May 18
My Friendship with Ray Haney
CHAPTER SIX
Yeah, me and Ray, we shared lots of good times and a few bad times, branded with the tattoos and scars of our experiences. We loved our weekends, during the long summer, when we’d spend most of the day golfing, sometimes — Ray’s big money-making idea! — wading chest deep into the big trap pond and submersing to the murky depths to dig up brand new golf balls we’d locate by feeling around in the squishy mud with our feet, and then take them to the golf ball washing thingamajig at the club house, polish ’em up, and sell them for a buck apiece, which always netted us some great pinball money! I’ll never forget the time we once hauled in, I’m not making this up, over a hundred golf balls that were all brand new looking once we gussied them up! We pocketed like seventy-five bucks that day — huge money for two teenage kids!
Come evenings, we’d catch a ride to Walt Haney’s Exotic Zoo and Safari Park to work admissions and the concession stand from seven to eleven. In some ways, the gig totally stunk, literally, because of the foul-smelling accumulation of feces and urine surrounding the filthy cages in such close proximity to one another with zero ventilation in the muggy night, but we got over it, ’cause we were able to gorge ourselves on all the candy and popcorn and corn dogs we could stuff into our pieholes.
Ray ran the concessions and I manned the admissions gate, greeting all manner of people from all over the place, mostly faces I didn’t recognize, people from different cities and backgrounds, 99% white conservative folks, and I never could understand how such a crappy place like Walt Haney’s Exotic Zoo and Safari Park appealed to people from as far away as Clay City, Fairland and Eagleton. What? Just so some fat asses could eat cotton candy and stroll around the pathetic walkway with their obnoxious kids screaming and yelling and making fun of all the pitiable animals? Walt Haney’s Exotic Zoo and Safari Park was really nothing but a pathetic joke, if you ask me — for pathetic people!
The “Safari Park” attraction was just an open dirt field contained by a perimeter of flimsy fencing where all the pathetic fat asses could pay ten bucks (ten bucks!) to ride around in a sputtering golf cart to gander at some seriously pathetic animals: one docile, scabrous giraffe; a stationary armadillo hiding out behind some rocks; a pair of giant tortoises staring blankly at a dinky water hole, where ol’ Walt got them, I don’t know; an underfed bear; an infirmed-looking elephant; a wildebeest or some kind of beast of obvious advanced age; and a skin-and-bones zebra slowly moving to and fro. Now, who in their right minds would pay ten bucks (ten bucks!) to see such a sorry-ass menagerie of miserable animals?
The rest of the animals in ol’ Walt’s zoo spent their forlorn existence cooped up in fetid concrete cages in the Monkey House, the Lion House, the Reptile House, and so on. They were just cheap quonset huts, is all, lined up irregularly along the walkway filled every Friday, Saturday and Sunday with gabbing gawking tourists. Nice job ol’ Walt. And yet people kept coming and paying the $5 dollar admission fee, the $10 Safari Park round-about, and loaded up on sugary snacks for them and their kids. Things were “so successful” that ol’ Walt started making plans to expand and open up on the weekdays. Not too, too fast, but may be on Tuesdays and Thursdays to start out.
Ray and I always felt like one day we were just gonna sabotage the place and set all the forlorn creatures loose on the world, but we figured they’d just come back, because what the hell was an elephant going to eat out there in the cruel world, or a fucking ape going to do in the cornfields, or where was a decrepit lion going to roam and hide in the sparse woodlands of our town.
One day after working the stinking joint for several months, we had reached our limit, especially after I had to call the manager, Buck Rasmussen, on the walkie-talkie to come and quell a mini-riot in the Monkey House. Some punk kids were heckling and tormenting a bedraggled chimpanzee, who had only been trying to masturbate in peace. I could see the gang throwing objects at the poor cuss, who began to screech and whimper and get all agitated, which prompted the yahoos to throw more rocks and sticks at the chimp, who promptly threw them right back with wicked force and precision.
The punk kids, probably drunk, were laughing, and one mean ass dude then stepped up the cruelty factor and threw a Pepsi bottle that struck the chimpanzee in the head, opening up a nasty gash. Blood was flowing and the chimp began howling in pain and rushed over to the bars of the cage to confront his tormenters. At that, the mean ass dude blew a nasty cloud of cigar smoke in his face, threw the lit butt at him, and kicked him in the chest through the bars of the cage causing the chimp to go reeling backward and bang against the wall and crumple to the ground, utterly defeated and in a state of sorrowful agony.
All these acts of indignity and unbearable cruelty, for a few cheap laughs. What heartless idiots. I wanted to knock their fucking teeth out. I knew even at my young age, having been expert at torturing flies and frogs and shooting snakes and birds, even once conspiring with some mean-spirited dickheads to insert a firecracker up a kitten’s ass, I now knew it was wrong, wrong, dead wrong. I gave all that stuff up, the senseless killing at Slaughter’s Pond (irony of ironies!), and I couldn’t understand how people could be so mean to any creature, especially helpless ones.
I could take no more, so I approached the scene of commotion to try to do something, but was powerless against this mob of reprobates. I didn’t know any of them, and they were all bigger and older than me. They told me to FUCK OFF PUSSY BOY! — so I urgently called Buck again on the walkie-talkie to come quick. Ray then showed up and tried to intervene, arms flaying and elbows swinging, doing his best to fend off the group and keep them away from the cage, but the mean ass dude, bigger than Ray, even, punched Ray in the gut so hard that Ray fell to his knees and the brute then kicked him hard in the ribs a couple of times. Ray could barely get up, and when he did, he staggered off to the side and puked.
