Word count: 1,995

ZOMBIE CHIMPS FROM MARS
by Chris Bauer

I seen them as a kid, in the alley between Unquist and Cranshawe streets, 3200 block, all row homes in the Mayfair section of northeast Philly. Seen and heard them from my open window, back bedroom, second floor, facing the alleyway. October fifth, 1964, almost midnight. One was already on the ground, standing round-shouldered at the end of Mrs. Clawson’s cement driveway. Another was climbing down the rainspout from her roof. The last one was still up on top, a square silhouette with bowed legs against the amber glow from the streetlights along Lankford Avenue. Then he squatted. Then he took a shit. Do zombies shit? This one did. Then he threw it off the roof. That’s how I knew it was a chimp. It thumped the hood of the Grubers’ Rambler just like Stumpo the Pizza Man slapped dough on the butcher block in his restaurant window. It left an impression on me. Maybe that’s why monkeys do it.
The Phillies had just tanked the National League pennant. I was thirteen and in tears. My mom was gone, as in dead, two years it was by then. Except I think she was still hanging around. Sulfur from a struck match then cigarette smoke, smells I hated, told me so. My father, he... well, the Phillies losing the pennant made him more pissed than usual. At the Phillies, then at my dead mother, then at me and Mikey. Not at the chimps. He had no time for the chimps.
And more pissed than usual because he had Phillies tickets for a World Series game that had been a sure thing a week earlier and now wasn’t going to happen. Then came his brainstorm: He’d keep the tickets rather than turn them back in for a refund.
“They’ll be worth something someday, Scottie,” he’d said, a smile in his eyes. A rare moment for him, to be sharing and not swinging.
“Uh-huh,” I said, flinching. Force of habit.
He reconsidered, smacked me anyway.
And years later the tickets were worth something, but not to him. To me. The prick bastard left me little else. I still had those tickets well into my fifties. Very good condition; near mint. Worth a few hundred bucks on eBay was my guess, maybe more. The tickets, I’m saying; not me. By then I wasn’t worth a second look.
The tickets never made it to eBay; too much trouble. Got thirty bucks for them from a pawn shop. The money lasted twelve minutes. A coupla shots and a beer and a few pulls at the Philly Park slots. Good times, I remember. Real good times. Yeah.
Back to that night and the Phillies and the chimps.
The Phillies were six-and-a-half games ahead in the standings with twelve games left to play in the regular season. Fuckers lost ten in a row. Worst collapse in baseball history. I liked Gene Mauch, the Phillies manager. Liked everything about him except his smoking. Still liked him even after he screwed up the pennant.
You’re looking at me funny; you wanna know how he screwed it up, since he was only the manager. Started his two pitching aces Jim Bunning and Chris Short, back-to-back-to-back, no rest, in five of their last six games, that’s how. Bunning, Short, Bunning, Short, Bunning. Desperate when he didn’t need to be. They both got tired. The Phillies tanked. I cried. Dad came out swinging. Then I saw the chimps. That night the chimps changed my life.
“Mikey. Wake up, Mikey.”
Mikey’s my kid brother. I say ‘is,’ but I don’t know if he’s still alive. If he is, it’s more likely he’s wondering the same about me but for more of a reason. Mikey was seven; six years younger than me. We shared a bedroom. Also shared a bed. Room for only one bed in there, a double. Mikey was a terrible sleeper, every night a track meet for him under the covers. Fell out a lot too, then stayed asleep on the floor. Seemed to like sleeping on the floor so I helped him with the falling out part pretty regular.
Sorry, my mind wanders. Me, Mikey, the chimps.
And TV’s Twilight Zone. “The Invaders” episode with Agnes Moorehead and the spaceship on her roof. A big influence here. Scared me pretty good. First time on TV was in the early sixties. A classic.
The chimps. Here we go.
“I’m sleeping, Scottie. You just wanna scare me. I’m not looking.”
“Don’t be a baby, Mikey. They’re doing something in the Brogan’s back yard. There’s three of them. You’re gonna miss it.” 
Which he did. Truth is I wish I’d missed it too. A dog showed up, then a second, then a third. Two hairy street mutts and the Brogans’ skinny beagle, Sarge. Three dog buddies out for a midnight stroll, roaming the neighborhood, soaking the shrubs and fertilizing the lawns. The three chimps stood in a row, shoulder-to-shoulder-to-hip, the last one bigger than the other two, all of them on a small strip of grass, stiff as soldiers. The dogs trotted up one by one, sniffed at their chimp feet, didn’t seem scared, Sarge sidling up to the bigger one, a gorilla maybe. Truth is they shoulda been. Scared. The dogs, I mean. They sniffed, then they barked, then they yelped, then the chimps had them in their mouths by their dog heads. It was that quick. I heard the crunch as they clamped their zombie teeth onto their faces. The bastards waited their turns as they each climbed the rainspout back to the roof, the dog bodies limp and dangling from their monkey mouths like they were chewing on spaghetti mops. I threw up on my brother’s hamster cage. Happy’s tan and white fur turned pink and chunky.
