r o b e r t    j a c o b y

What Will Entertain People

 

This is ‘77. We’re stuck in Alexandria, Egypt. Three weeks to get the cargo off. Me and two other guys, we’re going around to the little café bars, we’re getting fucked up. We come out of one, lit, we’re trying to get a taxi to go to another one.

Here this Egyptian kid’s got this baboon like you see at the zoo. The fucking thing’s 3 foot high, got a muzzle on. I’m looking at the kid, and the kid’s smiling, and the baboon’s looking at me. So the kid’s like, I don’t know how you sense these things, but you know: the kid wanted me to get a coin and give it to the baboon. That’s what the kid wanted me to do.

So I got a coin, and I’m showing it, and the baboon sticks his hand out, and I drop the coin in the baboon’s paw, and it closed it, and looks at it, and looks at the kid, looks at the coin, looks at me, looks at the coin, gives the kid the coin, and flips. Does a flip.

I say, “That’s cool.” You know. What will entertain people, especially when you’re drinking.

So I get another coin out.

Now the guys are yelling, “Come on, Ronnie! Come on, we got the taxi!”

“Wait a minute! Wait a minute!”

Now in my mind, me and this baboon are becoming friends. I give it a coin. Takes the coin, looks at it, looks at the kid, looks at the coin, looks at me, the coin, the kid, gives the kid the coin, does a flip. Now me and this baboon are buddies. See. So in my mind, what I’m gonna do is, I’m gonna take the baboon back to the ship, see, cuz we got the taxi. And we all hated that chief mate, so what I was gonna do was, I was gonna take the baboon back to the ship because we’re buddies. I was gonna tie his leash to the chief mate’s doorknob, and I was gonna kick the baboon three or four times and pull his muzzle off and then knock on the chief mate’s door. And when the chief mate opens his door, this thing is gonna attack him.

So that’s all going through my mind, because Henshaw had told me the trip before, one of the ABs hated this chief mate. Well, everybody hated the guy. He was a real fucking idiot. They had these pipes coming down the front of the house where we slept. We had these big breathers up on the flying bridge. They stuck up almost like mushrooms.

Well, this guy climbed up there one night, this able seaman, and he took a line, and he lowered the line down from the flying bridge in front of the house where the chief mate’s room was. He marked it, then he pulled it back up, and he tied a chipping hammer, which has two points on either end, we use it when we’re chipping rust, it comes to an angle on either side of the hammer. He drops this down through the air vent so you couldn’t see it and tied it off up there. So when the ship would roll, it would knock back and forth, try to drive the mate nuts. I think that’s what gave me the idea of the baboon. God bless Henshaw for telling me that.

Anyway, this is going through my mind. So now the baboon puts his paw up to get another coin. I grab the baboon’s paw, and I’m trying to take it over to the taxi, cuz me and the baboon are buddies.

Well, the kid, he don’t like this. I don’t think the baboon liked it much, either, to be honest with you. Now the kid’s pulling the baboon by the leash, by the collar on the neck.

So I got the arm, and I’m pulling the arm this way, and the baboon’s trying to grab the leash, and the guys are yelling at me. “No! NO! Don’t take the baboon,” cuz they’re in the taxi already waiting for me. “No, Ron! NO! Don’t bring the—God, no, God, no! Not in here with us! No baboon! Jesus Christ!”

So I finally gave up on the fucking thing. He didn’t want to go, so I let his arm go, and I got in the taxi, and we left.

  

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ROBERT JACOBY is currently pursuing happiness in Maryland. "What Will Entertain People" is an excerpt from his unpublished nonfiction book, the memoir of a 61-year-old, life-long merchant marine re-counting 40 years of his fantastic, hilarious, and politically incorrect exploits around the world. He has also completed a novel, There are Reasons Noah Packed No Clothes, and is at work on a second novel, Dusk and Ember.

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