The Boogie Truck and the Gorilla Mask

My aunt and uncle divorced shortly before my fourth or fifth birthday, I forget which. What's important is that my cousins; Paul, a year my senior and Phil, a year my junior; came to stay with my sister and me on the week days when my aunt would work. And this, of course, was a catalyst for a great deal of mischief. But the anecdote that I am about to relate happened a year or so prior to that. My cousins had a Matchbox Fedex truck. Nothing fancy, simply a die-cast boxy-looking truck, painted white with a Fedex logo on either side and a pair of black plastic double doors in the rear. What set this particular truck apart from the myriads of pointless trinkets that passed for toys was what was inside of it, for it carried a priceless cargo. We had spent months and months, which at that time amounted to a sizeable portion of our lives, depositing our "boogies" in the back of that little truck. It was really very exciting. You would pick the truck up and and pry the little doors open and see that it was packed to the rafters with boogies. Yeah, I know. But it gets worse, trust me. On evenings when dinner was late and our little tummies growled, we would force the doors of the truck open and pass it around and lick the boogies for salt. I know, its repulsive.

This was around the time when my father learned that children can be remarkably savage when engaged in fight-or-flight mode. It was a brisk October evening and my sister and I were in the bathtub sporting our Johnson & Johnson mohawks. Yes, together in the bath tub and yes it was innocent. We were very young and we had plenty of bath-toys to distract us from playing with each other's no-no's. So relax. As I was saying, we were in the bathtub with little toy tugboats, rubber duckies, and Fisher Price people bobbing up and down around us. The bathtub was set back in the wall, obscuring it from the bathroom doorway and thus we could not see our parents who were out in the hallway, nor could we hear my mom's frantic whisper as she pleaded: "Bud, oh Bud, don't do it! Don't you dare do it!" My sister and I were completely oblivious as we were entirely engrossed in a mock tugboat-disaster that was unfolding before us. Oblivious, also, to the fact that my father had stopped by Kmart on the way home from work. And after walking past the seasonal aisle on his way to the hardware section he had somehow decided that he desperately needed a rubber gorilla mask. And this was no ordinary gorilla mask. It had wrinkled gray skin, bloated features, and tumorous growths everywhere. The eyes were cut out and the entire face was framed by a matted explosion of greasy jerry-curls. It smelled like my nightmares and tasted like earwax.

My mom's hushed pleading and Dad's stifled laughter and the sloshing of our bathwater and suddenly the lights in the bathroom went out. My sister and I looked up. We were still smiling innocently when Dad came bursting around the corner with his gorilla mask on. He had his hands raised ominously and his fingers were curled like claws. He gave a terrifying roar that I could never duplicate for you phonetically. If pressed to describe it, I would say that it sounded more-or-less like wookiee getting an unexpected enema. As you might have guessed, we screamed. And not just any ahhhhh-ok-you-got-me scream, these were death-screams. Our little hands were playing invisible bongos as we emptied our lungs over and over again. We, my sister and I, were about to be devoured by a vicious beast, of this I was certain and I resolved not to go without a fight. Somewhere in the darkness and the confusion, my little pink wrinkled fingers found and closed around the prow of my Fisher Price tugboat and I lifted it and hurled it with all of my might. The little boat's flight was a brief one. It traveled no more than twenty inches before it connected solidly with Dad's gonads. The impact was punctuated by Dad's consternated "oomph." And he sank to his knees and crawled to the doorway before collapsing in the hallway, whereupon the lights came back on and my mother, rushed in to console us. She was laughing hysterically and this only confused us even more.

We eventually learned that it was a mask and after a month or two, we even made a game of having Dad put it on and chase us around the backyard in the evenings. This went on for sometime until the neighbors called and said that their little girl had witnessed this activity from her bedroom window and had grossly misinterpreted it.