means: I am a bad man. My talent is pain.

There was no name for the marks war carved into his psyche back then. I was his only confidante and I ate up the bad thoughts in his head, a child sin eater.

His confessions scarred my soul and I let his psyche bleed. There were too many sins. Too much wrong to right.

As a young man, he made a pilgrimage with a friend to visit Ezra Pound. The old fascist threw his hand in witih Mussolini – and come 1945 he was locked in a cage by American troops for three weeks awaiting trial. By the time my father paid his respects Pound was in an asylum in Washington

The poet remained silent throughout the visit until my father turned to leave. When he finally spoke up his only words were : “I got it wrong.”

“Sums it up, Pix,” Dad says. “Whatever I touched went wrong.”

We were defective and imperfect, but together we made a ragged whole. He was my twin, my comrade, my father.

Of course he did not leave.

I would not let him go.

#

Spontaneity is not something I would typically associate with Jeremiah.

Everything about him screams earnestness, gullibility and a desire to misplace his trust. He is a beige man. His hair is sandy colored, his glasses shade light brown eyes, flecked with gold. He dresses in off white like Laurence of Arabia, staring across the desert sand.

Yet here we are, miles off our planned itinerary in the car park of a uniquely Floridean tourist attraction Monkey Jungle.

“When your mother mentioned you had a pet monkey, I thought we should make a stop.”

There wasn’t simply a mention of my pet. My mother is an amateur taxidermist. She stuffed my dead monkey and was wearing him on her Dynasty shoulder pad when we visited. She described him as “a divine accoutrement”. My monkey looked most aggrieved at this treatment.

As was I.

I ordered the monkey from a coupon printed on the back of a DC comic. He arrived in a brown cardboard box ten days later, covered with excrement and $4 postage due. He was angry at the world, bit my finger and ate my hamster.

We were kindred spirits. I forgave him for devouring my hamster, but I never lost the feeling of resentment at having to scoop up his abundant monkey poop.

At Monkey Jungle the visitors are caged, and the monkeys roam free. Vervet, spider and squirrel monkeys abound in the grassy area surrounding the humans caged in a tunnel made of chicken wire winding through the park.

The monkey jungle rulers are rhesus macaques, the red rumped primates. They watch humans wend their way through the wire cage tunnel and I swear those red assed mothers are laughing. Caging the visitors adds a disturbing Charlton Heston vibe to the whole experience.

The rhesus macaques shake the chicken wire walls and jump on the ceiling above our heads demanding we purchase a twenty-five-cent bag of seeds.

“It’s a trap,” I warn Jeremiah. “They will bite your finger off the minute you are careless and get too close.” I nudge him out of the way of falling monkey fecal matter from the blushing ass of the primate stalking us along the roof of the chicken wire tunnel. Rhesus macaques are riddled with herpes B. They use monkey shit as a biological weapon.

Jeremiah’s expression is crestfallen. He mistook me for the Pirate King’s daughter Pippi Longstocking with her loyal monkey Herr Nielsen perched on her shoulder. The feral primates flinging their shit at gawking tourists have destroyed that misplaced illusion of a childhood he imagined for me.

Like Pippi, I did not have parents who cared for social convention or good table manners, but any resemblance stops there. Jeremiah is a testament to the power of denial, evidenced by his ability to imagine me as a pigtailed pirate princess – despite meeting my mother.

He mistook me for the strongest girl in the world. A girl whose creator, Astrid Lindgren believed “Give the children love, more love and still more love – and the common sense will come by itself.”

Maybe in Sweden, not so much Florida.

Pippi Longstocking? Bonjour Tristesse is closer to the truth of my girlhood.

My dead father’s ghost aligns himself on the side with the primates sniggering at us walking through the human cage with the other tourists.

This is the way the world ends, he says happily. Let me hear you whimper, Pix.

It’s always the end of days in Florida. I lived abroad since I was sixteen, washing up in different ports across the globe, until I found my way back with Jeremiah. Don’t let the bright sunlight in January fool you, in Florida it is always Apocalypse pretty soon. This is where the final seals will be broken. Damn straight.

#

“Stop!”

The sign reads “The Tragedy in US History Museum”.

The St Augustine chamber of commerce has been campaigning for some time to close this museum of the American nightmare. They omit it from any tourist brochure and occasionally sue the owner for building violations.

