LOSSES

Fan Fiction for Tales of the Gold Monkey (1982 TV series). Jake searches for his lost cigars, and his lost life.

July 1980

Duluth, Minnesota

Jake rummages his cabin for the third time, digging through laundry, opening every drawer, checking pants pockets, but his cigars just aren’t there. Standing in the living room’s center, irritated, he looks for some nook where he might have stashed them, or misplaced them. His frustration is spurred by the association he makes with this place. Small quarters with rattan furnishings—so reminiscent of the room he rented from Louie on Bora Gora, long ago. He never lost his cigars there. His eyes finally rest on the wall calendar where today’s date is circled. July fourth, nineteen eighty. Thirty years to the day.

I always thought I would grow old gracefully. I didn’t. One day I woke up with more aches than an active life could account for. The mirror showed more wrinkles than scars. Less hair on my head but more gray in my beard, until I shaved it today, anyway. But the deeper realization was that not all of my aches are physical. The worst comes from losing friends I had loved like family. Their deaths stretch behind me like a long dark trail. A sense of loss prompting me to observe anniversaries. Death-days, mostly. Today is a big one, and I need my cheroots to do it right.

It occurs to Jake he might have left the cigars at the club house. He had smoked one there when helping Marcie prepare for the holiday celebration. He hesitates, not wanting to go back. He would have to make his way again through his son’s friends and the general levity of their July Fourth celebration. He sighs into the mirror. He was cheerful today as he helped Marcie; as much as he could manage. The thought of doing it again, though, is tough. Why did Corky have to die on a national holiday? Thirty years ago. But he’s looked everywhere in the cabin, and he hasn’t been anywhere else except the clubhouse. He needs to find his cheroots. Corky deserves that much.

On his way toward the door, he reaches for his hat, and the sight of it stops him. The hat is his “fifty mission” crush he pulled out of his trunk for today. He shakes his head as he holds it, lovingly, feeling its sweat-soaked form. For a long time, after his time in China, he seldom went outside without it. Amazing it survived for so long. He only wears it now on special occasions, like death-day observances. Pulling it onto his head is a familiarity, like riding a bicycle, or sliding into the cockpit of his P-40. Memories well, choking him up. It takes a few minutes to regain his poise. Then he steps outside.

Sunlight wanes, but the day holds on, filled with the ambiance of grilling and faint sounds of Sousa on somebody’s radio. Following the gravel road leading from his cabin, Jake skirts the bank of the lake and heads uphill to where his son is still attending a charcoal grill on the grounds outside the clubhouse. Gandy is an enthusiastic griller. Once he starts, every meal for the rest of the day is barbecued. Of course, he is good at it.

Friends, kids, and pets surround the big grill as sizzles and smoke effuse out of Gandy’s culinary ministrations. They’ve all gorged through the day on hot dogs, hamburgers, and sausages. Surely, they don’t need more. Kids are pits, though. Jake was with them most of the time, until the activity tired him. The day’s meaning as a holiday became frivolous, and its real import for him weighed heavily. His desire for a quiet evening overwhelmed, and he left the party for his cabin.

The cabin has been a blessing. Part of the clubhouse complex owned by Gandy’s business, Gold Monkey Charters, it affords Jake a place to be alone when he needs it. Where he can work on his memoirs and honor anniversaries.

“Hi Dad,” Gandy calls to him when he’s closer. “Glad you came back. Got more food coming.” Then his son does a double-take. “Dad. You shaved your beard.”

“No,” Jake says. “I mean, yeah, I shaved it. I’ve had plenty to eat. I’m looking for my cigars. The little ones. You seen them?”

“Your cigars? No.” Gandy looks around as though the cigars might be near him on the grass or on a table beside a plate of sausages. “Haven’t seen them. You check in the house?”

“I’m on my way there.”

Gandy flips a burger, splashing grease that rises another smoky cloud from the grill. Gandy back up and apparently takes better notice of his father. “I see you got your army hat on. Another anniversary?”

Sympathy is in Gandy’s eyes, evident even through tearing from the smoke. It’s the kindness that’s an integral part of his son. Just like it was in his namesake, Jake’s second-best friend. Jake nods.

A couple of young men standing next to Gandy raise their beer bottles in friendly salute. Gandy’s friends respect him, if they don’t understand him. Especially the slim, balding one with the barely-there moustache. Chuck. The man steps away from his friends, following Jake like a puppy.

“Hey, Mr. Cutter. You did shave your beard, and got on the old crush hat.”

Jake nods again, smiles, and looks away. Anyone else would take the hint.

Chuck doesn’t. “Yeah, armor for the hero, I always say. Planes and swords against the old sun dragon. You still got it.”

That has to mean something in some language. Misplaced hero worship. Chuck misses the forest for the trees. Doesn’t realize he’s a tree himself. My brain is a dark and tangled forest filled with strange trees. And creatures named Chuck.

