My name is Morgan. As for my last name, shit, I had dozens of them. Make up one. Amuse yourself. Some members of the press know me as Morgan the Cunt-knife. I’m sure you’ve seen me on TV, in the newspapers. You probably have a friend of a friend who’s liked me on Facebook. I’m being tried for stabbing my boyfriend, Lee, three times before severing his carotid artery. How did I know it was his carotid? I took a guess. I got lucky. It was a red rush.
I disowned my mother when I was fourteen.
Do you buy that?
My name is Morgan Simpson.
Jail makes everything so unreal. Maybe I’m unreal. Like I’ve been having this recurring dream. I’m in this holding cell all by myself. Maybe a kind of solitary confinement. And I’m being guarded by a gorilla. Sometimes I put my face right up to the bars and imitate him, mock him. Just to make sure he’s not a human in disguise. I snort or frown or grit my teeth. I say, You wanna play with my shit, nice gorilla?
Whenever I say that, the gorilla charges me, shaking the bars of my cage, slipping its furry hand through, trying to swipe me. It narrowly misses my face. I say, Back off, stupid monkey.
All men are stupid monkeys. But not all gorillas are men.
Some gorillas spend their time getting fucked by other gorillas.
I don’t call the shots around here.
Sometimes I daydream about my guard-gorilla and how fucked up it is that I’m its prisoner. It should be the other way around. I have a higher I.Q. and I can get bananas without having to climb trees. I often daydream about the gorilla after I have sex with one of the female guards, a stout, foul-mouthed divorcée named Henrietta. She gets me free cigarettes and extra tampons and computer privileges. She says my pussy tells her secrets. I say, Like what secrets?
She says, Your pussy says you’re guilty, bitch.
We laugh and roll naked over each other on the hard cold floor.
My gorilla is shaking its head. It’s a jealous mammal fucker.
At the trial today, the dog-face prosecutor tried finding all kinds of inconsistencies in my testimonies, like when I said I loved Lee too much to let him go, or later, when I said how much I abhorred him, the way I’d be pinned down by his huge size, his hot gorilla breaths.
Maybe there is no inconsistency. Maybe love and hate are the same lonely animal.
Sometimes Lee would taunt me in the shower. He’d open the plastic curtain with the little brown horses and men with riding straps and top hats on it, and stroke his cock, making me burn, and I don’t mean the soap-suds in my eyes.
Or the times I called him on my smart phone, telling him that I needed him right then and there. He was panting, breathless from having sex with that nerdy bitch who was trying to steal my banana.
He put the bitch on the phone. Told her to say Hi. She said Hi and giggled.
Now, whenever I hurt inside, maybe from some pain I can’t quite put my finger on, maybe from some abstract impression of a pain—I giggle.
It almost works.
In the courtroom, I spotted Lee’s twin brother, James, sitting next to his mother. He stared hard and long at me. Like when I told the defense that Lee threatened to bash my head in for lying to him, or insulted me by saying that my clit was an overworked traffic cop. Or that I had no right smearing shit over his photos with this other geeky chick at Palm Beach. The thing is she looked kinda like me. It freaked me out. Maybe her boobs were bigger, but I swear they were fake. I wonder if her pussy could talk. And what would it say? It would say, I wanna be like you.
And as for lying. Sure I bullshit people. Who doesn’t? Do you get what you want by being stone-face and admitting to pissing next to cherry trees? The thing is I lie so good that I believe my own lies. Then the lies turn to truths. So what it comes down to is: I tell the truth. It just takes me longer.
The prosecution shows the jury the knife I used to bleed out the truth from Lee. The truth was he really did love me but he was only an animal. The truth was his cock was a golden banana.
My gorilla is rocking himself outside my cell. His eyes are soulful and wet.
So why did I kill Lee you might wanna know, as if you really don’t.
I killed him because I wanted to be famous. No, infamous.
Infamous girls get loved forever.
I killed him because he fucked me up the ass without a lubricant.
I killed him because his cock was bigger than my daddy’s.
I killed him because I didn’t want to need him so much.
I killed him because somebody needs to be taught a lesson.
Somebody should take me seriously.
I am more than the sum of my breast implants.
And you know who you are out there in Twitter-land, in Facebook Zoo, you know that you really love me.
You know you want to sniff my panties.
The truth gets a different spin every minute.
The truth is that I’m in your face and you like my girl-animal smell.
Back in the cell, I think about all the good times Lee and I had. We used to party, I mean, the three of us. Him, me, and his twin, James. We dressed as gorillas for Halloween parties. Then we did it for all parties. People would say, Hey, here come the monkeys! One time we robbed a 7-Eleven dressed as gorillas. Just to prove we could do it. I lived on cold Spam and overripe bananas for weeks. I laughed and barfed. We got away with it because I was fucking a cop.
Lee broke my heart by fucking girls who looked like me. I am not a monkey.
I’m back in that insulated daydream. My gorilla is getting restless, is pounding its fists against the floor. It bangs into my cage.
I say, You can’t have me, you dumb gorilla.
I lean against the door. I pull back the latch just to check that it can’t open. It opens. It was open all along.
My gorilla takes off its mask. It’s James, Lee’s twin. He’s staring long and hard at me. His smile makes my blood run cold.
James always felt cheated out of everything. My impression. When I was with Lee, Jim wanted my space, my time.
Jim is just a messy gorilla who can’t apologize for his anger. In the small towns of the Midwest, his loneliness is just so surreal.
I am so jungle in a city of smelly-foot hypocrites. I am so scam-beautiful in a city of discarded- tampon lives.
Give me the death penalty. And clean up your own mess.
Today, I imagine the jurors wearing the faces of gorillas. Monkeys want truth and justice, says my chain-smoking girl, Henrietta, after another session of scorched-tongue jail sex.
Monkeys want to be loved for their blindness, their purity in mirrors.
The judge asks the jury if they have reached a verdict.
We have, the gorilla spokesman says.
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