Boo, the Unwell Baboon

"...we’re just monkeys…

living in our own little monkey pods,

driven by base instincts to create these hierarchies

and hump each other.

I thought I knew my father, you know?

I only knew the part that he wanted me to see.

He hid the monkey, and that screwed me up, Quinn."

Mark Mossbacher, The White Lotus









Content Warning:
Strong Sex References, Crude Humour, and Strong Cancer References

Transcript

Boo, the Unwell Baboon

They had seemingly little to do with one another but I remember two salient events from that time, both of them really quite well. The two events would later find themselves knitted and entwined, but quite by accident. And yet I wonder if that’s true. That their entanglement was an accident. At any rate, my mother was diagnosed with colon cancer, and no sooner had she broken the news at breakfast, she demanded that we take a trip to the zoo. Cancer and zoo: let the duality nest at length in your mind. That was then.  

On the other side of our union’s dissolution, dissolved with difficulty and mythic effort, Claudia has irretrievably gone the way of her purpose, to her mother’s house. She always goes there, whenever I fall short of her standards. But this packing of the bag seems definitive, the exit of that indignant majesty seems ultimate. The bag she filled with clothes and toiletries and her unfinished novel seems to have been designed and sized especially for the great storming out, whenever the urge to storm out should take her, with all its expected theatricality. I started to compose a letter to Claudia not so long ago. I have since abandoned my letter to Claudia. But, as I sit in my car, feel every so often the thrum of a passing train, notice that the rain on the roof is intensifying not dwindling as I thought it was a few minutes ago, as I sit in my car, baleful with the failure of that unwritten letter, I find that I have begun to look for the meaning of me. Stirred, moved to do so by the attempt to pen, I look for the events, the memories, or the original sin- the original crimes- that might explain me, the key to the riddle. My needs are simple, I knew it from day one, mankind knew it from before day one. On the other side of bottles and pills and self-help books and wellness retreats and therapists and the ill-said ill-apprehended mysticism of the East, I have stumbled upon my own continent of wordlessness. I have finally entered into and joined myself with the right silence of the ignorant. Coming down the garden path, there is a man and a woman, screaming at each other, drunkenly and irately failing to see one another’s woefully imperfect point of view. A laugh sweeps over the darkness of me, it tremors, it quakes, it spangles the dark canyons of my mind with the first light of the East. Why do I laugh? Something to do with us. Like Alpha and Omega. O and A, and A and O. Like Ooh ohh ohh and ahh ahh. Ah.

“I have cancer” mother said, back then.   

My father’s bespectacled gaze rose inquisitively above his newspaper, my brother’s cutlery dropped with a clatter onto the table, my lower jaw dropped just as my brother’s cutlery did so.  

“Let’s go to the zoo,” she said.   

I don’t think those were her exact words. They might as well have been. And for some reason, that was what she desired: the zoo. I associate zoos with animal captivity, depression-inducing statistics about the rainforest, fecal matter, not particularly good restaurants, and screaming children. Perhaps my mother had finally learned to cherish all of those things, those things of acquired taste. Perhaps she just didn’t realise quite what she loved about life until the discovery of the cancer within her digestive tract forced her to confront the endless chasm of mortality, and so to love life’s drudgery. At the zoo, having refused to concoct for me and my brother Jake our usual egg and soldiers on account of her cancer, and she not her two boys being the one in need of consolation, she gazed upon the condor at length; she pined after the little, smelly aardvark family, curled up like old, pink slippers in a pile, she wept before the bonobo cage at the sight of the little one nestled in his mother’s breast. And she wept also, wept yet more furiously, when a big baboon stood up before her, pressed his face against the glass, and sported his enormous red erection right in front of her eyes. I’m not sure why that bold display in the baboon enclosure should make her cry. The libidinous self-exhibitions of unfixed apes have been known to induce laughter among spectators of all ages.   

