This Monkey's Gone to Heaven

Chapter 9, This Monkey's Gone to Heaven

Chapter Nine




I spent a couple days in the hospital during which time I tried escaping to go help my dad, but the orderlies or nurses always found me, usually down on the floor crawling because of my dizzy spells. Nicole didn't try and stop me either. She’d just sit there in the chair beside my bed, paging through her Vogue magazine knowing I'd get caught and brought back over the shoulder of some enormous orderly. I liked that about her. She was aloof. She didn't get emotional. She just raised her eyebrows and kept her eyes in the Vogue as I dropped from my bed to the floor like some circus freak dragging myself to the door, my fat ass exposed in my starched gown, mooning the universe, hairy canyon crack and all. Maybe it was my way of showing her I wasn't a monster. I could care, I had a heart, I wasn't all bad. My dad came first. I'd kill myself trying to help him. Look at me, Nicole! Crawling across the floor, leaving a glistening trail of drool. Slack-jawed, grunting. I'm sacrificing everything! I don't care about me, I care about others! I'm good! But these thoughts never occurred to me, so maybe I was just plainly concerned about my dad's welfare. I wanted to go rescue him.
When I was released from the hospital, I called my mom. She was furious.
"Where the hell have you been?!" she hollered. She started crying.
"Mom, I'm sorry. I thought Nicole called you. Didn't she tell you?"
"How could you, Emmett?" she blubbered. She was slurring her words, she'd been drinking. "How could you?"
"Mom, I said I'm sorry."
"Because of you he left me. I'm all alone again."
"Who left you?"
"Roger, who do you think? You left his car on the freeway? What's wrong with you? What kind of a son did I raise?"
"What? What do you mean he left you?"
"He left me! He left me! I'm all alone again! Can't you understand?! What don't you get!? The greatest guy in the world just left me! God, I feel so horrible I can't even tell you! What's wrong with you, anyway! I knew I shouldn't have let you take my car!"
"What do you mean 'your car'? It was Roger's car."
"I meant his car. Well, it would've been my car, if you hadn't screwed it up for me!"
"Have you been drinking, Mom?"
"Wouldn't you be? Jesus, Emmett, why can't you be more like your brother Stanley? He's never done a thing to hurt me. But you! Oh, you take the cake, mister!"
I was growing tired of this. All my life it’s been like this. Screw her.
"You know what, Mom? I was in the fucking hospital. Don't you even care?"
"Oh, don't get all weepy on me now, Emmett. We hate it when you start feeling sorry for yourself. We hate it when you do that."
"Oh, screw you!" I hung up on her.
Nicole was waiting for me, sitting out in the car with Howser. He had driven out to help us find my dad. At first Nicole and Howser didn't seem to get along. She was quiet and they were awkward around each other. Typical Howser in the presence of a pretty girl. I noticed, but didn't seem to care.
I opened the front door of the car, gingerly as my ribs were hurting terribly from the slightest movement. It took a few minutes to get situated up in the front seat. I reached for the door to close it, but it was just too painful, so Howser had to get out and close it for me.
Nicole laid down in the back seat and soon fell asleep. We drove to the address in Cucumber where my dad was supposed to be. Howser was quiet as we drove through town.
"What's wrong with you?" I asked.
"Nothing. Why?"
"You're usually talking."
"Not in the mood I guess. Maybe I'm coming down with something. I have a sore throat." He turned and looked in the back seat. "She's sleeping? That was fast."
I imagined finding my dad in dire straits, maybe locked out of his apartment, curled up in the fetal position, his apartment ransacked, his expensive electric wheelchair stolen, the kids taking it for joyrides around town, my dad blubbering beside himself with grief, "They took everything. I don't have a thing left. They wiped me out, Emmett. Oh, boo hoo hoo. Oh, boo hoo hoo."
Instead, I would find him in the best of spirits. We drove up to the address. I recognized the apartment building. Shit. It was the same apartment building where Brittany lived. I double-checked the address to make sure. Christ almighty, it was just my luck. I looked at the apartment number. It was apartment 214. He lived on the same floor as Brittany did, too. Wonderful.
"Is this it?" Howser asked.
"Yeah, I guess."
"Well, what's wrong? Don't you want to go in?"
"Yeah."
"Monk?"
"What?"
"You look like you're gonna get sick," Howser said.
"Fuck."
"What?"
I turned around to see if Nicole was still sleeping. She was.
"I'll tell you later."
We left Nicole in the backseat of the car and went into the apartment building. Apartment 214 was just down the hall from Brittany's. How weird was that. I grew nervous and agitated. Howser was talking a mile a minute as we walked down the hall, telling me about the girls in Jamaica in a loud voice like all of the sudden he had something to prove.
"Would you just shut up for a second?" I snapped.
He looked at me, all hurt. "Jesus, what's wrong with you?"
