My stepdad’s backyard has one of those “island paradise” vibes. You know, there’s a hammock, some palm trees, and a trio of mariachi frogs made out of metal. We were all sitting by the pool—my mom, my stepdad, and me—admiring their newest article of homespun outdoor decor, a hand-lettered sign, about the size of a rainbow trout, that says: Put on your big girl pants and deal with it. Signs like these, I imagine, are what felonious fairies make instead of license plates when they go to the Enchanted Prison. “We saw this and thought of you,” my stepdad said about the sign, which is nailed to the poolside palm tree, “and when I heard you were coming by for dinner tonight, I made sure to install it somewhere you could see it.” It had cost $9.99. I could tell because he’d left the price tag on, probably on purpose, and I had to admit, it really set the mood.
“That’s a good one,” I said, and added, “whoever makes those signs is probably a millionaire or something.”
“You better believe it,” my stepdad said wiggling his ass and pointing to another sign on another tree: Dance like no one is watching.
My mom was like, “Shake it, Boom-boom!” That’s what she calls my stepdad because that’s the sound he makes when he walks into the room-room. Then, she turned to me with that look in her eye and said, “hey, there’s a thought, Cassie. You could go into the sign-making business.” This is what happens when you’re a 24-year-old unemployed, cartoonist in my family. Everyone becomes very focused on making you into something you’re not.
“You could make all sorts of crazy-ass signs,” said my mom, lighting another Marlboro Light, “let’s brain storm.”
At this point, my stepdad excused himself to the cabana, where he was in the middle of grilling up some shish kabobs.
“You gals need anything while I’m up?”
Boom-boom you see, is a doer, not a thinker.
“I want a sign that says ‘I love Jesus, but I cuss just a little’,” said my mom, flicking the ash from her cigarette into an empty can of Coors Light. Her mouth puckered a bit, and sort of went off to the side of her face, like she was sucking on a big fat lemon. It has since been revealed to me that she was always having, like, minor strokes all the time, but for the moment I just figured she made faces like that because she was drunk.
I could think of a million zany little signs for the home. Signs that said things like ‘It’s all rather unfair, isn’t it?’ and ‘No one gets out alive.’ No one likes to think about these things, though. No one wants a sign reminding them that ‘Objective reality does not exist on a subatomic level.’ Might as well stick with cartoons, I figured, as I curled myself up into a little ball and started shivering.
“How about a sign that says ‘Life is all about balance’,” my mom said to me, swaying in an imaginary ocean breeze, feigning like she was oblivious to my anguish.
My stepdad reappeared, holding a margarita, and twirling his steel tongs like a gangster before holstering them down the front of his Tommy Bahama swim trunks. He chuckled. As if this was normal. As if this was any sort of sanitary way to handle a pair of cooking utensils.
“Think I’m gonna have me one of them fine see-gars,” he said as he walked over to the patio table, where his humidor was sitting. His humidor was a replica of the White House. You know, where the President of the United States of America lives. He lifted the lid by removing the roof, and, like a giant in a fairy tale, reached inside, and grabbed the president. Except he didn’t grab the president. He just grabbed a cigar, took a sip of his margarita, and splayed himself out like some sort of lazy merman on the wicker chaise near my mom and me. My mother, having finished her cigarette, reached for her steel drum because—I don’t know—she thought she could fill the ever-expanding hole in my soul with some funky beats.
“I’m so glad you came out to see us,” said she to me, “because it just so happens that Boom-boom here’s got some big news.”
“Dang straight!” said my stepdad, as he wiggled his ass again. “I done shelled out the cash to buy your mama here a monkey, and we’re gonna be a the happy parents of a little monkey-baby!”
Wow. I told them, coming out of the fetal position so as to demonstrate that even though I saw this as a blatant attempt to tell me they’d grown bored with my shenanigans and hair-brained stabs at personhood, that I knew how big of a deal this was for them. As much as it broke my heart to admit, I knew that a new era was about to begin, and this era would belong to the future monkey-baby. Wow. Wow. Wow. Ow. Ow. Ow. Wowee. Wowee. Wow.
