Summer Switch by Mary Rodgers.
Title: Summer Switch.
Author: Mary Rodgers.
Genre: Fiction, children's lit, YA, fantasy, teen.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 1982.
Summary: Did you ever wish you were in someone else's shoes? Ape Face Andrews does just that-and lives to regret it. So dies his father. What could be worse than finding yourself in your son's body, on your way to the same macho summer camp that you hated when you were a boy? Worse is realizing that your young, inexperienced son must therefore be in your body, on his way to the most important business meeting of your life! It all starts one afternoon at the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Ape Face doesn't want to spend his summer scaling cliffs, climbing ropes, swatting bugs. Bill Andrews is dreading an upcoming meeting with Stephanie Marshak, his new boss with a nasty reputation. Ape Face finds himself admiring his father's cool. Mr. Andrews finds himself wishing he were as untroubled as his son. And an instant later, both find themselves in each other's bodies. Will Mr. Andrews (now Ape Face) be able to survive Camp Soonawissakit again? Will Ape Face (now Bill Andrews) be able to survive "Killer Cream-Puff" Marshak?
My rating: 7/10
My review:
♥ I nodded in the direction of the men's room, where Dad had just disappeared. "My father," I said. "I would give anything to be him right now."
Well, you are not going to believe me, nobody in their right minds could possibly believe me, but the next thing I knew, I was in the men's room.
In the body of my father.
Standing at a urinal, looking down at...
OH WOW!!!
And then- No, wait. Before I go any further, I'd better give you some hard-nosed facts..
♥ I, Benjamin "Ape Face" Andrews, only son of Ellen Jean and William Waring Andrews, beloved of all elevator men and little old ladies on the street, star of the Barden School, the boy most likely to be invited for a sleep-over-I, the crowd pleaser, the yea-sayer, the boy with the ready smile on his face... was a coward. Yes, sirree, four feet eleven and a half inches of Yellow Jell-O. Would you like to know what was behind that ready smile of mine? Another ready smile. Ha-ha! Fooled you, didn't I, you thought I was going to say a snarl or something. Oh no, not me. I'd never snarled in my life, never lost my temper.
I had many friends. Many, many friends. It's easy. As long as you're born with a reasonable dose of looks and smarts, and are careful never to make people mad, everybody likes you, I guess. The hard part is figuring out who you like-because you're so grateful to people for liking you, it kind of colors your vision when you try to decide what you really think of them.
♥ "Sit down and behave yourself," I hissed under my breath as we reached the counter. "And don't twirl on your seat."
"Why not?"
"Because, dummy, you now weigh a hundred and fifty-five pounds, and if you get going too fast, the seat'll come off and spin you through the plate-glass window." A nasty thought occurred to me. "Leaving me locked in this fragile frame of yours forever." I shuddered.
Ape Face looked pensive. "Gee, that's right. Then you'd have to grow up all over again."
♥ "And another thing, I've already paid the camp-with my money, and it's too late to get a refund."
"Oh, well," I said with a blithe snap of the fingers, "easy come, easy go." It was a monstrous tactical error. Hell hath no fury like a feminist scorned.
♥ Wrong, wrong, wrong! I screamed silently. Suddenly everything was going wrong, and now the head counselor-who looked for all the world like your run-of-the-mill, beer-bellied, pig-eyed, sadistic Kommandant from Bergen-Belsen-was shouting final embarkation instructions, and the hordes were moving forward, and my time was running out! And so was my luck!...
Decision: I would stage a scene. Improvement: a Scene. Further improvement: a SCENE.
With a Rumpelstiltskin-like stamp of my dessert boot, I bellowed, "I don't wanna, I don't wanna, I'm not gonna, nobody can make me, nobody, no way! I'd rather be dead of a fulminating brain tumor!"-crude but effective, I thought, and flung myself into Ellen's arms, sobbing piteously. "Please, Mom, pretty please, pretty Mommy, puleeze don't make me!"
