The Monkey and the Mosquito Bite 

A Tale of Old Austin Texas

By Walter Agnew Moore II

I'm walking out of the Crown and Anchor at 3 in the afternoon on a warm day. The hefe weizen they have on tap isn't bad, but I miss Germany already. I'm OK. I've got money in the bank, even though half of it's gone. I've got work I can do to get more. But mostly I'm wondering where I can go get a shower. I stink.

And there's (Brickhead) coming up the sidewalk. Has he heard what I said I'd do? He's smiling real big and shouting: "Hey! There you are! I was looking for you, to pay you what I owed!"

Yeah, they must have told him what I said I'd do.

I look at him and grin. In 30 seconds we're both back in the bar, air-conditioned, side-by-side on the wooden stools that wobble, two little lost Irish boys who understand roommates skipping out on the rent or roommates declaring they'll kick the guy's ass if they ever find him. (Brickhead)'s bought me a Paulaner, and I guess we're even. What's the point otherwise?

For about the third time he says, "Yeah, I came by the house a couple days later, and everybody was gone!"

"You can't even do that now," I say. "There's no house to go to. Bulldozed."

"How many trees did they fuck up? Those trees are more than a 100 years old, those f—"

"Didn't touch the trees. Just the house."

The pint glasses are cool and heavy. The girl comes over to the bar and hands (Pitbull) the backpack that was under a table. She doesn't know who left it.

(Pitbull) is the bartender. I don't know him, but I usually don't come in this early. Husky guy, shaved head, little glasses. (Pitbull) picks up the pack off the bar.

(Brickhead) laughs: "Hey, it's not ticking I hope!"

I add: "Better be careful..."

(Brickhead) turns to me: "Don't worry, (Pitbull) knows his bombs. In the SEALs he—"

"He does? What kind of bombs, (Pitbull)?"

"Real bombs. Not the kind you know how to make," he says.

Excuse me. I'm just a low-class guy who could mix two common household products into a slurry and napalm your moped, it's a matter of—

"You said 'Slurry'," chuckles (Brickhead). Damn. I didn't notice I was thinking out loud again. (Pitbull) sets the pack on top of the little bar-top poker machine, right next to my head.

"Great. When this bag blows, my head goes all over you, (Brickhead)."

(Brickhead) laughs. He always looks like he's going to cry before he laughs, and he shouts: "It'll be like that time in the Fuehrer Bunker, I'll get away with some scratches, but you'll be the poor sap who was right next to the bomb!"

(Pitbull) has fished an address book out of the pack and phoned a woman who must be the mother of the guy who owns the pack. Probably some 19-year-old sneaking into bars with a fake ID, and now a bartender's calling his mom.

"Yes, ma'am. The Crown and Anchor. You're welcome."

(Pitbull) puts up the phone and leans over the bar between us, stretches his back. He has the same family name as the famous springs on the south side of town: "Yeah... that was my great-uncle. Wish I still had that place, that big nice mansion..."

He wipes the bar. He starts a story :"Finding that back-pack reminds me of something. My girlfriend—"

"Just because you stalk a girl doesn't make her your girlfriend!"

He stares at me a second, then smiles on one side of his mouth. "Yeah, I guess I stalked her a lot, because she's my wife now. Anyway, we were in Denver, and there was this old black man you'd see in all the bars, everybody knew him, Hastings Brown. Just an old black homeless guy, always half-drunk.

"So my girlfriend gets a phone call. It's a storage place, they have a storage unit rented to this old guy Hastings Brown, and he hasn't paid the rent. He listed us as the second contact on the contract."

"Just pulled your name out of a phone book?" I ask.

"Exactly. Well, it turns out we know him, we both saw him in the bar. They say we can do three things, we can pay the back rent, or we can tell them to throw his stuff away, or we can buy all his stuff for 100 dollars. We figure, hey let's help this poor guy out, we pay the 100 dollars and go get it and take it home, figure we'll see him sometime and give it to him.

"So, it's a few boxes and stuff piled in her living room. One night I can't sleep, and I decide, what the hell, let's see what Hastings Brown was paying to keep in storage. Can't hurt to look, right?"

"No, no", we both say. I see my dad's old box in my head, and inside, the faded picture of the laughing redhead.

"That's what I thought too. So I open a box, and it's notebooks. Lots of medical notebooks that Hastings Brown had written in. Hastings Brown was a doctor. He did research and won awards. He found a new way to synthesize estrogen, he almost won the Nobel Prize.

"Then he started going crazy. Schizophrenic. You could see it happening in his notes, and trace it as the days went by. I'd look through a lab notebook, and it'd be normal for pages, then some crazy little note to himself. He knew he was cracking up. Then a couple of days' entries, then another crazy note."

"Crazy note?"

"Yeah... like one of his split-personalities kidnapped and killed a woman, stuff like that."

"Killed—?"

Schizophrenia doesn’t mean split personalities. I know that, and you know that, but that's what (Pitbull) says. (Pitbull) the former SEAL. Guys like (Pitbull) were always in the SEALs. Or the Green Berets. Never truck drivers or parts clerks.

"And so I'm reading these notebooks, and the crazy notes start coming more and more often, every day, you can read the dates and track it. Then there's a point where it's nothing but these notes to himself.

"And so I'm in my girlfriend's apartment sitting up half the night reading these things, and I get to this last page that isn't a note, it's a drawing he did. It's a monkey on the top half of the page, and a dot on the bottom half. The monkey is staring down at this dot. And there's one line he wrote: 'the monkey and the mosquito bite.'

(Brickhead) and I are turning our heavy glasses with our thumbs in circles on the bar, turning them in the wet rings of condensation. (Pitbull) wipes the bar again:

"That's right. Hastings Brown had written "the monkey and the mosquito bite" on the page. He had been a genius, had a family, discovered new medical techniques, won prizes. Went crazy and ended up homeless with all his notebooks on my girlfriends' living room floor. That story is going to be in my movie, I'm going to tell it when I make my movie."

I shake my head. "Just went crazy."

(Brickhead) has to go back to work. I'll give him a ride. (Pitbull) and I do the nice-to-meet-you thing, and to be polite I ask him if I can swim in his family's spring sometime.

"Be my guest. Just leave it like you found it."

Now, dear reader, I did indeed steal (Pitbull)'s story about Hastings Brown. But if you believe he's ever going to quit bartending long enough to make a movie, you probably believe he was in the SEALs too, or that (Brichhead) was going to pay his bills, or that I was going to do anything about it if he didn't.

The water in (Pitbull)'s springs is cold, and I swim under the surface, come up and paddle on my back and look at the blue, empty sky.

It's better than a shower.

© Walter Agnew Moore II 2001