Jerry never imagined that a wrinkled old Spider-Man comic book could lead to death, mayhem, and, perhaps, worse. But if he were to look back at events, that was where it all began… the day he flipped that comic over and saw on its back cover the wildest of advertisements: a grainy, cartoonish ad that was all bubbles and smiling kids and promises of Fun! Fun! Fun!
An ad for Sea Monkeys.
It was 1972, and Jerry had never heard of such a thing. But there it was in print, like God’s own truth, with a heart-stopping illustration showing families of pink-skinned merpeople just hangin’ groovy in front of their underwater castle. They sure didn’t look like 'monkeys' but, then again, he’d never contemplated what an aquatic primate should look like.
What were these sweet wonders of the ocean?!
The eighth-grader down the hall had traded the comic to him for some old photos Jerry found tucked in his mom’s top dresser drawer of her looking all weird, nude in a field of wheat or something. But then, as much as Jerry loved Spider-Man, the web slinger was as forgotten as Tuesday’s homework once he saw the Sea Monkeys.
The ad claimed: Instant Pets—so eager to please they can even be trained! And, when it seemed the deal couldn’t get any finer, it even added: Customers must be 100% satisfied with the Sea Monkeys or their money will be refunded! For the cost of only one dollar (plus thirty cents S&H), he’d receive the Monkeys, their food, and the company’s guarantee. Jerry couldn’t believe the bargain; a spaz hamster cost two dollars and couldn’t be trained to do anything.
He returned to his mom’s top dresser drawer and rummaged around until he came out with a sticky dollar bill and three dimes. Carefully, he clipped out the order form and filled out his name and address in neat block letters, requesting the purchase be mailed posthaste to their apartment in San Francisco.
Jerry’s brother, Luke, was four years older and too cool to be impressed by much, unless it was rock-and-roll, dope, or long-haired chicks protesting the War. But when Jerry told him about the Monkeys, Luke’s fingers ran a riff of air guitar.
“That’s Cool City!”
A long month passed until the Sea Monkeys finally arrived. It was a Saturday morning and one of the few times their mom was home between her three jobs.
When the postman made his delivery, Jerry was so excited he felt like he could run up the ceiling. “It’s here, it’s here!”
The box was labeled all over with big, bold words: Caution, Live Organisms Within. Holding it, Jerry’s hands felt like they were filled with electricity. Luke joined him as Jerry tore open the packaging. But rather than any miniature monkeys, inside were three flat envelopes, each labeled with its contents: Water Purifier, Food, and Sea Monkey Eggs.
The electricity in Jerry’s hands fizzled.
Luke made a stink-face. “What the...?”
They looked at each other, wondering how tiny envelopes of powder could turn into frolicking merpeople.
Alongside the envelopes lay a pamphlet explaining the official method to raise and train Sea Monkeys. There was also a certificate of ownership, reciting the company’s guarantee of satisfaction or money back.
Jerry read the claims—just like in the original advertisement—and the excitement began to return. “Look, they promise our satisfaction. It must be for real!”
Their mom, Sharon, looked over their shoulders. “Oh, boys, I’m so pleased you have a new pet.”
Though she smiled, Jerry noticed that she also cringed slightly, and he knew she remembered their last pet, a spotted hamster she’d brought home on Christmas. The brothers were wild with delight when they first saw little Fuzzy Jive Head, but then it died several weeks later. The tearful devastation he and Luke expressed at their pet’s loss had not been truly genuine however...
What their mom didn’t know was that he and Luke had just gotten bored with lil’ Fuzzy. They forgot to feed it, and Luke had blown bong smoke at it with his friends one afternoon until the hamster fell over and never got back up.
“I hope you have fun with your Sea Monkeys,” she said. “I’ve got to get ready for work.”
Luke read the training instructions aloud, and Jerry cleaned out Fuzzy’s old home, a five-gallon glass aquarium collecting cobwebs in the back of a cupboard.