It was a pyrotechnical display of unsurpassed brilliance; and Ellen, whose compliant younger child could usually be counted on to behave with suitable decorum, was aghast.
"Good Lord, Bill, what do I do now?" she asked Ape Face.
"You don't do anything, Ma'am, we do it," said Splasher Wilking.
What "we" did was the ultimate humiliation. "We" picked me up, slung me over his shoulder like a duffel bag of dirty laundry, and carried me, wailing and flailing and upside down, toward the Trailways departure gate.
"Wait, I have to kiss Daddy good-bye!" I screamed.
"Bull didly!" said Wilking, purposefully accentuating his already nautical swagger. We were yawing and pitching like a dinghy on the high seas; in a second, I might vomit down his back. That'd teach him!"
"Daddy, come say good-bye!"
Ape face, ever obedient and fleet of foot, quickly caught up with us. Then, upon realizing that communication with a perilously bobbing, upturned human duffel would be next to impossible, he adroitly adjusted his posture to accommodate mine-by running backward alongside me with his head tilted at an angle I never knew anyone but a freak-show contortionist was capable of achieving.
♥ "Boy, I hope you're right. For my sake as well as his," he added uneasily. "You see, all along I've been kind of counting on him to keep my spirits up, but the way he's been acting today-all that screaming and yelling and nut stuff..." Perplexed, he combed his fingers through a hunk of long blond hair. "Gee, Mr. Andrews, do you think he's having a nervous breakdown?-because that's just not the Ape Face I know!"
I considered leveling with him ("Curious you should mention that, Duck. It just so happens he's in my body and I'm in his." "Golly! You must be a hallucinating paranoid schizophrenic! Wait right here; I'll go call the little men in the white coats."), then thought better of it.
"True," I admitted truthfully. "But cheer up, this can't last forever." How truthful was that? I wondered. Maybe it could. Would... wow!... weird...
♥ Maybe it was just the case of saying is believing, but all of a sudden I was filled with this wonderful sense of pride and confidence in myself. And I don't mean my superficial Bill self (although it certainly doesn't hurt to be over six feet tall, dark, and handsome, with hair on your chest and other places, a deep, commanding voice, and money in your pocket), I mean inner Ape Face self.
Suddenly I knew that I, Benjamin Ape Face Andrews, former Yellow Jell-O champion of the world, would inherit the earth, and the sky... and the entire West Coast office of Galaxy Films.
As for poor little piddling William Waring Andrews, "Well, too bad for you," I said to myself jubilantly, and marched off to find my mother-wife.
♥ "Siddown and shuddup!" Splasher Wilking thundered at them. "As for you," he said, wagging a menacing finger under my nose, "if I hear another word out of you, another single sissy syllable, I'll throw you off the bus in White Plains!"
Wonderful! Less than ten minutes into the summer and already everybody had my son pegged as a hotheaded homo with a penchant for ladies' lingerie. Maybe getting thrown off the bus wasn't such a bad idea.
"Is that a promise, Cap'n?" I asked hoping against hope.
Regrettably, it was merely an idle threat.
♥ There are three lessons to be learned from all of this. The first is that when it comes to desertion in grubby public places, grown-ups don't react any better than kids.
"Thanks a lot," Mom said bitterly. "You should just try being a defenseless woman surrounded by nothing but hoods and harlots sometime, and see how you like it!" Thanks a lot yourself, lady, I've already got my hands full trying to be a middle-aged man.
..Which brings me to the second lesson. A grown-up doesn't usually desert you without any warning; so even though the grown-up seems to have vanished into thin air, do not expect the worst. She is probably in the bathroom, fixing her lipstick. At least, that's where Mom was.
The third lesson has to do with cabdrivers and big bills. When a driver tells you he is not obliged by law to leave his cab to make change for you, and you are not permitted by law to leave his cab until you have paid him, "Therefore, if you don't got nothing smallern a twenny, you gotta gimme the twenny, irregardless," that driver is lying in his teeth. This is a perfect example of being taken for an imbecile. Also for a ride.
