Matt Ruff - Bad Monkeys

Yeah. I almost didn’t, I mean I thought about not taking the scholarship, but Phil convinced me I’d be an idiot not to.

You were in contact with your brother?

By then, yeah. The first couple years in Siesta Corta I didn’t hear from him, but on his thirteenth birthday he came out to see me. He stole a page from my old playbook: told Mom he was staying at a friend’s place for the weekend, then hitchhiked out to the Valley. I came home from working at the store one afternoon and found him playing with the cats on the front porch.

At first I was pissed about the hitchhiking: “Do you have any idea what kind of psychos are out on the road, Phil?” But he just laughed and said I was the pot calling the kettle black, and anyway he was big enough to take care of himself. And the truth is, he was; he’d gone through this major growth spurt, so even though he was barely a teenager, he had the height and weight to make a bad monkey think twice.

It ended up being a good visit. The same time he’d become more like me, I’d become more like him, so we were able to sort of meet each other halfway. Turned out we actually liked each other. So from then on we kept in touch, and when he could he came out to see me. He had a knack for showing up when I needed advice, like about the scholarship.

What about your mother? Did you and she ever reconcile?

No. I thought about going to visit her once I was back in S.F. I talked to Phil about it—I figured he’d be all in favor—but he thought it was a lousy idea. “You know you’ll just end up fighting with her, Jane. Why would you want to do that?” So I put it off. When she died in ’87, I still hadn’t seen her.

I’m sorry.

No, Phil was right. There was no love lost there, and no sense pretending, either.

Tell me about Berkeley. What was your major?

Christ, that question…Which one do you want to hear about first? I had like five.

You had trouble deciding?

I didn’t think I needed to decide. Look, there are basically two reasons people go to college. Some people actually go there to learn something, something specific I mean, a trade or a vocation. Other people—like me—just go for the experience. I was like one of those starving-artist types, people who convince themselves back in grade school that they have a destiny to become actors or musicians or writers. For them, college is a place to mark time until their destiny kicks in.

And you believed that you had a destiny…to become Nancy Drew with a lightning gun?

See, when you say it that way it sounds crazy. It was never that explicit. I didn’t even know what the organization was at that point, so it’s not like I ever thought to myself, “One day I’m going to join the fight against evil, and here’s how.” It was a lot more subtle than that, just this general sense that I was covered—I didn’t need to make a plan for my life, because the plan already existed, and eventually it would come clear to me.

But the wait got long. When I left Berkeley after five years, my destiny still hadn’t kicked in yet, and suddenly it didn’t seem so smart that I hadn’t studied anything useful. To survive, I ended up doing what the starving artists did, taking jobs that even a high-school dropout could get: waitress, pizza-delivery girl, liquor-store clerk…Name an occupation with no entry qualifications and no future, and I probably tried it at least once.

So I was poor, and living in one shitty apartment after another, but I was young, and having fun—too much fun, sometimes—and I still felt like I was covered. And then one day I turned around and I was thirty years old. And like I say, my destiny, I never thought about it that explicitly, but on milestone birthdays, you do think about things, and the day I turned thirty it occurred to me that it had been a really long time since I’d seen the coin. I decided I needed to see it, to hold it in my hand and remind myself, you know, omnes mundum facimus, we all make the world, whatever the hell that meant.

But I couldn’t find it. I trashed my apartment looking for it. And it was no surprise—I’d moved so many times, it was a wonder I hadn’t lost more stuff—but I was still very upset. So I went out and got really fucked up, and to make a long story short, my birthday ended with cops and an ambulance ride.

Afterwards, Phil came to see me, and we had a long heart-to-heart about what I was going to do with my life. I’d never told him about the coin, or the voice on the phone, or any of the rest of it, but he talked like he knew: “You don’t need an engraved invitation to do good works in the world, Jane,” he said. “You want to do them, you just go out and do them.” Which, once I got done gagging, actually made a lot of sense to me. So that kind of became the theme of my early thirties.

Good works?

Well, attempted good works. Turns out it’s not as easy as it sounds.

The first couple years, I did a bunch of gigs with groups like the Salvation Army and Goodwill, but I found out I don’t really have the temperament for charity work, especially religious charity work. I decided to try more white-collar stuff—March of Dimes, CARE—but that was just boring, plus I’m even worse at office politics than I am at charity. So then I thought, getting back to basics, maybe what I needed was something with a more disciplinarian bent to it.

Law enforcement?

Yeah. But there I had a different problem: to become a cop, or a prison guard, or even a parole officer, you need to pass a background check, and there were things in my history—like that meltdown on my thirtieth birthday—that made that a deal-breaker. About the best I could do was a job as a security guard, and protecting the inventory at some department store didn’t really count as good works in my book.

So as time wore on, my thirties started looking more and more like my twenties: lots of pointless, dead-end jobs. And then I was thirty-five, and thirty-six, and forty was just up ahead, and Phil didn’t have any more suggestions for me.

And then one day I bumped into my old pal Moon. I hadn’t seen her in twenty years, but this one day I was feeling nostalgic and decided to go back to the Haight, to the street where we grew up. I was standing in front of the lot where the community garden used to be—it had been paved and turned into a skateboard rink—when Moon came along, dragging a pair of kids with her.

She looked great. Young and skinny, not like someone who’d been through two pregnancies. Meanwhile I was definitely the worse for wear, so it took her a minute to recognize me, but when she finally did she gave me this big hug and introduced me to the brood. Then—like this wasn’t depressing enough already—she told me that she and her husband had started their own consulting firm and were pulling down six figures a year working from home. So I came back with this story about how I’d been in the Peace Corps, and if I seemed a little run down it was because I’d spent the last decade fighting AIDS in Africa. Then she had to go, so I gave her a fake e-mail address and told her to keep in touch.

And I was on my way home when I passed by this pay phone, and just on impulse I picked up the receiver. There was no dial tone, but the phone wasn’t dead—it was an open line. “Hello?” I said. There was no answer, but still it felt like someone was listening at the other end, so I said, “If you’re ever planning to call me back, do it soon.”

The next day, I got a jury-duty summons in the mail. I’d gotten calls to jury duty before, and I was about due for another, so it could have been a coincidence. But maybe not…and either way, I figured this was an opportunity to do some good in the world, exactly what I’d been looking for.

It was an arson-murder trial. This guy Julius Deeds, reputed gangster, found out his girlfriend was cheating on him and threw a gasoline bomb into her living room in the middle of the night. She escaped through the back door of the house, but she left three kids upstairs and none of them made it out.