Trials of the Monkey

by Matthew Chapman

  ‘You had to be there,’ I say apologetically.

  You had to be there at Leland’s church, had to see the shacks along the road, smell the unleaded gasoline of the dispossessed, hear the train hooting and rumbling through. You had to look into Kurt’s eyes. You had to feel the rough, gouging sweep of history through the valley, the thousands of miners who scrabbled beneath the ground to make clean-fingered men in London rich, or picture Rappleyea strutting down Main Street and knocking open the door of Robinson’s Drug Store, or imagine the requisitioned houses beneath the waters of the TVA, or see the end result of it all, Aunt Ruth trembling behind the screen door, Gloria with her wayward, uprooted laugh.

  I stop talking about it.

  At one point, one of the studios flies me out to L.A. for two days to discuss another script I might do. On the way back, I’m sitting in First Class when Muhammad Ali steps gingerly in with his wife. He walks slowly and deliberately across the aisle and starts to sit down right in front of me. In spite of his uncertain walk and his shaking hands, in spite of a mask-like quality in his face, he is the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen. As he shuffles into his seat, he turns and looks at me. He puts out his hand and I reach to shake it, but he’s merely trying to steady himself on the seat and I’m left touching the back of his hand, like a Catholic toadying up to the Pope. He smiles at me, twists, and drops out of sight.

  We’re stuck on the ground for a while and I can hear him talking to his wife. It is hard for him to talk, each word is pushed out against his body’s will. At one point, she says, ‘Don’t be so anxious, Muhammad.’

  Anxious?! Muhammad Ali? How dare she!

  I have never asked for an autograph but I want to get one for my daughter. The first time he goes to the bathroom, I ask his wife if it would be all right and she says, ‘Sure, go ahead, do what you like.’ He comes back. I’m too embarrassed to ask. Why shouldn’t the guy get some peace? Then I hate myself. An hour later, he gets up to go to the bathroom again. The same laborious process, bend at the waist, ease up, grasp the backs of the seats—freeze. He stands there motionless for five seconds as if calculating the push and pull of all his muscles and then straightens up. He exits the row and stands. His shoulders are very broad, his hips narrow, and now he walks like an athlete, slow as he is, that stiff but rolling walk, the arrogance and implied menace.

  When he comes back, I get up and ask him for the favour. With great effort, he dedicates a piece of newspaper to my daughter and signs it. I thank him effusively and sit down. I remember a friend of mine in L.A., Paul Getty, who was kidnapped, had his ear cut off, and then, having survived that (and who he was to begin with), fell victim to a drug overdose. Now he cannot talk or move and is strapped into an electric wheelchair. All you can offer in this circumstance is to be as entertaining as possible. So, when Muhammad and his wife stand up again and are in the aisle, I get up and start talking to them. I tell them I’ve just come back from the South, how I’m a descendant of Charles Darwin, and how I’m writing a book about an old trial down there. Muhammad leans in, smiling faintly, nodding now and then, intrigued.

  When I’ve spoken for a few minutes he asks, ‘Where is this?’

  ‘Dayton, Tennessee.’

  A smile—a smile of mischief I’ve been watching since I was ten—spreads over his face and he looks at me sideways.

  ‘Bible Belt,’ he says, and shakes his head, laughing.

  I’m so embarrassed about the drunk-driving thing, I’m taking no risks. I hire a lawyer whose last big case was defending one of the terrorists who blew up the World Trade Center. He has an office in the Woolworth Building, an old, ornate, peculiar building downtown near City Hall. He collects expensive antique watches. He has a hard time getting excited about my problem.

  ‘Hey, I’ll deal with it.’

  And, for three grand, he does. I come out of court with a choice. Lose the licence for ninety days, which will complicate matters in Tennessee, or keep some provisional version of it and attend a series of alcohol education classes, which will complicate matters in New York, emotionally because I cannot stand to be talked down to and will become infuriated, and practically because it will cut deeply into my writing time. Nonetheless, I decide on the latter, the classes. I go down to the DMV and a woman behind the counter spells it out for me. It’s ten classes, one a week, and each one takes a couple of hours.