♥ Finally, if, at the last minute, you decide you can't live without your collection of Lampoons, your Find the Hidden Words paperback puzzle book, and the pink plush hippo you've kept your pajamas in ever since Uncle Burt gave it to you for your sixth birthday, that's okay. Just make sure you hide these things at the bottom of the suitcase where your wife won't see them when she goes to put in the toenail clippers she forgot; because if she does see them she'll probably ask scornfully, "What in heaven's name is all this?" and you won't know what to answer.
For me, that particular problem never came up; I hid everything in my briefcase. For some reason or other, women never open men's briefcases. I guess they think it's rude.
♥ At the Airport
TWA, on a Saturday, is a very busy place. The clerk behind the check-in counter and all the people behind you in line won't like to be kept waiting while you fumble in six different pockets for the plane ticket-or, if you're me, surreptitiously rummage around for it under the pink hippo in your briefcase. And when asked whether you prefer smoking or nonsmoking, try to refrain from hooting with mirth; remember, adults consider this a perfectly sensible question. In other words, A.Y.A.*!
*Act Your Age
♥ Which reminds me: In first class, you can get seconds on dessert, so instead of letting the flight attendant catch you stealing your seatmate's dish of melting vanilla, just ask for another butterscotch sundae. She'll be happy to oblige. Also, don't forget to use your napkin or some kid on his way back from the bathroom will stop by your seat to tell you you have nuts in your mustache.
♥ Apprehensively, the crowd backed off a few feet-you'd've thought I was the Hillside Strangler. To be fair, you could hardly blame them. I don't know how I look when I get mad because it happens so rarely and I'm never in front of a mirror when it does (who is?), but I know how Dad looks. Demented! This was no time for demented.
♥ "The thing is, what do you do around here?"
"Me? I work," he said wryly.
"No, no, not you, me. What do I do around here? Swimming is out, what else is there?"
He was puzzled. I elaborated. Don't you have a game room-with a Space Invaders in it?" He shook his head. "Asteroids, then? Or Galaxia-it's not so good, but-" More head shaking, continuing throughout the next. "Pinball?...A pool table? No pool table?...Darts!...No?! Not even darts, well what do you have in your game room, nothing but cards, I'll bet," I said scornfully, "for silly old ladies to play bridge. Well, play, you want to play me a game of Crazy Eights? I'll win, I usually do, maybe you'd rather play Double Solitaire?"
In a minute he was going to have himself a fat case of Inner Ear Disturbance from too much head shaking.
"What does this mean," I said, shaking my own head, "No, you don't want to play Crazy Eights or no, you don't want to play Double Solitaire? Or"-an incredible thought occurred to me-"no, you don't have any cards in there, either?"
One final shake, followed by a "you got it" nod of affirmation.
"You're kidding!" Outraged, I began a negative countdown. "No Space Invaders, no Asteroids, no Galaxia, no pool table, no pinball, no darts-"
"No game room."
"No cards, no- What did you say?! No game room?" Unbelievable!
Now it was his turn for a negative countdown. "That's correct," he said blandly. "No game room, and no Boom Boom room, and no discotheque-as a matter of fact, we don't even have a jukebox on the premises-"
"Well what am I supposed to do around here all night?" I demanded angrily. "Sit in my room smelling flowers and munching funny fruit sent by some total utter stranger?"
♥ "Please, Daddy, this is important," I pleladed. "You've got to get me out of here. Because I need you, and you... need... me, believe me you do!"
"Oh, he does not!" said Annabel, thoroughly disgusted.
Wilking grabbed the phone out of my hand.
"But Daddy," said the phone on the way to Wilking's ear. We all three heard it. Two of us blinked. I winced.
"What's goin' on here anyhow?" Wilking asked me. "You call him Daddy, he calls you Daddy, hell's bells, let's all call him Daddy.