“I’m going to teach the Sea Monkeys to jump through a hoop,” Jerry vowed.
“I’m going to teach the Sea Monkeys to play air guitar,” Luke pledged.
A pounding at the front door startled them both.
“Open up, it’s Odie.” The voice was gruff, tinged with cigarette ash and crust. It was the voice of a man wielding a bit of power and whose greatest pleasure was to squeeze every drop of leverage he could from that advantage. The voice was cold smiles and greasy hair... The voice was the landlord. “Rent’s due.”
Sharon’s head popped out of the bedroom, angst caked over mascara and rouge. She motioned at the boys to be silent, but it was too late.
“I heard you in there. Don’t play games with me!” Odie said, louder.
Sharon bit her lip and went to the door, wearing only a faded bathrobe.
“Hi, Odie, is it that time already?” Her voice rose a notch as she slipped out into the hallway, closing the door behind her.
Luke and Jerry stayed at the table, hearing only garbled bits of conversation.
“I’m a little short...” her voice.
“…last time…” his voice.
“Please…”
“…maybe work something out...heh heh…”
Sharon returned inside and slunk into her bedroom. The boys fell silent, the morning’s elation flushed away by the crapper of reality.
Ten minutes later, their mom emerged in a striped waitress uniform. When she spoke, her voice was flat, and she didn’t look at either of the boys. “I’ll be home late after work. If you need anything, I’ll be at… Odie’s.”
After she left, Luke muttered, “He’ll get his one of these days.”
Jerry didn’t understand what his brother meant, but it sounded righteous.
They put their minds back to birthing Sea Monkeys like great gods breathing life into the mud of man, or some crap like that. Jerry filled the small aquarium with water, and Luke added the envelope of purifier. Together they opened up the tiny envelope titled, Instant Live Eggs, and poured the contents into the water. It looked like just a pile of yellow dust, like the kind you’d find under an unswept bed. Slowly, the minuscule eggs fell apart in the water and sank to the bottom of the aquarium.
The boys nodded to each other and watched, envisioning magical Sea Monkey shenanigans.
Nothing happened.
Jerry looked at the clock, then back to the instructions. “I guess it could take a few days to grow.”
Luke rolled his eyes. There was nothing to do but wait.
Weeks later, the Monkeys were lamer than penny loafers at the school sock hop. The so-called 'Wonders of the Ocean' turned out to be nothing more than microscopic brine shrimp, looking like curly pubic hairs dangling in green-tinted water.
The Sea Monkeys didn’t dance, didn’t smile, didn’t possess humanoid limbs or perform zany antics. Jerry couldn’t imagine how they were considered eager to be taught anything. The Monkeys just floated, and their greatest achievement was occasionally drifting from one side of the aquarium to the other.
“This is totally square,” Luke decried.
Jerry didn’t say anything. He was too upset with the Monkeys to even vocalize his disappointment.
Their mom was away at work again that day. Rain poured outside. Luke picked at model airplane parts, gluing together random pieces from different kits with plastic cement. The aquarium of Sea Monkeys sat on the table while a Jimi Hendrix record played in the background. Jerry reread the Monkeys’ instruction pamphlet and company guarantee for the hundredth time, trying to figure out what they’d done wrong in raising the bitty tots.
There was a lull in the music, and Luke filled it. “Hey, little brother, want to drop a tab?”
Jerry shrugged. “A tab of what?”
“Acid, man. LSD. Everyone’s doing it.”
“Doesn’t acid burn you?”
“No, turd, it’s not battery acid, it’s a mind-enhancer. I took one already. Everything’s faaar-out.” Luke showed him a clear baggie containing small squares of blotter paper. “You just put one on your tongue and suck on it until it dissolves.”
“Gross, I don’t want to suck on paper.”
Luke snickered. “You’re so out of it. You’ll never get laid, you know that?”