I’m not sure if that particular sight was responsible for it, but her libido sky-rocketed after that point. Upon me too, the tumescent baboon made a ferocious impression. I was well into puberty, my sexual antennae constantly tingling and stiff. The baboon’s prowess, behind the glass of his enclosure, at the zoo to which we had been compulsorily couriered on the morning of my mother’s diagnosis being disclosed, wasn’t the thing to unlock my sexual consciousness, the secret society of womankind had conspired to admit me to that circle years before, had left titbits in my path, if you’ll excuse the phrase that they knew, I am convinced, to be suggestive. But I simply couldn’t dispel from my mind the spectacle of that virile ape: his streaming lion-like hair, his whole body wrapped in silken, rippling mane, his terrifying blueberry blue and strawberry red and creamwhite jaws open in a massive, teethed yawn, and at his centre, defining, like a writer’s most acclaimed big book, the penis, oddly foreskin-less, just an entirely red, trembling rod of glans-coloured sensation, with notes of purple. Thoughts of what that baboon could possibly do with that awe-inspiring phallus held my dreams hostage: the orifices he could win for himself and brutalise should he so wish, the strong, healthy, cancer-resistant, well-endowed offspring he could father, the ungodly liquid quantity of semen he could muster with one completion. That being said, his testicles were not made apparent to me, so as to that final point I am not sure. Huge, festive phalli provoke thoughts of huge, festive loads, but it is perhaps a misguided cognitive leap. In my mind, I called that baboon Boo. 

Boon. Boob. Bab. Babby. Baby. The Baboon, even in name, is a creature who just oozes the reproductive and thoughts of it. He shakes, like a Richter Scale nine quake, with thoughts of ejaculation, reproduction, insemination, impregnation, lactation. So inspired, my mother began having affairs, after her cancer diagnosis, after the zoo had infected her (and us) with its inspiration from behind glass panes. Orgastic urgency triggered by fear of mortality, or pure, simple, immoral, me-centred, libidinous cancerousness I couldn’t be sure. It was with a sense of unease that I discovered that my mother’s string of infidelities caused my own libido to dramatically increase. My father permitted these infidelities, safe in the knowledge that my mother was dying, and was simply acting out of an incurable existential angst. I have since been able to realise that my mother and father had been very distant for some time. I don’t give a monkey’s anymore (if you’ll excuse the pun), I’ll ride who I please. And she did. And my father watched. Sometimes. Others he just sat on the sofa and cried, about the cancer, about her affairs, his stream of consciousness set on fire with the whiskey and gin that he binged alone. Meanwhile, I would be upstairs, walking about wordlessly on all fours, occasionally humphing gutturally, pretending to be a baboon, and my penis rising with every further moment that I convinced myself of such a sacrilegious fiction. I felt that hot, randy baboon blood run like pure, stimulant, alcoholic ambrosia in my veins, I felt somewhere deep within my young manhood the intoxicating male thrill of claimed, realised integrated ape-descent. My cancerous mother was crying out by this time, the floorboards above me thumping, a male voice I didn’t recognise ohing and ahhing, my father downstairs crying, my brother sleeping sound, and Boo, the zoo baboon, probably pounding his she-baboon like a maniac in the enclosure. We all slept in our respective enclosures when our respective labours were concluded, I for one, fitfully.  

At any rate my mother soon became pregnant. For nine months her abdomen inflated like a balloon, her womb swelled with its contents and the bump in her belly blew up as large as a beachball.   Christopher Hitchens suggested before he died that cancer is worse for women than men. The fact of the cancer’s being a living thing within a host hurts some women very deeply, as the cancer becomes a parody of pregnancy. My mother found herself in the uncommon position of being able to experience both cancer and pregnancy, simultaneously. My mother was remarkably unsentimental when it came to children. I remember snuggling up to her and sinking my face down into her tummy, back when she was pre-cancerous and unpregnant, and asking her what it felt like to be pregnant with me. She called me a deviant, and told me to fuck off.  

But imagine, if you possibly can, if you possibly dare, our collective surprise when my cancer-ridden, fifty seven year old mother pushed out, onto the sterile surface of the operating table, a young baby babboon. I don’t know if “operating table” is the technical term for whatever gurney (in layman’s terms) she was deposited upon, he was deposited upon. Boo! suddenly did seem the most appropriate name. I was the one to make the suggestion and they accepted it. Imagine how superlative my mother’s surprise that the fruit of her labour was of any species other than her own. It can’t be imagined, you simply had to be there. 

