The actor-author can often be a dicey proposition—sometimes you get lucky and end up with something delightful, like Tina Fey’s thoughtful and funny memoir Bossypants. But more often than not you end up way down in the other direction, what veterans of the field call “Sean Penn territory.” And while we would certainly never encourage an actor as talented as, say, Vincent D’Onofrio to hang up his acting boots for a bit and turn to text, we have to confess: The man tells the sort of beautiful, haunting monkey shit story that the American literary public is obviously clamoring for.
This is per D’Onofrio’s Twitter account, where he took some time today to tell an apparently well-worn story about a series of bad experiences at a Florida “petting zoo” for monkeys. (D’Onofrio doesn’t remember the name clearly, but Miami’s Monkey Jungle seems like a potential candidate. To put it lightly, the young Vincent did not enjoy his time there; the story is less about its plot, though, than about the force with which D’Onofrio evokes the ever-present sense of the monkey shit surrounding him. (It doesn’t hurt that we found ourselves imagining it in Wilson Fisk’s eerily calm drawl. “But it was severe torture for me. The amounts of monkey poo everywhere was unbearable. We walked through the poo, on the poo, in the poo for the whole visit..”. It’s really the Apocalypse Now of monkey shit parables.)
Anyway, Mr. D’Onofrio: We know you’re busy promoting your new Western The Kid, and teasing the broken hearts of nerds who want Daredevil back on the air. But don’t hide your light under a bushel; if you’ve got more stories about primate crap stored up somewhere, it’s your duty as an artist to hurl them out into the world. Meanwhile, you can read a full version of the story here: