A moment later one of the bartenders was at our table asking for our order. He knew Nelson, and they chatted easily. I was, frankly, sniffing, for as the stale beer smell of the place settled, I had a sense of being literally in a zoo.
As I looked about, I observed a mesh of wire fencing across the section of the ceiling beneath which we were sitting. I got up and inspected. There above us were live monkeys sitting on a bar behind the fence. I sat down and asked Nelson what this meant.
He said, “Wait and see.”
The tavern din was terrible, a demonic blend of shouting, laughing, swearing, name-calling—the human cries at inhuman pitch. It was out of a Gorky novel.
We drank several beers and waited, talking very little. Nelson’s face seemed fixed in a slight smile of playful disdain. It was impossible to say of what.
My bafflement was intensified when two men walked in and approached the place where we were sitting. They pulled a ladder from the wall, climbed the steps, and opened the door of one of the cages. One of the men took a monkey by the leather strap attached to its collar, placed it on his back, and climbed down the ladder. He walked to the far end of the room, opened a door, went in, and closed the door after him and his companion.
I sat rooted to my seat, failing to understand what I had seen. Was this in some way the meaning behind the phrase, “a monkey on his back”? I knew that whatever was going on here could scarcely be an idle zoological experiment, yet somehow I felt an impenetrable wall between my innocence and the full possibilities of human depravity.
I looked once more at the people in the tavern, and all at once it was with different eyes. I no longer saw them as “dregs” and “strays.” I saw something terrible, humiliating, too outrageous to form into words.
What is happening? Who are these people? Are they, indeed, people? But am I? Have I an identity?
My smugness melted and the distaste I had felt for what I saw now angered me. I had come into this place small, mean, and superior, a cad and a fop, the epitome of what I had long viewed with scorn in others.