Sam Swank, All I want for Christmas is.....a monkey?

When I was a child my family & I had lots of pets.  Gerbils, hamsters, guinea pigs, chameleons from the fair, fish, dogs, cats, a tarantula, turtles, a raccoon, even a sickly armadillo with a gunshot wound.  I even had a boa constrictor that grew to at least six feet named "Basil."  I raised rats to feed him, but as far as I'm concerned, they don't count.  The apex of our animal accumulation occurred one Christmas when my parents, apparently not content with the usual array of conventional pets, decided to push the envelope a bit and get my sister Margaret a spider monkey. Whether she'd expressed a desire for such an animal, I don't recall.

In those years my mother and father did a great job at Christmas time of perpetuating the Santa Claus myth. They would stash the gifts and then get up in the middle of the night, put the presents under the tree, fill the stockings, kick the decorations up a notch, and even leave the cookie crumbs and empty milk glass from the snack we'd set out for Santa the night before.  The real deal.  I remember more than once being genuinely astonished that Santa had actually come to our house and left all these presents, not concerning myself with the logistical questions of how such a large man could squeeze through the four inch wide damper in our fireplace.  In those days you left the back door open and the milk man would just walk in and stock your  refrigerator. I thought maybe Santa came in the same way, just to save time.

Before long we'd given up on the Santa Claus idea. Seems like l was always the last to know these things. Still, my parents made a gallant attempt to carry on the tradition for a couple of years even though their children had started down the path of perpetual cynicism.  I think the Beatles' "White Album" had more than a little to do with it. I recall the genuinely confused/concerned look on my fathers' face when we'd listen to "Revolution #9". But I digress.

It was during one of these Santa Claus "cusp" Christmases that something went horribly wrong.

The first indication of trouble that morning were the pine needles and shards of tree ornaments that littered the floor.  In law enforcement parlance there were "signs of a struggle."  I have no idea where they kept this animal before he appeared, shivering and terrified in his wire cage by the mantle piece, but at some point during the night he'd escaped during the "transfer."  To hear my parents tell it, he went straight for the tree and quickly got tangled in the tinsel. He then started hurling ornaments around the room and growling in that malicious wide-eyed, teeth-bearing way that only fully panicked monkeys can achieve, as my parents tried to corner him with a fire poker.  By the time they caught him the tree was knocked over, a pre-columbian vase on top of the piano was shattered, and my father had been bitten on the arm.  They probably realized right then that they'd made a terrible mistake.

A very refined and culturally plugged in friend of my parents, Claire Rosenfield, suggested the name "Raja Singe" after some kind of Senegalese shaman.  We may as well have named it after a New Jersey bus  mechanic named "Turd Bake."  When observed swinging around the canopy of lowland rain forests, I'm sure spider monkeys are a sight to see. The Swank household however, was not a suitable monkey habitat, and soon I found him to be a smelly, obnoxious nuisance as did the rest of my family.  Often my sister's room had a hand written sign taped on the door that read "Monkey Out," because he would get out of his cage and then try to escape from the room. To lure him back in one had to hold out a chunk of fruit or monkey chow (yes, Purina Monkey Chow, honest!) at which point he would slither down from his perch on top of the drapes with his beady eyes fixed on the bait, then hurl himself at you in a desperately acrobatic move so as to grab the food, but avoid the door of the cage. He usually succeeded.

Suffice to say that we rapidly cooled on the monkey idea once we'd had this thing for awhile, and within a few months, he was gone.

People that run spider monkey shelters, and I have an innate understanding of why they exist, will not find this story at all humorous. It serves only to illustrate why monkeys make less-than-desirable house pets for children. But for me it recalls a time when my family was together and both of my parents were alive and healthy, the kind of Christmas that one looks back on fondly and nostalgically later in life. It is a sweet memory indeed.
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