The only story Isaac ever told about his Hungarian father was the one in which he, during the Great Depression, accepted a monkey as payment for a debt owed him by a local shopkeeper.

Explanations as to how the shopkeeper had come into possession of a monkey in Newark in 1938 differed depending on the company in which Isaac told it. At a fraternity party that he had lied his way into a month before his expulsion from Cal State Northridge, he convinced several active Delta Tau Delta brothers that, up until their de-toothing and eventual extinction at the hands of State Troopers in the late forties, New World Spider Monkeys of the family Atelidae were native to the Jersey wilderness, and wandered into the city when pine nuts ran scarce. He called the shopkeeper’s motives for catching and raising a monkey questionable, saying that his father had found the thing too human for him to bear the thought of it ending up on the dinner plates of the shopkeeper’s gaunt children.

Other times he just said that the shopkeeper had a cousin who worked for the Bronx Zoo. He said everyone in Jersey had at least one cousin in New York whom he regularly begged for favors. He said that the Hudson River was the poverty line, and you knew it by smelling the water.

In all versions, though, the shopkeeper owed Isaac’s father for repairs to his geriatric bicycle. Though he claimed never to drink, the shopkeeper was a notoriously clumsy rider and crashed into a mailbox or fire hydrant or carriage-horse once a month as if on a strict schedule, always dragging the bent and dismembered bike back to Isaac’s father’s auto-repair garage. The garage didn’t typically fix bicycles, but so few people in Newark could afford cars then that Isaac’s father had scarcely a gasket to grease in the way of actual automotive maintenance. Unable to pay in cash, the shopkeeper compensated Isaac’s father with powdered milk and canned mushroom soup—staples that sustained Isaac’s family during that period—until eventually he required a repair he couldn’t spare enough of either item to cover. He came then to the garage with a cage under a blanket.

Though Isaac occasionally called the monkey a “thumb-footed, knife-toothed son of a bitch,” he also referred to him by the name given him by the shopkeeper: Jocco. He remarked on the creature’s eyes, actress-blue and disinterested in all but the soup they fed him. He gestured the length of Jocco’s arms in comparison to his stunted torso and mimicked the violent hiss he issued when anyone but Isaac’s father came within ten feet of him.

Isaac’s father, however, could safely cradle him like a pup and ask him questions in Magyar, a tongue he refused to teach Isaac for fear of making him strange in America.

Regardless of venue or audience, Isaac invariably ended his account of Jocco the Monkey by describing the way he swung from pipe to pipe across the ceiling of the tenement basement that had become his home, knowing its design so well after a month that he took to its plumbing even at night, lofting his woolly weight in broad arcs through the pitch darkness there, shrieking so loudly that he woke first-floor residents when he scalded his hands on heating lines, but never falling, always keeping his grip despite the burn for long enough to make the next rung.