THE ZOO STORY

It was a fine howdy-do and was known throughout the zoo, no doubt it was true, from cage to cage it was the rage, the lions in their pit were part of it, every rhino I knew and every hippo, too, were in at the start of it. It wasn't a plot but there was a lot of it.

The turtles in their shells, the baboons and the loons and the men who sold balloons could tell all was not well. It had cast its spell on the sick and well in the menagerie. It wasn't imaginary. They knew how the inmates of the zoo went through the antics animals usually do.

And it was true. Something was askew throughout the zoo. It started with monkeys' monkeyshines and spread then two by two to the gnus and kangaroos, the pythons and the bisons, the ant eaters and the skeeters and the cats and all the rats who enter free without paying a fee like you and me.

The monkeys were the junkies who first began to crash. Where they got the cash to buy their stash of crack and hash nobody knew. But every day as the zoo would close the jungle came alive with all that jazz and all that jive and the beat of stamping feet and the smoke of a toke of poke, a cough and a choke and coke would soak the veins and befuddle the brains and the fur would fly as birds got high not in the sky but in their nests and sometimes guests would join the quest for a shot of pot. And the pelican went psychodelican again.

The laughing hyena would laugh a lot and the coyote hooked on peyote would howl and the owl would who-who-hoot and shoot and the fawn would get it on from dusk to dawn and this would go on until all the drugs were gone and then they'd have to wait for the next supply to get high again.

Too-da-loo. See you at the zoo.