  ‘Take the licence,’ I say. ‘See you in ninety days.’

  Later that week, I remember I still have a British licence. I find it and look at it. It’s valid for another twenty years! Ah ha …

  Insofar as I can drag myself out of the script, I begin to anticipate going back to Dayton with an almost furtive pleasure. I wonder about the re-enactment. How many people will come to the town? What kind of people will they be? How can they tell the story without making William Jennings Bryan—and thus everything they believe in—look ridiculous? How bad will it be? How amateur? How distorted?

  As exhaustion sets in, there are more and more mornings where I wake up at three, sweating, convinced of my mediocrity. The hour of the wolf. During the daylight hours, I can ignore his scratchings on my psyche’s door, but at night he creeps in and whispers how I made the wrong decisions; another life was mine, I let it go. He compares me unfavourably to other more successful men, gnawing with unerring subtlety at whatever confidence or hope is left. I wake up and stare at the black windows, try to flush him out, banish his scent, but only work can drive him away and seal back the door. I wait until four and then get up. By five I’ve walked the cold, deserted streets to my office, crossing sometimes with women stumbling out of cabs in evening dress or men with ties askew, and find myself back among friends whose sufferings, unlike my own, I can manipulate and control.

  Another movie I’ve written based on a Donald Westlake book called What’s the Worst That Could Happen? looks like it might get made, but now there’s the problem of hooking a director, actors. I make calls, I take calls. I buy plane tickets back to Dayton in a thirty-minute gap prised out of the middle of a day.

  I try to spend time with my daughter, but I’m distracted and she’s too smart not to notice, and hates me for it. My million-and-a-half-dollar sale runs into problems. I’m not going to get all the money without a fight. I can see a lawsuit shambling down into my life, malicious and well funded. When my wife, Denise, calls and asks me to take care of some small domestic detail, I feel my scalp tighten around my head (Not more! Please not more!) and then an even tighter feeling as if I’m being zipped into a bodybag. I hyperventilate, I sigh, I gasp for air. I’m killing myself, I know it. The wolf has made his burrow in my brain and my heart is ready to blow.

  Denise and I are not getting on well. It’s nothing serious, she just hates me. She hates me for attacking and damaging her faith, for undermining her optimism, and for my tedious and pervasive whining about the fact that I have been forced by our excessive life to work day and night for years on end without rest. She has a quick temper. Sometimes it explodes in my self-pitying face and I walk around wounded for a week, unable to forgive, stepping aside when we cross in the corridor of our apartment.

  But she is wounded in a more profound way.

  When she first went to see Thomas Green Morton, her forkbending guru, Denise’s twenties had come to an end, concluded by the death of a child. Believing in Thomas, she recovered from this and found peace. When we first started living together, she had mantras and prayers and meditational techniques which he’d taught her and they seemed to work.

  Uneducated though I was, I knew enough about science to know that if the ‘miracles’ Thomas performed—the ‘phenomena’ as they were pretentiously called—were genuine, then all the laws of science were meaningless. I also knew enough about human nature, having inhabited the margins of a criminal life, to recognise Thomas for what he was.

  And I was jealous.

  Here, after all, was a man who dictated what my girlfriend hummed after breakfast, whose bent
coins she carried in her purse, a man to whom she believed she owed her happiness, even her life. Faith has a proven physiological effect on the body. It’s called the placebo effect. Thomas was Denise’s Grand Placebo. He had no ‘powers’—obviously—but he worked for Denise so long as she had faith in him. Without asking myself if I had anything better to replace him with, I set out to destroy that faith.

  We lived on the second floor of a two-apartment Spanish stucco building on La Peer Drive in the wrong part of Beverly Hills. Anna Bella was less than a year old and we were so broke we had recently taken an art deco lamp belonging to Denise from one antique shop to the next and finally, after considerable humiliation, sold it to help pay an electricity bill. In spite of this I went out one day and bought a four-head video machine. Denise had some tapes of Thomas performing some of his ‘miracles’ and I intended to study them in detail.

