Portfolio Piece 2: Greed and Gorillas
Witches do exist in New York City, but Bradley Jacobs didn’t know that. He didn’t know a lot of things. An advertising executive, he only thought of these cackling green women, who in reality are not green and certainly not cackling, as potential mascots for pimple removal cream. In the evening, Mr. Jacobs was going to have wished he did a little more research on the nature of magic. This afternoon, however, he was walking on air.
Bradley had just won a new client in an up and coming payday loans conglomerate. His logo proposal was a big ugly green zeppelin. The client was unconvinced.
“That looks like the Hindenburg.”
“It’s green and magic, there’s no similarity to that death trap.”
To make sure his thoughtless reply wasn’t questioned further, Bradley slipped a few hundred dollars into a napkin and slid it across the table to a now very happy client. Bradley stood up, bowed slightly, shook the large Italian man’s hand, and left the diner they were meeting in, content that he would make quadruple his bribe on commissions later that week.
“That idiot didn’t even notice the other bills in my wallet,” Bradley chuckled to himself as he left the rusty brown building. He came up to an intersection, and his day was almost ruined right there when he jaywalked and narrowly avoided a couple riding a screaming red moped. After he threw some violent slang at the young men, Brad carried on towards the ferry station, which would take him home to Staten Island. He passed a convenience store and saw that the price of cigarettes dropped. He debated buying a pack when his cell phone buzzed.


He looked at the caller identification. It was his mother, no doubt wondering where he was. She was old and sickly, especially so now that she had been diagnosed with lung cancer. Bradley lost his father to this, and he wasn’t about to let his mother have the same fate, so he made her stay with him while she awaited surgery. While he loved her very much, her calls were grating, particularly today after his near miss with the queer couple on their silly bike. “Bradley, before you come home, don’t forget to pick up my prescription from the pharmacy,” Said his mother, who didn’t like to nag, but relished having a little bit of power over her son again. “You forgot last time, I just thought I’d remind you.”
Muttering that he wouldn’t forget this time, he hung up the phone with as much force as possible with a touch screen and looked up. In front of him, a wild haired old lady holding an assortment of shopping bags in one hand and what looked to be an encyclopedia in another stood staring at the puzzled businessman. He tried shoving past her, but with each step forward he took, she took a step backward, staring wide and unblinking into his bitter chocolate eyes. “What do you want?” Accosted Bradley, his fist clenched in frustration. “Nomen mea est Maria” Said Maria.


Maria was a witch, although she didn’t know this. She was under the impression that she was just another crazed vagrant living on the streets in Queens, so she tried her best to live up to these high expectations. She had all the common aesthetics of a lunatic in New York, bushy eyebrows, yellowing teeth, ratty black hair, and grocery bags filled with squirrel carcasses and empty alcohol bottles. What set Maria apart from the majority of the homeless community, however, was her elementary command of the Latin language, aided by the phrase book she always kept on her person that Bradley mistook for an encyclopedia. She put down her bags and picked up a dead squirrel, which she then presented to Bradley. “Quid Vides?” Maria asked, innocently.


Bradley stared perplexedly at the woman, he didn’t know what she had just said, but he assumed that she wanted money, because that’s what all of the bums have asked him before. “Do you want some money? Here, I’m feeling generous.” He took out what he thought was a ten dollar bill from his pocket, and held it to her. She curiously grabbed it as though she had never seen money before, genuinely impressed with the morals of the man who had just presented her a one hundred dollar bill. “Gratias tibi ago,” spoke the woman, who then flung herself into a bow, her ratty hair nearly whipping Bradley in the face. Upon her reposturing, he noticed that he hadn’t just given her a tenner, and this displeased the young man whose commission wasn’t due for another few days and who needed to pay for his mother’s medication.


“Look, you’re probably really excited about this, and I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to take that money back now, ok?” Bradley half begged as he quickly snatched at the bill from the unexpectedly agile homeless woman. She leapt back, confused as to why he wanted his money back. “Aha!” Maria thought to herself, “He was probably paying me for one of my squirrels! For this price, he shall receive the most delicious of the bunch!” She picked out a fat black squirrel from the bottom of the bag and tossed it to him, but he swatted it away, fuming now. “Give it to me now!” Bradley screamed, leaping at the increasingly puzzled bag lady.


