The Monk and the Monkeys

When my daughter was eight years old, she and I found ourselves bunking on the sixteenth floor of an apartment building four blocks off the strip at Waikiki. I had scraped ice off an old station wagon in Idaho and flown for ten hours to watch the apartment while Delta's mother looked into a rumor that some tiny bird was gagging into extinction on the fumes from equipment servicing the observatories atop the mountains on the Big Island.
On Sunday morning Delta announced that she and I and her pal Max were going to the Honolulu zoo. When she phoned to invite Max, his father asked to speak with me. He explained that he was providing a halfway house for Tibetans fleeing Chinese oppression, and asked if one of the monks could accompany us. You bet.
After being lost for an hour in a catacomb of streets with only vowels in their names, we stumbled across Max's house, and there, waiting on the steps, were bright-eyed Max and a featherweight guy dressed in mustard-colored robes, wearing black hightop Kedds, and a chrome Timex with a metal expansion band.
On the way to the zoo, Max explained that he couldn't say the monk's name, that the monk didn't speak English, had only been in America for three weeks, that he slept sitting up, smoked too many cigarettes, and was a professional wristwatch repairman.
The kids ditched us at the entrance to the zoo. The monk and I made quite a couple, one have-a-nice-day-face in a curtain and one overheated drugstore cowboy in lace-up logger boots. We wandered down the zoo paths, smoking Camel stubbies, pointing at animals and giggling at each other's name for the critters. We had a lot to talk about, but couldn't. The Tibetan word for giraffe sounds like "chewing gum."
At the cat cages, the monk was shuffling along, looking back over his shoulder at a yawning lion, so when he turned forward he came eye-to-eye with a standing Bengal tiger, and immediately went into a crouched self-defense posture. From somewhere down in that skinny frame came a throbbing yowl that was so low in pitch that I froze up for a few seconds, before I realized that this fellow had grown up where tigers run wild, and that he didn't care for tigers. I stepped between them and broke the spell. He looked at me, looked at the tiger, nodded his head, then fired up the smile again.
On a concrete island a middle-aged chimpanzee was playing games with the humans, throwing a knotted gunnysack over the moat to the crowd. When it was tossed back to him, he tucked it behind a chunk of driftwood, performed a cheerleader routine, then reached behind the log, and threw the cloth ball back into the audience.
During the third act of this performance, when the tourists were packed around the ditch, popping flashbulbs, the monk grabbed me by the arm and led me up on a knoll, away from the show, just as the chimp finished his arm flapping, foot stomping segment, reached behind the driftwood, filled his hand, and sprayed ten thousand dollars worth of camera equipment with chimpanzee shit.
The kids were waiting at the lunch counter. We bought popcorn and Pepsi, and sat on a warm concrete bench in the shade, munching and slurping, while the pigeons swarmed around us. I fed the birds by broadcasting popcorn by the handful then watching the neck-bobbing scramble. The monk carefully chose one kernel, held it between thumb and forefinger, zeroed in on one pigeon, fed that individual that one piece of popcorn, then switched birds.
When they finished snacking, Delta and Max ran off to see the seals. The monk, using universal sign language, made it clear that he had to use the restroom. I pointed to the appropriate door, then stretched out on the bench, and fell asleep.
The kids woke me, wondering where the monk had gone. I checked the men's room and the tiger cage, no monk, then began asking zoo visitors if they had seen a hairless guy in robes anywhere. A young couple from South Dakota said they had seen something like that down by the telephones.
We found him there, sitting cross-legged on the grass, his entire being focused on a pay phone in a plastic clamshell. Max claimed he was asleep. I kneeled beside him and gently tapped the face of his Timex. He snapped from his reality into ours, smiled, and followed us to the parking lot. On the way back to Max's, over the noise of the kids discussing whether an elephant could beat up a killer whale, the monk hummed a few bars of "Love Me Tender."