Recense (realized)

I have just realized that, were circumstances to combine in just the wrong ways, I might spend the rest of my days in prison for a crime I didn’t commit. Sort of like the A-Team, I suppose, though, of course, they escaped and became Robin Hoods, which is one of many significant differences between them and me. Also, they’re made up, and I never wear makeup. My realization came shortly after learning that the gorilla suit I’d donned for a gag at a college craft and karaoke night was returned to Amazon, still slick inside with my sweat, and probably peppered with some skin cells and hairs, too. I don’t blame the person who thought of and bought the hairy outfit—hoping to replicate that 1999 Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris selective attention experiment, where you’re instructed to count how many times three white-shirted people pass a basketball to one another while three people in black T-shirts are also passing a basketball, thus confounding the scene a bit and requiring you to really focus—but I do wish she’d kept the costume.

The correct answer is fifteen passes. But guess what? Did you notice the person in the gorilla suit meandering about, then pounding their chest smack dab in the middle of the screen, then wandering off? I didn’t. Most people don’t, until the video tells you what you missed, rewinds, and plays the scene again, at which point the gorilla becomes utterly obvious, and, if you’re introspective, you wonder at how much else you’re missing in this world as you go about your tasks focused on outcomes and moiling toward economic ends that may or may not make you happy, and which may or may not leave you with enough cash to keep the gorilla suit.

So my friend returned it, and the Machine was none the wiser. Amazon policy states that such items should not be resold, but an article that has serendipitously just arrived in my inbox confirms what we all already suspect. “Amazon Sold a Used Diaper. It Tanked a Mom-and-Pop Business,” says the email’s subject line. The upshot is that the Great Middleman’s system is so vast, so prone to the unexpected (or expected but unpredictable) error, that their overworked, underpaid warehouse staff let through a returned soiled swim diaper and shipped it out to the next paying customer. That customer, justifiably “grossed out,” let the world know, and Amazon ignored the seller’s pleas to remove the review for four years, until this very article was published, prompting the Mercantile Behemoth to finally issue an apology and remedy their site’s brown mark on the product. But the damage was done, and the small company is now millions of dollars in debt.

So I’m quite sure the gorilla suit is back in circulation.

And while it’s unlikely that its new owner will run afoul of the law and ditch the suit where the police will find it, my fear is not entirely unfounded. A simple search reveals several crimes by men in gorilla suits in recent years.

There’s the simple matter of a guy in Tennessee surprising a little girl in her home. “According to police, the investigation revealed [that the gorilla] thought he was at someone else’s home and was looking for another individual.”

There’s the case of a Louisiana man inexplicably walking through a neighborhood, peeping in windows, then entering a home and hiding under a bed (and possessing methamphetamine). The police seem to have taken twin mugshots of the culprit. In one, he’s still wearing the smirking gorilla mask, though his eyes are nowhere to be seen behind the deep, dark holes. In the other, he’s looking forlorn and downtrodden (and with a black eye).

But we can only notice what we pay attention to. And we miss so much.

There’s the trio of Minnesota teenagers stealing Black Lives Matter signs and stomping and grunting on people’s porches.

There’s the North Dakota man chasing neighbors with a machete and threatening to blow up their apartment complex.

There’s the Ohio man driving around a peaceful suburb on a four-wheeler, scaring kids.

There’s the Kentucky man who held up a Kentucky Fried Chicken at gunpoint, threatening to kill the employees, and who fled when commanded to freeze, and thus died, shot by police.

There’s the New York trio, two gorillas and one chicken, who stole a bike and punched its owner in the head before making their getaway.

There’s the Texas home invader who made off with over $1000 worth of property and, as of whenever public interest faded, remained unapprehended.

Most of these folks get caught still fully in costume, but every so often, as in the last two examples, gorilla-men escape, and who knows what they do with the outfits? Some of them surely shed the fur somewhere along their route home, and when the authorities find it … that’s when they come knocking at my door.

I get that the probability of such a coincidence is astronomically small, and yet. What are the chances that I would land here on Earth in the latter half of the twentieth century and survive (perhaps even thrive) well into the twenty-first, where I’d write down some ludicrous ponderings that would make their way to you, also a near impossible cohesion of matter made conscious? Our very existence is far, far more unlikely than my imminent arrest.

And who are we trying to kid? Just since I graduated from high school (1989), and just in my country of birth (USA), with the advancement of DNA evidence, over one thousand people have been exonerated after serving time for crimes they didn’t commit. Nobody really knows, but conservative estimates suggest that about 1% of the vast US prison population is innocent, which would mean over twenty thousand people are languishing, paying for someone else’s crime.

So, yeah, maybe it won’t happen to me, but it’s happened to somebody. Maybe somebody who doesn’t have the same privileges I do, who belongs to groups that the dominant powers presuspect of criminal activities. And maybe “it” isn’t related to a gorilla suit, exactly, but given the sheer number of people on this planet and the vast and various ways we can harm one another, then not only can everything happen, everything has happened. Every impossible monstrosity of human cruelty or glory of human goodness, every unbelievable combination or inconceivable atomization (I’m just making linguistic antagonisms unrelated to, or preceding, sense; creating some new thing with words, sure that it all corresponds to a remote corner of reality). But we can only notice what we pay attention to. And we miss so much.

If I pause and think calmly, I figure that gorilla suit was probably used for a kid’s birthday or Halloween party or to mess with somebody’s basketball game, and the only crimes its wearer committed were of the dancing or punning kind, and the costume has likely been folded and stuffed in the back of a closet by now. But because you can never know, I’m writing this essay to establish my presumptive innocence. Which I guess is exactly what a guilty person would do.