Trials of the Monkey Read Free

failed, you certainly couldn’t fault me for its execution on the ground: I emerged from school with an outstanding lack of knowledge.
    I only took two significant exams and failed both. The first was the eleven-plus, which should have been called the eleven-plus/minus because if you passed it—at the age of eleven—you entered grammar school and had a shot at university, while if you failed you were subtracted from opportunity and condemned (unless you had money) to the purgatory of secondary modern, and life on the production line. The second exam was an O level. Most kids passed five to ten of these. I failed my solitary one and my parents and the system conceded defeat.
    Thirty years later, here I am on a Greyhound bus, a screenwriter. I used to direct but now I get paid so much to write I can no longer afford to. I write for the studios in Los Angeles. They pay, I deliver, they own. Nothing I create belongs to me. The scripts I write rarely become films and a screenplay, however well written, is only a blueprint. I’m an architect whose only buildings lie in the past, each made by uncomprehending builders. Worse still, the scripts which have been made are not my best, and the rest, the unmade ones, the ones I love, have now accrued so much interest that I cannot afford to buy them back. This year I sold an idea for a million and a half dollars. It won’t get made and before you know it I’ll need two million to get it back.
    And of course I won’t get it back and it will be consigned to the great necropolis of dead scripts, a massive tomb under a mountain in Utah where the air is dry and cool. A friend of mine was sent down into this awful legacy of failure to root around and see if anything was worth bringing back to light. He found a script by F. Scott Fitzgerald and for a while, the studio was looking for someone to rewrite the great man; but I’ve heard no more about it and presume it’s gone back into the darkness.

    In my struggle for survival I have dragged my simian arse as far from its origins as I could—from the lawns of Cambridge to the Mercedes-littered lots of Hollywood, then to New York’s Upper East Side—and all I’ve achieved, ‘spiritually,’ is that: survival. I have a life which requires me to earn at least half a million dollars a year. I am always either in debt or on the verge of it. I have no money saved. I could be wiped out by a few months of studio indifference. I feel drained. What is the purpose of all this?
    If I believed in God, I could comfort myself with the thought that once in heaven the bills would at least stop coming. Instead the only relief in sight is complete extinction. Circumstances change and in response, I simply become more anxious. It’s as if my whole character has become vestigial to this constant fear. Somewhere in my mind there still swaggers the fine young, atheistic monkey waving his insolent hard-on at the world, but suddenly it’s no longer amusing or effective and soon it will become embarrassing. I am not afraid of death, I’m afraid of a moment when, immobilised by something fatal, and unable to distract myself with work or sex or illusions of progress, I reflect on my life and see a rich and fascinating landscape, and me off to one side of it, a rat inside a wheel of darkness.
    It’s time to become wise and happy. But how? I am an adolescent lobbed into middle age without the necessary equipment. Sitting in the bus, cut loose from obligation and decency, I start to wander inward. When I look out the bus window now, what I see are scenes from my childhood, and I find myself compelled to write them down. Another book, an unasked for book, takes shape in my mind, The Monkey and His Education.
    There’s a sudden random swath of wildflowers on the meridian. It passes by like a brush stroke and jolts me back to the external journey. The country has become more hilly with tree-covered mountains in the distance. The highway is less crowded.
    To my