My mother had not, until this point, expressed that she aspired to as much, but when I looked at her and said, “it’s as if he’s making your dreams come true a little more each day,” she agreed with me. Like I wasn't being sarcastic. Like it wasn’t some bullshit I was saying to make my stepdad feel good about himself and to remind him that he was the one true patriarch around here. Instead, she was beaming, with that this-is-what-I’ve-always-wanted look in her eyes. She adjusted her bikini top, which was made up of two halves of a coconut shell and a strip of leather. And. Oh. My. God. She was totally going to town on that steel drum. She really had this whole Caribbean Queen thing down.
“That’s right!” said my stepdad. He hopped up and wiggled his ass with an intensity I’d never seen before. I mean, he was really working it here. Shaking his hips. Sucking his lips. Eyes closed. “We’re gonna have a monkey-baby!” He licked his two index fingers, touched them to his nipples, and made a sizzling sound. “That reminds me. Time for shish kabobs!” he said, and we watched as he pranced his way back toward the cabana.
I turned to my mom, who was still thumping away on the drum, and said, “I want to be a cartoonist.”
And boom. The drumbeat stopped. This is not the first time we’d had this conversation, but I figured, what with the news about the monkey-baby and all, it might well be the last. She reached for a Marlboro Light.
“Like, full-time,” I continued, “I don’t want to do anything else. It’s what I think I am best at, and I feel like I should be able, in theory, to make a living at, you know, plying my trade.”
“What about making sweet little signs for people who want to sing and love while smiling? What about, you know, making some money?”
“I mean, it makes sense, right,” I said, pretending not to hear her, “for people to contribute to the world by doing what they’re best at? Isn’t that, like, the way things should be? Shouldn’t everyone just sort of give their all the best way they know how?” I felt my face get red. I could feel a rant coming on.
“Yes, but, Cassie, honey…”
I thought again about the monkey-baby, and then I lost my mind.
“Just. Shut. The. Fuck. Up,” I said to my mom, who seemed, of course, honestly confused by my anger.
I just wanted to fucking draw cartoons is what I told her. I would work from sunrise to sunset, I said. Until my fingers bled, I said. That maybe, just maybe, I could make the world a nicer place to live. I told her I was good at it, and that I could become even better at it. I told her that all I had ever needed was time. That all I had ever needed was a place to live where I felt safe. I told her that it sucked that I couldn’t get back everything I could put in. That I wished she could just believe in me and that I was sorry she had to worry about me. I told her I was real fucking worried too. Worried that if my skill-set wasn’t valuable, then maybe I wasn’t valuable, like, as a person. And that I didn’t think I could live with myself if I, you know, sold my soul to the devil, and—
“What about the pilates certification your stepfather and I spent all that money for you to get?”
I gave up. That was Custer’s Last Stand.
I curled back into the tightest ball I could and screamed under my breath like an egg with a car alarm until my stepdad eventually came back with a platter of shish kabobs. I sat up and pretended I had just been taking a nap.
“Who killed the beat?” he asked.
I thought it was a rhetorical question, but my mom resumed playing the drum again, as if nothing had ever happened. My stepdad, setting dinner down next to the White House, told me he had an important favor to ask of me, and then asked it.
“I know you’re gonna be real busy teaching pilates, helping people with their body exploration goals, and whatnot,” he said, “and I know you’re gonna be able to pay your mama and I back the money we let you borrow—“
“I didn’t know it was a loan,” I interrupted, because that was the truth, and people should always let their lives be interrupted by the truth.
“Of course it’s a loan. You’re never gonna feel good about yourself unless you can stand up and say to the whole wide world that you did it all on your own.”
I looked at my mother and her long, healthy hair, just nailing it on the steel drum, and said, “oh.”
“Anyhow,” said my stepdad, “I know how anxious you are to put all that high-quality training to good use, but I just need you to do this one thing that’ll mean the world to me and your mama.”
He explained that he needed someone to be in Africa within the next week to pick up the imminent monkey-baby, and that he couldn’t be the one to do it for some reason or another, and that my mom couldn’t do it because it required a bit of traveling in some jungle region, which wouldn’t be suitable for her because—you know—she has nerve issues. Basically, he told me, I needed to get my shit together, and finally get a goddamned passport, because he urgently needed me to go over to Africa and get the monkey-baby. And that, yes, he would buy the ticket, and that no, it wasn’t a loan.