I walked back out of the apartment building as Howser went on to my dad's apartment. I had to get some fresh air. I was suffocating in there. I thought about the movie. I felt like I was at a standstill, that the movie was just never going to happen. I had to focus my energy into something clear, a goal, a project, something to prove my worth. At this rate the movie would never get finished and people would think of me as just another dreamer, a fat guy who talked and planned without doing. I had to do this movie; I had to see it through. I made up my mind: in two weeks we'd start production. If I couldn't find money by then, we'd use a home video camera, I didn't care. We'd just do it and if it sucked we could all laugh about it. If no real actors were interested, we'd draw characters with straws and do it ourselves. Good. It was decided. I felt better. My ribs were killing me and so was my head. I looked at my watch. It was time to take my medicine. I was going to watch it, I was going to follow the prescription down to the wire. I wasn't going to abuse it. I was all done with that.
I walked up to the car and looked into the backseat. Of course, Nicole was still sleeping. My God, she was such an angel. It was really hot in there, she was sweating, her hair all matted down sticky and wet, so I opened the rear door and rolled down the windows. I took out my hanky and wiped her face. I leaned in--grunting, since it hurt to bend over--and gave her a peck on the cheek. I shook my head and smiled. What an angel, what a perfect angel. I couldn't wait to introduce her to my kids. They'd just love her to pieces.
I closed the car door gently and when I looked up I saw in the distance a woman driving down the sidewalk in an electric wheelchair. This young woman, she was smiling and looking up at the sky. I was moved at first. Look at her! Here's someone with a great attitude, I thought. Stuck in a wheelchair, but still loving life. I shook my head in awe. I was thinking, boy, you really learn something every day...Then I started to see who it really was. I couldn't believe my eyes. But it was her all right. It was Brittany. She had a bag of groceries in her lap. She looked extraordinarily happy. She kept looking up into the trees, looking for birds. And that wheelchair...I recognized the stickers: Inventors of America and North American Inventors Association. What was Brittany doing with my dad's wheelchair? What the hell!?
At first I was furious and I imagined the standard horrible things. But for the second time in my life I decided to play it cool. I crouched down behind Howser's car and watched her take the turn--with finesse, I might add--and drive behind the apartment building to the elevator, which I myself used to take in better days to avoid walking up the stairs. Once she was out of sight, I went inside the apartment building and took the stairs. I listened for the sound of the elevator. The shaft was on the other side of the staircase wall. I heard the elevator doors open. Someone must've been coming down in the elevator, because I heard a guy's voice and she responded cheerfully. (It was Howser I would later come to find out. No one had been at my dad's apartment so he'd gone back down to the car, looking for me.) I heard the wheelchair move forward, the elevator doors close, and the elevator start rising. I kept up with the elevator running up the stairs, wincing with each step because of my ribs. Sure enough, on the second floor it stopped, the doors opened, and the wheelchair rolled out and started driving away. I went to the door, cracked it open, and watched her drive down the hallway, humming to herself.
Suddenly, I had this overwhelming feeling that my dad was in danger. After all, what was she doing with my dad's wheelchair? She drove right past his apartment, too. She didn't even acknowledge it. I jumped out from behind the door and started running down the hall, hanging onto my side, screaming, "What the hell did you do to my dad?! Brittany!!" She didn't even look behind her as she started driving towards her own apartment at the far end as fast as the wheelchair would take her.
"Hey, Brittany!! You get back here! Where's my dad?! What did you do to my dad?! Brittany!! Answer me!!"
I ran to apartment 214, threw open the door, and leapt inside. The studio apartment had a cot in the corner and a cardboard box at the foot of the cot and that was about it. Where was he? I went to the bathroom, but that was empty, too. Where in the hell was everybody? Where was Howser? I ran back outside my dad's apartment and started running down the hall to Brittany's. Of course, my mind was racing and I imagined the worse. Shit, maybe somehow Howser was involved, too. It was a conspiracy or something. Maybe Howser was Brittany's pimp. Maybe they ran a drug ring. After all, look how much time Howser spent in Jamaica. He claimed he worked for a fetish magazine, but I'd never seen any evidence of that. It was clear to me now. He was smuggling drugs in from Jamaica and he was pushing pot, blow, and horse on all of Brittany's johns. I was convinced of it. By the time I kicked down her door I'd see Howser and Brittany caught in the act as they scurried to hide the drugs. My dad would be tied up in the corner, tied and gagged, looking lost and hopeless. My dad had gotten nosey. Brittany wanted to have him done away with, but Howser, friend that he is, protested. "He's my best friend's father. I could never."
At Brittany's apartment I started pounding on the door. Then I grabbed the doorknob and pushed it open. "Where the hell's..." I stopped, dumbfounded, because there he was, my dad with a big smile on face, getting lifted into his wheelchair by Brittany.
"Hey," he said. "Look what the cat dragged in."