She’d been terribly disagreeable all throughout the birth, for the most part screaming various imperative iterations and synonyms of Fuck Off! at the top of her lungs, as her pubescent sons and cuckolded husband and a bloke called Gerald kept solemn and tireless vigil around her bed, listening to her scream, watching with horrible fascination the fearsome spectacle of her bloodred genitals dilating, thanking God with the greatest of gratitudes that none of us were born women. Gerald she suspected of being the father: Gerald. Gerald, the two syllables are repugnant to me. Gerald, whom she’d met at pub speed dating and got to know a bit and telephoned and liked and shagged and invited to be birthing partner. He gazed, with us, as through the parted ruddy lips, the pinkfaint, fleshcoloured, hairless, hardly human primate (male) was pushed into the loud, wet world, fingerwidth on fingerwidth, by unusually painful contractions. Indeed, the screams torn by the labour from my mother’s churning depths, and let rip from her baboon-yawning jaws, were at times so intense that it was all I could do to stop myself from falling to my knees and begging God aloud through floods of tears to spare my mother’s perineum from tears, or her cervix from prolapse. 

We all looked at Gerald when the baboon was delivered, the umbilical cord cut, the placenta received in a kidney dish as soon as it slithered out of my mother like a big, fat kipper, and he suffered a look from all of us of incensed accusation. But he was relieved, the sigh of relief he sighed was not a sigh at all, but an operatic exclamation. 

“Does it look like me?” he triumphantly and rhetorically asked, and off he went.     

We believed in God back then. Having thanked Him (first letter capitalised) for NOT (all letters capitalised) doing something, we all subsequently thanked him for doing something. The obstetrician, who was in possession of mother’s cancerous records, having called a senior doctor, and then an oncologist, informed us that my mother’s cancer had completely gone. We didn’t believe him at first until he suggested that we all go down the pub to celebrate. Who were we to repudiate such an encouragement, even if its pretences were false? Mother later appeared at the threshold of the local, still wrapped like a mummy in white sheets and bandages. Loudly she cried out, so that every drinker turned their head in her direction, “the cancer’s gone!” 

Everyone cheered and a number of people rallied around her and bought her shots and complimentary gin and tonics. After she’d explained the story, quite inebriated, a number of times, someone asked: 

“What about the baby?” 

“In an incubator,” she said. “Can’t breathe too well.” 

Everyone cheered. 

My mother would have loved to discard, incinerate, or incarcerate elsewhere her new baboon baby Boo! (notice that the percussive exclamation mark succeeding his monosyllabic, onomatopoeic name is ever compulsory) but she instead found herself tasked with the discomfort of taking him home and raising him as one of her own. He was one of HER own, after all, he just wasn’t one of OUR own. 

After a few weeks in the incubator, full of tubes, Boo! came home. I had sometimes watched my mother’s unhuman lovechild sleep his comatose sleep, his muzzled complexion afforded by those eyes, closed in ailed, womblike slumber, an air of the ancient and sagacious and ancestral. He had cried out, wildly, in a primal paroxysm, upon delivery, blindly clutching at mother’s breasts. He had then been sedated and placed in medically induced sleep, while he healed from the trauma of his birth. I felt nothing I could comfortably categorise, no emotion for whose occurrence in my breast I could generate comparison in experience, or even name. I felt sorry for the little ape more that I felt anything else. When I was littler and more nefarious, I might have unplugged his air supply, or throttled him, smothered him, as I would have any competitor for my mother’s love. But the absurdity of the situation pacified me, even broadened my horizons, deepened my sense of life’s mystery.    

Boo! was a relatively pleasant baby, quite peaceable and placid. He seemed to have been spared the ills of cradle cap and colic. Teething pain caused him quite a lot of bother. His body gradually became haired all over with a short, rough, stubble of hair. Coarse hair, it hurt to affectionately run one’s hands over his body. Not that I spent all that much of my time running my hands affectionately over Boo’s body. Nor did my mother to be honest. 

His diagnosis of cancer came as a shock. And it came also as a weird inevitability. The oncologist informed mother by telephone that the cancer, lately red and angry and knobbly in her intestine, had now somehow been passed on to Boo’s where it took up its residence. It had metastasised from the larger to the smaller intestine. The blood in his nappies suddenly made a lot of sense. 

He grew up fast, Boo! the Baboon. It was self-evident, the swiftness of his early development. Compared with our own, it was shaming quite how efficient the rate of maturation that his species enjoyed. Within a year he was wild and fierce and independent. He no longer relied upon our mother for food, indeed his cravings for maternal affection were surprisingly slight: it was written deep within him, and manifested, predestined, a cold hard need and necessity to break away from mummy and begin fending and foraging alone. He made a habit of killing people’s pets. And plants. Vegetal or carnivorous, he habitually dieted upon things which didn’t belong to him, or us. 