"Hey there, Daddy," he said into the phone, "this is Cap'n Splasher Wilking."
♥ By now, I was probably out of a job.
"Listen, yo listen to me," I shouted. "Either you tell Captain Wilking to put me on the next available flight to the coast or I'll throw myself off a mountaintop and it'll be all your fault!" I thrust the phone at Wilking.
"Kid's talkin' hogwash, sir," drawled Wilking in a voice that would lull a lion. "Forty years Soonawissakit's been runnin', we never had a suicide yet and we're not fixin' to have one now. So you can go on back to sleep with a clear conscience."
A look of disbelief, followed by "Nighty-night to you, too, sir," concluded the conversation.
Gently, he replaced the phone in the cradle, then, not so gently, gave me a knuckle rap on the head.
"I got one or two things to say to you, young feller. Thing one is you daddy, and me, and Sis, here, all agree..." without even knowing what she was agreeing to, "Sis, here," alias my daughter the fink, nodded heartily, "that you are stayin' in this camp whether you like it or no. Thing two is before you can throw yourself off a mountain, you gotta learn how to climb one."
♥ On and on they went, with the winks, and the titters, and the burbles, and the flutters, and the ogles, and the gurgles and the murmurs and the sighs-let me tell you, I could have dropped dead without their noticing!
I'll tell you something else: In the end, I found my own way to Outward Bound; it was plenty rough. But being a possessive father incarcerated in the body of his twelve-year-old son, unable to prevent an assignation between his nineteen-year-old daughter and her slimy, sleazy new boyfriend, is a whole lot rougher, I promise you.
♥ They-a couple of youngish women in slacks and, including Tony, four men about Dad's age wearing open shirts-looked up from the blue papers they were all studying and studied me instead. Briefly, but long enough to see something they didn't like. My clothes, I hoped.
"I haven't unpacked yet," I explained, loosening my tie and removing my blazer.
"Really? We heard you came in last night on the five," said toneless Tony. Without so much as a "have a seat, Bill," he and the others went back to their blue papers. The problem was clearly deeper than clothes.
Have you ever been to a shunning? A Puritan shunning where nobody talks to the sinner or takes notice of anything he does-even when he opens his briefcase upside down, nervously looking for his own blue papers-and one Lampoon, two Penthouses, and a pink hippo fall out on the floor? No? You haven't lived.
♥ I checked the entire room, table by table, and the cafeteria line; he was nowhere to be seen.
To be seen were:
four Roman gladiators in breastplates and plumed helmets
a bevy of identically costumed show girls from one of those 40's movies (good-looking girls)
an enormous fat man, a bearded lady (real beard, I think), three clowns, and two midgets, all eating at the same table, the midgets sitting on those baby seats that fit on regular chairs-must be a circus movie
three surgeons in green coveralls, an operating-room nurse, and a lady bandaged from top to toe, one arm in a cast-a hospital movie
some grease-streaked G.I.'s in camouflage jumpsuits
one werewolf
a seven-foot gorilla taking off his head in order to eat a fruit-salad platter brought to him by his five-and-a-half-foot gorilla girl friend (I guess it was a girl-she had a dainty way of walking)
some regular people in work clothes (unless they were actors in a movie about regular people who worked)
and me, who was too hungry to wait any longer for Ray Ewald-word travels fast out here; by now he was probably captain of the shunning team.
♥ As I headed for the door, one of the show girls, referring to me, said, "What's he in?"
"Trouble, I think," said the Roman thoughtfully.
All actors are not dumb....
♥ By them, this proposition (I use the word advisedly, and you'll soon see) was a definite 10-4-until they swaggered into Marty's and discovered its sole occupants, other than the bartender, were not what they'd been mistakenly led to expect.
"Muskrats!25" Tough Tiddly was disgusted.
"Male muskrats!" The Jolly Green Grape was even more so.
"You thought we were seat covers26?!" gasped Duck.
