Post #144096 by ZebraTiki on Tue, Mar 1, 2005 8:54 PM

It's all vague and badly lit, but allthe parents' drunken parties were held at my uncle's Hollywood hills home, in his home tiki bar that was the entire lowest floor of one of those homes up on stilts perched precariously on the hill. The party I recall the most was in full gear, and all the adults had reached that relaxed stage where kids could do no wrong. Someone thought that they saw a large monkey outside, scampering in the deep foliage, and soon everyone was hysterically looking for it. (This was the late 60's - early 70's, and exotic pets were rather common, especially in Hollywood hills.) Within an hour or so, the gossip about the monkey changed to the monkey being the size of a large dog (so we thought it was a chimpanzee) to it being a prowler, so the police were called. Some people were more upset by the police being summoned, and a few women were terrified that a 'wild animal' was on the loose. About 30 paranoid, screaming, and drunk people were what the police found. They searched in my uncle's car in the carport, where they found one of the guys passed out in the backseat wearing a caftan and a life-size papier-mache 3-D horse head mask ... he was brought inside to recover on the couch. Late in the night there were people locked in the three bathrooms retching loudly, and people breaking things in the kitchen, and probably more retching there. To this day, I dislike chimpanzees, those little party crashers. The extreme tiki ambiance of the basement floor tiki bar made up for all the adults behaving worse than any of the kids ever dared. Summary: tiki bar, chimpanzee, man in a caftan, papier mache horsehead, police, vomiting adults, typical childhood.