Before the Monkeys Came

By W.P. Strange

"Before the Monkeys Came" is a 2001 winner in the Writers Digest Self-published Book Awards, Literary/Mainstream category. Frank watches as his friends are drafted to fight a war no one believes in, or he helps them escape to Canada when their student deferments expire to avoid serving in the rock and roll war. Never having to chose, being forever 4-F (unfit for military service) has robbed him of the chance to make his own political statement. Frank was born with hemophilia, a hereditary disease passed from mother to son. His blood doesnt clot normally, so even a minor bump to a knee or elbow joint often becomes a serious bleed, ultimately causing crippling, muscle atrophy and extreme episodes of intense pain.

As a child frequent hospital stays were the norm, and missed school routine. The needles, transfusions and traction are the only therapies being preformed in the fifties and early sixties when the average life expectancy of a boy with hemophilia was fifteen. With the first significant advances in cryo-precipitate (clotting factor removed from whole blood, spun in a centrifuge and frozen for later IV injection.) the first real help arrives by the mid-sixties. Later came Factor VIII, manufactured from whole blood from blood banks like the Red Cross, and the technology for quick intravenous treatment that worked significantly better than anything that came before, promises a more normal life for those born later than Frank and the other men already significantly impaired. But Franks crippling is stabilized by Factor VIII and he finally sees hope.

The comes 1976, the bicentennial year and the year of AIDS. Drug companies poor quality control and the FDAs lack of oversight allows millions of contaminated blood to be processed into Factor VIII and other blood products and distributed to the hemophilia community without regard to the possible infections it could cause. Not warned until 1985, eighty to ninety percent of hemophiliacs who infused Factor VIII during those years becomes HIV positive. A third of them would die of full blown AIDS within a year, hundreds of spouses will be infected, and their children before the spread is controlled.

Franks story is only one of thousands of people caught in this terrible web. The treatment that once held such hope and promise for a healthier life, becomes worse than the disease it tried to help. Frank faces heartbreak, loss, new injuries and further crippling as he tries to face down his demons and find a way just to

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 23, 2001
• ISBN: 9781462812226

W.P. Strange

W.(Bill) P. Strange has been a teacher, writer and editor for twenty years. He has co-authored or ghostwritten thirty novels and non-fiction titles and has authored numerous short stories and articles. He lives in Western Massachusetts with his wife, two kids and a dog named Boggs.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Life is not a spectacle or a feast, it is a predicament

George Santayana (1863-1952)

1969

Three years of Latin, and I don’t give a damn. Nothing about Caesar or Cicero can reach into this part of the twentieth century and rescue us from the grim prospects of post parochial high school paranoia, and Vietnam. My friends are being scooped up, like so many fallen peas from the dinner table and flushed down that mindless garbage disposal in Southeast Asia before we can even say goodbye. Devoured by the Big Green Machine, their epitaph.

If there’s a reason, no one is talking.

Me? I have been twice deferred. My undergraduate standing rescuing me for a while longer, and then, as if there was no choice for me to make I will be forever labeled: 4-F.

I have hemophilia.(No I will not bleed to death if I cut myself.) We’ll get back to that, and other myths, later.

Anti-war activities are the order of the day. We are forced to take sides. On campus there are few hawks left, too many have lost friends, brothers and even fathers. Reality’s a bitch. It would be less than symbolic of me to burn my draft card. Irrelevant!

Matt, a good friend flunked out. We got him to Canada a few steps ahead of Uncle Sam. Nowadays you move fast or the Gestapo gets you. So will the VC.

Better the evil you know, than the one you don’t. At eighteen or twenty or twenty-five, how much can we really guess about what course this life should take. It all blends in, from the feeling that the whole world is waiting for us to burst on the scene to the dull, down deep aching knowledge that we are about to be eaten alive. Alive!

Eliot wrote, in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;/ I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,/ And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat,/ and snicker,/ And in short, I was afraid.

The youth, the men and boys they are bound by the conventions of the universe to be haunted by their own unwise allusions and not so profound confusions when making those first, long, painful strides at becoming themselves. We are indeed a generation lost in space. Danger Will Robinson! Danger! They need, they insist (we insist) that there is a need to find oneself, and if mercy exists, some live through it. Or find it by dumb luck.

Say no! Uncle Sam is murdering your future.

Matt is in Canada, and hopes it is heaven. I wait in between, in purgatory, waiting for an entrance, or at least an invitation.

I am the go-between. Between the real world and lunacy, it is frequently not clear which is which. Matt is sure. Matt doesn’t want to die. Matt doesn’t want to learn how to kill.

I agree. The choices are still not simple. Maybe one day, before Matt and my other friends are gone for real, someone will give us the answer. Tricky Dick doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground, and he’s got his finger on the button. Insanity breeding insanity.

When this madness stops, there will be a new madness to take its place. I know about madness. When you begin life with a handicap, physical, social or moral, you know about madness. Madness will kill me. I have accepted my mortality, and I am hardly old enough to vote.