"With girlie voices and handles like Squeaky Bird and Bibi, what else would we think?" growled Tough Tiddly.
"Gosh darn!" I exclaimed, smacking the tabletop. "That never occurred to me."
(It probably should have, too, but when all your energy is going into acting like a twelve-year-old boy, it really never crosses your mind you might be taken for a seat cover.)
25children
26attractive girls
♥ "Look Bill, when you told Peggotty Horn I was a Killer Cream Puff-did you make that up, by the the way? It's perfect-"
"You're not like that, I'm sure you're not, I know you're not!"
"No"-she appreciated the compliment, I could tell by her eyes-"but to make it in this job, I should be. Now, thanks to you, everybody thinks I am and will treat me accordingly-with a great deal of respect that I'm actually not entitled to at all."
♥ Whew, that's good. Not that I could marry her anyway, I'm already married... to my MOTHER! Ye gods, I don't want to be married to my mother, I don't care what Freud says. I mean, I love her a lot, but I don't want to be married to her and I'm sure she won't want to be married to me either when she knows who I am, but if I tell her, here we go again with the littler men in the white coats-
♥ "Oh!" she exhaled with relief; then, imitating me earlier, she snapped her fingers. "Just like that? You can make up your mind just like that?"
Wouldn't Dad? Of course he would. Besides, he wasn't there to ask. I'd just have to stand on my own two feet and make up my own two minds.
♥ The words were convincing, but the tone reminded me of Duck the day he told me he thought his voice was changing so fast he wouldn't be able to do the Metropolitan Opera broadcast but I shouldn't worry, it wasn't the end of the world-when I knew it temporarily was.
♥ Having delivered this dour parting shot, he took off, leaving me with a whole bunch of thoughts that bugged me all day and half the night. Such as:
If you give the impression of being ambitious, aggressive, a strategic planner, in other words, a killer, it's as good as being one-better maybe, because you don't have to really be that way, you can remain a nice person who's just pretending. Like Miss Moon. Like Dad?
WHAT ABOUT DAD? Ty had him pegged as a second banana and acted disappointed and hurt when (thanks to Miss Moon's spies and my goof with Peggotty Horn) the company pegged him as a first banana and rewarded him accordingly. Is this because Ty is a deposed first banana himself, and jealous? I sort of don't think so-I stick by my first impression of Ty: a really nice guy... which would make him a second banana who got deposed-because he wasn't good enough at pretending? But if this is true, then Ty is disappointed in Dad because he thinks Dad was a first banana and a killer all along.
But was he, is he? Or is he just a terrifically successful pretender? When you come right down to it, what's the difference between the two? And who's to know which of the two you really are?
Only your wife, apparently, because according to Ty, you can't trust anyone else. Not even your kids, apparently, because why else would I be sitting in my Bev Hills hotel room at three in the morning asking myself WHAT ABOUT DAD?
More to the point, WHAT ABOUT ME? On a banana scale of 1 to 2 (first banana and second banana being all there is), I'd have to rate myself at least a 14 in one of my rare assertive moods, and somewhere in the high 30's otherwise. With a personality like that, how long can I go on fooling all of the people all of the time? Even more to the point, how long do I want to?
♥ "Yes, a chauffeur. Available at all times, night or day, beginning with four o'clock this afternoon. As you may have heard, I'm in the market for a house here, and I want to check out some of the better neighborhoods, so could you please get me someone who really knows his way around," because I don't. It's all I can do to find my room.
Well, folks, at four o'clock on the dot, a nine-hundred-year-old Englishman in a black suit and tie, white shirt, leather gloves, peaked cap-the works-was waiting for me in front of my Mercedes.
I drew Bob aside. "Is that my driver?"
"No, sir," corrected Bob, pleased as punch at having catered to another of my whim on such short notice. "That's your chauffeur. His name is Barkham."
(Barkham. Can you believe it-Barkham?!)
