The Monkey Boy of Puerto Vallarta

It was another July late afternoon in the tepid waters of a Mexican resort pool. It had been a punishing day in the tropics with the humidex courting, wooing and winning that trophy of 40 degrees Celsius. The pool seemed like the only logical place to be. Around fifty Mexican families apparently agreed with us: the water was thick with splashing, squealing, playing children of all shapes and sizes from all over the country and their happily wading parents.

"The winter is when us Canadians usually come down here to get away," the rapid fire Air Canada Vacations representative on the bus had explained to us as the bus took us from the airport to the resort. "But in the summer the Mexican families have their vacations. You are going to be out numbered." The thought was was fine with me. I would prefer to be the foreigner in a Mexico full of Mexicans than any alternative.

I liked the massive vacationing extended families. The aunts and uncles and grandmothers and the hoards of children. I liked hearing Spanish everywhere and feeling like the odd man out. I enjoyed the opportunity to try out my rusty and mediocre Spanish. In fact, just a few days before in that very pool I had commissioned in their own language two young Mexican boys (who had been, like earnest assassins, snooping around the pool for days with their swimming goggles, black shirts and water guns) to take a hit out on Sonia. Nodding seriously, they willingly obliged and soon were chasing my squealing girlfriend around the pool. This is of course the type of magic from which only the purest cultural exchange is made.

So, on that lazy afternoon we were splashing here and there, hanging out in the shade here, or in the sun over there, and plotting our current position in opposition to whatever group of children was currently splashing the most at the time. Sometimes we would seek shelter up against a very small island with straight tiled vertical walls they'd built in the pool. This was a good traffic block for youthful splashing swimmers so we often found ourselves around it. The circular raised area was perhaps five feet from end to end with some earnest tropical looking plants growing there.

We happened to be against that small island when a young and kind of tubby white child swam over, clung on to the side of the island and with great effort hauled himself out of the pool. Once up on the island he began hooting like a monkey and running around the island's tiled perimeter. He was very earnest about his play.

Soon we began to get worried about the monkey boy. Even ten minutes on, he was still hooting like a monkey and circling around the trees on his miniature island. His blue eyes were earnest. His face showed no trace of a smile. You could tell that in his mind he had become monkey.

At one point he bent down and started picking up straws someone had discarded in the dirt of the island and ooking at them. I was making my way over to him to ask if he had parents around, but a Mexican woman made her way over to him first. "Hey, mate!" she said in an incredible Cockney accent. "Those are dirty! You need to put those dirty things down!"

"Ook, ook, ook!" said the monkey boy and he obligingly tossed the straws back into the dirt and resumed his circular arm-waving dance about the plants of monkey island.

It was my turn. "Do you have parents here?" I asked when he was at the closest point in his monkey orbit. He stopped, looked at me funny expression and gestured toward some pale fellow stretched out on a resort chair at the far end of the pool. "That's my cousin!" he explained.

Assuming that all was okay, we shrugged and continued swimming. More time passed with us hearing the occasional "ook!" out of the child as he continued to play his engrossing primate game. At one point we started to notice Mexican families here and there were looking at us with mixtures of curiosity and concern. "Why are they looking at us?" I asked. We looked around and realized we were the only white people in the pool and then it slowly dawned on us. "Oh my god," Sonia whispered. "They think he's our son!"

At first I laughed at the absurdity and delight of the notion. To think this was our child! Even though he was the only white child in the pool, could he be ours, just based on appearance? Well, I suppose that wasn't too outlandish.

But would a son of mine act that way? Then out of the blue I remembered Grade 7 and my very first dance.

Oh god. Yes. The apocalypse of my very first dance at junior high school.

I don't know what kind of la la land I was in at the point. Was it that I wasn't hormonally ready for the social phenomenon? Was I just wanting to sabotage the next two years of my life? All I know is that when the first slow dance began and the disco ball started to turn I - all by myself - meandered and wove my way through the crowds of slow dancing people - my arms spread wide like the moving points of the disco ball light were snowflakes I was trying to catch. I was mesmerized. I was hypnotized. I was doomed. This solitary act got me dubbed Space Boy for the next two years and endlessly teased.

I stared at him in shock. Yes, monkey boy could have been my son.


After Sonia pantomimed to the Mexican families that the child was not ours, I approached him. "Are you doing okay here?" I asked.

"Yes," he responded in a very serious British accent.

"Is there anything you need?" I asked.

"Well," and he looked down and then looked up shyly, "do you think you could push me on a floaty a bit?"

"Um, sure," I said wondering where the 'floaty' was, but he cannonballed into the water and soon was back with a blue flotation mat.

And as he laid on its top and clutched on tightly, I pushed him away from Monkey Island into the teeming hoards of Mexican children. And he swam back laughing and we did it a bunch of times. Meanwhile I'm sure the Mexican families were thinking "Why in God's name did she say that boy was not theirs when clearly he is???" after which they probably shrugged and thought "There is no understanding Americans."

Girl and Dog