Jerry made a sour lemon-face and tossed the Monkeys’ instruction pamphlet at him. Time ticked by. He muttered and sighed. Chewed a nail. Hummed a Deep Purple tune. Cupped his head in his hands and stared off into the ceiling, counting water stains. After a couple dozen of those, he sighed again and started picking at Luke’s models. Pieces of airplanes, boats, and tanks overflowed a ratty shoebox and scattered across the table like the debris from some brutal massacre of toys.
Luke had gone silent, staring transfixed at the Sea Monkeys. “I’m trippin’ balls, little brother.”
“That sounds bad. You want to finish making this P-51?”
“Naw, but I know who does.” Luke fingered the aquarium. “Those Sea Monkeys are bored in there! That’s why they’re just floating around—they’re like us, with nothing much to do.”
Luke took a tube of modeling cement and squeezed it out into the aquarium.
“What are you doing?” Jerry shouted. He tried to stop his older brother, but Luke was stronger.
The glue floated on the water’s surface like an oil slick. Monkeys that drifted into it were suddenly stuck and squirmed to escape. Luke took the fuselage of a plastic toy helicopter and dropped it in the water. The helicopter broke through the cement surface and sank, carrying glued Sea Monkeys to the bottom of the aquarium.
“Yeah, man, see?” Luke said. He added plastic tank treads, airplane cockpits, wheels, rotors, and another entire tube of glue. The shrimp flailed, spasming. “Now they’re moving. With all those parts to choose from, maybe they’ll build a Sea Monkey car.”
Jerry stopped trying to fight Luke. Although part of him was horrified, another larger part realized it didn’t really bother him at all watching their mail-order pets get tortured. Truth was, it was kind of satisfying seeing those phony Monkeys finally do something, even if it was struggling for life.
“They are pretty active now,” he admitted.
“I told you they were bored. I bet their Sea Monkey car will be awesome!”
Jerry doubted that, but he shrugged his shoulders and went with it. “Think if we put wings in there, they’ll make something that flies?”
“Yeah!” Luke picked out a pair of airplane wings and, adding more cement, dropped the wings into the aquarium.
After five minutes, a jumble of model parts lay at the bottom, and the water began to congeal from the glue. The Sea Monkeys turned sluggish, and many sank.
Luke got angry. “What gives, man? We shared our toys and they’re still not doing anything?”
“Stupid Sea Monkeys,” Jerry agreed.
“What will it take to make them fun?” Luke’s eyes drifted to the baggie of blotter paper on the table. “Maybe…”
He dropped an acid tab in the aquarium.
It dissolved quickly, and the cement-laden water flashed in the radiance of a thousand rainbows. Streaks of purple light twisted around red tracers, refracting over emerald veins. Turquoise and ice-white spots flared and burst in sparkle explosions like raining fireworks. The Sea Monkeys animated and began swimming in long, swooping arcs. Those glued to the model pieces moved as one, dragging the plastic parts behind them. Other Monkeys circled each other in a double-helix spiral, while electric-blue flashes flickered in their eyes, and the comic book smiles and crowns and antics seemed at last to be realized.
The brothers almost fell over. Jerry didn’t know whether to laugh or run away, so he did both, and then returned to look closer. More bright fireworks erupted within, and the aquarium rocked gently back and forth as if to the tune of a magical song. Some Monkeys danced a conga line while others performed somersaults. Monkeys began to merge with one another. Where four shrimp squirmed only moments earlier, one larger shrimp appeared, the size of a mealworm.
It ended after the quickest ten minutes of Jerry’s life. The colors of the water faded, and half-dead Monkeys floated listlessly to the surface.
“Ho-lee Moses,” Luke whispered.
“Do it again,” Jerry whispered even quieter.
Luke nodded reverently and dropped in another tab. The aquarium reanimated.
The Monkey frenzy grew, and they swung in dance like a concert troupe. More Monkeys merged together, and even those that had already done so merged again, so the conjoined bodies grew thick and sinewy. The aquarium shook with carousel delight.
Luke and Jerry shrieked with laughter.
