Billy walked down the hall that led to his front door. It was dark except for a flickering glow coming from the den. The TV is on, Billy noticed, but he wasn’t worried. It was late enough. His parents always fell asleep. Especially if the show was good. Still, he peered carefully into the den. Yep. There they were, his mom and dad splayed on the L-shaped couch like ragdolls, sound asleep.
They’d been watching that channel, the one with all the black-and-white movies, from a time his dad called “back in the day.” Billy found these movies very interesting but strange. There were no colors in back-in-the-day movies. Just white and gray and black. And the dads all wore hats, and the moms wore tight dresses, and the cars were big and roundish. And ALL the people had smoke coming out of their mouths as they talked. And they talked with these weird little sticks called cigarettes between their lips that had smoke coming out of them too. And people talked really fast. Plus, everybody seemed to have guns. They’d stand around and talk fast, with smoke pouring out of their mouths, and almost always after a while they’d all pull out guns, even the moms, and then the music would get really loud and everybody—moms, dads, grandparent people—would start shooting.
Billy had given a lot of thought to all this and had decided that people really had anger issues in the black-’n’-white times.
But tonight the black-and-white channel was showing something even stranger than usual. Billy could hardly believe what he was seeing, and he felt himself drawn to the screen. Without realizing it he had walked into the room and stood gaping: a gorilla—a really, really big gorilla, a big-as-a-house-gorilla—was standing at the top of a tall, pointy building. Not only that, but he was holding a regular-sized lady, and she looked like a toy in the giant gorilla’s hand.
And there were airplanes; funny-looking airplanes with two sets of wings, and the guys flying the planes weren’t even all the way inside of them—their heads were sticking out, like, in the air! And they were shooting at the giant gorilla with these log-sized guns tied to the front of the plane, and the gorilla was really mad, which made a lotta sense to Billy, and the gorilla put the girl down, and she was screaming, which also made sense to Billy, ’cause she didn’t have on a coat or anything and it had to be cold way up there, and then the gorilla grabbed one of the planes and flung it down and it crashed into a building.
Then some guy said, “We gotta rescue Ann!” and Billy thought, Oh, the gorilla’s girl’s name is Ann, and they are trying to save her from the gorilla. . . .
Saving . . .
Saving . . . Oh! Billy blinked. That’s what he was supposed to be doing. He was supposed to be saving Ollie. He tiptoed quietly back out of the room, past his still-sleeping parents. He couldn’t understand how they could fall asleep watching stuff this awesome, and he took one more glance at the TV. The gorilla was still raging. And as Billy inched down the hall, he could hear the big guy’s mighty roars. As he opened the front door as quietly as possible, he could hear the planes and the clatter of their guns that sounded sharp and fast, like a stick brushed across a fence.
And as he shut the door and left the house, Billy faced the great dark of the night. He knew what he was about to do was highly illegal, and big-time in trouble (if he got caught), and was maybe even gonna be scarier than all get out, but in that moment his mind had gone to someplace new. It was a place where pretend and real were all mixed up and he couldn’t quit thinking about that gorilla, because the gorilla looked like he was in trouble and Billy felt sorry for him. Maybe the gorilla had to get in trouble for a good reason. And he thought, I hope that was a real story. I hope that wasn’t pretend. And he wished the big gorilla well, and hoped he’d be all right.