Tommy was secretly delighted that he no longer had to share a room.

At 10 years old, I didn’t understand much about the ways of grownups, but I knew punishment work when I saw it.

“What’d you do?” I asked him.

“Do?” he responded. “How do you mean?”

“To get in trouble,” I said.

He chuckled bitterly, “Son, I been in trouble since the day I was born.”

Confused, I asked, “You mean you’ve always been bad?”

“Not exactly,” he said. “At least not on the inside. But you’ll find out soon enough that that ain’t what matters to lots of folks. It’s the outside of me is all they can see, and they don’t care for it much.”

“That don’t make any sense to me,” I said. “You look just fine to me.”

“Why, thank you, sir, ” he said as he bowed graciously. “If only everyone could be so blind.”

He stood beside me 46 years later, watched me sign the bill, shook my hand, and said those exact same words.

Childhood sweethearts, they had married in the spring of 1927. He looked deeply into her eyes and was happy.

On the train coming home from their honeymoon, a man with desperate eyes shoved a gun into their faces and demanded money. Without thinking, he pushed the gun aside and tackled the man, then pummeled him until the police arrived.

She told him he was a brave man.

After university he secured an excellent job as a factory manager. She bore him two children within three years.

They were content. He came home every evening to an immaculate home and was greeted by a warm smile and embrace.

By 1934, neighbors started looking at her differently. He overheard snippets of guiltily whispered conversations: “…black hair…nose…star…”

By 1936, she wondered why he no longer looked her in the eyes when they made love and why he resisted family outings.

In 1940 a friend in the Gestapo secretly handed him a note at a party. Hands shaking, he opened it in the bathroom. It read: “They know.”

When they got home that night, he told her to take the children to the park in the morning.

He kissed them goodbye that morning, then watched them leave through the window. As soon as they were out of site, he rushed to his bedroom to pack.

After finishing, he scoured the house for every document he could find that connected them. As he was feeding them into the fire, his eyes fell on her old diaries, from which their love letters protruded.

He lay down and began reading them. Lazy summer afternoons at the lake. Whispered promises under the stars. Nervous caresses. Shared dreams. First kiss and first realizations. Naive, heartfelt, authentic.

With a sigh, he dropped the last one into the flames, then went into the bathroom to wash his hands. He didn’t look up into the mirror.

He grabbed his bag and newly-prepared documents, took one last look behind him from the front door, taped the yellow star onto the door, and disappeared.

On those blustery days the fire in my belly was stronger than the ice in my fingers and toes.

Every afternoon after the school bell rang, I burst out the doors, hustled home, changed my clothes, then rushed to the dump. I spent most of every Saturday there, too.

I probed the piles in search of pearls — discarded treasures that could be repaired, re-sold, and re-used. At the time my sister just thought it was fun, but I was a boy with tunnel vision.

The neighborhood boys always gathered, pointing and laughing as we scrounged like hungry rats. I can’t say it didn’t hurt, but hearing the clang of coins in my secret can always soothed me afterward.

I’d watch them, envy clawing at me, as they spent their fat allowances on candy and ice cream, cheap toys and carnival rides.

There were times when, glaring at my holey jeans and shoes, the jeers ringing in my mind, a feeling so strong would rise up inside me I thought I’d explode.

“Someday,” I’d imagine, “I’m gonna buy leather shoes without even looking at the price tag. I’m gonna swim in ice cream. I’ll be so rich that no one will ever laugh at me again. And I’ll always look out for holey shoes on young boys, pounding the pavement in search of a brighter future. They just need a chance, and I’ll give them their chance.”

27 years later, after I owned half the town and the same boys who used to mock me worked for me, I bought that old dump, just as a souvenir.

After I signed the papers, I drove to the dump and stood staring at it for awhile. As I turned to leave, a movement behind a pile caught my eye. I watched as a young boy emerged, face dirty, clothes tattered, eyes bright and absorbed as he explored.

“Son,” I called, “What are you doing?”

“Just looking for things I can sell, Mister,” he replied defensively.

“Come on over here,” I said. “I’ve got an opportunity for you.”

When funds ran dry, the president suggested they cross-market with homeless people, though the details were a bit sketchy in their initial proposal.

“Once the naked monkeys got out of hand, the gods became fed up with life on earth.”

So says Tom Robbins. Whatever. It’s not that I would have disagreed with him, mind you. I was simply too fed up with my own issues to calculate the consequences of godly worries, no matter how plural or pressing.

And as far as I was concerned, naked monkeys would have been a welcome addition to the funeral Kitty’s mother called a “party.” Now that would have been something to smile about.

Come to think of it, isn’t it a bit of a redundancy to identify the natural state of monkey attire, or, rather, the lack thereof ? Perhaps drawing attention to that detail heightens our interest towards — and maybe even elevates our fear of — hairy, hooting primates.