  The tapes were at once amusing and alarming. Thomas was a funny little man, a simple country type who had some training as a pharmacist and had turned it into alchemy. He had a beard and a bump on his forehead which, so the story went, was caused by his getting struck by lightning. This was the source of his power, along with an encounter with aliens from a planet called Itibi-Ra. I found it all extraordinarily hokey, a lame amalgam of Uri Geller and a bunch of New Age bunco artists. In Denise’s defence, however, there were eminent Brazilian doctors and scientists who were also taken in: you could see them on the tape, open-mouthed. How could Denise know that scientists, trained to deal with nature, which is not intentionally mischievous, are the least capable of exposing human fraud? A magician would have busted him in a second.

  It took me about an hour.

  Amid a lot of shouting and distraction, I watched as Thomas turned paper into aluminum and made childish patterns appear on its surface. He squeezed perfume out of his fingers. He put a coin in the palm of someone’s hand and asked them to make a fist around it. When they opened their hand, the coin was bent. (Why one never actually saw a coin bending on a table was not explained.) When things were going well, he relished the presence of the camera. When he was unable to perform some sleight of hand without the camera catching him, he insisted it be turned off. The moment was too ‘sacred.’

  I ran the tapes at normal speed and then more slowly. When I got to the second tape, I caught him.

  Denise and Diogo sat in a dark room. Two months had passed since the death of the child. The son of one of Denise’s girlfriends, and Diogo’s best friend, he had died of cancer after a long and appalling fight. Denise, a passionately loyal friend, had come to New York, where the boy and his mother were installed in Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital, and she and Diogo had been there throughout the last weeks. Denise had actually been there at the moment of his death. It had been a gruesome and tragic ordeal.

  Here now, or so I had been told, I could see Thomas contacting the dead boy’s spirit. As usual, he yelled a lot. Soon lights started to flash in the room. The first one was almost in Denise and Diogo’s faces, the next couple further away. You could see the vague outline of Thomas moving about and waving his hands.

  ‘Look, look, look!’ he yelled. ‘He’s talking to you!’

  They were bright flashes, like flashlights. I selected one in particular and slowed the tape down, moving the video forward a frame at a time.

  Darkness. Darkness. Yelling. More yelling. Flash!

  I reversed the video a frame. And there it was.

  A clearly identifiable flash unit off a camera.

  By its light, you could see Denise and Diogo’s rapt faces. Off to the right, part of Thomas was visible, his arm, the side of his face, yelling, and the hand with the flashlight in it.

  I called Denise in to look.

  She stared at the frame in shock. It was brilliantly simple. The first flash going off in total darkness, with Denise and Diogo’s pupils dilated, effectively blinded them. The yelling then covered the sound of the flashlight recharging and popping again. The audacity of it was startling. If he was capable of this, what else might he be capable of?

  I showed the tape to Diogo, who was then thirteen. He was furious.

  A week or two passed. Denise seemed a little depressed. When she spoke to a friend of hers in Brazil, she told in amazement of what I had discovered, and admitted ruefully that she’d been conned. After a few weeks, however, she began to revise herself. Thomas was not a scam artist, after all; he just performed this one scam, perhaps a couple of others. It was hard to have these powers, sometimes he couldn’t conjure up the real thing, so he faked it. That’s how it is with gurus. They don’t want to disappoint anyone.

  Such reasoning is irrefutable. If a man claims he’s bred a herd of pigs that can fly, but when you test them they all stay earthbound, you haven’t proved they cannot fly, only that they didn’t fly that day. On the other hand, having thrown his entire herd off a cliff and seen them all crash, you might rationally conclude that in probability the claim was false. And whatever Denise told me, or even herself, I believe that deep down she now knew her old friend was a charlatan. I thought she’d be outraged at him and grateful to me. Instead, she has never forgiven me. And why should she? I had taken from her something she valued.

