Monkey Boy by Francisco Goldman (best self help books to read .TXT) 📕

if being an underachiever actually meant you were somehow a superior person, which according to Ian it did, you shared a bond with a fellow underachiever, you were like members of a secret club who understood the workings of the world in a way people outside it didn’t. According to Ian, we didn’t really have to worry about the future, high scores on our SATs would get us into college no matter what. When we took the exams our natural underachievers’ intelligence would take over. I didn’t really buy that theory. I was sure my low grades were going to count against me no matter how I did on the SATs, but I kept it to myself; even when you disagreed with Ian about something minor, he’d ridicule you until you took it back. Ian’s elastic grin, the way it narrowed and stretched his greenish eyes, gave his face an ecstatically diabolical expression. But he was a handsome kid with a mop of sandy hair who could always create a circus around himself. On Halloween he came to school with his face dyed red with food coloring, carrying a jar of mayonnaise under his arm, and went around clapping his own cheeks to make the whitish goop squirt from his mouth into the paths of squealing girls and onto their clothes. Even the pretty young social studies teacher Miss Turowski came out into the hall to gape at Ian doing that, and I saw how she lifted her hands into her thick blonde hair and looked around appalled, then went back into her classroom shaking her head, sort of laughing. No one else but Ian could have come to school on Halloween as a perambulating phallus and gotten away with it like he did.

That’s some goddamned friend you picked, that Brown kid, I remember my father blurting as we drove somewhere in the Oldsmobile one day. His father’s in B’nai B’rith, I see him when he comes to meetings. He’s the one owns that toilet store out on Route 9, wears those pastel jackets and dyes his hair, a regular Liberace, that one. No wonder his kid’s a good-for-nothing, thinks it’s a joke to be forced to go to a summer program for lazy kids going goddamned nowhere, big joke that is, and you running after him every time he snaps his fingers.

And me, running after Ian Brown every time he snapped his fingers. It makes me feel sick to remember all this.

Ian’s father did own a bathroom fixtures store in a small shopping plaza on Route 9. Mrs. Brown worked as the personal secretary to the owner of a Boston liquor distillery called Old Yeoman. There’s one night that I especially remember, when Ian must have snapped his fingers and I’d gone running over, and Mrs. Brown came and sat with us at the kitchen table after they’d all had dinner. She was wearing pajamas and a thick quilted bathrobe, her hair a Phyllis Diller mess, cold cream spread like cake frosting over her face, her nose like the carrot on a snowman. She was smoking menthol cigarettes and sipping Old Yeoman mint-flavored vodka straight on the rocks.

Gleefully grinning Ian proclaimed: Ethel says you’re a sickly looking boy. He called his mother Ethel. A sickly little monkey boy. Come on Ethel, don’t deny it, and Ian rocked back in his chair as if propelled by his inhaled wheezy laughter, slapping the tabletop with his big basketball player’s hands.

Mrs. Brown wanly smirked at her son, thin eyebrow raised, opposite eye narrowed, and she exhaled a long plume of minty smoke. Her chin was trembling.

Ethel knows you got tuberculosis down in banana land when you were a baby, said Ian. And you don’t take the TB tests at school because they’re going to be positive. So you don’t even know for sure that you’re cured.

Mrs. Brown’s eyes fixed on me from inside her white mask in a way that suddenly sickened me. I should have heeded my mother’s advice and never told anybody about having tuberculosis, but to have told Ian! The TB tests took place behind a curtain. Nobody even had to know I didn’t take them because when the nurse looked at my medical record, it informed her that my skin would react with a positive.

Come on, show some character, I silently urged myself, then said as strongly as I could: I’m cured.

That made Ian laugh. I don’t know, he said. Ethel thinks you’re still sick and that it might be contagious, right Ethel?

Mrs. Brown laconically said, Oh Ian, stop that. Don’t be such a jerk to your friend.

You’re going to catch a sleeping illness from that sick little monkey boy. That’s what you always say, Ethel, admit it, said Ian, even sounding somewhat accusing.

Alright, boys, Mrs. Brown slurred wearily. I’ve had enough of your joking around, what a couple of pranksters. I’m going to bed. She took a last drink of her vodka, stubbed out her cigarette, got up without saying goodnight, and headed down the hall, her big pink shaggy slippers, thin slumping shoulders, and wild hair making her look like a Dr. Seuss character.

So, really, it was Mrs. Brown who named me Monkey Boy.

What was Bert doing in B’nai B’rith anyway? He wasn’t religious. Most years he’d go to synagogue for maybe one High Holiday service at most. I never heard him say a word, fond or disparaging, about his Fiddler on the Roof shtetl roots. Even his youngest sister, my aunt Milly, born in Dorchester, spoke some Yiddish, but if my father did, he never let on. Once as a boy when I asked him why he didn’t love Russia the way my mother loved Guatemala, he answered with a wolfish snarl: Why the hell would I have any love for that goddamned country. They didn’t want the Jews there, our family and all the others that got out alive were the lucky ones. He’d probably joined the local synagogue’s B’nai B’rith