Then, one day, on an escalator, he said his first word: Bum.  

“Bum,” Boo! the Baboon said, in his monkey voice. 

The monosyllable resounded jubilantly in the station, its plosive beggining sent forth strong, the rest of the word succulently following, and the whole three-letter affair concluded by a delicious, salacious smacking of his baboon lips. Bum! He had seen, thought about, and articulated what stood before him: a big fat woman’s big fat bum, presented, albeit unintentionally, emphatically and largely and inspirationally before Boo! the Baboon’s delighted vision on the escalator.  

“Bum!” Boo! the Baboon repeated, joyfully. 

The back-buxom woman turned around. The fact that she had turned around at Boo! the Baboon’s utterance was in itself instructive. She shot Boo! the Baboon a vindictively sour look. Her face was enormous and misshapen. Her lips were unified into an enormous pout, her eyes were two blood-shot lamps. 

“Bum!” Boo! the Baboon epiphanically cried out, once more.  

He was faced directly with the spectacle of that woman’s colossal cheeks, clothed. One cheek alone would have been… “Sufficient” is hardy the right word, “Great” I suppose is the word, meant in both the sense of massive and indubitable and satisfactory. Boo! the Baboon seemed poised to drum upon the cheeks as though they were a large primaeval percussion instrument, or certainly seemed about to squeeze himself into the depth of that capacious blubber before him, surround himself in the grand hug of the woman’s nether flesh.  

At any rate, the woman with the big bum was offended and away she went, taking her big bum away with her. 

We were making the somewhat lengthy and tortuous journey to Oxford. Me, my brother, and Boo! the Baboon. In the station, Euston or Paddington or London Bridge station, one of the big stations, I forget which, our mother had to explain to Boo! the Baboon the nature of his infraction. Mother did her best to communicate to Boo! the Baboon that such unfettered comment was a social ill. Boo! the Baboon’s face fell and his muzzled complexion turned a little green beneath its nut-coloured hairs, and he rushed off to the nearest lavatory to evacuate his bowels. 

Boo! the Baboon’s general sounds were guttural, incensed, and animal. He could get what he wanted with far greater ease simply by freeing from his terrifying mouth one of his giant, maddened ape-yells. He had recourse to some language but favoured his own screeches over the various pieces of English vocabulary which cumbersomely came into his awareness. Bum was the first word, Tits came along not long after that, then Milk, Twat, Shit, Angry, Food.  

His puberty came upon him swiftly. A new set of shoulders heaved their towering width higher against his head, his baboon screams deepened about an octave, and as for his penis and its new capabilities! It was his pride and joy, that red, courgette-sized growth at the centre of his being.  

The cancer gradually ate him up. Its angry path was not stoppable by surgery, radio or chemo therapy. Our mother wasn’t a bad mother to him. Dad had not stuck around after Boo! the Baboon’s arrival. As for Boo! the Baboon’s biological father, it was a great mystery. The enigma of his beginning. As Boo! the Baboon simultaneously, concurrently lived and died, grew into being and faded from being, came and went, it never occurred to him to search for a meaning to his life, to solve the problem of his existence. He never stopped to mourn his condition, nor understand his origin.

He had enjoyed one-on-one remedial education at primary school, the same me and my brother had attended. The teacher would try in vain to teach him how to spell Anxious, or to add up using the column method, and then he would go to the hospital and sit in the dreadful chair, hooked up to the lethal tankard, waiting at length for the medical venom to enter him. 

He fell in love with a nurse. He knew her by her smell, and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that he was able to correctly determine her fertility by the swing of her walk. Long before he was able to make out the delicate features of her face, he would be seized by arousal, and would masturbate fiercely, in her honour. He even attempted a couple of times to mount her, but she was well prepared for this eventuality and stunned him with a tasering rod. Fizzing with electric shock, he would stagger back into the chemo-therapy chair and wait for his erection to subside. The nurse, whose name I forget, would laugh heartily, unconcerned. It was all part and parcel of that strange inter-species theatre of flirtation between the two of them. 

The results were not good. The odd, galactic, blobbed, blue and purple images from Boo’s biopsies, incomprehensible to us, showed, apparently, no remission. If the registrar had produced the scans only to crow in joyful triumph: He’s cured, the cancer’s completely gone! we would have been none the wiser. In a heartbeat we would have pinned to the notice board, or blu-tac-ed to the fridge, the very image that evidenced Boo’s doom, if the registrar or the physician had spoken of positive developments.      