I mean, a monkey is one thing. But a naked monkey? Well, that’s a different story entirely. A monkey is cute, innocent, and playful. A naked monkey is mischievous, unpredictable, and lecherous.

If a monkey looks at you, you think, “Oh, he wants to play!” If a naked monkey looks at you, you avoid eye contact and start tucking in your shirt and shifting uncomfortably.

Yes, naked monkeys are decidedly and particularly menacing. Still, I would have traded being alone with a naked monkey for being confined to that stupid party.

Everything was so prim and proper, I felt handcuffed to a teacup that trembled between the thumb and forefinger of a stiff-backed queen who struggled to breathe through her corset. The women floated through the scene sighing disgusting things like “Just lovely!” and “What a pretty picture!” The unimaginative girls chattered on about the dullest things, like dollhouses, dress up, and make-up.

I was desperate to escape. I ached to fling my hat at the cake, kick off my shoes, hop onto the table and scream, “WAKE UP!”, then dance a quick jig while the ladies gasped, then giggle with glee and flee.

And now that I’ve thought it through, I’ve decided I do disagree with Mr. Robbins, although I confess my conclusion is anthropomorphic. If I were a deity looking over the sorry state of human affairs, I would let monkeys roam wild and free and naked without giving them a thought — no matter how nervous people felt around them.

I’d rather be inclined to be fed up with a lack of imagination and playfulness on the part of humans.

We dawdled despondently on the dusty porch, oppressed by heat and hopelessness. We weren’t lazy; there was just nothing to do and nowhere to turn.

But as we watched Daddy walking up the drive, we could tell something was different. He strode with a spring in his step we hadn’t seen in years.

We no longer had the energy to run out to meet him, but we were curious.

He was bursting with news. He spoke fervently of a green and shimmering land flowing with crystal waters, gushing with juicy fruit falling off drooping branches, and land where the rich, black earth radiated energy and life and promise.

He leaned, eyes glistening, arms waving. Transfixed, we watched him transform from a downtrodden, bare-footed farmer in holey overalls to a glowing saint in holy robes.

When Momma struggled off her stool to join us, we could tell the feeling was rising in her, too.

We swam in the cool, blue pools of Daddy’s words. Sweet juice streamed down our chins. Our bellies were gorged, our tongues danced from exotic flavors, lounging in tall grass so green it hurt our eyes — and no bill collectors in sight.

We piled everything we owned onto our old Ford that afternoon and headed west into the setting sun.

She often dreamed longingly of the day when she and her beautiful rake would be accepted as they were.

The pretty brunette nurse, radiating motherly comfort, chatted pleasantries while she set up the machine.

“Now don’t worry,” she assured me, “you won’t feel a thing.”

I smiled back at her, feeling cozy under the blanket. I wondered if I’d be able to sleep through it.

But when she flipped the switch, a thousand lightning bolts shattered my brain.

The pulses froze my muscles. I couldn’t move or speak.

The nurses stood gossiping quietly and discussing after-work plans as I shrieked and wailed inside my head.

I was trapped inside myself with no way to communicate to the nurses that I was being fried alive from the inside. Horror strangled me.

I bloodied my fists, elbows, knees, forehead against the interior wall of my skull, screaming at them to let me out.

Needles, flames, plyers, hack saws, machetes, hammers, meat hooks, thumb screws collided inside my body, swirling and ripping, clawing and slashing, pounding and scorching, piercing and hacking, squeezing and slicing.

I was boiling and suffocating in pain. Red, hot, frothing, vicious, twisting, torturous torment. My insides writhed and thrashed and melted.

It felt like I had turned inside out and I was gushing and splattering all over the ceiling and walls, erupting nerves, sinew, tissue, organs, blood onto the floor.

And all the while my face, body, eyes are fiercely gripped, locked tight, frozen by the electricity.

Inside my mind I’m jerking, writhing, howling, screeching, bawling, begging, pleading for them to FLIP THE SWITCH! DEAR GOD PLEASE JUST LET ME DIE! TAKE IT AWAY! MAKE IT STOP! OH PLEASE OH PLEASE OH PLEASE MAKE IT STOP!

After the stipulated six minutes, the nurse switched off the switch and said gently, “There, now that wasn’t so bad, was it?”

Toilet paper was her enemy.

Every time she was forced to perform her bodily duties, she sat and stared at the sinister roll, its deceptive whiteness concealing its teeth. She tried to tell her mother that she heard it snarling every time, but her mother dismissed her with, “Oh, don’t be ridiculous.”

When her first record spiked on the charts, the first thing she bought was a closet full of two-ply, quilted Charmin.