Let Me Try To Explain Why I Seldom Leave The House

I was sitting in this hotel bar in Sacramento one night a few months ago. It was early in the evening and the place was empty. Some friends of mine were out on a golf course somewhere and I was bored out of my mind and wished like hell I’d never agreed to come along on what was supposed to be a little weekend getaway for a bunch of old buddies who’d all gone to chiropractic school together. I never went to chiropractic school, and I don’t play golf, but a guy I knew from work had put this package trip together and had a late cancellation so he’d talked me into tagging along.

I thought I’d gotten a good deal, but it wasn’t looking like such a good deal after all. The night before we’d had tickets to see Abe Vigoda and Marion Ross in “Gin Game” at some cheesy dinner theater.

At any rate, I was sitting there in this bar and I haven’t had a drink in years, so I was just nursing an iced tea and watching college basketball on the TV. The bartender was this wired little character who was behaving almost like an imposter. He was pacing back and forth behind the bar and aggressively snapping a towel, and then he started lighting matches and flinging them in the air.

Finally he comes over to refill my iced tea and says, shaking his head, “I’ll tell you what, you hear some interesting stories in this line of work.”

“I’ll bet you do,” I said.

“Just this morning I had this guy come in here and sit right down at the bar and commence to telling me about an exerience he had recently in Thailand. You ever been there?”

“I haven’t,” I said.

“Beautiful country,” he said. “Nice looking ladies. I’ve spent some time there myself. Anyway, it seems this fella was doing some hiking in Khao Wang, which is some sort of national park, and he stumbled across a bunch of workers who were castrating tranquilized monkeys on picnic tables. He said there were dozens of these poor insensate monkeys piled about, and these characters had them splayed right there on the picnic tables and they were sawing the little nuts right off the damn things, one right after the other. The guy said they had a big boombox and were blasting a Van Halen CD. Up to their elbows in blood and gore and monkey testicles, and there they were, he said, laughing and smoking and listening to Van Halen like they were having themselves a party.”

“I can’t imagine it,” I said, and I was telling the God’s honest truth.

The bartender claimed there was someplace on the Internet where a guy could see all the footage he wanted of monkeys being castrated.

I told him I didn’t doubt it for a minute.

“That’s where I get all my prescription drugs and fishing gear,” he said.

“I’m sorry?” I said.

“The Internet,” he said, and slapped the surface of the bar with an almost frightening burst of enthusiasm. “Damn straight, mister. We’re living in an incredible age. Don’t let anybody tell you any different.”