Salut King Kong

The summer that I was sixteen, I got a call from my friend Dave Greenwood. The people two houses from his were having a garage sale. There was a gorilla costume. Dave knew I'd be interested.

I couldn't find my shoes. My dad's running shoes were in the vestibule, idle. He called them tennis shoes but he didn't play tennis. Or, for that matter, run. What did he even need shoes for anyway, on a Saturday? My feet were smaller than his so, as I ran to Chapleau Street, I had to stretch out my toes and point them against the insides of the soles to keep the shoes from flopping off my feet.

The gorilla suit was stuffed inside a worn out cardboard box. The costume came in six parts: a mask with a rubber face surrounded by black fake fur, two hands and two feet (also combinations of rubber and fur), and a bulky, furry body with a Velcro zipper strip up the back. It was perfect. I gladly handed over seventy dollars for the thing, money I'd earned sweating over the grill at the local McDonald's. I went home, kicked my father's shoes off, and tried the gorilla costume on.

Then I took a walk along the main street of town.

The suit was hot and scratchy. There was a rank, industrial scent inside the mask. My eyes didn't line up perfectly with the eyeholes so I had to pull down slightly on the nose to see properly. I'd never felt so vibrant in all my life.

Traffic slowed on Sir-Wilfrid-Laurier Boulevard. Horns tooted. Hands waved at me from rolled-down windows. A few people on foot, particularly people walking dogs, crossed to the other side of the street, but most were amused and friendly. "Salut King Kong!" a grandfatherly type quipped, pleased with himself. He was smoking and I motioned at his cigarette with my fake simian hand, brought two furry fingers to my lips and mimed puffing. The man produced a pack of Player's Light from his front shirt pocket. He cocked his head and carefully threaded a cigarette through my mask's mouth opening. Then he lit it for me. "Merci," I grunted, the way I imagined a talking gorilla might talk. Smoke escaped my mouth, filled the inside of the mask and stung my eyes.  

I walked a few more blocks and came to the intersection of Sir-Wilfrid-Laurier and Curé-Antoine-Labelle. Everybody called this juncture The Four Corners; a gas station on each of them except the one where The Montclair Inn stood, longstanding haven of career and underage drinkers alike. It was known simply as The Inn, though those two words did not appear anywhere on the beige stucco building. The large neon sign affixed to the edge of the roof read, in red block letters, MONTCLAIR; our town's unofficial welcome sign with (noticeable only at night) a burnt-out T.

I had a nightmare when I was five. A triceratops was charging through Montclair, trampling everything in its path. People fled as cars, houses, the gas stations at The Four Corners, The Inn, everything, was flattened. It was the one dream from childhood that stayed with me over the years. 

The McDonald's where I worked was across the street and a couple of doors down from The Inn. They had recently installed a security camera in the Drive-Thru, trained on the microphone where customers gave their orders from their cars. Us employees couldn't keep our eyes off the screen, thrilling at the sight of familiar faces on (sort of) TV. "There's my History teacher!"

I knew Theresa Black was working and I knew she was probably working in the Drive-Thru - she always did. I made my way toward the microphone amid the cheers, shouts and honking horns in the parking lot. I waved my furry hand to the camera under the roof overhang. As one car advanced, and before the next one pulled up, I put my rubber gorilla nose to the microphone grill and grunted, "Milkshake. Chocolate. And fries. To dip in the milkshake."

"Tim?"

A few weeks before, when we had the staff room to ourselves, I'd revealed to Theresa my private fondness for French fries dipped in chocolate milkshake. It sounds disgusting, and it did to Theresa, but there's something in that combination of salt, grease, hot potato, and cold, sweet chocolate ice cream. After some coaxing, I got her to try. She wasn't crazy about it but did concede it was not as gross as she'd expected it to be. 

Since then, on days when our shifts coincided, we'd been coordinating our breaks. We employed affected nonchalance, like it didn't really matter if I could get away from the kitchen at the very same time that she could leave the Drive-Thru, pretending it was a happy but unimportant coincidence. My summersaulting stomach and hot earlobes were not as blasé about it. 

I made my way around to the other side of the McDonald's, waving to customers waiting in line in their cars. Theresa was leaning out the pickup window. Her dark bangs curled like a little wave beneath the brim of her green McDonald's cap. The skin on the upper regions of her cheeks was shiny with the grease of a four-hour shift. "Tim? Is that really you?" She was beaming.

"It's me," I replied, nearing the window. "I forgot to shave."

"You're crazy." She slipped me a milkshake. "I'm finishing in ten minutes?"

Fuck the casual act, I thought. "That's great! I'll be in the park."

"I'll bring fries," Theresa said. "Now go, I gotta work."

In the park behind the McDonald's I sat atop an orange picnic table with my feet up on the bench. I pulled the gorilla mask off and basked in the cooling breeze on my sweaty face. I took a long drink of milkshake through my straw. From my spot I could see, beside the McDonald's, the back of the Harvey's, and beside that the back of Buffet Chinois Ben Foo. Across the street from the Chinese place was the Tim Hortons and beside it was the Provi-Soir. Next, in the direction of The Four Corners, was The Montclair Inn. For the better part of a year, I'd been thinking about my old triceratops nightmare a lot, and how I really wouldn't mind, would in fact like, for something to come along and raze this lifeless town to the ground. Wipe it off the map. If not a dinosaur, a giant ape could do the job, and nicely. Salut King Kong, the place is all yours.

But at that moment, sweating in my new gorilla costume in the park, I had other things on my mind. There'd be more garage sales to scope out next weekend. Dave had his license now and we had plans to go see Fugazi in Montreal in August. Chocolate milkshakes were awesome. I loved Theresa Black and, in just a few minutes, she was meeting me in the park.