The afternoon passed, and their mom came home. The brothers hid the Sea Monkeys in their shared bedroom until the following afternoon when she was again gone. Then they pulled out the aquarium, and Luke dropped in another tab. Monkey shenanigans resumed, and the boys were joyous.
They lost track of how many times they doped the aquarium over the following months. Neither brother ever provided food for the Monkeys; they just dropped in LSD or random pills or cigarette butts from Luke’s friends. Rancid algae as toxic as nuclear sewage grew on the glass, but even that was beautiful when the acid-radiance began. The fluorescent green algae glimmered and flashed like strange Christmas light displays.
And in this environment—somehow—the Sea Monkeys thrived. They sustained themselves on the blooming algae, and their colony grew. Monkey eggs appeared in the filth and hatched into baby Sea Monkey mutants. The things that grew in the aquarium were nothing like the smiling merpeople Jerry first saw in the back of his Spider-Man comic. Instead, they were fleshy and tubular, like lengths of soft, pink noodles. Occasional groans rose from the mire and, more than once, Jerry thought he saw teeth materialize and snap shut against the glass.
Luke giggled and dropped in another acid tab. “It’s feeding time.”
The brothers watched as the Monkey-spectacle lit up once again. The water swirled in rainbow radiance, and the aquarium rocked back and forth like a record that spins warped on one side. Many of the Monkeys had melded together, transforming into slithering creatures, each with a hundred heads and tails. They still danced, but slower now. Fat, throbbing forms like red-veined slugs wrapped around themselves, forming trippy, ringed shapes.
Those shapes began to look very angry.
Suddenly, the rocking of the aquarium grew, starting to tumble back and forth like a wild, bucking horse trying to break its tether.
“Watch out!” Luke yelled, moments before it exploded in a kaleidoscope of dancing, singing colors. Both boys fell backward.
From the aquarium’s fragments, a Sea Monkey-monster stood, pulsating, shards of glass embedded in its body like the razor quills of some demon porcupine.
Jerry gasped. “It’s free...”
The creature turned to face the brothers, and they saw it as a gelatinous blob, maintaining the square shape of the five-gallon aquarium it’d grown in, like a quivering Jell-O removed from its mold.
The thing had a core of sloshing algae-filled water at its center, contained by the greasy, sticky jelly that composed its membrane skin. Mounds of misshapen plastic model parts were covered in squirming Sea Monkeys, and the Monkeys moved as one, splitting apart their own jelly mass, and casting out the shape of feet made from toy airplane wheels. Millions of Sea Monkey eyes blinked once across its body in rapid succession. The assemblage of its head was capped by the clear cockpit window of the model P-51.
It took a step toward them, then stopped, testing the limits of its movements. Even standing still, the body was never motionless—each frenzied little Monkey struggled in the greater form, causing the appearance of a television after the channel goes off-air, a wavering fuzzy static.
Luke moved to defend himself, grabbing a frayed baseball, then wavered between holding it out like some talisman of protection or pulling his arm back to throw it. He decided, and fired it hard at the creature. The ball shot through the air and sank into the thing’s chest, like plopping into thick mud. Tiny Sea Monkeys swarmed over it and the ball became part of its chest, bulging out like a red-stitched goiter.
A range of expressions rippled across the creature’s body, none of them happy. This was followed by a fierce cry as individual Monkeys raised their squealing voices together in triumph. Jerry shivered, the sound reminding him of a growling junkyard dog that’s broken its leash and is about to make the most of unchecked freedom.
The monster took another step toward them, and the boys screamed.
“Run!”
They raced to the front door and flung it open, escape beckoning in the hallway beyond. The monster followed, each step a wet squish on the floor, like a series of underwater farts.
Their flight was cut short; Odie, the landlord, blocked the way, jangling keys in one hand while he pounded at a neighbor’s door. A stack of moving boxes towered beside him, and Jerry recognized the signs of eviction. Odie stood between them and the staircase at the end of the hall.
