Purple-assed baboons

Purple-assed baboons are both protected inhabitants of the Island and recurring agents of disruption in the book’s strange public spectacles. A legend ties their departure to the Island’s fall, so killing one is a capital offense; yet their conduct, and the human institutions that exploit or punish them, make them a persistent source of conflict rather than passive symbols.

Island History and Protection

The purple-assed Tripoli baboons were brought to the Island by pirates in the seventeenth century. A legend holds that the Island will fall when they leave, though the account does not specify to whom or in what manner it would fall. The belief has legal force: killing a baboon is a capital offense. At the same time, their behavior harasses the population almost beyond endurance, creating a stark mismatch between the severity of their protection and the burdens attributed to their presence.

The baboons’ place in Island politics is also reflected in its narrow democratic institutions. The Senate and Congress spend their endless sessions discussing garbage disposal and outhouse inspection, the only matters within their jurisdiction. For a short period in the mid-nineteenth century they were permitted to control the Department of Baboon Maintenance, but that responsibility was withdrawn because senators were absent. The animals thus figure not only in law and folklore but in the Island’s limited, ineffectual public administration.

The Hunt Breakfast

At the Huntsmen’s gathering in the Swarm Bar, baboons are caught up in a ritualized display of masculine bravado and domination. The Huntsmen wear black leather jackets and studded belts, show off their bodies, and periodically assault men at the gathering. Their drink, Victory Punch, is served from a large hollow gold baboon. A patron twists the figure’s testicles to make the punch flow from its sexualized outlet, while hors d’oeuvres emerge from its rear with a comic noise. The object turns the animal’s body into an apparatus for entertainment, making the scene’s treatment of baboons inseparable from its grotesque performance of power.

The gathering spills into a violent mêlée. Motorcycles careen, jump, and overturn as baboons and Huntsmen fight hand to hand. Some motorcycles, riderless, scramble through the dust and attack both groups. The animals are not merely decorative accompaniments to the spectacle: they take part in the disorder, while the machines acquire their own uncontrolled motion. The scene presents human authority and masculinity as unstable performances, with no clear boundary between organized ritual and chaotic violence.

A Baboon in the Nightclub

In the Manhattan Serenade episode, A. J. enters a New York nightclub leading a purple-assed baboon on a gold chain. Dressed in checked linen plus fours and a cashmere jacket, he presents the animal to the manager as an “Illyrian poodle” and claims it will improve the establishment’s tone. The description is a calculated act of misnaming: a disruptive animal is passed off as a fashionable accessory, and A. J. attempts to turn its presence into social prestige.

That performance collapses when the baboon defecates. A. J. calls it a “purple-assed cocksucker,” threatens to teach it not to defecate on the floor, and strikes it with a whip drawn from his umbrella. The baboon breaks free, climbs onto a nearby table and then onto an elderly woman, who dies of heart failure. A. J. answers the death with the excuse, “Sorry, lady. Discipline you know.” He continues chasing and whipping the animal through the bar as it panics among the clients and furniture. The sequence makes the attempted control of the baboon produce a larger catastrophe: discipline is invoked as a justification even as A. J.’s own actions drive the disorder.

Recurrence, Commerce, and Human Projection

The baboons recur beyond the Island and the nightclub. “Fats” Terminal has organized a purple-assed baboon stick from motorcycles, placing the animal’s name within another image of collective spectacle. Elsewhere, the narrator’s account of adolescents’ worldwide vandalism includes the release of zoo animals and the introduction of dangerous aquatic creatures into swimming pools. That catalogue situates baboons among the animals people encounter or mobilize in scenes of social breakdown, though it does not specify that these particular baboons are involved.

Other appearances sharpen the book’s shifting treatment of animals. An explorer recounts being initiated into the Agouti Society, while the adjoining account describes artificial respiration for a person incapacitated by curare. In another passage, the narrator describes an insecticide’s effects on cockroaches and bedbugs and the poisoning of a rat. These moments do not establish a direct connection to the purple-assed baboons, but they place animal life within the book’s wider traffic between human use, danger, spectacle, and extermination.

The book’s wider imagery also repeatedly blurs distinctions between animal and human behavior. In an account of a scalpel fight, a baboon assistant attacks the patient identified as the weakest party; elsewhere, an extensive catalogue of public disorder includes released zoo animals, while the Hunt Breakfast stages baboons and men in reciprocal combat. Such scenes do not settle the animals’ meaning into a single emblem. They show instead how readily people turn animal behavior into a justification for hierarchy, entertainment, or punishment—and how the resulting spectacle can escape human control.

Significance

The baboons’ importance lies in the contradiction built into their status. On the Island they are protected because of a founding legend, although they are described as a near-intolerable nuisance; elsewhere they are displayed, chained, used as a serving device, or drawn into violent entertainments. Their treatment exposes a society that can make an animal sacred by law and disposable in practice, depending on the immediate demands of ceremony, profit, or authority.

At the same time, the recurring episodes resist a simple division between civilized humans and unruly animals. The Huntsmen’s behavior mirrors the violence attributed to the baboons, and A. J.’s attempt to impose order in the nightclub intensifies the crisis that ends in a woman’s death. The animals’ presence makes the fragility of human control visible: the people who claim to manage them often reveal, through their own conduct, how little mastery they possess.