theinferior4+1 - The Monkey's Tale...

Here's a story. Years ago, I was in a group called the Cathouse Band. It was a damn good band and we had a hell of a time. One of our roadies, this guy named Gordon, was a biker. (Our other roadie was Tom Sherred, the son of science fiction writer, T.L. Sherred, but that's another story). Not a gnarly old biker. He was eighteen or nineteen, and it was his philosophy that fighting was the purest form of physical expression. He put this philosophy to frequent test. During one of earliest gigs, at the Blind Pig in Ann Arbor, I was onstage singing when I saw him come into the back of the room and he waved to me. His right hand was gloved in blood. Another time, at the Golden Hatchet Saloon in the old lumber town of Bad Ax, Michigan, he saved our ass by shooting the fender off a car full of guys who wanted to kill us because they thought we had trifled with their womenfolk. Anyway, Gordon was actually kind of a sweet guy, though that may be hard to swallow. He looked upon me as an older brother and came to me for advice on worldly matters. Once he was told he had been given probationary status with the Cleveland chapter of Hell's Angels, something he had long desired. The only trouble was that in order to become a full member you had to kill a cop, and he wasn't altogether sure he was up to it."How many members in the Cleveland chapter?" I asked him."Seventy, maybe.""So you think the Cleveland cops have seventy open police homicides on their books?"He looked at me, his brow furrowed."No way they've got that many," I said. "The Angels are screwing with your head.""Fuck," he said after a while.One day Gordon came to me excited and told me he'd found a place where he could fight a monkey. It appeared there was a ranch down near Monroe where one could fight a monkey for fifty bucks and shoot a buffalo for, if I remember correctly, two hundred. Gordon had signed up to do the former. He asked if I'd come with him. I said I didn't know if fighting a monkey was such a good id...