A piece of incidental intelligence: In Hollywood, if all you want is a plain, ordinary garden-variety driver who looks and acts like a regular person, don't' ask for a chauffeur. A chauffeur is a driver with in idiotic name in an idiotic costume who makes you sit in the backseat-where you feel like a jerk-and is so stultifyingly boring and snobbish you fall asleep before you've seen even one third of Beverly Hills, let alone Brentwood, Westwood, Bel Air, or Pacific Palisades.
Conclusion: Power has its pitfalls.
♥ "Couldn't I just have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich?" I asked the waiter.
"But of course, Mr. Andrews," he said, rushing off.
Ten minutes later, which even for HoJo's is the speed of light, he rushed back with a nine-dollar (!) Peanut Butter Platter: four dainty, crustless, toasted (I hate toasted, it's too runny) sandwich morsels surrounded-practically engulfed-by bushes of parsley, delicate carrot frond and radish rosebuds. When I want a garden, I'll ask for a garden!
♥ On short detour up Squangit River-which seemed vaguely familiar-Bains pointed out rope dangling from tree branch overhanging rushing river. Any takers? he challenged.
There were three possibilities: 1) Swing out far enough to dive safely into fathomless pool of glacially cold, clear water. 2) Swing out only far enough to dash yourself to death on jagged rocks protruding from turbulent water directly below. 3) Sit humiliated and shivering on bank while everybody else played Tarzan and called you chicken-which Bains pointed out was what my dad had done 30 years ago. (He didn't have to tell me-I suddenly remembered it all too well.)
♥ Katahdin is highest mountain in Maine. If afraid if heights, don't look behind you. Forget about lost canteen-death by dehydration is preferable to death by free fall. Besides, dehydration is impossible in Maine, it's The Land of the Summer Monsoon-a feature rarely disclosed in camp catalogues.
♥ Wed. and Thurs. were full of meetings, screenings, and the usual dailies in the afternoon. Having to watch the same scene over and over again got pretty
interesting on Thursday when we had to watch a man and a woman take off all their clothes and make love in a wheat field over and over again.
boring after a while, but don't worry, I didn't ho-hum any more than anyone else
Quite a lot less, in fact. In fact, someone who usually has to get a grown-up to walk me into a R-rated flick, it was all I could do not to oh-wow! through the whole thing.
♥ After a while I gave up. Said good night. Found Barkham. Went home to the hotel. Looked at myself in the mirror for a long, long time. Then reached out and touched the image of my face. Don't be sad, I told myself. At least now you know what it feels like-loving. That's something, anyway. And tomorrow, I lifted my chin, tomorrow...
♥ (Annabel as a daughter is merely a continuing responsibility. Annabel as a sister sinks!)
♥ Good-Bye, Ellen, hello Mom?! Forever?! It was unthinkable. So unthinkable, I'd avoided thinking about it altogether.
But you really must, I told myself. You've got to begin at the beginning and think it through, all through. From the beginning...
Well then: I have been given (by whom and for whatever reasons I suppose I'll never know) a new lease on life, which in my case means the chance to become what everybody, even Ellen, already believes me to be: Willy Winner. Let's hear it for Willy Winner!
"If I'd only known then what I know now," people are always saying. Okay. For me, Then has become Now, and Now will become thirty brand-new, born-again years to whip the world into shape (funny word, whip-is that what I mean?)-how bad can that be? I'm already number-one jock in the camp and I betrayed my best friend in the bargain-congratulations, Willy, you're on your way.
Another crack at Varsity track, another crack at college boards, college interviews-Yale this time around. Do they still have Freshman mixers?-poised, this time around. Do they still have senior dances?-who this time around? Who do I take? Anybody I want, they all want me. I want Ellen. Not this time around.
But I want Ellen. To sit across the dinner table, to share the little triumphs and sometimes little losses. To love me and to love. Not this time around.
I want to walk my daughter down the aisle. But I'm not going to be the father of the bride. I'm going to be the brother of the bride, this time around.
