Signifyin' Monkey
by Michael Donaghy
'Never write a check with your mouth your ass can't cash.'
- Zach Newton
O.K. I'll tell it, but only if you buy lunch.
One summer I worked nights for Vigil-Guard,
the Chicago security firm. The work was easy:
sitting. And close to home. Ten minutes on the train.
And every night I passed the same fluorescent sign
somewhere in Chinatown: FIGHTER MONKEY.
I paid it no mind. It was the year of the monkey.
I thought I'd try it out one day for lunch.
Risky, I figured, but it's always a good sign
if the sign's in English. I wasn't made chief guard
for nothing, you know. It takes a week to train
on half pay so don't think it's all that easy.
Security's an art. I just make it look easy,
like the day I walked home past Fighter Monkey.
Looking back, I wish I'd caught that train,
but I was after a cheap pork feng shui lunch.
Something out front put me on my guard,
though, something about that Day-Glo sign,
the smell, and the cages in the windows, and no sign
of a menu anywhere, which made me a little uneasy,
when out steps this whtie guy built like a bodyguard
wearing a T-shirt showing a shrieking monkey.
He just stands there, chin out. 'Still serving lunch?'
I ask. 'This is no restaurant,' he says. 'I train
animals' - He's got this tight whisper - 'I train
Barbary Apes using American Sign
Language.' O.K. I figure he's out to lunch,
a potential situation. 'Take it easy,'
I tell him. 'I made a mistake. You train monkeys . . .
I represent a firm called Vigil-Guard.'
Turns out he once trained dogs for Vigil-Guard.
And he pays me there and then to help him train
one of his babies, a kind of Rottweiler monkey
that took her orders and talked back in Sign.
I swear she must have weighed forty pounds easy.
And teeth! She could have had me for lunch.
Shit, she could have had me and lunch!
Then he hauls out this heavy, padded armguard.
'Put that on,' he says. 'This part is safe and easy.
She's going to come at you like a freight train.
Freeze.' I remember he laughed as he made the sign.
The asshole. Lost a thumb to his own monkey.
It's easy. Look, he'd been her only trainer.
Guard or no guard, he'd signed 'I'm lunch.'
The blood! Of course they had to shoot the monkey.
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