Sharing things can be touchy. I started this with the intention of now and again posting stuff that I wanted to share. Mostly my writings but sometime I'll share books and movies and records, things folks need to know about, in my opinion, as my late mother always wanted me to add. She wanted it known for certain that it was my opinion not fact. Why do we call dead people late? Is it because they just can't seem to make their appointments because they're buried in the ground? Maybe somebody knows. My mother has been gone 15 years. A week doesn't go by that she and my father don't come see me in my dreams. After all these years she still wants to correct me and remind me how much smarter my brother and sister are.
To the point: I have a bag of writing. When we moved I found it again. I am going to start posting some of it. I want it understood that these short little pieces are like poems to me. Faulkner claimed a good poet could say it in as few words as possible. I just say it and hope I don't make anybody mad. This story is a combination of several and helps to explain some things. I'm posting it because just recently I'd thought of the girl in the green and orange
striped dress and when I got email about a class reunion she was on the committee. Here goes...
Cart monkeys and the wisdom of Oz
They call us the cart monkeys. I can't remember who put it on their name tag first. It must have been Clooney. Everybody thinks he looks like that actor. I don't see it, but most all of the others on the crew do so Clooney it is. He became using the term officially on a Saturday during the Christmas season, not holiday season, no war on Christmas here. Actually if you think about it that business, is just that, business, so that someone can get outraged, shout, get on the news and in the paper. Sometimes it isn't follow the money but follow the ego. The period of time from Thanksgiving until January 6th or so is the holiday season, the holidays. I grew up in a church that didn't celebrate Christmas. No mention what so ever yet we still thought we knew more of what God wanted us to know. If he didn't mention Christmas then we didn't. We didn't dance either so to this day I can't. I still look to the sky for lightning when I start tapping my feet. If it is cloudy I can't honestly enjoy music no matter how great the beat is. Happy holidays and back to my point. Why we are called cart monkeys.
On Friday we all got together at Moochie's. Most of the crew made it. Me, Mooch, Clooney, Richard not Rick, Dick, or Rich, Connie and Dusty. The only person that didn't make it was the professor. He had some play or concert to go to downtown. Dusty had read in a magazine how to sync up a video tape of Wizard of Oz with Dark Side of the Moon so that the music matched. It was going to be so cool. After a half dozen tries we got it to start working. We tried it with a record but it was scratchy and Moochie's apartment bounced when you walked across the room and made Pink Floyd skip.
Moochie lived in what we called the Pleasant Quarters. Mr. Pleasant owned the house and Moochie lived upstairs in an apartment that resembled a miniature hobbit hole. It was a regular apartment but two thirds the size. Being in the quarters was like making a transatlantic crossing on the Queen Mary. The light fixtures were smaller than normal and only took 40 watt bulbs. You could reach them to change bulbs with your out stretched arms. The kitchen was complete but the size of a closet. One bedroom actually was in a closet. It was furnished with couches and chairs that seemed normal but were actually scaled down. Mr. Pleasant was a warehouse manager for the school system and he knew how to do everything, even make little furniture that looked store bought. It was just about our favorite place to hang out. The only normal sized room was the bathroom. It was as roomy as a stateroom on the Titanic. Commode wise it was as comfortable as any I've ever seen or sat. The tub was an old deep claw footed model that you could swim in. It would hold two people easily. Clooney made Moochie work late weekends just so he could sneak in and prove it. The only bad thing was that the Pleasants' downstairs controlled the heat and the AC. If Dusty and friends got too noisy the climate would adjust accordingly and you either got quiet or called it a night.
Once we switched to an old Floyd 8-track that would just go round and round repeating, the movie was magical. I'm not sure how it works. My mind can't even understand little things how could it explain a magical relationship between a stoner album and the most famous movie of all time. Masons, that's what it was, Masons! That night it fit perfectly and Dorothy and the witch and the flying monkeys made more sense to me than ever before. Watching the movie with the record was more fun than the first time I saw it in black and white hiding behind my dad on the floor. The black and white part made me cry. I felt the lion's inner pain and for the first time I felt and understood the tin man's loneliness at a primal level that left me depressed and contemplating why no one loved me for days. I didn't have a wizard to give me a watch so what shot did I have.