Wait. Forgot to mention the scabs and the open sores on their chimp skin and their oozing red-rimmed eyes. Swear to God. And the gorilla had an empty eye socket. Two zombie chimps and a one-eyed zombie ape. That’s what I told my father.
“Where’d they go then, Scottie, and in what? A rocket ship?”
Smack.
“You’re a fucking idiot. This is your mother’s fault for smoking while she was pregnant with you.”
Sounds funny, huh? I hated him for it. For that comment and others, and for all the other lousy shit he did to us. Abused my mom, physical some, verbal a lot. Lung cancer killed his wife and he makes a comment like that to her kid. Blames her. I blamed the cigarettes, he blamed her, for her cancer and for everything else that never went right for him. I soon took to blaming him. For all of it.
Hell, I didn’t know where the chimps went either. Told Dad they went back up the spout with their dangling dog carcasses then crossed the rooftops, since all the roofs on the block were connected. Then they were gone.
“Coulda happened like that,” I said to him, my face burning from the slap.
“‘Coulda happened like that’,” the SOB said, his voice all squeaky and shit, making fun of me.
Smack. 
Fuck him. Far as I’m concerned there could have been a rocket ship on top of the house at the end of the block, where I couldn’t see it. Only proof that any of this happened was the Brogans’ dog was missing. Dad didn’t say he considered me responsible for Sarge’s disappearance, but he also knew I wasn’t upset about it either, which was almost the same thing to him. Truth was, me and Sarge didn’t get along. It involved an episode with a drippy Fudgesicle, a baseball card downstream of the drips, and my punch to Sarge’s face when he went after the wet card. My 1963 Gene Mauch Phillies Manager card. The punch earned me a bite on the hand. Needed six stitches. The bite earned Sarge... well, let’s just say I didn’t feel bad when the gorilla ran off with him.
Sorry. The chimps, and how they changed my life.
I married young, had a baby girl, thought I was happy. Lived in a small cape cod in the Germantown section of Philly. Me, Joy and Mandy, our little one. I worked longshore on the Philly docks. Twenty-six years a union man. Good money plus whatever I could steal. The way of the docks, my friend.
The chimps.
I often told my daughter bedtime stories. Made them up on the fly. Liked to make her laugh, get a rise out of her, scare her sometimes.
Fine. I admit I liked the scaring part more than the making her laugh part.
Shut up.
“See the tree out there, sweetie?” The tree’s long limbs were close to Mandy’s bedroom window.
“Yes, Daddy.”
The chimps were in my head. Planet of the Apes, Gorillas in the Mist, the Philly Zoo, I got no ideer what triggered it, but there they were.
My Mandy’s such a sweetheart. Black hair, her mother’s serious tropical-blue eyes. Eight years old she was back then and there I was about to scare the pee out of her, which I did. She heard all about the Cow Monkeys of Germantown. The row houses became cape cods. Shade trees instead of downspouts, cows instead of dogs. No chimps, all apes. Apes the size of refrigerators, all living in the trees. Apes who took calves from their cow mommas and, well, ate them. She cried.
Pretty stupid to tell a story like that to a kid, you’re thinking. Not really. At least not for telling it as a story. But major stupid because I was drunk and insisted it was mostly true. A customary condition by then, me being shit-faced a few nights a week. Kids can handle being scared if they know you’re making it up. Mandy had nightmares after she heard me tell it the way I did, which also made her ask if it could really happen, to which I said hell yeah, it already had. My wife demanded I cut down the tree. I refused. She demanded we move. To wherever there weren’t any trees, she said, which meant deeper into the city. I refused again. She and Mandy moved anyway. We divorced. The beginning of the slide.
Who am I kidding? It started before that. I was missing work some. No, not some, by then it was a lot. Then the divorce, then the court order to stay away, then more drinking and gambling both, sometimes on my lunch break. Didn’t take long for the dock foreman to stop missing me for me missing work. I got canned, went to work in a meat packing plant, lost a finger, got canned again, washed dishes, canned again, lost a few fingers more for not paying a gambling debt, this time on my slots-pulling hand. (Sigh.) Soon my full time job became drinking. Got really good at it. Like you, my friend. Wake up, damn it, I’m talking to you.
Like I was saying. Lowest point of my life, telling her that story, even compared to where I am now.
My brother’s still alive, lives in the house we grew up in. Yeah, I lied to you earlier, about not knowing where he was. Deal with it. If he wanted to, he could find me. I live in the empty apartment above the abandoned store that used to be Stumpo’s restaurant. Six blocks away from Mikey, give or take. Me and a few other professional drinkers like yourself. I agree; the neighborhood’s not what it used to be.
Sometimes I remember them zombie chimps real clear. One big one, two small ones. A family of ugly killer outer space zombie chimps no one else saw. Other times I remember Sarge, a twisted heap stuffed into the Brogan’s garbage pail, his skinny dog neck broken. No one else saw that either.
Maybe I mixed the stories up a bit. My mind wanders.
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