Some delicious scenes were left on the cutting room floor. This was one of my favorites to suffer such a fate. --JL


In the late ’80s Sally was painting once a week with a friend we’ll call Jean, a young woman with some family-of-origin baggage. Jean’s freedom in her painting of tortured, surrealistic faces emboldened Sally to lift a lid inside herself. Every Tuesday morning for months, the two painted their dark images in the upstairs studio.

One day they wanted some fresh air, so they set out on a neighborhood walk. It was a cool afternoon, and Sally donned her cloth coat.

A couple blocks away, she noticed a strange shape on somebody’s porch.
“Look! There’s a monkey! Are they dangerous?”

“Oh!” said Jean, spying the stocky creature — about 3 feet tall — perched on the cement porch wall of a brick house. “No! No. He’s not dangerous,” she surmised. “He’ll pay no attention to us at all.”

As though her words were the starting pistol at the racetrack, the monkey dropped from its perch, arced over the lawn, sprang into the street and sank its toothless gums into Sally’s calf.

This was extremely painful. Adrenalin pumping, Sally kicked out her leg, and the monkey fell off. But he leapt back at her aggressively, this time biting into the hem of her knee-length coat. She grabbed Jean’s arm and the two women began to spin around like whirling dervishes, laughing and expecting the monkey to be thrown off.

But this had now become an exciting challenge for the exotic pet, and he held tight to the coat. By then, the centrifugal force of Sally’s spinning had caused the primate to rise into the air about waist height.

The women were twirling. The monkey was riding the tilt-a-whirl. And Sally commenced to scream at the top of her lungs.

“Whose monkey is this!? Helloo-ooo!”

Like villagers converging on the town square to glimpse the circus, people ventured out of their houses and formed an appreciate circle around what had become a performing trio.

Then the door of the monkey’s brick house opened, and a woman called to them from the porch. “Oh! He won’t hurt you!”

“He already has!” Sally yelled back, still spinning. “Come get your monkey!”

Meanwhile, the monkey was not only a bit dizzy but was feeling the call of nature. He let loose a stream of stinky urine that reacted to the laws of physics by spraying the assembled spectators.

Sally slowed down as the pet owner approached.

The woman lifted the monkey and cuddled it protectively. “Oh, Occho-faccho!” she cooed. (That was the best Sally could do to remember the monkey’s name.) “What do you think you’re doing?”

As she and the hairy creature disappeared back into the house, helpless mirth among the gathered neighbors was the aftermath. But there was an epilogue.
Sally happened to describe the unwarranted attack to her mailman. He piped up knowingly. “Oh, he’s a character!”

“What do YOU know about him? Did he ever attack you?”

“No. But he’s inside the front hall every day waiting for the mail.”

Because an oval of beveled glass is inset into the carved wooden front door, the mailman had a clear view.

“When the mail comes through the slot and falls to the carpet, that monkey picks up the letters and tears them up and throws pieces every which way.”