Don't leave your wife and children to make a no-budget movie. |
In "This Monkey's Gone to Heaven" Emmett Monk is an overweight 34-year-old Alaskan bush pilot who impulsively abandons his politician wife and two young children to wildly pursue a sudden dream of making a no-budget movie in Minnesota, only to find the world turn against him and spin out of control. THIS MONKEY'S GONE TO HEAVEN Introduction I’ll say it plain: my mom fell off the roof and broke her neck. It sounds harsh to put it so bluntly and I hope you don’t think I’m insensitive. But that’s how she died; she left this world screaming. In a drunken stupor my mom climbed up onto the rooftop of the farmhouse and by hooting and hollering she tried to get the attention of a deaf man who didn’t even know she existed. We were trying to make our first movie. The accident happened there on the set. I could lie and say that I never think about that day, because it was so god awful, but it isn’t true. Her final scream has been ringing in my ears like I was born and raised with it. Like a congenital birth defect. The priest at her funeral said she was one of God’s special children. But if you and I were God would we want to see our children die that way, falling off rooftops? Wouldn’t it be better to let everyone know a year in advance so they could set things right and on the day they were to die instead of falling to their deaths or getting shot or run over by a car, they’d simply start floating up to heaven and everyone could wave goodbye? Though I suppose in this scenario for some it could be seen as the last chance to finally show your neighbor what you really thought of him, doomed anyway now, soon to be inanimate as a road sign, floating so slowly that the target proves irresistible. But I’m not here to change the world. For that matter I’m not here to accept it, either, but I’ll try and stick to the facts. I’m a pilot by trade. This is a love story. |