My father considered the tragic history of America’s past an important part of my education, and I toured the museum with him over several weekends. He accompanies me now, bounding up the steps to revisit grotesque symbols of our country’s endurance. Jeremiah frowns unhappily, considerably less enthused than my father.

“Jayne Mansfield’s car? Lee Harvey Oswald’s bedroom furniture?” He blinks at me. “Torture machines.”

“For old times’ sake.” Good times. As good as it got anyway.

Jeremiah opts instead to visit De Ponte’s rumored fountain of youth several blocks over.

The last thing I want is to relive my youth. We arrange that he will pick me up here after his visit.

Careful what you wish for. Eternal youth is a sweet deal. My father’s spirit pops up in the doorway. I’ll show you fear in a handful of dust. Boo!

I ignore him and contemplate instead the mummy bearing the sign “Lonesome? Take me home tonight”and wonder how the St Augustine chamber of commerce could have possibly considered this in poor taste.

The proprietor, LH Buddy Hough informs me there are new exhibits since I last toured with my father.

“Unending tragedy is what makes us great as Americans,” says Buddy.

America feeding on its own tragic decline, my father says. The man is a visionary.

To the right of Lee’s bedside table and situated next to James Deans’ leather jacket is a steel wire monkey.

The centerpiece of Dr Harry Harlow’s experiments on the nature of love.

During a series of twisted experiments in the 1950s, Harlow stole baby monkeys from their mothers. His first experiment offered the babies a choice of fake mothers. A soft cloth monkey mother or a cold, wire monkey mother with a baby bottle attached. The monkeys would forego nourishment preferring to cling to a soft cloth monkey mother sucking down warm maternal comfort in preference to milk.

Harlow’s central hypothesis was the power of love trumps child neglect.

Before long he began to contemplate the concept of “evil” mothers. He built wire monkeys that shook violently, flinging the babies into the cage corners as they reached for love. Another mother contained a concealed catapult boomeranging any baby that clung too tightly, punishing them for their futile quest for love. A blast of cold air from a third fake mother was directed towards any babies seeking maternal warmth. Finally, the mother featured in Buddy’s exhibit, the cruelest of all the artificial monkey mothers. A monkey with hidden spikes. Without warning the spikes would stab any baby monkey clinging to the wire monkey hoping for a maternal embrace.

Time and time again, trembling, fearful and in pain, baby monkeys returned looking for comfort. The more the monkey mother spiked them, the more they sought her comfort hoping to ease their pain.

I’m your spiked monkey not your mother. You only know how to seek comfort if it is coupled with pain, my dead father whispers in my ear. That boy you are with won’t withstand the pain that comes with loving the damaged. Run away, Pix. Spare one of us at least.”

#

A mummified chimpanzee dressed in a child’s space suit stands guard on the steps of the museum. Buddy claims it is Enos, the only chimpanzee to have orbited the Earth. The third great ape in space.

“Except for Buzz,” mutters my father. He has a beef against Air Force that extends to Space Force. Something about Air Support coming in too slow in the final days of Vietnam.

“Typical of those Nazis at NASA to sell off Enos at the end of his faithful service,” my father continues

Jeremiah arrives to pick me up and continue our road trip across the state. He smiles happily to find me with another stuffed monkey companion.

“A monkey spaceman,” he says. “Cute.”

Buddy launches into a history of chimps in space. I watch Jeremiah’s face fall as Buddy describes the training regime.

“They trained Enos to push buttons and pull levers in exchange for banana pellets. A mild electric shock was administered whenever Enos touched the wrong lever,” Buddy reads from a card.

“NASA’s word, “mild”, who the hell knows what Enos felt when his monkey paw was zapped. And “banana” pellets? Sure. Leftover LSD from CIA experiments is my guess,” Dad’s voiceover continues.

“Enos was so well trained that even when there was a malfunction on his second orbit that saw Enos zapped regardless of which button he pushed, he completed the mission – despite the capsule temperature rising to around 100 degrees,” Buddy continues as Jeremiah’s mouth drops in horror. “The US Navy fished Enos out of his capsule after a successful touchdown in the ocean. He recovered his good nature after a few banana pellets and retired from the service a year later.”

