The Monkey Bite (Thailand travel story)

Thailand Travel Story

There were nine of us in total but most importantly I had my best friend William there who had traveled with his wife all the way from Hawaii. The night before Phi Phi island we were drinking rum by the bottle on Bangla road where all the real pandemonium happened. It was a road of drug dealers, cheap whores, ladyboys, bars, souvenir shops, and wild drunkards every god damn night. 

The nine of us were smashed in one little bar near the end somehow blending into all of the chaos. Girls danced half-naked on poles throughout almost every bar on the street. They were like little magnets: attractive from the back, repulsive from the front. Everything was for sale and nothing was off-limits. With the right set of eyes, one could get almost anything imaginable on that crazy fuckin’ street. 

The boat for the islands left early the next morning and we all came out looking like stroke victims when the bus arrived to pick us up. It wasn’t until lunch on the first island before the mood began to pick up and the hangovers subsided just enough for all of us to say yes when somebody pulled out a strip of little white hits of LSD.

The acid was digging a hole into the center of my brain by the time we arrived at monkey island, or so they called it. 

William found a fat monkey on a fence post drinking from a Mountain Dew bottle. Naturally, he gravitated towards it in the sand. A baby monkey, no bigger than the Mountain Dew bottle, crawled up William’s pants and snuggled on his shoulder. A crowd gathered around William adoring the cute little spectacle. 

The unnerving glare from his eyes told me that his brain was somewhere in wonderland also. He moved through the crowd nervously trying to force out a few awkward laughs on the way. As he started walking away through the sand with a baby monkey on his shoulder the mom bum-rushed him. She flew through the air like an angry little gremlin and bit into the back of his leg leaving a bloody gouge. Two more came flying past like little trash pandas swooping watermelon from tourists’ hands left and right. The little fat monkey sat idly on a wooden post a few feet off to the side of me sipping his bottle of stolen mountain dew watching his buddies terrorize the tourists. 

William, somehow managing to escape the chaos, followed me towards the boats and out of the chaotic planet of the ape’s attack. 

“How bad is it,” he asked showing me the backside of his leg.

As I looked down, I could see a perfect imprint of the whole line of teeth from the monkey’s mouth. Four long streams of blood ran down from each fang puncture and it seemed to be pulsating violently but I couldn’t be sure if that part was real or not. 

“It’s got a little blood,” I said trying to hold back the utter distress culminating in my throat.

The boat driver came up and gave Will a swift slap on the back before saying, “No worries, buddy. A few rabies shots at the hospital when we get back and you’ll be fine!”

Will’s eyes opened wide as his face tried desperately to form a smile. I imagine his brain was in complete terror while his body was trying desperately to display some kind of cool nature. From the outside, he looked like a complete psycho. 

I could only imagine the dark turn his thoughts shifted into as the idea of foreign diseases from wild monkeys coursing into his bloodstream. 

“I’m gonna die,” he said as he grabbed a snorkel from the boat. “Let’s go see some fish before I do.”