I want to be a wiser, kinder father to my son. Too late, Willy Winner, too late...
I cried, then. Alone on a stump (in full view of nobody, thank God), the Soonawissacamper of the Week cried-isn't that something? Cried buckets for the thirty misbegotten years that lay ahead and the thirty irretrievably behind.
♥ This is a gosh-darn mess, I said to myself. (Well, that's approximately it-what I actually said was a good deal shorter. One word, actually.)
♥ In full view of all the Andrews, Levines, and assorted others, he beat me fair and square-he happens to be a better player.
But not a better runner! After Ping-Pong, we paired up for the three-legged race and came in-well, let me describe it this way: When one person is running straight ahead and the other person is running due left because that's the direction his free foot is facing, it's extremely difficult to progress.
We not only didn't come in first, we didn't even come in last; about halfway to the finish line, we fell flat on our faces and just sat there laughing and scratching and hooting and hollering-Duck Levine and the panty-hose queen, joined at the hip forever (metaphorically speaking)-we never came in at all.
♥ "Well, nothing!" said Dad. "It's just the most inconsiderate thing I ever heard in my life!"
"Listen, Mr. Holier Than Thou," said Annabel to Dad, "what are you trying to do-make things worse? If I remember correctly, when that letter arrived, you never gave a thought to Mom's job either-all you were concerned about was having to live in Westwood!"
Dad looked as though he'd been punched in the stomach. "True," he he admitted, hanging his head, "I'm afraid that's true."
"Sweetie," Mom reminded Annabel, "he's only a child."
"That makes two of us," I said to Dad.
♥ The tension was gone, now, but not the sadness.
"Yeah, well, I wish you weren't," he said ruefully. "I want to be the little kid and you be the grown-up. I'm not ready. It's too hard," he said, storking on my pants-his pants! "Much too hard."
"Oh, no it's not," he said, trying to cheer me up. "You've already missed the hard part. What's ahead is all downhill sledding. I'm the one you ought to feel sorry for. I've got to live through all that rotten stuff all over again.
"I'd much rather be you," "I'd much rather be you," we both said at once, and for the second time in one week, I crashed to the ground. Storking is simply not one of my talents.
"Jeeze Louise, Ape Face, look what you made me do to my pants!" I said, examining a colossal triangular rip in the knee. I must have been in shock. I mean, after enduring hideous weeks of imprisonment in your son's body, not to mention his world, when you finally get you own body back, you don't complain about pants!
Ape Face had a firmer grip on reality. "Better yours than mine," he said with a wild and wicked guffaw. "Boy, am I glad that's over!"
♥ "But there's always the rest of the summer..."
A fleeting cloud crossed his face. "I can hardly wait," he said. "Is this place as bad as it seems?"
"The pits."
"It must have changed since your day, huh, Dad?"
"Not one iota."
"No?! Then how come you loved it so much?"
"I didn't. But over the years, I guess I managed to block out the worst of it, so when you wanted to go-"
"But only because I thought it would make you happy!"
"And guess why I wanted to go?"
"To make Grandpa happy?"
I nodded. "And if you send any kid of yours here, I'll break every bone in your body!"
♥ which led to
4) An indignant monologue from Ape Face on the subject of executive game players like Tony Crane and Ray Ewald, the loneliness of men like Ty Donovan who couldn't afford to trust anybody but their wives-if you didn't have a wife, you were really up the creek (it was phenomenal how much he'd picked up in only a couple of weeks!); and then some juicy philosophizing about how to survive in a business where the thing that counts is not what you are but what people think you are-as evidenced by Miss Moon's Killer Cream Puff coup which worked vs. Ty's indie prod pretense which didn't-
leading finally to
5) Ape's Bottom Line: What kind of banana was I anyway? It was very important for him to know, he said.
I considered myself only a second banana, I told him. Would this be satisfactory?
Quite, he assured me. Actually, it was the only kind he liked.