FUNKY GORILLA It’s been a long time since the Funky Gorilla was on the loose. Actually, the Funky Gorilla was the creation of an old friend, Dennis Byrd, who retired a few months ago after a long career in journalism. I met Dennis a few months after I got out of the Army Security Agency and went back to work for the Texarkana Gazette. He was a journalism student at Henderson State in Arkadelphia, Arkansas, and was working for the paper during the summer. One of his assignments that summer — an assignment that I believe demonstrated his good nature — was about panhandlers on the streets of Texarkana. Dennis was to pose as blind man, selling pencils on the street. He developed a few days’ stubble, put on shabby clothes and sunglasses, and took his box of pencils and cane and found a spot on a downtown sidewalk. I suppose the project was doomed from the start because police officers, who had been made aware that the “blind man” was actually a reporter, would drive slowly down the street and make loud jokes about him. It was a hot summer day and the sidewalk heated up, making sitting uncomfortable for the now very sweaty “blind man.” Finally, after about eight hours, he regained his sight and closed up shop. His take for his eight-hour ordeal — $2.19, or roughly 27 cents per hour. Over the summer, Dennis and I became good friends and when I decided I had nothing better to do, he suggested that I go to Henderson, where he was certain he could get me a paid position as sports editor of the Oracle, the campus newspaper. A few years later when there was an opening for a news editor at the Gazette, he talked me into leaving the sports editor’s job at the Big Spring Herald and coming back to Texarkana. I’m not sure whose idea it was, but a year or so after I moved to Texarkana, the nightside staff, both editorial and composing, began to have regular parties on Thursdays after we put the paper out. For several months, most of the parties were held at my house — and that’s where the world, or at least one small part of it, was introduced to the Funky Gorilla. After a few beers and a lot of ol’ time rock ’n’ roll got him loose, Dennis began to dance, which was a sight in itself — a bald, 295-pound former All-State lineman moving like one of the Temptations on steroids. As the music got faster, Dennis danced back through a door into another room, then bounced two or three times and leaped high into the air, sailing across the living room to come down — WHOOOM! — shaking all the furniture and making me worry about the strength of the floor. With everyone staring wide-eyed and with our mouths gaping open, he grinned and said, “That’s the Funky Gorilla.” The Funky Gorilla was caged, at least in my house with its old wood floors, but it did reappear several times more at parties in groundfloor apartments with carpeting, carpet pads and concrete floors.
Posted on: Fri, 31 Oct 2014 20:06:34 +0000
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