MR. MONK GOES TO DISNEYLAND
BY
BOB WRIGHT
AUTHOR'S NOTE: Although Bob Iger and Roy Disney are included in this story, their mannerisms and personalities as shown here are used for dramatic effect, and any relationship between these and their genuine mannerisms and personalities is purely coincidental. All other Disney personnel are fictitious and any relationships to actual employees are equally coincidental.
All utilized Disney characters are registered trademarks of The Walt Disney Company and/or Pixar Animation Studios. Adrian Monk and all related characters and indicia are registered trademarks of NBC/Universal, Mandeville Films, and Touchstone Television. And now, as always, sit back and enjoy the story.
The sleek station wagon cruised its way up the ramps of the parking garage, early morning sunlight glancing off its sides. It slowed as it reached the fifth floor, inched down the various rows, and finally coming to a stop in Section E-7. No sooner was the engine shut off than the passenger door burst open. Adrian Monk leapt out and started scraping away at his pant legs. "Never get it off, never get it off!" he whimpered out loud to himself.
"Mr. Monk, for the ninth time, it was an accident," Natalie Teeger climbed out of the car and strode over to him, "I had to turn or we would have been broadsided by that pickup!"
"Look at it!" Adrian pointed hysterically at barely noticeable coffee stain on his inseam, "It's irreparable! I can't go into the park like this! I shouldn't even be outside like this!"
Natalie exhaled a deep sigh of frustration. She tapped on the back window. "Julie, go dig out another pair of Mr. Monk's pants for him," she informed her daughter.
"Which suitcase?" Julie stared at the myriad of suitcases—at least forty of them—cluttering the back trunk.
"Number twenty-seven, compartment C," Adrian told her, pinching his legs tightly together. "Mr. Monk, no one's watching you," Natalie told him, pointing around at the practically deserted section of the garage around them.
"Oh they're watching, trust me on that," Adrian glanced around nervously, half-expecting people to pop up out of thin air, "And there's nowhere I can change, that much I know."
There's a…" Natalie stopped briefly as Julie pushed the heavy suitcase through the open window. "...bathroom right over there, I saw," she pointed to the far corner of the garage.
"I see," Adrian nodded, noticing it, "Listen, if I'm not back in ten minutes…well, remember me fondly, because this is going to be heavy-duty."
A response to this remark wasn't forthcoming from either of them. Adrian lugged the suitcase toward the bathroom. They'd been given a three week respite from their usual duty back up in San Francisco, and Natalie had suggested as a vacation a trip to Los Angeles area, and in particular Disneyland, which Julie had been hoping to visit for years. Ordinarily, Adrian would have had reservations about such a trip, but the mention of Disneyland had made him somewhat eager to come along. For when his wife had been young, she'd told him early in their marriage, she'd made special wish one time when she'd visited the park. A wish that one day a fair prince would come and sweep her off her feet. She'd written out this request on a piece of paper, she'd said, and hid it in a special place. "Only my true love will be able to find it," she'd told him when relating the story, "So someday you'll have to go and look for it. I just know you'll find it right away."
The sad irony of the story was that Adrian had made preliminary plans for such an excursion to the park just a few weeks before Trudy had so tragically died. He'd been too emotionally shattered in the intervening years to bother going himself. Now, however, redemption was at hand. If he could in fact find that piece of paper—if indeed it was still even in that park—he knew he'd be making Trudy's wish come true. The only king-sized problem was that Trudy had never given him any further information on its whereabouts. She'd figured any preliminary information would have given its location to him immediately. So the detective knew he was essentially working with a barren cupboard. But he was determined to succeed for Trudy's memory.
Once inside the bathroom, he locked the door, locked himself in a stall, sat down on the toilet—after first grimacing from the very fact that he was on a toilet that from his observations hadn't been cleaned for the last five hours—opened up the suitcase, and extracted a clean pair of pants out of the dozen or so he'd brought along just in case. It took him what seemed like an eternity to redress himself. Once done, he tossed his ruined pants into the trashcan next to the sink and unlocked the door—by leaning his covered forearm against the lock until it slid down. Too many people had touched it already, he'd figured.
"What took you so long?" Natalie scolded him when he finally returned to the car as good as new, "Mr. Monk, you've been gone fifteen minutes. It does not take fifteen minutes to switch pants."
"Well, you're not factoring in several factors," Adrian popped open the rear trunk and took out a large baggage porter's rack. He hefted suitcases 1-6 (labeled respectively FOOD, WATER, WIPES, CLOTHES, SUN PROTECTION, and MISCELLANOUS) and placed them on the rack in descending order. "Remind me to get some cleaner; I'm going to need to give the bathroom a good scrubbing by the time we leave," he informed the Teegers as he locked them into place one at a time.
