Requirem For A Monkey

The aroma from Angelina’s filled McElroy’s consciousness. A slice of pizza and a beer was all he could think about as he waited for the light to change. The green man flashed and McElroy was in the cross walk, moving at the forefront of the noon migration. Delivery trucks, limousines and taxis, lunch time traffic in the heart of the city.

Exhaust fumes filled in around the plumes of cigarette smoke from the sidewalk cafés. McElroy darted sideways toward the gutter to keep from stopping for a uniformed monkey panhandling at the end of a thin chain. A woman dressed in grimy lederhosen that matched the money’s attire sat on a three legged stool and spun the crank on an organ. Her eye’s appeared closed, as she tugged on the chain to control the little beast’s range. McElroy had already veered into the street when she yanked the tether back.

As McElroy’s foot touched down, a horn blared in his ear, brakes protested a prolonged squeal followed by a scream of abject terror. McElroy threw himself forward in a head-first slide and glanced over his shoulder at the source of his panic. A black sedan was up on the sidewalk, headed toward the customers at the outside tables. McElroy wondered who had time to sit and eat. Customers were screaming as they leaped from the car’s path. Chairs, pizza and beer flew everywhere. As the black sedan skidded to a halt, a delivery van, it’s doors emblazoned with winged silver shoes slammed into the car’s rear bumper and shoved it through Angelina’s front window. McElroy’s heart pounded as he stood up the block from Angelina’s, his hunger in momentary remission.

Steam from the van’s radiator formed a cloud between the two vehicles as the car’s driver jumped from his seat and began to scream obscenities at the van’s driver. The door of the van opened slowly the driver a tall broad black man emerged and stood over the car’s operator. The customer’s whose pizza and beer were mingled with the dripping radiator fluid, got into the fray as they screamed in indignation over their interrupted lunch. The driver of the car, a young man in a good suite, too busy dealing with the van driver to care, extended his left arm back toward the crowd and shot his middle finger into the air. Infuriated, the diners and a throng of onlookers increased the volume of their protests.

The back of the gathering on the sidewalk started to push forward for a better view and one of the people in the front row stumbled forward and fell into the car’s driver. The young man, propelled from behind, was thrown off balance and put up his hands to keep himself from falling. He braced himself and pushed into the bigger man’s chest with open palms. The big man stumbled in response, and moved one foot to brace his stance, as he did he stepped on the monkey’s tail. The monkey shrieked and bit at the nearest thing it could find, which was the young man’s ankle. Now the smaller man struck hard on the van driver’s chest with his open hands to push himself away from the pain. The big man, incised with such an intrusion, grabbed the lapels of the guy’s suit coat, snatched him from the ground and hurled him backward into the crowd.

The monkey, excited and scared ran to the top of the van and leaped toward the awning that hung askew from above Angelina’s shattered storefront. In the heart of the disgruntled mob on the sidewalk a fist flew, followed by another, as a herd mentality took over, more fists, curses and feet flew. The monkey missed the awning and landed on a woman’s head, she grabbed at it’s legs to pull it off, but the monkey, in a blind panic bit into her finger before the woman flung the little beast over the van into the street.

A pack of marauding curs watched the monkey’s flight and bayed their pursuit in an off-key babble with the horns from the snarled traffic. A chair flew over the mob and through the windshield of the sedan.

From every direction the sound of sirens converged on Angelina’s. McElroy, edged around the back of the mêlée, stepped through the empty window frame into the now patron-less lunch counter. Angelina’s staff was nowhere to be seen. The only ones he could see flung their fists and legs with all the rest of the beasts. McElroy leaned over the counter, filled a pitcher of beer from the tap and shoved a slice of pepperoni in his mouth, washing it down with a deep gulp of the cold beer. He was on his third slice when the first police cruiser slid to a stop in the street. McElroy tilted the pitcher back and emptied it as he stepped out through the broken window.

The sirens finally got the brawlers attention and people scattered every-which-way. Marvin, the owner of Angelina’s, ran up and started screaming at the arriving officers to arrest somebody. The whole episode got ten seconds on the evening news. McElroy saw himself on film observing the commotion as he calmly ate his free lunch. The camera that captured the fracas should have been focused on the intersection, but the light pole it was mounted on had been struck in the multi-vehicle collision twisting the lens to capture the lunch time excitement.
No one died in the incident, except for the monkey, who had been mauled by the pack of dogs and had to be destroyed. The big news at six P.M was that Frost’s Jewelry at Broadway and Thirty-Third had been emptied of its entire inventory and no one had seen a thing.