  As ridiculous and grotesque as it was for Thomas to pretend he was invoking the spirit of a dead child, he at least had the intention of comforting Denise and her son. What I had done, out of a genuine love of truth, certainly, but also out of petulance and jealousy, was to take away that comfort. What I had done benefited no one.

  Within a year, I would be facing the death of my mother, and I would have only Denise to comfort me.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Flowers and the Promise of Moonshine

  The day arrives for my departure back to Tennessee and, to my great disappointment, the script is still not finished. I pack the computer and kiss my wife goodbye. She and Anna Bella stand outside our apartment building with our little white dog, Gracie, and grin at me and wave. They are amused, you can tell, by my Quixotic journey.

  I’m disappointed that I have to take the script with me, but soon I’m on a plane, out of my narrow railroad office into a tubular arrow, sprung from the ground, whistling south. The rubber rips, the body-bag unzips, light surges through the rounded window, and life yawns and stretches and opens her arms.

  Next to me on the plane is an irritable woman. She’s in her mid to late forties and well dressed. She is reading what appears to be a self-help book called Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart. In front of me is a child. The child keeps throwing himself against the back of the seat and then peeking over the top at me. I eventually snake a hand around the edge of the seat and prod him in the ribs.

  The woman next to me seethes as I relentlessly turn the key in the child’s hysteria. She’s a big, blonde voluptuous woman, magnificent in her way, and now she’s throwing her big tanned legs around, one across the other and back again, twisting around on her big arse, and grunting softly each time the child’s head appears over the seat.

  She’s going to pieces and falling apart.

  I observe her out of the corner of my eye and make some guesses. Fifteen years ago she was a real beauty and married some guy with money in Atlanta, maybe in real estate or hotels. The guy dumped her, or even worse, didn’t. Now she’s a confirmed and bitter Republican who plays golf and drinks too much, and right now she’s angry. She’s angry at me, at the passage of time, at the kid, at the turbulence, and at the fact that she’s not in First Class and the seat’s too small. Furthermore, the plane is late taking off and the pilot won’t stop talking, and this is really annoying her. Every time he comes on with his capable, piloty voice, she sighs massively and lunges from side to side on her big cheeks. In this area of her pissed-offness I’m in total accord. When the stewardess arrives to take our orders for food—against the pilot’s continuing description of the geographical features below and exactly how high we are above them and exactly how late we’re going to be—I grumble: ‘
Maybe if he’d stop talking and concentrate on his driving we could pick up a little time here.’ And the irritable woman laughs wildly and introduces herself.

  This is what I like about travel: it’s such an antidote to your preconceptions. The woman and her husband live in Mexico, where they own a large flower farm. She spends most of her day painting in a big white studio. Their life is a big adventure: big money, big risks. The book is by a Buddhist psychiatrist in New York and when I read it later it’s fascinating and smart. She and her husband have been married for over twenty years, sticking by each other through poverty and wealth, and still adore each other. They have two children who are doing interesting things and from the way she talks about them, amused at their individuality, you can tell she loves them and they love her back. She’s curious, lively, acerbic, and, the more you look at her, the more beautiful she becomes.

  We spend the rest of the trip laughing.

  When we get off the plane and she and her husband have hugged and kissed and grinned and laughed and patted each other with the delight of teenagers, she asks me if I have time to come smoke a joint with them in the car park before I catch my next plane. I don’t, but thank them. They walk off, she with her big arm around his shoulder, he looking at her and smiling as they talk.

  I imagine them waking up in Mexico in the middle of a billion swaying flowers, a light breeze carrying the scent of their crop into their white bedroom, a distant church bell, the husband on his side watching as she rolls toward him with her smile and her big tanned legs. And there was I putting her on a dry, shaved golf course with her bitterness and disappointment.

  I’ve decided to fly all the way to Chattanooga and pick up a car there with my British licence. Now, however, it starts to rain and the next plane out is late and getting later and I have a very bad feeling about the whole thing so I decide to rent a car here and try to make the two hundred miles to Dayton before it gets dark.