Hemophilia is madness.

Matt has another kind of madness to deal with. The madness of politicians, the madness of Nixon, Westmorland and the idiocy of Agnew. He has the madness of a demoralized generation. He is looking for sanity in an insane situation. In politics there is no room for sanity, only more politics, and endless madness. War, the ultimate madness!

He thinks I do not understand this kind of madness. He thinks my deferment excuses me from the conflict. I understand that he does not understand I straddle both kinds of madness. I only look sane.

Matt is in Montreal.

missing image file

The space between us was the space of a cheap room. Matt looked up slowly after one of his prolonged silences, toking as usual, with sad melon eyes and chipmunk cheeks that seemed to put parentheses around his wasting mind.

How was Woodstock? His words were slurred, adding an unnecessary click to the last syllable.

I looked back at him with what I hoped was boredom, and a look that could hide the mounting pain in my knee. This and that, I answered with as little enthusiasm as I could muster.

Yeah, a real trip huh! He spoke back at me, but life seemed drained out of my friend now. It was the drugs, but it was his life too. He had no direction, thought nothing of what tomorrow meant to him, and he knew he was adrift on a slow current. Wish I coulda been there, man, he drawled, tugging on his unwashed ponytail.

Montreal was your choice. It was a weak attempt at rebuke, but my heart wasn’t in it and it was a weak gesture at best. In the real world, what else could he do? The rhetorical questions are endless.

Jumping out of his chair suddenly, with jerky movements quite foreign to his recent slowness, Matt began a tirade, raging with a fervor as sincere as the most dedicated of radicals, rage against the political system and the war that exiled him and half his generation. I let him spout, not showing how much the antiwar, anti-establishment rhetoric was beginning to wear thin on me about now.

Say something original, I whisper to myself.

I had to take a stand, he concluded pounding his fist against his chest for emphasis. I’m commited to my moral stand against this genocide, my exile is my statement. After that he sighed deeply, wandered back to his chair and faded out again.

The next morning I packed while Matt slept it off. My mission was completed, I had delivered the care package from home and was no longer useful or needed here.

My knee felt stiff, but otherwise a little less painful despite the swelling and tenderness created by what I’ve learned to call, a spontaneous bleed. The spaces around the knee cartilage slowly filling with slow clotting blood, the pressure building, the discomfort soon to be pain. Sometimes are worse than others. Immobility helps most.

When I finished packing I took my gym bag containing a razor, toothbrush and a change of socks and underwear out to the borrowed Mercury Comet and threw it into the back seat. Then I returned to his room to say good-by.

Matt was trying to pull on his jeans and slip into his sneakers at the same time.

A picture of coordination, I said as I limped in.

Thought you were leaving without saying anything. he moaned through what I knew was a massive headache.

You were sacked.

He nodded toward the refrigerator in the back corner. Don’t forget your shit.

Already in the Coleman in the trunk, I said.

He zipped his jeans and stood facing me wordlessly for a long moment. There was the vaguest hint of a smile at the corner of his lips, but that faraway look was still in his bloodshot eyes. There really wasn’t very much for two friends to say at that moment.

Thanks for coming, Frank. His voice was low, a bit hoarse.

I’ll be back at Christmas break, I assured him.

Yeah! He nodded.

I opened the door. Hey, Matt, by the way.

Yeah?

Woodstock wasn’t that great.

No?

Won’t change a thing. I shrugged.

He chuckled and put out his hand. The war can’t last forever.

God, I hope not. Shit!

We shook hands, embraced and pounded each others back in a manly way. He stepped back and nodded.

Nixon’s keeping it hot. Too hot. Matt said with a hard look in his eyes.

We only have to put up with him till ‘72. The country isn’t stupid enough to re-elect the Dick.

Super Dick, he laughed.

He walked behind me and followed me out to the car, then held the car door like a chauffeur as I got in. The last thing I heard him say as I drove away was: Nixon, man who’d’ve believed it!

I thought I heard him cackle as I turned the car onto the street and headed back toward the US of A. I cut down through the Hamstead section and turned east onto Rue Sherbrooke, and checked out The Main once more.

There were enough draft dodgers and deserters in Canada, so Matt wouldn’t get too lonely. A few have taken him in already, and they nicknamed him Six, for his room number.

I guess Montreal was becoming the ex-patriot destination for our generation that Paris was for Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and Fitzgerald. Hemingway went searching for the adventure of war, Matt was running from it. The rich kids from Exeter and the Ivy League could still have Paris. Montreal was for the working class. Only the language was the same.

By the time I crossed the St. Lawrence heading south my knee was still twanging. I should have stopped to infuse, but I still resisted it. I would never understand how junkies do it, it takes me three or four stabs just to find a vein.

I was in a hurry to get home. There was business to take care of, but later I would regret my haste, but then I often do—regret my haste.

Doesn’t mean a thing!

