The Chimpanzee Man

When I was five, our house was frequented by a man with the head of the chimpanzee.  He stood straight and tall, and while has arms swung like a primate, and he grunted and scratched his head, he was human in all other ways that I could tell.  He wore pants and a shirt and a chrome watchband. The backs of his hands weren't hairy like the chimpanzees in the zoo, and they weren't the right color.

He had a curious way of staring at us with wide round eyes, cocked head to one side, then rapidly tilted to the other like an owl.  He moved in quick bursts, suddenly standing from the couch and darting across the room to examine something on a bookshelf, then returning to his seat just as quickly. 

My mother treated his visits as a banality, rarely paying him any attention.  I stared back, but shied away if he approached me in his strange gait.  Once, he tried to touch me and I screamed and ran to my room. When I cautiously returned to the living room, he was gone.

A couple of years later, after my parents were divorced and we moved in with my dad, I was exploring the boxes of junk in our basement.  My father was a pack rat of the first class, never throwing anything away.  Among the notebooks of his homework in junior high, I found a short story once, titled "Danger at 40,000 Feet."  It was a science fiction story, but I don't remember what it was about, and I couldn't quite read the handwriting.  I asked him, but he brushed me off, saying that his teacher had told him that it was terrible, and that he hadn't written anything since then.

Even at the age of eight, I felt a rush of indignation and rage that a teacher would ever say something like that to a student.  In retrospect, it was the only time I ever caught a glimpse of my father as a man he could have been, instead of the man he inevitably was. 

Not long after I found the story, I found the mask in an old medicine cabinet that contained other Halloween trinkets;a pair of skull earrings and a a dried-up dollar store make-up kit for turning kids into zombies.

The chimpanzee mask was rubber and fake and I could barely contain my disgust for having believed that the chimpanzee was real, seeing it there, limp and expressionless.  I could have sworn that the mouth moved when he made the grunting sounds, that they puckered once when he bent and gave my mother a kiss.  Tricks of the imagination.  I couldn't believe I was duped by such a stupid, ugly mask.

 The chimpanzee man made another visit, and I wasn't afraid this time. I laughed and called him "Dad."  I wouldn't be fooled again.  His shoulders slumped in a very human way, and the chimpanzee man never visited again, at least not when I was around. 

A year or two later, my Dad would occasionally and suddenly claim that he was not my Dad, but an alien wearing a disguise that looked like my father.  He told a story of visiting from another solar system, being sent here to learn how humans live.  He did not speak like my father. The words he used were different.  He didn't move like my father--he walked awkwardly, as if not used to a bipedal frame.  He had the same, odd stare, tilting from side to side, that the chimpanzee man had.

I'm not sure I ever stopped believing that he was an alien in disguise.  There was no mask to find.