Now, I was getting scared and worried, and wondered where the fuck Buck was, because things were out of hand. Ray was incapacitated off to the side, bent over and holding his belly, and the chimp, poor thing, was carrying about in an uproarious tantrum, and soon a crowd had gathered, and that’s when the gang split, taking one last pot shot at me and the chimp. In a selfless act of valor, Ray had regained enough strength to give them chase with a steel rod he’d pried off an unused cage, but they were long gone and it was more symbolic than anything that he tried to avenge the moment.
Of course, just then Buck arrived on the scene, explaining he had been waylaid attending to another emergency when some seven-year old shit for brains had stuck his hand in an enclosure and got his finger nearly bitten off by a rabid raccoon. Buck threw the chimp some fruit which mollified him somewhat, and I tried to coax him over to pet him, but he’d have none of it. Ray was now feeling better, thank goodness, but I could tell he was chagrined that he had taken a beating like the chimp. I tell you, my two favorite beings on this earth enduring and suffering such indignities — my best friend, Ray, and my favorite animal of all, the chimpanzee named Stanky — that stuck in my craw a long time. I was further devastated to learn that the already somewhat unhealthy Stanky died the next day, not from heartache, but from literal heartburn, when he had picked up the lit cigar butt the mean ass dude had thrown at him and, trying to puff hard on it, accidently inhaled it where it lodged in his throat, seared his lungs and heart, and suffocated him in an agonizingly painful death with no one around to save him.
A few days after this incident, Ray and I were walking the back way home from school, and we thought for a disorienting second that we were hallucinating when we saw a pair of scruffy baboons shuffle off into the bush, then a scrawny-ass bear standing doing nothing by the side of the road, then that sorry excuse for a zebra grazing in a hay field, and finally, what we swore was a flabby old elephant. I mean, how can you mistake an elephant for anything other than an elephant. We were dumbfounded, though, and figured the animals must somehow have escaped from Walt Haney’s Exotic Zoo and Safari Park, which is crazy, because they were imprisoned in their cages, weren’t they? So what the hell was up?
Of course, Ray and I knew exactly what the hell was up, because as employees of Walt Haney’s Exotic Zoo and Safari Park, we were saddened and fed up with the horrendous conditions and decided we were finally going to do something about it. So one night, after the place closed down, while the manager, Buck, was attending to closing time duties, Ray and I snuck around and secretly unlocked all the cages and left the doors just barely ajar so that Buck, on making his final rounds, didn’t notice a thing in the dim light.
Well, as we neared town, we saw that all the roads were closed and the police had blocked off an entire square acre outside the town. What the hell? We approached two of the local law enforcement lackeys, a couple of bozos named Wimpy and Jigs, right out of Mayberry or something, and they told us with a tinge of sadness and alarm in their voice that one of Ray’s little brothers, Junior, had gone missing. Oh shit, we thought, but didn’t flinch.
“Yeah,” said Wimpy, “We have an eye-witness who claims to have seen Junior being carried off by that dangerous lion, what’s his name?”
“Andy,” said Jigs, “We got no clue neither how all these animals escaped, but we’ve gotten reports of monkeys and boa constrictors and other animals on the loose, and just heard tell a few minutes ago that Judge Dickerson’s ’64 Mercury was totaled by a rampaging elephant.”
Wimpy looked us up and down, almost suspiciously, I felt, and said, “Whoever did this, there’ll be hell to pay.”
Ray and I looked at each other, not betraying our secret that had totally backfired on us. The best intentions, we learned at such an early age, were paving material for the road to hell. The horrifying realization that Junior had been snatched up and eaten by Andy was just too much for our little minds to grasp and our innocent souls to bear, and yet we couldn’t exactly confess to our malfeasance, now, could we? No way, no how, so we vowed to take this secret to our graves, our dirty little secret that we were responsible for Junior’s death.
Wimpy put his arm around Ray’s shoulder, and said, “I’m sorry about your little brother. We’ll find that sumbitch lion and shoot his ass dead and whoever did this, we’ll catch ‘im and there’ll be hell to pay.”
But the next day, it was like something out of a storybook ending, because a search party had been organized by the good townsfolk, who had also brought in a professional tracker and hunter, and in due course they turned up Junior, safe and sound, along with Andy. Turns out, Junior and Andy were best friends. Andy was Junior’s favorite zoo animal, and over the months, the loner Junior, something of a gentle half-wit giant, had begged and begged his dad, to no avail, to let him take Andy home as a pet. That day, when Junior spotted poor old Andy, confused and disoriented, limping back behind the hardware store in the grungy alleyway, he coaxed the old boy over and led him down a path to a secret swimming hole area where they’d be left alone in peace and Junior could attend to a piece of glass stuck in Andy’s paw, poor old infirmed, and darn near toothless Andy. He couldn’t have been more harmless! Once Junior had extracted the shard of glass from Andy’s paw, Andy gave Junior a huge licking of gratitude with his big old wet feline tongue.
After scouring every nook and cranny of the surrounding area, the search party found the unlikely pair at the break of dawn, snuggled up together, both sleeping. They had spent the night by the creek camping out. Junior awoke with a start at the sound of the search party tramping into his camp, and Andy stirred groggily, struggling to his feet, but sadly, before Junior or anyone could stop him, the trigger happy professional tracker put a bullet square between Andy’s eyes, and that was the end of poor old loveable Andy. In fact, a whole hit squad was now out and gunning down any and all stray animals in sight, including a report that two dogs belonging to the town dentist were among the casualties, having been accidentally mistaken for dangerous wild dingos.
Well, as you can guess, that was the nail in the coffin for Walt Haney’s Exotic Zoo and Safari Park. For me and Ray, it was a bittersweet ending to our summer money-making gig, despite never meeting any city chicks to make out with, as Ray promised me we would.
Stay tuned for CHAPTER SEVEN!