It made me think about a little girl I met when I was a kid. I was in fifth grade and for a day I was a page at the state house of representatives. Fifth graders aren't mature enough to be obsessed about what other people think or if they will embarrass themselves. At that age you are a kid living in the moment, being here, and focusing on right now. Buddha would be proud. There were other kids there from all over the state. Because I lived in the state capital I could only be a page for a day. I wanted to make the most of it. We got paid two dollars a day, excused from school, and if you were lucky the reps might tip you a nickel or a dime. The job consisted of sitting in a chair waiting for the call light to come on. Whoever was in the first chair went and ran the errand. It might be getting coffee, copies of a bill, or putting change in a parking meter. All day long I had my eye on the girl in a green and orange striped dress. I can still the dress and how it looked on the girl. We were only in fifth grade, but she looked like a model to me. I was smitten, but at the age of 11 I'm not sure I understood what it was I was feeling. To that point in my life I'd never seen a cuter girl.
Who can explain why anyone is attracted to someone else. You could spend a month in a library studying and still you wouldn't have the answer. In my life I have never been involved with any woman for any length of time that didn't start with that spark, that irrational instant judgement without contemplation that makes us stop and go, "wow." Wow-worthiness is subjective and unexplainable. All true romantics are hit by it multiple times in their lives. I wasn't always just a cart monkey. There was a time in my life when I had nearly everything that I wanted. Even then if I wasn't in a steady deal( Why can't men call a relationship a relationship? Why is there that need to live behind a secret code of colloquialisms? Could it be that we want to deny the truth of our emotions? ) at that time I couldn't help but travel backward through my life's record and think of those moments when I was hit by the blinding explosions of awareness. I think we choose to remember those moments because the positive nature of the event causes a surge of a chemical deep in the brain that if harnessed would end the need for psychiatric medicine. Try to recall pain. I don't think we can. I can only remember the fact that it occurred. I'm unable to recreate the sensation. Why would I want to? On the other hand I can call up happy positive thoughts most anytime I want. With that being the case, explain to me why humans spend so much time frowning and not smiling. The girl in the green and orange striped dress possessed a classic smile as well.
I came back from getting a copy of H.B. 1017 and took my seat. I scooted over as another page headed out on a mission. The next thing I know someone sits besides me and says, "Hi, I'm ___." (lest you think I can't remember her name, I can. I don't use it to either protect her privacy or my emotions.)I turned and it was the girl in the green and orange striped dress. Instead of stammering and stumbling over my words I introduced myself. We spent the rest of the day talking about nothing of consequence. She knew kids that I knew. We'd end up going to the same junior high and high school. We made fun of people, told jokes, and learned how our state government worked. In less than eight hours we had become friends for the day. We might not ever see each other again but on that one day things were swell. Kids can do that. At the end of our day we said our goodbyes. I didn't see her again until the first day of junior high.
As an adult I've often wondered why things don't come that easy for me anymore. If I meet someone and I think that "wow-worthiness" is there I don't trust my instincts anymore. I have the need to mull it over in my head, dissect, and analyze it until I'm no longer confident of the initial perception. By the time I can make the decision to act the object of my contemplation is long gone. Maybe that's why I'm still a cart monkey.
Which gets me back to why they call us cart monkeys. After the movie you could sense how it had effected all of us. I wasn't the only one absorbed with the deeper meanings. Connie saw herself as Dorothy and the rest of us..well somebody has to be a munchkin. We each had new theories and insights to the movie and we needed to discuss them. After arguing for ten minutes about where we would go we settled on Dug and Edna's because they were open late, it was dark(the walls were painted black) and the wait couldn't be too long.
On the drive over Clooney was very silent. I thought he was focused on the road until, driving he missed one red light but it was late, after midnight, nobody noticed. We were driving down Westlawn on the divided section when he slams on the breaks and pulls over to the side of the road and blurts out, "Cart monkeys, get it cart monkeys! We are just like those flying monkeys doing the bidding of others. In that part when they flew into the woods and tore up the scarecrow and scared everybody one of them was pushing a little cart picking up pieces." He laughed his patented Clooney laugh and pulled back into traffic. "Cart monkeys...sweet."
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