“Good. Because it would make you a liar if you didn’t. I mean, you’re already a liar for saying you’d keep an open mind, but if you bailed on me now you’d be a double liar.”
“Well I wouldn’t want to be that,” says the doctor. “So after you killed the Angel of Death, what happened next?”
We All Make the World
I GREW UP.
I lived in Siesta Corta until I turned eighteen. It wasn’t supposed to be for that long, but my mother refused to take me back, and not even my aunt and uncle could come up with a way to make her.
Were you upset about not going home?
No. Before the incident with the janitor, I would have been, but after…My perspective on pretty much everything was different.
I can understand that.
I’m not sure you can. I mean yeah, I’d been through a life-and-death experience, I’d killed someone, but in hindsight, it wasn’t the shooting that most affected me. It was hearing that voice say my name on the phone. It’s like, imagine if God called you up one day, not to give you a message but just to let you know He existed. Imagine how you’d feel right after you hung up.
You thought the voice on the phone was God?
No! But it was like that: like I’d been in contact with something big and mysterious, and the fact that it was out there made the whole world more interesting.
So it was like a conversion experience.
I suppose. Only not bullshit—it really happened, and I had the coin to prove it. And that was another thing: the fact that they’d left me even that tiny bit of evidence told me it wasn’t over. I’d be hearing from them again.
You saw that as something positive.
Sure. Why not?
I think many people, having been through the experience you describe, wouldn’t be eager to repeat it.
Well yeah, but those people wouldn’t have even gotten the first phone call. Not everyone is cut out for Bad Monkeys, and that’s OK. But for me, once the initial shock wore off, of course I wanted to go again. I mean, Nancy Drew with a fucking lightning gun, what’s not to love?
So with that to look forward to, living in Siesta Corta wasn’t such a drag anymore. You can wait for a bright future pretty much anywhere, right? And while I was waiting, just in case it mattered, I cleaned up my act. I never became a model citizen, but I did cut out most of the bad-seed crap. I gave up trying to outsmart my aunt and uncle, and at school, I actually applied myself—enough so that when I finally graduated, I was able to get a scholarship to Berkeley.
So you ultimately did go back to San Francisco.
Yeah. I almost didn’t, I mean I thought about not taking the scholarship, but Phil convinced me I’d be an idiot not to.
You were in contact with your brother?
By then, yeah. The first couple years in Siesta Corta I didn’t hear from him, but on his thirteenth birthday he came out to see me. He stole a page from my old playbook: told Mom he was staying at a friend’s place for the weekend, then hitchhiked out to the Valley. I came home from working at the store one afternoon and found him playing with the cats on the front porch.
At first I was pissed about the hitchhiking: “Do you have any idea what kind of psychos are out on the road, Phil?” But he just laughed and said I was the pot calling the kettle black, and anyway he was big enough to take care of himself. And the truth is, he was; he’d gone through this major growth spurt, so even though he was barely a teenager, he had the height and weight to make a bad monkey think twice.
It ended up being a good visit. The same time he’d become more like me, I’d become more like him, so we were able to sort of meet each other halfway. Turned out we actually liked each other. So from then on we kept in touch, and when he could he came out to see me. He had a knack for showing up when I needed advice, like about the scholarship.