Lycanthropia

His name was Churchill. Or Winston Churchill. Or Winston. I never really got it straight. For the sake of this story I’ll call him Winston, mainly as a tribute to Winston Smith, the protagonist in George Orwell’s 1984, a character with whom he had a good deal in common.

I should have learned his name, and shame on me for not knowing it. Because Winston was hopelessly in love with me.

He was a 7-year-old capuchin monkey, a stocky little fellow who looked for all the world like a gorilla if a gorilla was the size of a ten-month-old human child. He was the color of milk chocolate, broad at the shoulders and narrow in the hips, with powerful arms that were twice the length of his stubby, muscular legs. What differentiated him from the average gorilla was his face: It was blanched white and sported two black, liquid, very human eyes under an Eddie Munster widow’s peak. He lived in a cage, a six-foot metal cube containing a dead section of a tree and a female capuchin, much smaller, stoop-shouldered, who looked like a different species of animal, though her face was also white and her hairline equally dramatic. By his ferocious temper and frequent white-fanged, barking displays of testosterone, Winston kept his female companion sufficiently cowed to suit him. He was the absolute master of his too-tiny domain.

Winston’s prison (for, indeed, it was the worst kind of prison) was located in a mom-and-pop pet store in a north Alabama township, and I often visited him there when purchasing cat food or as a diversion on a gloomy afternoon. Over the course of a nearly year-long aquaintance, Winston grew to recognize me, then to know me, and then to anticipate my arrival. I have no clue how it happened, whether I reminded him of his mother or my cologne contained the squeezings from a female monkey gland or I had been, in a previous life, the Marilyn Monroe of capuchin monkeys, but eventually Winston came to love me, and love me with an unrequited passion that burned in his eyes and rolled off his lips in squeaks and grunts.

Our affair started simply enough. One day, quick as a flash, Winston reached a paw outside his cage, grabbed my shirt sleeve, pulled my hand to the steel bars, pressed his cheek to it and stared up at me with a pensive expression on his face. He looked heartsick. He clung to my hand and rolled his eyes and made purring noises deep in his throat.

The owner of the pet shop, working a newspaper crossword, glanced up over her reading glasses and warned, “You’d better get your hand away from there. That monkey bites.” A half-minute later she said, a little astonished, “I’ve never seen him do that before.”

It was a good three minutes before I was able to gently extricate my hand from Winston’s, and even then he looked as though I had taken his best friend from him. He climbed to the top of the cage and watched my every move, chattering as I walked down the cat food aisle, screeching as I picked up a 10-pound bag of Science Diet Regular and carried it to the checkout counter, and hissing when I interacted with the pet shop owner. Her name, I learned, was Carol, and she and her husband had “adopted” Winston and Elizabeth after their original owners had been arrested for importing illegal exotic animals into the United States. By the time they were discovered, both capuchins were too old and too tame to be released back into the wild.

“We thought it would be like adopting a couple of babies,“ Carol told me. “It isn’t. They’re a lot of work.”

Winston swung from side to side on his cage bars, howling plaintively.

“I’ve never seen him behave that way,” Carol said and shook her head.

I gave Winston’s cage wide berth as I left the store; I swear he watched me get into my car and back out of the drive.

From that point on the ritual was the same: Whenever I’d enter the store I’d stop by Winston’s cage, give him my hand, and let him make love-eyes and sing to me. If I happened to be in the company of my then-roommate — a charming brunette with a dazzling smile — the little monkey would moan, screech and spit until she moved away from me, and only when she had gone an appropriate distance would he resume his courtship. It became something of a novelty in the store. Carol and her husband often stopped customers and said, “Look. Winston has a crush on this guy. Watch him.” And Winston and I would go into our routine.

Of course, love has its trials, and my relationship with the little capuchin proved the rule. One day I happened into the building when Carol was cleaning his cage and Winston was free in the store. He was standing atop of a stack of dog food cans and, when he saw me enter the building, he dashed off them, tumbling several tins to the floor, springing over three shelving units and onto my back, wrapping his simian arms around my neck and pressing the side of his face into my ear. His display of affection so startled me that I screamed a little and nearly lost my footing. We were both rattled, but Winston clung to me as though I was the last vine to Paradise. It was all I could do to move him to the front of my body, adjusting his grip so he did not strangle me. His hug was all arms and legs, and his muscles were like steel bands. He was determined not to turn loose. In fact, after a 15-minute union, it took the combined efforts of husband, wife, my roommate and and me to pry away the little fellow. Back in his cage, he shrieked and whined and pouted, and it was only after I offered him my hand that he settled down. Following that experience, I never entered the store without first checking through the glass door to see whether Winston was locked safely away.

So it went. I started bringing him toys and treats, and he loved me faithfully and groomed my hands and wrote little songs he sang from the back of his throat in cooing monkey couplets. When I took a position in Atlanta so my roommate would be closer to her family, I visited Winston and told him goodbye, promising I’d visit the first chance I got. It was the last time I saw him.

Like all star-crossed love affairs ours ended in tragedy. During the six months before I returned for a visit, Winston died. It seems his owners left him in the store one winter weekend and the heater failed in their absence. Due to exposure, Winston caught fatal pneumonia. His mate died a month later, presumably of loneliness. I asked Carol a number of questions about the pair and she finally cut me off: “They were pets,” she said. “Nothing more.”

But driving back to my motel in a gray drizzle I couldn’t help remembering that Winston’s affection had never failed. Not once in all the time I knew him.

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