I ran into Jimmy Gallagher yesterday. I was heading for the used bookstore on B Street, and he was standing in front of a European car-repair place called The Werkstatt.
I saw him from about twenty feet away, but at that range I couldn’t do anything but keep up my pace and hope that he didn’t recognize me.
He recognized me.
“Jimmy Gallagher,” I said by way of recognition, casually, as if I’d just seen him.
“I’d forgotten that you guys used to call me that,” he said, with what might have been an annoyed chuckle.
I thought of the other names we called him.
Jimmy and I had worked together, thirty years earlier, at a local, and very much down-market, amusement park called Worlds of Wonder. WOW was mostly a wild animal park, with animals in a zoo-like setting, plus some animal shows. Chimps riding bikes, lions jumping through hoops, that kind of thing. I didn’t think too much about the shows at the time, though now I feel vaguely guilty that I somehow participated in those spectacles that were surely degrading to somebody.
WOW didn’t have any real rides, apart from camel rides and a safari boat ride. Jimmy Gallagher and I worked the safari boats.
It was a great job for a high school kid. We drove unsinkable river rafts, painted like zebras and tigers, powered by outboard motors and filled with local tourists. But the best part was that WOW gave us microphones and speakers to educate and entertain our tourist audiences.
Two kinds of kids wanted this job: those who loved animals and wanted to eventually work in the veterinary sciences and those who wanted to be stand-up comedians. The first group sat around between tours talking about whether the Dorcas gazelle looked a little sad today, while the rest of us traded bootleg audiotapes of Paula Poundstone and Barry Sobel and stole their jokes for our twelve-minute performances. Though I’d like to think that some of us became sophisticated judges of stand-up, none of us became comedians. Actually, one guy made it to the stage of the Chuckle Factory for an open mic night. Once. The response was tepid, and he couldn’t work up the spirit to go again.
But the point is that we were professionals. As long as we either informed or entertained, we could be sure of earning minimum wage, plus a ten percent discount on ice cream sandwiches at the Jungle Hut. And maybe we’d move up the comedy or veterinary ladders, getting a set on Letterman or helping to euthanize old dogs and cats.
There was just one hard rule. Do not crash on Monkey Island.
I never did learn why the monkeys were so angry, though it was probably being stuck on a tiny island in the middle of a sad amusement park in the flight path of planes landing at SFO. I’m also sure they could hear the Huey Lewis songs played interminably over the park’s loudspeakers. That could’ve done it.
But however it was, the monkeys were unhappy, and we were told to never make landfall where they could get at us or the customers. Even the monkey keepers dropped anchor off shore and chucked the monkey chow to their howling charges.
So we all gave Monkey Island a wide berth.
Except for Jimmy Gallagher. One day, late in the last summer I worked there, Jimmy arrived at work, dressed like Indiana Jones, complete with a bullwhip and a toy cap pistol. Throughout the day he pretended to save his boat’s passengers from various animals that were standing silent and bored. He had dreams, I think, of moving on up to Disneyland, where the safari boat driver shoots at animatronic hippos. Eventually he got around to trying to save his passengers from the monkeys, and he got too close. Inattention, probably. It may not be relevant, but he’d also been experimenting with cocaine for performance enhancement possibilities.
So he crashed, and then was unable to back the boat off the shore. The monkeys watched for a few minutes, amazed at this change in their narrow world. The tourists didn’t know any better either, and several of them got some very nice photographs of monkeys gesturing and grimacing.
But then the monkeys attacked. There was some screaming, and everybody ended up in the water, which wasn’t the worst outcome as it was quite shallow. Of course, the water was also stagnant and filthy and dark and probably full of parasites.
And one guy lost the tip of his index finger. Just a little bit, just down to the first knuckle.
Nobody was surprised when Jimmy Gallagher was fired. We all found that rather funny, and about half of us began working on bits involving angry monkeys. One of us even found the courage to try them out at the Chuckle Factory. The response, as I noted, was tepid, and I didn’t go a second time.
But we were surprised when, a short time later, the lawsuits bankrupted the park.
Most of us blamed Jimmy Gallagher. No more jobs. No more animals. All because he wanted to try prop comedy. Jesus, we’d all have been better off if he’d just smashed a watermelon. I’m still chapped, thirty years later.
“I heard you’re teaching,” Jimmy Gallagher said.
“Yeah. Middle school P.E.”
“Great,” he said, and he almost had me believing he was sincere. “We need good teachers.”
I asked him what he did, but The Werkstatt told me enough already. General counsel for a hedge fund company, he added superfluously.
As I walked away, I wondered about karma. And then I wondered about whatever happened to the monkeys.
Don Carroll lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and teaches high school English. He’s been working on his first novel for more than thirty years.
Great story. Love the back and forth narrative contrast between the benign normality of the gigs and the absurd potential in their inevitable encounter with Monkey Island. God job, Don.
A nostalgic piece. I liked it.