Before the Big Game

"i wrote a page of pure unadulterated text
and i ain't looking back now that i've come this far
i can't stop or i might trip
so i must continue my long sojourn forward
For alas, such is the life of man and monkey."

So sung the goateed man who sat on the curb corner, his eyes shaded by the wide brimmed 12-gallon hat he wore above his reflective sun glasses.  He softly stroked his guitar as he stared into the bright light of the blinding sun, watching the skybridge that went between the courthouse and the jail.

25 stories in the air, a uniformed man prodded the manacled Gorilla in the back with his gun.  Slowly the Gorilla walked forward, his movements restricted by the footlong chain between his raw ankles.  Three police officers escorted him from behind, their assault rifles trained constantly on his head.  The Gorilla trudged forward slowly, head hung low.

The man with the goatee and the ripped denim jacket strummed his guitar slowly, watching as the black body of the Gorilla passed between the small slit windows in the skybridge.

The Gorilla continued to hobble across the bridge.  At the middle, the guards backed away from him, and he saw three more come out of the dark from the other side.  He tried to turn around, tripping over his ankle cuffs as he did so.  All six guards pointed their guns at his head.

"Sorry," the chief guard said, "but we have orders to not let you reach the jail alive.  We'll try to make this as quick as possible."

Beneath the sky bridge, the bearded man ripped a power chord off on his guitar.  The echoes reverberated through the ancient courthouse building and across the skybridge and to the prostrate Gorilla.

The Gorilla felt the vibrations of the music and looked out the window.  The guitarist raised his hat and saluted.  A surge of adrenaline rushed through the suddenly rising creature.  As he stood up, he ripped apart the manacles that knotted his hands together and started to beat on his chest in a steady and intensifying rhythm.

The guitarist snapped his fingers and the sun lowered itself so that it shone through the slits in the skybridge, picturesquely illuminating the raging Gorilla.  He then pulled off his shades and threw them into the air, and started out on an epic guitar solo, accentuated by the bass thumps vibrating from the Gorilla's massive pectorals.

"Shoot him! Quickly!" Yelled the chief guard, and all of the guards leveled their guns at the Gorilla and pulled their triggers.

To the bang of the gun shots responded the crash of shattering glasses and the slam as the floorboard dropped out beneath the feet of the still pounding ape.  The Gorilla fell, for five stories, ten stories, twenty stories, the hissing and whooshing of the air running past his ears intermingling with the rocking solo of the guy on the ground below.  Inspired, the Gorilla pounded his chest, and would have kept pounding his chest until he died.

Luckily, the Gorilla didn't die.  Just as he was two feet from the ground, his descent rapidly stopped.  A leg hooked around his leg, and he hung there, his nose hovering just above the concrete sidewalk that the guitarist was sitting on.

The guitarist plucked out the last of his solo, swung the guitar over his shoulder and walked away.

The Gorilla looked up.  He saw that he had been saved by a barrel of monkeys.  The first hung from the gap in the floor of the skybridge.  Below that monkey were one hundred more monkeys, linked by the bent arms and feet and tails in a humongous chain that stretched all the way downwards to the Gorilla, who had been saved by the power of the music that he had created and that had called his jungle bretheren to his aid.

With a soft thud, the Gorilla fell to the ground, and started running after the man with the guitar.