PART ONE

Then there was the summer that I worked the coat check in a place called The Secret Society of the Brown Monkey.  


I got the job from my friend Mickey Mascotti.  


Mickey wasn't a member of the society but he was on the waiting list, and the waiting list entitled you to use the facilities on Tuesday and Wednesday nights, before 9pm.  


Mickey said he couldn't really say too much about what went on inside, partially because there was the whole question of secrecy but also because he wasn't sure Tuesday and Wednesday nights before 9 was prime time in Brown Monkey circles and that he didn't really get the sense that non-prime time Brown Monkey activity was so much less of something wonderful as more like something different designed to both haze Brown Monkey acolytes and, by jacking up drink prices during these off hours, fund raise essentially.  


Mickey noticed certain curtained and sheeted apparatuses that portended mysterious yet titillating promise of debaucheries to come which Mickey took to be of a sexual nature, of course.


Mickey was once, and only briefly, suspended from the fifth grade for flashing his fully-erect penis, and a waggling tongue, out the leg of his powder blue terry-cloth shorts, and mouth, respectively, at Mary Alice Freund during a gym-class square-dance and was only eventually allowed to return to school after his mother had produced a letter from Mickey's 'analyst,' a Dr. Quaff, which alluded to certain deficiencies in Mickey's home life in the father-figure department, which led (the deficiencies) in many cases, not unlike this one, to desperate incidents, on the part of the "unfortunate youngster," of assumed intimacy and sometimes even attacks of what are typically perceived as being of a lewd and sexual nature by unthinking and knee-jerking school administrators (the doctor was careful to point out that, in his experience, the 'unthinking' type of school administrators were those who had matriculated at what could only be thought of as 'lower-echelon' institutions of higher learning as opposed to, say, our principal's alma mater, for example, which was deftly referenced in a previous paragraph as that of Quaff himself) and that if the girl in question could be persuaded to accept a carefully and completely passed-around-and-approved letter of apology, the incident could be put to rest in a way that would do the least damage to all concerned, from a, strictly-speaking, long-term mental health perspective.


Dr. Quaff was in fact a well-known chiropractor--well-known, that is, in the neighborhood across the tracks, as they say, from that of "all concerned," save Mickey and his mother who was one of Quaff's "most loyal patients and indeed a close personal friend."


Mickey had a different elaborate prediction about each apparatus' use and origin every time he checked his coat, proffering each sotto voce and side-mouthed and only when we were completely alone.


Part of the coat check job was sweeping the wood floors in the lobby and stacking cases of Pellegrino-brand sparkling mineral water in the rear of the coat check closet.


I never saw the cases of Pellegrino leave the closet but on the day they were delivered there was always space to add more.  


There was no sign or anything indicating that the building or the establishment had anything to do with something called the Secret Society of the Brown Monkey or anything that could be even a euphemistic reference to such a club, building or establishment.  


Monkeys, brown or otherwise, never entered into it as far as I could see.  


Occasionally a giraffe necked man with painfully white skin and blue-black shiny hair would arrive in the driveway in a golf cart wearing pointy-toed brown boots and green suit with velvet lapels.