Curiosities | The True Story of the Devil Monkey

Travis made his hand into the shape of a gun, lifted it slightly and then flicked it, as though he were trying to dislodge something thick and salty from his finger. He angled his head to the left, looking to the right, then made a rushing sound.

“There ain’t no fuckin’ monkey up there.” He sounded convinced, but the increase in his Tourette’s tics betrayed his subconscious fears.

The corrugated rusted tin of the rabbit shed was blown up by another gust of wind and flapped back and forth against the wooden frame. The sound was similar in pattern to a cat running through the room – tah-dhum, tah-dhum, tah-dhum.

“There it is again! He’s getting pissed, Travis!”

“Man, fuck that monkey! Tttt-tttt!”

“You don’t fuck the Devil Monkey, Travis. He fucks you!” A bolt of lightening and then a rumble of thunder deep to the North seemed to underscore my point.

“Shut up, fucker! Schwwwwaaaaaa!”

More rattles echoed from the rabbit shed, causing my back to crawl. I was freaking myself out now. Not that it was terribly difficult. The sound coming from my cousin’s rabbit shed did have the rhythm of a living thing. All one needed to complete the effect was a highly suggestible state of mind– and that’s exactly what Bunt’s weed and Travis’ Tourette’s– were providing.

Bunt was Travis’ 60-year-old dad. He grew his own pot in his tomato garden out back. I’m not sure what he did to it, but to this day, it’s the best weed I have ever smoked. It was downright hallucinogenic. Bunt himself was crazy as a loon. I wasn’t certain if it was his own Tourette’s affliction or the decades of drug use that were the cause. Bunt claimed his grandmother had turned him on to smoking grass when he was nine years old. But you had to take everything he said with a grain of salt.

Another bolt of lightening and the thunder was growing louder. The tin roof was wild with simian mischief. I turned to my younger cousin, Pete, “What the fuck was that thing?”

It was an unanswerable question that we had asked each other for the past two years.

“Fuck…” He shook his head and shivered mildly.

You see, the Devil Monkey wasn’t just the product of a stoned mind looking for cheap entertainment at Travis’ expense. It was a legend– a real, live creature that terrorized the small community where Pete and Travis lived. Well, it terrorized Pete and me at least. Everyone else remained blissfully ignorant, choosing to hide behind their unsubstantiated skepticism.

It had been a pleasant spring evening. Pete had stolen some pot from his sister and we went down the driveway to smoke it under the willow tree. Pete had built a pipe out of several plastic bottles he had taped together, with a piece of foil as a bowl. It was an incredibly effective device. The pot itself was somewhat curious– it was a deep brown color and soggy.

I was somewhat concerned. Knowing Crystal, that “pot” could be just about anything. “That looks kinda weird,” I pointed out, as Pete filled the bowl.
Pete shrugged and lit the mound, inhaling deeply. He had made the decision for both of us. No matter what it was, I wasn’t going to let him do it alone. He passed the pipe to me and I inhaled, somewhat carefully. It had a strange chemical taste but, like whiskey shots, the hits became easier and easier to take.

Eventually, I grew aware of feeling somewhat numb.

“What the fuck is in that?” I burst out laughing.

“I don’t know!” Pete burst out laughing.

Within seconds, we were sitting out under the willow tree, our arms around each other laughing without restraint.

“Shhh-shhh-shhh!” Pete managed to choke out, “we’re gonna wake up mom and dad!”

We both collapsed, laughing even harder.

I laughed so hard and so long that my entire body hurt. My eyes were filled with tears and for several moments, I hallucinated I was nothing more than a pair of lungs connected to a windpipe. Some deeply-buried chunk of lucidity in my head managed to squeeze out a thought, “We’d better go somewhere!”
Though not particularly well articulated, my point was we were in serious danger of waking up my Aunt and Uncle. We had to get out of there fast. It was an almost impossible task. Any time one of us uttered the most innocuous sentence, we’d both laugh even harder than before. We were laughing so hard we physically could do nothing else. After what seemed like hours, we managed to get control of ourselves long enough to stand up. We were both somewhat wobbly as we started off down the pavement, having decided to walk around the block a few times.

We made our way up the hill that was the first leg of our journey, chattering about things I’ll never remember. The road was lined with street lights and in the darkness of midnight, the whole scene had a somewhat surreal look to it. It reminded me of looking into an Easter egg diorama. As we turned left, something flitted across the road. We both laughed hysterically.

“What the fuck was that?” I asked Pete.

“I don’t know!”

“Did you see it?”

“Yeah!”
We both laughed harder at our own ignorance as we crossed the path of the shadowy figure. We looked around us and saw nothing. Deciding it must be a squirrel or something, we continued our walk without much more thought on the subject.

As we made our way down the other side of the block and approached Pete’s house again, we once again started laughing uncontrollably. We decided it would be best if we continued walking until we could get some sort of control over ourselves.

We walked past the house and back up the hill and made the left turn again. Again, the shadowy figure scuttled across the road– it came from the same side of the street as before and the same location. In fact, we were at the same location as before. This time we both stopped, almost in shock.

“What the fuck?!” I asked.

“It looked like a monkey!”

A chill went up my spine, as I had thought the same thing before he even said it. The way it crossed the road, the shape, everything reminded me of a short scene in Forbidden Planet when a monkey tries to steal some fruit from the table and “Robby the Robot” blasts it with an energy bolt. The way that monkey sort of limped off was what this “monkey” was doing when it crossed the street.
“… a Devil Monkey,” I observed.

“I almost don’t wanna go up there,” Pete said.

“Wait, let’s go back a bit and then come back this way and see if it happens again.”

We went back down the hill and then walked back up and made the left turn. No Devil Monkey.

“That’s weird. Come on…” I pulled Pete along up the hill.

We walked carefully, almost tiptoeing along, watching each side carefully to see if we could make out what kind of horrific creature was toying with us. We saw nothing. This time, the Devil Monkey sobered us up enough that we made it down the hill and past the house without laughing. We decided to make one more round to see if that thing would show up again.

Sure enough, just as we made the left turn and again, from the right side of the road the Devil Monkey limped across. Pete and I turned and ran back to the house.

The next morning Pete confessed his theft to Crystal and we told her of the Devil Monkey. She laughed, informing us we had just hallucinated the whole thing– the pot had been laced with angel dust. Pete and I have never been convinced. How could we both have the same hallucination? I have no doubt we both saw the exact same thing. Maybe it was a cat or squirrel that just looked strange in the angel dusted night… but why did it always cross from right to left, in the exact same spot on the road, after we had reached the exact same spot in the road? And the manner in which it crossed was always the same too, like some kind of goddamn glitch in the Matrix.

To this day, the Devil Monkey– in addition to being the name of a few pets– serves as the explanation for things that have no explanation. It is the thing on the wing of a plane that crashed for no reason. It is the thing that takes one of your socks from the dryer. It is the reason Planck’s constant is 6.626068 x 10^-34 m² kg/s.

I guess it makes as much sense as blaming it all on God.