Bad Monkey

“Tell me where she is, Mr. Stafford.”

“I tink I know,” said Neville, waiting for more thunder.

Twenty-three

Driggs was a white-faced capuchin born into a show-business clan. His father had worked for a few seasons on a popular television comedy called Friends, and an older female cousin had appeared with several look-alikes in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, a high-grossing feature film starring Jim Carrey. Swinging deeper into the family tree, a great-great-grandmother of Driggs’s had played the organ grinder’s sidekick in an edgy Parisian musical about the Nazi occupation, the cross-dressed primate sporting hand-polished jackboots and a Hitler-style mustache clipped from Belgian broom bristles.

Born Baby Tom, Driggs was reared among other domestic capuchins on a ranch outside Santa Barbara. He showed none of his forebears’ gifts for acting—his disposition was prickly, his attention span fluttering. Unlike his camp mates, he failed to outgrow an adolescent preoccupation with his own genitalia, and this too hampered his career.

A scrotum-grooming reverie, broadcast live on the stadium Jumbotron, brought an end to a short-lived stint as the official “Rally Monkey” of the Los Angeles Angels. The next morning, his team of exasperated trainers sold Driggs to a freelance animal wrangler named Martell, who hoped to cash in on the monkey boom that was sweeping through cinema and television.

Thanks to an improbable connection at Disney studios—Martell had succesfully housebroken a dwarf lemur belonging to the senior comptroller—Driggs was allowed to audition for a series of action movies based on a popular theme-park ride called Pirates of the Caribbean. The part naturally called for the garb of a pint-sized swashbuckler. Knowing Driggs was averse to costuming, Martell prepped his would-be star for the audition by spiking the animal’s noontime Snapple with a shot of Wild Turkey. No more relaxed performer ever set foot on the Disney lot. Two months later, he was in the Bahamas with Johnny Depp.

Driggs had been hired as a backup to another capuchin, Dolly, who was docile, obedient and attention-loving. Martell hoped she and Driggs might become off-camera playmates, and that Driggs would begin to chill in her company. It didn’t happen.

Because some of the film’s stunts were staged to occur on a ship’s rigging—no place for a drunken monkey—Martell had halted the palliative dispensation of bourbon. Predictably, Driggs reverted to the execrable antics that had cost him the Angels gig. From remote shooting locations on Great Exuma came reports of unprovoked biting, wanton vandalism, wardrobe destruction and of course feces throwing, the signature method of protest for unhappy simians. Depp was spared only because Driggs tolerated him, but several other actors and even one of the stuntmen refused to come on the set unless it was Dolly’s turn to work.

Her demure presence, far from calming Driggs, pitched him into a state of fiendish priapism that literally came to a head when an assistant director caught him jerking off on a rack of brunette wigs. Driggs and, by association, Martell were fired within the hour. The studio agreed to pay the trainer’s airfare back to Nassau though not the expensive connecting segments to Los Angeles. No return ticket was provided for Driggs, not even in cargo.

Worn out by his dissolute trainee, Martell unloaded Driggs for seventy-five Bahamian dollars to a sponge fisherman from Andros, who was bloodied and soiled by his new pet on their homeward passage. That winter, kind fate appeared as a casual game of dominoes in which the sponger happily took a flop in order to divest the horrid creature on a gullible fellow named Neville Stafford from Lizard Cay.

Neville was a gentle, patient man, and the capuchin did not despise him. The name change from Tom to Driggs was an easy adjustment, as was the dietary switch from healthy seedless fruits to batter-fried chicken, conch fritters and coconut cakes, which Driggs soon learned to crave. His skin grew scaly and then inflamed, and thereafter he began losing his fur in handfuls. The unattractive condition was worsened by the tropical heat, and by the nonstop feasting of doctor flies and mosquitoes. Wild capuchins smash millipedes and smear themselves with the guts as a natural insect repellent, but Driggs was too far removed from his Central American roots to innately know that trick. Consequently he remained wretched and welted during the summers, which possibly explained why Neville cut him so much slack.