Excerpt from Ga Ga

from Gaga the Gorilla

Gaga the Gorilla can really dance.

I suppose one version of my life could be told as a succession of stories about my father. Stories about who he is and how I’ve reacted to who he is. What I think I know of him; what he doesn’t know of me. But when I think of the array of experiences I could relate about this man, perhaps the quintessential Robert Lee Nichols, Senior, can best be captured by telling you about the evening of a few drinks, John-Boy Walton’s new bride, and a battery-operated ape called Gaga.

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I was visiting and it was near the end of a good day. Mom was long past and Dad lived alone. The house had grown dark with the fade to dusk and Dad and I sat in his living room singing songs, talking politics, and gradually letting in the night. He sipped a bourbon and water with a dash of Coke. I strummed a guitar.

There came a knock and it was the kid from next door, John Walton. Dad always called him John Boy and he never openly complained. He had with him his new bride. “I wanted my wife to meet Mr. Nichols,” he explained to me as I let them in and cleared off a place on the couch for them to sit. Dad, without as much as a hint of reason, said his exuberant hellos and then dove into a large box stuck behind his recliner chair. Triumphantly he retrieved a furry little battery-operated gorilla from the menagerie of oddities secreted there. He sat the beast on the coffee table right in front of the girl and then, exceedingly spry for an octogenarian, dashed up the stairs and disappeared.

“So, you guys are married,” I said in as normal a voice as one might muster while dwelling in the land of the bizarre.

“Yes. Last week,” he said with a haltering nervousness.

“How nice,” I said.

She said nothing. It was very dim in the room and it smelled of booze and dog piss (Dad’s pooch was a fine little beast but not inclined to denial of certain biological urges). Shadowy, yes, but I could clearly see a tinge of terror in her young eyes.

I could hear the sounds of search thumping from above.

Then, Dad came rushing down the stairs with his boom-box portable radio.

“You’re going to love this,” he said as he slammed the radio down on the table next to the great ape and stretched the cord to the nearest outlet. “Gaga can really dance.”

Years have taught me, in many venues of existence, the futility of the question: What’s this all about?

The radio came alive in a blur of half-stations as Dad spun the dial away from the sanity of Public Radio and landed on the most violent heavy-metal-rap-hip-hop God awful broadcast on the entire dial. “He likes the bass notes,” Dad veritably shouted as he cranked up the volume to dangerous decibels.

The monk didn't move.

“It’s the batteries,” Dad yelled over the clamor of profane pandemonium blasting from the speakers. He picked up the toy by its beady-eyed head and slapped it a good one across its flared plastic nostrils.

It came alive. Father released it and in gyrations of arm and electric twitches of skull and kick of leg (I think its eyes even lit up, but I couldn’t swear), Gaga began to dance.

With a flick of a switch on the radio, blessed silence be-stilled the din and the ape stopped cold. I could see my father’s eyes, a-swim in glee (they might have lit up, too, but I couldn’t swear) darting from focus upon the ape on the coffee table to the startled gape of the bride. You sould have seen the look on her young face. And with another flick of the switch the growl and thud of the horrible