A little monkey business

A LITTLE MONKEY BUSINESS

Inside the George Washington Hospital emergency room, I opened my eyes for the first time. It was as if I were stepping out of some primordial haze. How did I get here? The last thing I remembered was that I was on my honeymoon with Jane. Looking down at all the wires connected to me, I wondered, did we get into a car accident? I could overhear a man talking to another man saying, “Max, the President has woken up.” This left me confused. The craziest thing that I have ever been noted for was helping a chimp named Bonzo not to commit suicide by jumping off a building.

Then the man named Max came over to me and said “Mr. President, you have been attacked by an assassin. You were walking out of the Hilton Hotel when you were shot in the chest. Right now we are checking to see if this was a coordinated attack by the Russians.” “Listen to me Max, I am not Ronald Reagan. My name is Peter Boyd. I work for Oxford as their psychology professor.” Max says “What the fuck?” “Where is Jane?” I ask. Max exclaims, “You mean Nancy?” Max says to the nurses, “Bring her in, maybe that will jog his memory.” Nancy walks in, relieved, and gives me a kiss on the head. I have never seen this woman in my life. “Don’t get me wrong, you’re a really attractive lady but my heart belongs to another.” Nancy, taken aback, asks the doctor, “What should we do?” The doctor says, “I have seen this with a lot of traumatic events, sometimes the mind will create a different reality in an effort to protect itself from those events. What you need to is take him home and remind him who he is.”

My first week back home was a strange one to say the least. Everybody was treating me like I was this Reagan character when I was not. I didn’t know how to run the free world, I was a psychologist for God’s sake. Military meetings were disastrous. I would get kicked out of the room constantly. I would say things like “Missiles are just phallic symbols.” I tried to cancel the War on Drugs program because I believed, as a psychologist, that if we legalized every drug then people would choose not to do it. You know, reverse psychology.

There was talk of impeaching me because I was mentally unstable. Everything came to a head one night when Nancy tried to make love to me and she told me that my life was a lie based on the movie Bedtime for Bonzo. How could my life be summed up in one movie? My friends? My career? My absent father? My love for Jane? I watched the movie and sure enough, it was all there. I didn’t know how to handle this cognitive dissonance, so I snapped. I began drinking Jack Daniels heavily and taking pills. Anything that I could do to escape my reality. But a miracle happened in 1982. John Hinckley Jr, the man who tried to assassinate Ronald Reagan, who everybody claimed that I was, was found to be criminally insane. I thought that if I could help him like I helped Bonzo, the suicidal chimp, that maybe my life would be worth living again. I realized I had to do this in secret because I knew that I would never gain access to the man they claimed was my attempted murderer. So I began to write to him. “Dear John, this is Dr. Peter Boyd. I heard your story on the news and I think I can help you. Would you want my help? My first question is this, ‘Why did you shoot the President?’” I did not expect a response, but he answered right away, “Hi Dr. Boyd, I’ll be more than glad to tell you my side of the story. My defense lawyers made me say that I was criminally insane, but I knew damn well what I was doing. I tried to kill the President because I received a message from an angel of God, Jodie Foster, while watching Taxi Driver. When you see a woman that beautiful and that radiant, you do anything you can to try to prove your love. Abraham was going to sacrifice Isaac to try and prove his love to God. How could I do anything less for Jodie Foster?”

I wrote back, “I don’t believe in signs but I do believe in love such as the love I have for my Jane. But the kind of love I have for Jane is not the kind of love that would kill someone else to obtain affection. Have you ever read Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death? He posits in his book that people commit genocide to assuage the fear of their own mortality. What are you really afraid of, John?” John writes back, “Dear Dr. Boyd, I don’t think you can help me because my reality is different than yours. I actually heard the voice of God while watching Taxi Driver tell me that I needed to kill Reagan, and there’s nothing you can say to make me feel otherwise. It’s not because I have a fear of my own death that I tried to kill, it’s actually because I have the courage to live for the first time in my life. My mother always told me that I wouldn’t amount to anything. She was always so dismissive of me.”

I wrote him back one final letter. “John, it pains me to tell you this, but movies are not reality. What would you say if I told you that I believed I was from another world where I tried, just like you, to impress a girl by taming a chimp? Everyone around me was dismissive of me. They called me insane. When I finally believed them is when they showed me my life on film. I was completely shattered. I didn’t want to live, but now I know that my name is Ronald Reagan.”