Perhaps I might be more sympathetic towards my mother if she had been permitted to administer “banana pellets” rather than relying on electric shocks and sharp spikes.

“Did you drink from the fountain of youth?” I ask Jeremiah.“Is there a portrait of you aging in an attic somewhere now?”

Confusion crosses Jeremiah’s face at the reference. My father heaves a sigh at his ignorance of Oscar Wilde. Dad loathed Victorian literature, preferring the modernists and the confessional poets. Dad and I were often parked up together at Skunk Hour.

I myself am hell I say out loud.

“Right there with you, Babygirl,” says Dad.

“I decided not to drink from the fountain,” says Jeremiah, ignoring my warning. “We will drift into old age together.”

Jesus says my father. Cut him loose, Pix.

Jeremiah’s sincere expression pains me. My father is right. I will only drag him down full fathom five. I’m incapable of loving anyone. Let alone loving unselfishly.

Yet, Jeremiah’s unending dedication has won my respect. In a rare moment of optimism, it occurs to me it is a fine line between love and respect. Or something like that. Tolstoy wrote about it in Anna Karenina. Unending respect is the next best thing to love

“Remember I went to the doctor last week?”

I have news and in this moment of glowing respect and admiration, I feel I can finally tell him and the best way to prepare him is to paraphrase Pound – and Dad.

“It’s all gone horribly wrong.”

Jeremiah’s eyes widen. “Is it cancer?” he asks, horror stricken. I shake my head and to his credit his next guess is: “Are you pregnant?”

Bullseye. A smidgen more positive than cancer or a brain tumor. However, I’m unprepared for the expression of delight that takes over his being. He spins me around as though we are in a stage musical. His eyes are shiny with happy tears. I have never seen happy tears before. I always thought they only existed in Hollywood.

There is no background music in this technicolor dance of joy, just the sound of my dead father howling in despair.

You want a monkey jungle? You try suburbia with this, this tax accountant and children! Run Pix. Make for Nassau. You were destined to be a sea gypsy. You should be Blackbeard’s consort, not trapped by this walking symbol of mediocrity!

Jeremiah is pre-med. Not an accountant. A small but quite important distinction that reminds me it could be worse. It occurs to me, not for the first time, my father’s take on Jeremiah is that of a jealous lover.

I swiftly turn that rock over and stomp on any anxiety that scuttles out.

Tentatively I try to temper Jeremiah’s excited response. “I wonder if I’m cut out for motherhood.”

At which point Buddy Hough, the owner of this little piece of American trauma, offers sage like advice, whilst shaking Jeremiah by the hand in sincere congratulations.

“Remember how those monkeys kept running back to be spiked.” He beams happily. “That is a get out of jail free card, sweetheart. Give yourself some leeway.”

Jeremiah, happily oblivious to Monkey Love experimentation, tells me I will be the best mother ever. His faith in me and Buddy’s understanding of the experiment differs markedly from Harry Harlow’s final conclusions.

Harlow had a personal interest in depression late in his career, writing for him it was like living “within a wall of steel.” But while Harlow pondered the dark void and the effectiveness of shock treatment, his monkeys were left caged in a “pit of despair”, living within actual walls of steel – alone, unloved.

All lonely monkeys break eventually. Some wither and die. Some in a last burst of defiance choose a warrior’s death.

Enos the mummified chimp’s eyes light up. Remember, he tells me. Primates are cannibals. They eat the weakest of the tribe’s young. Set yourself a low bar and you will not be disappointed.

Not quite in line with the nuanced conclusion of Harlow of the importance of parental love or for the therapists that followed but, I suppose, allowing for the widest of interpretations, it is broadly correct.

The only happily ever after is to be found across the state in Orlando at Disney World. And that happiness is a fake package of squirrels and blue jays for tourists and the obstinately gullible.

Jeremiah won’t change me. You can’t change anyone. But like Enos the chimp, I will keep pushing the buttons and levers in the hope of treats even with the occasional electric shock.

Enos the chimp’s anguished mummified jaw twists briefly into a supportive smile which is more uplifting than the expression on my irate dead father’s Skeletor face.

I climb into the car with Jeremiah for the last leg of the Floridean road trip and wave goodbye to Buddy and St Augustine. We are heading for the coastal highway A1A. I can already hear the mermaids’ song.

.

“Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.”

― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

END