She deftly sidestepped the regrettably clumsy man and resumed trying to offer him squirrels of varying sizes to no further avail when a novel idea popped into her mind. “Perhaps he doesn’t want a squirrel! I will get him something bigger!” With a flourish, she opened her phrase book to the “Animals” section and showed it to him, backing up as she did to avoid his violent advances. She tried asking him if he wanted a big animal, “Volisne animale magnum?” Like the previous questions, he responded in turn with confusion and anger, “Just give me my f*ing money back!”


Her finger slid to the picture of the gorilla. This is the animal that she would get for the angry man in olive. Not only was the word easy to say in Latin, (Gorilla) but it also bore a resemblance to him, and she figured that he would benefit from the company. She lifted up her great book like a shield and shouted, “Eris una gorilla!”


Bradley collapsed onto the ground and sprouted long black hairs from his chest, arms, legs, and neck. He looked up at the shocked bag lady, pleading with his eyes to spare him his current torment. Maria had mistaken her vocabulary, accidently saying, “You will be a gorilla” instead of “I will give you a gorilla,” as she had originally planned. He burst out of his suit and stood on his haunches, towering over the bag lady with her dropped jaw and the nearby pedestrians who were now fleeing in terror.


“Please turn me back into a human being.” Bradley implored, but his words came out in the form of terrifying growls and shrieks that only served to scare off more people, some of which were on their phones frantically beseeching the help of the police.


“Meus Deus!” Hollered Maria, who fell to her knees and prayed to Diana, the goddess of wild animals. Bradley was visibly frustrated, and he showed this by pounding his chest and screaming about his mother. Sirens could be heard coming in from the distance as SWAT vans were sent to dispatch the wild gorilla that was terrorizing the neighborhood outside of the ferry station.


This couldn’t have been for the bribe, could it? Thought Bradley, picking up the nearest moped and flinging it through the convenience store window. His father told him that he should be honest in all that he did, but his dad’s dead now, what did he know? He remembered the look on his ma’s face when she found out he cheated on his final math exam in high school. She wasn’t an emotional woman, that look she gave him when she received that phone call from his principal, when he saw that tear roll down her cheek, it was too much to bear.


A big black van pulled in front of him, and five large men carrying tasers and net guns leapt out of the vehicle and closed in on poor Bradley. They had been informed that magic may have been at play here, so the gorilla was probably an innocent bystander, but under no circumstances was he to be allowed to injure any innocent pedestrians.


“Stand down!” Shouted the largest of the officers. Bradley shrugged his shoulders, not knowing that a gorilla shrugging its shoulders appears incredibly threatening, with its arms outstretched above its head and furry muscles bulging out. The largest man shouted an order to the others, and they blasted out a giant net, pinning Bradley to the ground.


Maria stood there dumbfounded, and one of the officers ran over to her. He noticed her dictionary, and he took on a stern expression.


“It’s illegal to be carrying any book containing Latin in this jurisdiction, ma’am, you’ll have to give it here.” She didn’t understand his words, but she saw the man in the black uniform lunging at her book, and she sprinted away, never to be seen again.


Bradley tried explaining the situation to the police officers, but he continued to growl and scream at them with these horrifying gorilla utterances, and each shout was only met with a quick prod from one of their stun guns. The big man that just tazed Bradley looked over to his friends.


“Let’s call the zoo.”


“Are you sure? They told us that a witch could have gotten to him.”


“Yeah, but do you really want to deal with the department of supernatural affairs?”


“You’re right, let’s call the zoo.”


The gorilla understood everything. With one final lunge at freedom he yanked at the nets and tried to break free to the ferry, where maybe he would be able to get back to his mother. He ripped through the thick fibers, turned around to flee, and was immediately met with a hail of tranquilizer darts coming from the group of SWAT officers. He tried to tell them one last time about his mother, but before he could get out an articulate grunt, he collapsed into a deep sleep.