Boo! hardly slept. No matter where he found himself, no matter what degradations, what humiliations, what horrors befell him, he woke everyday with enthusiasm. He always rose with the sun. With the larks. Until he didn’t.     

He lay on his back in the hospice deathroom, sleepy with powerful opiates. Woozy and dwindling he lay, supine. Occasionally his right arm, only his right arm, seemed to wake from the stupor within which he found himself trapped. The non-opposable thumbs and the artful digits (in which one could not fail to recognise that which was precursory to the human) would uncurl, and his arm would lift a little. His fingers would crane, it really did seem as though he were reaching for something. 

I don’t remember the exact circumstances of his expiry. But we discovered, mother, me, my brother, upon being summoned by a kindly assurance of imminent death over the telephone, that his soft and lengthy going, from the gloom of this world into the light of the next, had awoken in hospice staff and a number of patients with whom he shared a ward, a terrible grief. Tubed and unconscious, his unwell somnolence recalling to me the incubatory scenes and the difficult birth of only a few years before, he slumbered, surrounded by candles, like an effigy. Youthful yet aged he lay, emaciated, grave with a look of furrowed brow and knowing mind that suggested a strange wisdom, quite apart from the temperamental, impulsive, mindless, libidinous thing he had been in life. Their devotions were constant, as were their shrifts of tearful lament, their nightly vigils around the bed of Boo! the unwell baboon, lying, hairy arms parted in a cross, unweller than he had ever been before. Unit nurses, lab-coated doctors, and pyjama-ed inpatients to a number of which oxygen supplies and mucus ducts were strapped, worshipped before him. 

Their agony was more articulate than our own. Their knowledge of mortality made them understand. Me, my mother, my brother, we lurked behind them, in the darkness, unsure how to make our sadness known, too proud to show any gratitude. For it lay unexpressed and secret, the reality that our mother had been spared by Boo!

He stirred one last time before the end. His adorers hung upon his every word, the ruined and doomed and weary who clustered around him craned their ears to hear what would be the final utterances of that cancerous, saintly primate who had perfectly unified all those souls that he touched. He hadn’t opened his mouth much in life. But for those rare occasions, words had never served to aid him, he had inhabited a plane beyond the articulate, beyond the need for erudition. Now he spoke. In his strange primal hiss, in the accents of death, as with a frail death rattle, he said: 

“Bum”. 

And then: 

“Sad”. 

Finally, he said: 

“Love”. 

His eyelids lost all resisting will, he relinquished his hold on consciousness, and he was gone.  

We were allowed a short while to say goodbye to the stilled and emptied body, before it was bagged and carried off by stretcher to the morgue.  

At home, we all had egg and soldiers of consolation. I looked about me, considered the dark room, the new, damning spaciousness we all now inhabited: me, and my mother, with a look of the unbearable in her tired eyes, and my brother uncommonly pensive and melancholy in his own way. What else? Banister. Wall. Wall. Table. Dresser. Door. Wall. Door. Picture on the wall. Fridge. There was an ultrasound image, a still from the strangest of movies: a weird dreamworld of blue shadows. I went over to the fridge door where the ultrasound was taped and studied the strange, humanoid, alive shape in the picture’s centre. I was sure it wasn’t Boo! 

“Is that one of us, mum?” I enquired. 

She didn’t understand. 

“This. It’s an ultrasound, isn’t it? an ultrasound of a baby… what baby is it, shown in the image?”. 

“Leave me the fuck alone,” mum said. 

She seemed weary with all the last several years’ anguish and waste and destruction and humiliation, and all the many checkpoints of no return that she had passed. The phone rang. It’s urgent summons broke the silence violently, startling mother. 

“Get that one of you,” her quiet, depressed tones said. 

I answered the telephone and listened into the receiver. I will never forget that call. 

“It’s the hospital,” I related when it was over, when I had laid to rest the voice that spoke from the other side. 

My mother’s head rose, my brother’s too. 

“It’s Boo.” The exclamation mark that usually ended his name no longer seems appropriate. I went on: “His body isn’t where the staff left it. He’s not in the morgue.” My heart quickened. “They don’t know where he’s gone. They don’t understand what’s happened to him!” 

“Useless fuckers,” mum said.