CHAPTER 2

"For some of us must storm the castles some define

the happening."

Arthur Nortje, South African Poet

(1941-1970)

I had come to this place alone, and now I was leaving alone. This seemed strangely prophetic, this seemed to be the course of my life.

Rolling on, past places and names that were now, in some small insignificant way a part of my past. No one here knew my name! It seemed unfair to have so few choices so early in my adult life, so pointless to be cast among your friends who could all choose, but you could not.

Choose? Choices?

Choose What, courage over capitulation. Matt had run away and that was his political statement, that was a large part of who Matt was. Who he would become. But someday the war would be over, and his choice will no longer have significance. But it may have consequences for the rest of his life. Just like hemophilia for me.

There was a measure of courage here, a moral justification, and yet I felt like I was aiding and abetting a criminal. Was this my vicarious bit of courage?

My father said that bravery was your reaction to an event that happened to you spontaneously, something that the end result would measure bravery or cowardice and for the most part it was all fate. Courage, on the other hand, he said was how you reacted to events that you had to face for extended periods of time, simply by doing what had to be done.

In the long run, it is wiser to be courageous, but bravery is more commercial.

Canada rolled away behind me now. I decided to turn west again and take the long way home, down to Niagara Falls and into the US by way of Buffalo, New York. I’d never seen Niagara Falls, or Buffalo for that matter.

Ahead, the line of cars slowed as each approached the customs check point. My mind wandered as the traffic snaked along. In the line to my left was a yellow sports car driven by a gorgeous blond (okay, so superlatives are overstated, but she was a chick worth checking out) with long straight hair and a perfect profile. She turned her head in my direction and smile.

I smiled back. That was it.

Are you an American citizen? A uniformed man with a chafed red nose asked as he leaned down looking in the car with practiced, bored eyes.

Yes, I answered as respectfully as I could. I handed him my driver’s license and birth certificate before he asked.

Casually he inspected them, as he looked up, his suspicious eyes roaming around. He looked in the back of the car, the seat beside me, and then at me, without actually making eye contact.

Anything to declare, son?

No, sir. Later I was convinced it was the ‘sir’ thing that got to him, after all my generation just didn’t give that kind of lip service sincerely. I guess I was nothing if not a bona fide member of my generation. Or maybe just in training.

Then again I thought I sensed him being bothered by my long hair and fatigue jacket, or maybe I was just naturally paranoid.

Or he was.

He stepped back, saying: Please shut off the engine and step out of the car, and open the trunk.

Uh-oh!

I did as I was told. I was also aware that there was a long line of cars behind me and I wasn’t about to cause a scene and scream harassment, even though I was certain that was what was going down. And no matter what he said I would not call him, pig.

Cars heading in the opposite direction toward Canada were moving along fairly smoothly, though there was a lot of rubbernecking to see what crime the long-haired hippie freak had commited. I opened the trunk and stepped out of the way. Leaning against the rear fender while the Customs people satisfied themselves that I was not carrying contraband. I could feel a new flood of pain in my aching, swollen knee. Stress is not good for my condition. One of the officials took my gym bag off the rear seat and set it on the roof. He carefully unzipped it, as if he expected it to explode.

While he did that I looked around to catch another glimpse of the long-haired blonde. The yellow sports car was nowhere in sight.

Another Customs agent walked over to my trunk and began his inspection. I became aware that I had been unconsciously smirking, it was a nervous reaction, but I’m sure now they didn’t think it was the expression of an innocent man.

A moment later he drew his head out of the trunk and stepped in front of me. He was about two yards away and looked deadly serious. I tried not to laugh, even nervously. It was really so absurd.

Turn around. Put your hands on the roof, take a step back and spread. The command surprised me, it even surprised Red Nose.

I responded by looking over at the trunk lid. The agent who gave the orders thought I moved too slow and quickly forced me into the required position, slamming me against the car and then choosing to kick my left leg back away from the fender very hard. My leg gave out and I went down uttering a spontaneous curse and a yelp of pain.

Without a pause in his movement the guard hauled me back on my feet and whirled me around, slamming me up against the guardhouse this time.

Don’t try that shit again, kid. If you know what’s good for you. He growled through clenched teeth. I noticed that a good flush had come to his pale somber face. The man was no longer bored, I was making his day interesting.

Then Red Nose stepped over to where I was being involuntarily held up against the wall. He had a shit eating grin on his face. We got ourselves a junkie! he said smugly, holding out several butterfly I.V. needles and a fifty cc syringe that I carried in my bag.

Take him inside and we’ll push his car over and strip search it for his stash. Red Nose enjoyed giving that order.

Don’t waste your time, I said stupidly.

Sure thing, kid. Red Nose was enjoying himself, and I was definitely beginning to take a disliking to the fascist creep. I thought, pig, but I didn’t say it.

I was being ushered away by then, so I called over my shoulder: In the cooler, asshole! My last words did not endear