Jake picks up his pace toward the clubhouse, leaving Chuck in his wake.

The clubhouse is big and gray with white trim. A veranda covers the front, facing the lake. Kids run on and off the porch, weaving among the support pillars as they chase after one another. Inside, Gandy’s wife, Marcie, is sitting with some of her friends in front of the TV where a July Fourth celebration, somewhere, is being broadcast. They’re deep in conversation, not likely about the TV program.

“Marcie,” Jake says, loud enough to turn heads. “You seen my cigars? The little ones. In a pack about this size?” He indicates a square shape with his hands.

“Cigars? Weren’t you smoking this morning? Go buy some more.”

“They’re cheroots. I mail-order them. I need them, cause I smoked them back then when…I mean, today’s Corky’s death…I mean, the anniversary of when he…”

Marcie shakes her head. “No. Don’t make sense of that. If you were going to, stop. If you were thinking, don’t. If you thought you might, cut it the fuck out.”

Jake freezes, just standing there looking stupid in the face of Marcie’s usual frustration with him. Her fuse is overly short, though. Probably from when he was helping her this morning. Sarah was like that, sometimes. Ordinarily, he would offer a retort. Not today.

“You don’t need to be smoking around the kids,” Marcie continues. “Why don’t you just hang out with Gandy and his friends? Have some watermelon.”

Sentences I never thought I would hear. Jake scoffs, tempted to verbalize his sarcasm. Instead, he starts poking around the living room, upending sofa cushions and earning some annoyed looks from the women. Nothing. He leaves them to look in the kitchen, then the rest of the clubhouse. Still nothing.

What the hell. A few beers will have to do.

Returning to the living room, he finds Marcie and her gal-pals still talking and ignoring the TV. “I’m tired,” he says. “I’ll just go back to my cabin.”

Marcie waves him out with a faint smile.

On the way back he grabs three beers from the ice chest next to where Gandy is still grilling. He nods a “good night” to his son, Chuck, and a few others who notice him. Probably they’re concerned he’s making off with too many long-necks. Too bad. His need is greater.

Jake reaches his cabin as the sun drops behind the trees on the west side. A cool breeze--cool for July--stirs the azaleas bordering the screened-in porch. Once inside the screens, Jake sets the beers on the table next to his typewriter. A thick sheaf of notes lies there as well--memoirs he has spent years writing by hand.

He smiles at the pile of paper. His friends back in ‘38 would be shocked that he became a writer in his later years. Well, a writer in that, he writes. He was always a fanatic for Heywood Floyd novels, anyway. At some point, he decided he could do it. Was it wishful thinking? An attempt to describe a life he could no longer live? Traumatic stress?

Eskimos have words for that shit.

After lighting a couple of kerosene lamps, he sits at the typewriter, opens a beer, and begins reading the last page he typed. It’s his recollection of the time in 1936 when he was flying the mail in Peru. Corky was with him, as was Jack, their dog with attitude. Jake sits back with the memory, savoring it over the beer. After a few chugs, he opens another bottle and places it on the table beyond the typewriter. An offering to an unseen guest. “Tonight, you can have all you want, Corky.”

Jake shivers when another breeze fills the porch. July breezes didn’t use to chill him. His old flight jacket is draped over a chair. The Flying Tigers blood chit on its back is yellowed and faded. Like him. He puts it on, remembering an episode from Peru, before his time in China.

He was smoking little green cigars then and realized, when they were well over the Andes, he didn’t have his smokes. The engines’ drone became irritating with the thought of having such a long way to travel without a cigar. He left Corky with the yoke to rummage through the cargo, rousting Jack from his nest of mailbags. When he couldn’t find them, he had returned to the cockpit, sullenly taking back the yoke. Then Corky, ever the supporting friend, took over the search. He didn’t find them either, until he stopped to consider, absently fingering the pockets of his coverall. And there he found them, stuffed in the pocket where he had put them there so they wouldn’t be lost, and then forgot about them.

The cigars’ recovery had made the trip bearable. Even Jack barked his agreement, though probably more out of relief from Jake’s improved mood. The rest of the trip was more pleasant for them all.

Inspired by the memory, Jake pats the outside pockets of his leather jacket. Nothing. He reaches inside the map pocket and pulls out his pack of cheroots. Smiling, he lights one up and blows a stream of smoke around the lamps. The effect is a mellowness with strong associations that take the form of ghosts in the haze. Looking from his cigar to the beer bottle across from him, he asks his unseen companion, “Did you just save me again, old friend?”

Instantly, another memory hits him with the strength of a vision. It’s something Corky said to him, in the Monkey Bar, back in ‘38.

Jake, sometimes I don't know what you'd do without me to take care of you.

A tear trickles down Jake’s cheek. Emotion wells from the loss of friends to time, but with thankfulness for having known them. And for having known them when only the love of friends could soften the horrors of a world sinking into chaos. He answers aloud as he did back then. “Me neither, Corky. Me neither.”