Grumpiest Monkey Fiction: The Orange Julius Caesar Assassination Plot (Part 1)

A juice stand in the middle of a suburban mall might seem like a funny place to plan an assassination, but goddamn if the place didn’t have smoothies to die for.

Plus, talking about the dirty business of planting pipe bombs and cutting brake lines over a couple of frosty orange sherbet blasts makes the whole thing seem more like a backyard game of tag than high stakes political intrigue.

But we both knew that Carl was serious. Deadly serious.

Carl leaned in close. There was a gleam in his eye and a smattering of sherbet on his lips. When he spoke, his breath was cool and tinged with citrus.

“Look,” he said. “There’s just no other way around it. The presidency is too important to leave to a vote. There’s just too much at stake.”

I took a long suck out of my straw and coughed when the shake hit the sweet spot at the back of my throat. Unable to speak, I waved at him to continue.

“I’d love to sit here and tell you that I trust the people,’” he hissed. “That they’ll see through Dave’s–uh…my opponent’s–campaign of bullshit and misinformation. But we can’t take that chance. Not after what happened four years ago. And not with what’s at stake at the national level.”

“So what do we do?” I finally croaked.

Carl took a sideways glance at the hapless adolescent boy manning the smoothie stand.

The boy was barely able to stand under the weight of his own teen awkwardness, let alone worry about what we were up to.

“We’ve got to get rid of Dave,” he said.

“But…murder?” I shrugged. “There’s got to be a better way. Blackmail? Sabotage? Can’t we plant some drugs in his car, or sign him up for a man-boy love association or something?”

Carl slammed his fist on the table, sending smooth ripples across the surface of my smoothie.

I glared at him.

Rubbing somebody out was one thing, but messing with another man’s frozen drink was going a step too far.

(To be continued…)

Grumpiest Monkey Fiction: The Grocery Store Checkout Line Conundrum

The snow was falling in droves now, and the lines at the supermarket continued to grow.

Gerald grunted impatiently, cradling his meager collection of groceries (one can wet dog food, one roll paper towels, one box of cereal).

He looked with increasing dismay at the size and complexity of the food orders in the grocery carts in front of him.

Each one had a bigger and more complex mix of groceries. Small items, large items, multi-packs, bags of fresh fruit and vegetables whose produce codes would have to be painstakingly entered into the register by hand. Was this going to be a small snowstorm or the apocalypse?

To make things worse, the girl at the register seemed to be moving like a turtle with a terminal morphine habit.

Michelangelo didn’t spend as much time on the Sistine Chapel as she did on every order.

Gerald rubbed his chin. He had shaved before he left for the store, but now he could feel the fuzz slowly creeping back into place on his face.

Had it been that long?

He felt a sharp stab of panic in his chest. For a moment, he became convinced that standing in this grocery line would constitute the entire second act of the two-part play that was his life. Everything up until this point — Birth-Childhood-School-College-Job — had been the first act.

Intermission had been spent winding his ways through the clusterfucked aisles of the Whole Foods trying to grab a roll of paper towels without getting swallowed up the teeming masses of snow-crazed ex-Hippies.

And now, in a bitter twist that was sure to upset the audience, Act 2 of the play would entirely take place in the world’s longest grocery checkout line.

Gerald had two choices. He could sit here and accept his fate and turn the play into a existential drama a la “Waiting for Godot.”

Or he could get a little crazy.

10 Minutes of Grumpy Monkey Fiction

In which your Monkey narrator, finding himself uninspired by real life, tries his hand at 10 minutes worth of fiction.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was a time for copywriting Monkeys in gray suits with chips on their shoulders and black coffee in their veins.

The Monkeys would shuffle into work each morning in v-formation like a gaggle of gray geese. Their  office typewriters started up the moment they sat down and they would clack clack clack all day long.

The Monkeys were hulking and brooding and sullen and they pounded their keyboards with a masochistic fervor that made the secretaries uneasy as they walked up and down the rows with files and files of copy to be written.

At lunch the Monkeys would gather by the elevator and nod grimly to each other without saying a word. They’d sit at a bar on Seventh Avenue and drink banana daiquiris while munching on fried plantains.

Sooner or later one of them would pull out a dusty copy of Atlas Shrugged and they’d take turns reading aloud, their hoarse monkey voices turning warm and smooth from the bananas and rum in their drinks.

And then it was back to work, the office once again coming to a halt as this gang of gray Monkeys shuffled back in from the elevators and wordlessly took up their typing again. And so it went until 5 pm, when their typing would come to a sudden and severe halt.

The silence that fell over the office was broken up only by the squeaking of chairs, the shuffling of papers, the rustling of gray trenchcoats and the clicking sounds made by a half dozen briefcases snapping shut.

And then the elevators would come and the Monkeys would leave, heading home to their wives and their lives and their thoughts of Ayn Rand.