The Pirate

In the spring of 1962 I was a child of ten years. Those innocent, sun-filled days were spent swimming and sailing on Lake Pontchartrain in New Orleans.

This particular day, my father and I had been sailing on his boat, the Interlude, a modest double-ended wooden sloop whose leaky hull showed its age. The Interlude was a noticeable step down the status ladder from the larger, newer, more glamorous boats which flanked it on the pier. Boats tend to be metaphors of their owners, and this was no exception. It was an unpretentious boat for an unpretentious man.

My father was dressed in his habitual sailing clothes, baggy khaki pants, a blue cotton shirt, and a dark blue baseball cap that covered his short-cropped head of completely grey hair. This attire was as close as he could get to his old Navy uniform, and he wore it whenever he sailed. With his omnipresent cigarette in hand, he shuffled down the concrete pier in a casual gait with me at his side. This quiet man honored simplicity and enjoyed the peace that followed a long, terrible war.

This rumpled façade concealed a complex and accomplished man who had witnessed more than his share of human suffering. The son of a country doctor, he graduated from Harvard Medical School in the late 1930s and then served as an officer in the U.S. Navy, in both the Atlantic and the Pacific, during World War II. By the end of the war, he was planning medical support for an invasion of Japan, where they anticipated one million American casualties. In 1946-47, he was stationed (with his wife and infant daughter) in the smoldering Philippines. Upon returning to the states, he left the Navy and specialized in orthopedic surgery. After several moves, he settled in New Orleans in 1952. Now he made his living teaching at Tulane Medical School, performing surgery, and working with crippled children. He sailed to relax.

As we walked, we approached a section of the pier referred to as the Visitor's Dock, where sailors from around the world occasionally stopped on their travels. Since New Orleans was the northern port of the Gulf of Mexico, salty boats and weathered crews frequently came straight from the Caribbean and Central America. Some of these boats were remarkably picturesque, more reminiscent of ships from "the great age of sail" than the sleek modern designs which populated yacht club harbors. This day, an exceptionally nautical-looking boat had slipped into the Visitor's Dock while we were out sailing.

"Look, Dad! It's a pirate ship," I said with great excitement. The boat was a gaff -rigged schooner about fifty feet long with a carved wooden figurehead on the bow. A live parrot was perched on a cross beam in the rigging. Freshly-washed clothes were hung out to dry.

"And there's the pirate," I whispered, letting my wide eyes announce the importance of the news. Coming down the pier towards us was the boat's skipper, a bare-chested barefoot gypsy, looking every bit like the Ancient Mariner himself. Never before had I seen such a character in person. His leathery skin held a deep brown tan set off sharply by his tattered sun-bleached pants cut below the knee. Long curls of grey hair haphazardly fell from under the bandanna tied around his head. On his shoulder sat a small, mischievous monkey about twelve inches tall, tethered on a leash. As we passed, the pirate smiled at us; his eyes sparkled. The monkey studied us with his small round head and big brown eyes. Despite my intrigue, I gave them a wide berth and tried not to stare, but it was difficult. My thoughts were now focused on the monkey.

I had seen plenty of monkeys before, mostly in the zoo, but I had never thought about having a monkey as a pet. We had a dog. Why not a monkey? It would be much more interesting. So I asked my father, "Dad, can I get a monkey for a pet?"

"No," was his immediate answer. After a pause, he anticipated my next question by adding, "They carry diseases."

I had heard my mother mention that monkeys occasionally carried rabies. I reasoned to myself for a moment: Dogs could carry rabies, but we had a dog. A vet could tell you if your dog carried rabies, so a vet should be able to tell you if your monkey carried rabies. And nothing (to my ten-year-old mind) could possibly be worse than rabies! I decided to give the monkey pet idea a second try. "Like rabies?" I countered.

"Yes," he answered in a fat tone. "They can carry rabies, but they carry a lot of other diseases, too. Some are weird viruses that we don't understand yet. Some of them can kill you."

I was puzzled by his comment. I wondered how my father, an orthopedic surgeon whom the children in my family jokingly referred to as "old sawbones," knew about weird monkey viruses which were still being researched at the leading edge of medical science. So I asked him, "Where did you learn about that?" He paused to take a long drag off his cigarette and seemed to be thinking about the question. In the interim I decided to speculate: "Did you learn about that in the Philippines?"

"No," he said, blowing out his cigarette smoke in a short breath. "I don't suppose there's any harm in telling my ten-year-old son," as if talking to a cloud. Then he turned to me and said, "They're researching monkey viruses down at the med school. Some of the more deadly ones are coming in from Africa."

Africa?!!! I may have been ten years old, but I did not need Joseph Conrad to tell me that Africa was mysterious. From what I had seen in school and on television, Africa was a wild, poverty-stricken continent riddled with starvation and horrifying diseases. It was also full of bizarre forms of life which defied your imagination, like ants the size of your foot and snakes as long as your car. I was not interested in catching any weird fatal virus from Africa, no matter how cute the monkey. I wondered if the pirate knew the danger he was in.

The fact that these diseases obviously concerned my father more than rabies made a huge impression upon me. His comments ended my desire for a pet monkey, but they were the beginning of my curiosity about the monkey virus research being conducted in New Orleans. My first real question arose from my dad's cautiousness: Why were Tulane's doctors not supposed to talk about the monkey virus research program?

Several days after the pirate incident we had a substitute teacher at school. In the middle of the day she turned her attention to science and started talking about germs and diseases. She reviewed the basics about how germs caused diseases and how our bodies fought back. She...