Wolfe, Reese. The Monkeys Have No Tails in Zamboanga (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1959) pp. 169.
An old friend, gone by and by, wrote this wonderful memoir a few years before I met him. He confessed he was an author when we worked together, but I did not read his work until decades later. Now I’m glad I finally read this part it; it may have been his most satisfying.
The Monkeys Have No Tails is Reese’s memoir of growing up and becoming a man. He told me, when I knew him, that he had grown up in the Berkeley-San Francisco area in a well-heeled family, an assertion confirmed in this book. I discovered I was vaguely familiar with his growing up years, as chronicled here, most probably because we talked about his early life when my wife and I visited him and his wife, Dorothee, and I started learning the little matters that underpinned our work. We were cultural attaché’s in Central America, he the older, I the younger (much younger).
Reese tells us in his book that he became a man at sea. That is what this memoir is about; that at the age of eighteen he left home and made it to the old wharfs in San Francisco where he committed himself as an apprentice mariner on a rusty old merchant marine ship. He thought it was the beginning of an exotic adventure but was soon put to work cleaning and polishing the entire ship, day after day, then later shoveling coal into the steam boilers. This is how came to sail the briny blue for countless weeks. He became overwhelmed with regrets when the fabled ports of call turned out to be a big disappointment.
He couldn’t get back home quickly enough.
In between, he discovered, among other things, that in Zamboanga monkeys have no tails but more importantly he learned lifelong lessons: who he was and who he wasn’t. He admired the first assistant engineer so much that he began aping him, but soon came to terms with himself, with who he was—and to return to finish up college in Berkeley.
He writes in a light and friendly manner and includes songs he sang on the ship’s foc’sle, strumming his banjo-ukulele to ease the long days on deck.