“What do you say?” he asked.
Wow. Wowee. Wow. Wow. Thinking this could be an opportunity to cause them to feel ingratiated toward me for a change, I told him I’d leave the next day. My mom kept right on with the drumming, like she wasn’t sort of glad to see me go.
“Sounds like a plan!” said my stepdad, as he reached down the front of his swim trunks, pulled out a tambourine, and began to dance.
Two weeks later, I was on a plane headed for Africa. This was really the best I could do. I hadn't understood that, outside of family emergency, it’s pretty hard to get a passport in just 24 hours. Not that I didn’t try. I told those bozos down at the passport store that this was a family emergency if there ever was one. That I was bringing my mom back a monkey-baby, and that doing so was really the least I could do for her. That I was a fucked-up piece-of-shit loser that did nothing but disappoint her. That I made her sad, but that this monkey-baby would help make her happy, and that I just wanted to be a part of that. But those assholes didn’t see things my way, and charged a bunch of extra money, and sent me a passport ten days later.
But I did get there, though. You know, to Africa. And I found the monkey-baby my stepdad told me about. In the jungle. In a tree. I saw her before she saw me. She was touching her genitals—because that’s what monkeys do, and not because she was some kind of pervert or anything. I wish my mom could have seen her and the way the light shone down on her through the canopy. If that monkey had wings, she’s have been an angel. Of course I didn’t take her home with me, and I like to think most other decent people would have done the same if they’d seen her sitting up there in her natural habitat pleasuring herself.
When I rang the doorbell at the house where my mom and my stepdad live, I was empty-handed, wearing nothing but a diaper, a little red vest made of felt, and a fez. I had spent some of the return flight home studying monkey behaviors in a book I’d bought at the airport, and was posturing accordingly. I must have been convincing enough, because when my mom answered the door, she totally believed I was her new monkey-baby. You should have seen her face.
“Are you my little monkey-baby?” she asked.
“ooooooooh oooooh aaaah aaaaaah,” I said, and did a little dance.
“Boom-boom! Come quick, and bring the steel drum! Our monkey-baby has arrived, and boy, can she cut a rug!”
“Oh, what a fine day this is!” I heard my stepdad yell from the backyard.
I scurried past my mother on my all four limbs—I mean, I was really doing it up. I made my way to the kitchen, and returned with a pad of paper and a felt-tip pen. My mother watched me, not as her daughter, but as her new and precious monkey-baby, draw her a picture of a banana. Almost as an afterthought, I anthropomorphized it by adding a smiley face. I admit, it wasn’t my best work, but it had a lot of energy. When I handed her the drawing, she just about had a heart attack right then and there.
“Oh. My. God,” she said, “you are a creative genius!”
I followed her to the backyard, where my stepdad was toweling off, having been in the pool. He was fully naked, and I have since learned that he pretty much exists in a state of nudity so long as he thinks my mom is the only human around. I don’t count, you know, because he’s under the impression I’m his monkey-baby.
“Our little monkey-baby is gonna be a star!” said my mom, lighting a Marlboro Light, then showing my stepdad my rendering of a banana. “She’s a bona fide cartooner!”
“Well, holy shit!,” my stepdad said, as he began to dance in his special way.
“You really do make my dreams come true, Boom-Boom. The era of the monkey-baby has begun!”
And that’s how my life is now. People clap and cheer for me when I use the toilet. No one used to do that back when I was just somebody’s daughter. As monkey-baby, I have a well-established sense of wellbeing. I draw all day long, just trying to make the world a little bit better in the best way I know how. The newspapers have all published articles about how talented I am. They write about how proud my mom and step dad are. About how, in a world where a little monkey-baby can find her voice through artistic expression, anything must be possible. About how people can look at my drawings and be inspired, and about how we should all follow our hearts and fulfill our dreams. And that clearly, it’s just about getting in there and getting the job done, because good things come to those who work hard and put their mind to it. Just look at this little monkey-baby making it happen. Just look at the smile on her mother’s face she plays away on an old steel drum and the sun beats down on the backyard paradise.