Monkey Business
It was dark and dreary in Daytona, but the sun shone brightly in Sarasota. So, I drove my Hell On Wheels chicken truck across America’s most ridiculous appendage to crack coconuts on the brick entryway of a Whole Foods.
An investigation in Thailand produced videos of chained monkeys being forced to harvest coconuts. Their masters had ripped out their teeth. It’s hard to deny the injustice of it all, but Whole Foods remained obstinate and refused to remove Thai coconut products from their shelves.
Police were already present when I turned on the squawking sounds on my chicken truck and turned into the parking lot across the street from the Amazon-owned grocery store. It looks like a live transport truck with the walls ripped off revealing the horrific images of tortured birds. People love taking pictures of this truck.
A PETA campaigner named Wendy handed me a jail-bird costume, black and white striped pajamas with a little pillbox cap. She put plastic chains around my neck and strapped a monkey mask to my face.
“How do I look?”
“Perfect.”
There were three of us monkeys. We filled three wheelbarrows with coconuts out of a U-haul.
“So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow.” No one thought that was clever.
As we pushed the wheelbarrows the long way around the building. I muttered, “is this how the Mormons felt?” Jonathan, an activist walking beside me helping me not run over the people sleeping behind the Whole Foods (I couldn’t see very well behind the mask) said he was Mormon and was delighted someone knew that his people had reached the promised land with all their belongings in wheelbarrows. This made up for flat-falling William Carlos William reference.
Wendy counted to three, we dumped our coconuts like an avalanche and leapt after them spiking them onto the ground, exploding them, glazing the red bricks with their sweet-smelling milk. The popping sounds and spillage reminded me of New Year’s Eve. But this was Sarasota; no one was happy about the mess.
We scurried to the public sidewalk where I was handed a sign: “Boycott Thai Coconuts.”
That’s when the cop got grabby.
He looked like a young, fat, Matt Damon. He snatched my wrist and said, “you’ve been observed destroying property, and you’re coming with me.”
I ignored him and didn’t move.
“You’ve been observed engaging in the destruction of property, and I’m taking you with me.”
I pretended not to hear him.
“Do you understand me?!”
My plan was to go limp if he took his assault to the next level. I am a 225-pound monkey and would not go lightly. But when he started to bend my arm, Wendy appeared and told him the coconuts were ours and we had destroyed our own property. He came to his senses and let go of me.
In the end, I was allowed to exercise my first amendment right and my duty to raise awareness of the plight of our simian brothers in Thailand. I was allowed to drive my chicken truck back to dreary Daytona. But the very prospect of being taken against my will by a silly little man whose friends had let him wander into a situation he didn’t understand, the threat of losing my freedom for even a few moments, is something I’ll take as a souvenir, a reminder that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. And if dressing like a monkey makes monsters out of men, being born a monkey means knowing that most men are monsters.
Monkeys protesting Thai Coconut sales at Whole Foods Market in Sarasota, Florida.
