Scooch’s Loose Monkey StoryPosted on Sunday, January 12th, 2020
This story took place along the Route 83 strip between Rockville and Vernon, CT on a Tuesday afternoon in December 1996. According to Scooch, well known neighborhood figure and all-around friendly mailman, the events unfolded as follows:
“There was this Puerto Rican guy who owned a monkey (I’m not sure what kind – some exotic breed from another country). The guy also had lots of other animals like cats and birds, turtles, reptiles, etc. Anyway, he lets the monkey out of its cage to clean it or something and the monkey FLIPS OUT in the apartment and chases him around, bouncin’ off the walls and generally ripping up the place, attacking him until the guy is beaten and bleeding, and he bails out through the window leaving the monkey inside. He goes to a pay phone and calls the animal warden (a man named Carl Spegr).
Spegr comes over in the animal control van and subdues the monkey with a blast of his handy dandy pepper spray, and he gets it secured in a cage. Carl thinks everything is cool and he heads back towards the animal shelter, but as he’s driving he hears these really loud screeching and crashing sounds comin’ from the back, so he stops by the side of the road to check, this is right across from Ray Seraphin’s Ford dealership (you know where that is right?) and of course it turns out that the monkey got out of the cage and it jumps out the back door when Carl opens it, and it gets away!
A little while later, this guy from Manchester (NOT the man in a yellow hat) happens to be driving by and he sees this monkey on the side of the road, calm apparently, so he stops the car and picks up the monkey and starts driving on down the road. He’s thinking this is really cool and they’re having a great time until suddenly the monkey starts FLIPPING OUT again – only now it’s going wild in the car and it bites the man on the thumb and the guy starts punching it, hitting it, trying to fight it off.
So he turns the car around and heads back towards where he picked it up, back to Ray Seraphin Ford, and he almost gets there but the monkey is still flipping out so he stops by the side of the road and he boots the monkey out of the car and heads for the emergency room at a nearby hospital.
From there he calls the animal warden, naturally enough, and it’s Carl, and he knows what’s goin’ on so he comes back out to get the monkey, only this time he’s got the police with him. They almost catch it, but Carl and the police catch themselves instead in a crossfire of pepper spray, and the monkey gets away again! It runs onto the lot at the dealership and starts jumping up and down on the new cars, breakin’ off antennas, scratching the paint, pulling off wiper blades and doing lots of damage, much to the dismay of the sales manager, who has by now come outside.
Then the monkey leads the police on a chase between the new cars – they swing at it with their truncheon billy-club things, causing even more damage! Finally, somehow, Carl catches the monkey with a noose around its neck and loads it into the van.
The next day this story appears on the evening news, and the original owner is even shown on TV all bandaged up – he says he doesn’t want the monkey back and in fact HE NEVER WANTS TO SEE THAT MONKEY AGAIN. The man in the car who went to the hospital is on with his bandaged thumb, and Carl Spegr is on, too. Carl says that kind of monkey really doesn’t belong around here in the first place and it shouldn’t be taken from its natural environment or it will just go wild like it did. I don’t know how it turned out for the monkey.”
Listen here to a 20 second soundbite of Scooch talkin’ bout it, set in glamorous no-fi by The Larry Mondello Band:
Category:
« Previous Article
Next Article »
