Tales of Monkeyman

23.

From here on, the novel diverges from what actually happened. What actually happened was that we incorporated the Geneva Towers Children’s Center as a private nonprofit and were able to raise about $20,000 in grants from the United Way and Chevron (!). We kept the center open for 18 months. It wasn’t always smooth. On several occasions, I came into the office and the parent/teachers, now paid, were sitting around drinking “Bull” (Schlitz malt liquor) while the children played by themselves, with only Eddie watching them.

We hired a head teacher, a Nigerian immigrant, whom I thought as a black man, would be able to supervise the parent/teachers. I underestimated the prejudice of African American parents toward Africans. The parent/teachers did what they wanted, knowing that neither of us, me or the head teacher, had the spine to stand up to them. It was their school, went my liberal reasoning. If they thought it was cool to drink on the job, who was I to challenge them?

I became involved in citywide politics, was elected secretary of a coalition for better schools that was adroitly led by members of the Communist Labor Party, one of the less sectarian sects. We held a march of more than 2000 parents in Sacramento where I got to speak. I got a lot of cheers for invoking the fighting spirit of the parents of the GTCC.

After about a year, one of the students told her parents that Eddie took her to the adult bathroom across the hall and molested her. Eddie was arrested, and we had a number of meetings with our licensing agency, the Department of Social Services. They were after us as well about how messy the place was. We kept our license by a thread.

We applied to the state of California for funding. We came close to getting it. When the state officials came to inspect our premises, I made one of my trademark errors of joking to one of them, a black woman I just assumed would be sympathetic to our cause, “Of course we cleaned up the yard for you.” Two of the inspectors gave us high marks, but the third – I’m convinced it was because of my glib remark – marked us way down.

So, in the middle of the winter of 1979, Geneva Towers Children’s Center, Inc. closed without fanfare. We just ran out of money. There was a possibility of keeping it open. One of our most relentless critics was a woman named Irma who was the president of the Tenants Association. She told anyone who would listen – not inaccurately – that our parent/teachers were all drunks and drug addicts. We were down to a handful of families toward the end. It occurred to me that the only way to keep the center open would be to form an alliance with Irma and kick out Tessie and the parents who fought for the center and were now running it into the ground with their “lumpen” behavior as I might have once characterized it. But I couldn’t do that, so I let it go.

I was still working for the school district. After the layoffs, I worked as a sub in the children’s centers, basically doing my old job at John McLaren Children’s Center, up the hill through the notorious Sunnydale projects. A few months later, I was rehired part time. Rather than succumb to the post-partem depression that threatened to overwhelm me after the GTCC closed, I decided to run for school board. I got some midlevel endorsements, like Cecil Williams of Glide Church and Patty Siegel of the Child Care Switchboard, but I had no money. I considered it an agitational campaign that I knew I wouldn’t win, but would give me valuable experience and a taste for electoral politics, which the PLP had largely scorned, except for ballot initiatives.

I did enjoy the campaign. I became relatively adept at speaking extemporaneously. I got a wonderful campaign manager, a woman named Geraldine Johnson, who was chairperson of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, and a friend of the Communist Party. On one memorable occasion, at a fundraiser at our house – Earldean and I had moved out of the Towers and bought one o the townhouses, also Eichler designed, right next door – she had me do a strip tease for money. It was certainly embarrassing, don’t know if we made much money.

Our platform centered around smaller classes, a teacher training program for classroom aides from the community, and a controversial program to provide “ESL” (English as a Second Language) classes for black students. The idea was that the home dialect of most black families was different enough from “standard” English taught in the schools that black students should receive similar additional resources to those going to Asian and Latino students in the bilingual programs. A program like this was developed in Oakland some ten years later, giving the name Ebonics, and then abandoned after being used as a whipping boy to attack the Oakland schools by white politicians trying – and succeeding – in wrenching power from the black majority school board. It’s still a good idea.

We worked hard, but I came in dead last in a field of 11, behind the Human Jukebox. It was 1980, and on that same election night, the Reagan era began. Even though I got nearly 10,000 votes (it took 40,000 to win) and won my home precinct (Geneva Towers), I was devastated. The feelings I’d been postponing from the collapse of the party, to the collapse of the GTCC, and now to the campaign came flooding over me, sending me into a deep depression.

I decided it was time to start my second career as a writer. I enrolled in the Creative Writing program at San Francisco State. I put politics on the back burner for awhile and threw myself into writing. I couldn’t figure out what to do with the second draft of my novelized biography of Earldean, now entitled Passengers Will Please Refrain, when I stumbled upon a small article in the San Francisco Chronicle headlined “Monkey Man Found in Kenya.” The article described a man who was discovered in the forests near Lake Victoria in western Kenya who appeared to have been raised by monkeys. The story, literally, captured my imagination. A modern-day black Tarzan. I went into high gear (also literally – the novel was marijuana-drenched) and spent the summer of 1982 typing the first draft. I finished in 3 months. I had a thrilling time studying baboons, inventing baboon language, making connections to the mythical axis of Mercury-Hermes-Thoth, the messenger of the gods who was represented in Egyptian iconography as a baboon. One brilliant invention: we (and the satirized scientists in the novel), see baboons picking at each other’s fleas and call it “grooming.” In Tales of Monkeyman, as the novel came to be called, this activity is called la-la-la, or the science of dream-sharing, a psychic connection which permitted it’s practitioners to plug into each other’s nervous systems. In particular, this experience led my human character to have horrific visions of end-of-world. So, he sets out to rejoin humans, gets captured and brought to Berkeley, where his is placed in a monkey experimental chamber, learns English, escapes, and so on. He ends up returning to Africa and training the baboons to become the second sapient species. They don’t need to re-invent the wheel, so to speak. They use Bic lighters to make fire and rapidly learn how to drive Land Rovers and shoot Uzis.

The novel went through various drafts and became my Master’s thesis at State. As such, it won the Walter van Tilburg Clark Prize for the best novel of the year. With help from one of my professors, it was well received at Mercury (!) House, and I received detailed critiques from four different editors. But, they finally turned it down, and, after years of being hawked around to all kinds of agents and publishers, it remains unpublished. Perhaps not for long, though.