The brothers shouted at him, babbling incoherently over each other. “Look out!” . . . “Run! . . . Get away! . . . It’s coming! . . . Oh-my-God, it’s right behind us!”
Odie whirled at them, confused. The boys’ panic was infectious, and he almost joined in making tracks, as most people do when someone runs at them, screaming to flee for your life. But he took hold of himself, hell-bent to not let any snotty kids tell him what to do.
“You brats keep your voices down, and no running in the hallway!”
Luke shoved past him, but as Jerry followed, Odie reached out and snagged him by the back of his shirt collar.
“I said, no running,” Odie repeated. It took a moment to recognize Jerry, but then he added with a toothy smirk, “And tell your mother I’ll be expecting her at my place tonight. Rent’s due again.”
His smirk changed to a muttering laugh, heh-heh-heh, like an old cat coughing up hairballs.
Odie had turned his back to the apartment doors when he grabbed Jerry, who jerked in his arms.
“Let me go!” Jerry yelled. Jerry saw it coming from behind the landlord’s back.
The creature had escaped their apartment and advanced down the hall, seeming to have mastered soggy ambulation. Strange things morphed from it, toys and weapons, as if the monster was cycling through available tools in a Swiss Army knife. Its squirming mass extended plastic airplane wings, and it seemed happy with this choice as it leapt into the air, gliding at them.
The flickering lights overhead reflected the sparkles of glass shards embedded in the Sea Monkey-monster, which also reflected in Jerry’s wide eyes.
Odie saw that reflection and spun around.
The creature slammed into Odie’s face, and glass shards pierced him. He tried to scream, but the rubbery beast wrapped around his face in a glob, suffocating him in jellied, pulsating brine shrimp.
Odie fell to the floor and rolled across the hallway, muffling wails like drowning under swamp ice. Sea Monkeys swarmed over his head, stretching against their gelatin walls as resolute as tree roots, trying to encase him like they did the baseball.
Luke came back up the staircase for his brother and froze, both watching Odie and the Sea Monkeys struggle against each other... Odie did not win.
The Sea Monkey creature stretched its blob-mass as far as elasticity would allow, reaching down the landlord’s torso. It then tried crawling backward along the floor, fighting to drag Odie away. But Odie was just too fat to be encased entirely by the Monkey-monster and too heavy to be dragged off. The creature retracted its tendrils, returning to its original aquarium-shaped form, and unglued itself from the landlord.
It alternated panting in exhaustion and hissing at the boys.
“Don’t move,” Luke whispered to Jerry.
Luke crept to the door Odie had stood at moments before. He took one of the moving boxes and tip-toed toward the creature. Faster than Jerry thought possible, Luke leapt and threw the box over it, trapping the beast underneath. “Now! Help me!”
The brothers wrestled the box as it bounced violently across the floor. They managed to close up each side flap, containing the Sea Monkey-monster within, and carried it back to their apartment, leaving Odie’s body sprawled in the hall.
They set the box on the table, and it shook for several minutes, while the creature fought for a way out; Jerry prayed the triple-ply, thick cardboard was sufficient to hold a murderous, drug-fueled Sea Monkey-monster within.
“What’s going to happen when it gets out?” Jerry whispered.
“Man, I don’t know,” Luke replied. “But we’ve gotta get rid of it before Mom finds out.”
“I wish I’d never ordered those crappy Sea Monkeys,” Jerry said.
He happened to look over and see, lying on the floor, a crumpled instruction pamphlet and company guarantee.
That night the cops came and went, citing Odie’s death as some random mugging-turned-murder. No one mourned him, and Sharon muttered something about karma.
The next day while she was at one of her three jobs, the postman carried away a triple-ply cardboard box marked: Return to Sender.
Inside, Jerry had slipped a note of paper, written upon in neat block letters.
I am not 100% satisfied with my Sea Monkey purchase. Please accept returned item and refund my dollar and thirty cents. Thank you.