"Oh this is going to be lots of fun today," Julie couldn't stop from groaning at the sight of the rack.
"Well we're not going to let it bother us no matter how ridiculous Mr. Monk might look dragging his stuff around," Natalie tried to force a happy face as she rubbed her daughter's hair, "We're going to have a great time today, really."
There was a loud squeaking sound as Adrian began rubbing down the windshield of the Saturn parked next to them. "I hope," his assistant added half-heartedly, "Mr. Monk, let's get going, the park's going to open in a half hour."
"Coming," Adrian followed them across the lot, dragging his rack behind him. His first vantage point of the area from the top of the escalator was not a positive one: there seemed to be countless seas of people converging toward the front gate, and he could generally only handle one sea of people at a time, for short periods only. As fate would have it, he knew, today was the opening day for Disneyland's newest thrill ride, one they'd crowed was going to set the standard for all subsequent thrill rides. Which meant there was no way in hell he would ever willingly get on it. Hopefully Julie wouldn't insist on riding it, he pleaded to himself.
He put an arm on Natalie's shoulder as the nearest sea of people swallowed them up. He didn't think he could handle getting lost. The sun was already beating down hard on them, and Adrian, dressed to the nines as he always was, had to strain to ignore the sweating feeling starting to overtake him.
"That guy, that guy over there, his right shoelace isn't tied the same as his left one," he pointed through the crowd.
"Where?" Natalie looked around.
"Right over there, can't you see it?"
"No. And what are we supposed to do, Mr. Monk, ask him to retie it so it does match?"
"It certainly couldn't hurt, Natalie."
"Natalie?" a black haired woman abruptly appeared out of the crowd, "Natalie Davenport?"
"Who…" Natalie looked puzzled for all of five seconds before breaking into a huge smile. "Sandy!" she exclaimed, hugging the woman, "Oh it's great to see you again! I thought you'd gone back east!"
"We did," the woman was equally glad to see her, "It's been so long. How've you been?"
"Good, and bad," Natalie admitted, "This is my daughter Julie," she gestured toward her, "And this is my boss Adrian Monk, maybe you've heard of him."
"Oh yeah, we've heard of him," Sandy shook Adrian's hand before he could do anything about it, "They said on the news he helped stop that bomb threat in San Francisco."
"Yes, that was me," Adrian snapped his fingers frantically at Natalie for a wipe, "You should also thank my brother, he actually defused the bomb—indirectly, sort of. It's Sandy Kopecki, I presume?"
"How'd you know my married name?" Sandy looked amazed.
"It's engraved on your wedding ring there," Adrian pointed at it on her finger, "And you know Natalie…?"
"Sandy and I were roommates in college," Natalie explained, "We were almost like sisters. It's been at least five years since I've heard from..."
"Here's Paul and the kids," Adrian pointed over Sandy's shoulder at a balding, bearded man with a boy of about ten and a girl of about seven. Sandy stared at him in absolute shock as to how he could have known her husband's name. "We've been looking all over for you, honey," the man said, kissing her.
"Paul, you remember how I used to talk about my old friend Natalie, this is her," Sandy introduced them. "Natalie Teeger," she smiled at him as she shook his hand.
"Ah yes, Sandy rarely stopped mentioning you early on," Paul told her. His gaze fell on the detective. "Say, you're Adrian Monk, right?" he asked him.
"Guilty as charged," Adrian felt a little intimidated by his presence, as Paul was at least a good six inches taller than him. He motioned for another wipe after Paul gave his hand a vigorous pumping.
"You were all over the news at Christmas," the girl spoke up from behind her father, "They said you were a bit loopy."
"Loopy?" Adrian frowned, "No, no, I'm not loopy, I'm, I'm good, I'm whack, I'm hip, I'm, I'm down with the bros."
He swayed his hips comically. The Teegers and Kopeckis stared at him in odd wonder. "Hold on, you, you missed a button there," the detective told the boy, bending down to button it for him.
"I'm OK," the boy jumped back in shock at his approach.
"It's OK Josh, he's not going to hurt you…I think," his mother reassured him. "Forgive me, you haven't met Josh and Molly yet," she introduced her son and daughter to Natalie."
"Good to meet the two of you," Natalie smiled at them, "Say, why don't you all come with us? We could catch up on old times and…"
"Uh, Natalie, objection," Adrian raised his hand, "You know me and large groups."
"Would you excuse me for a minute?" Natalie told the Kopeckis. Pulling Adrian aside, she half-barked at him, "Mr. Monk, this woman is a good friend of mine. If you hadn't seen one of your friends in years, you'd like to catch up with them, wouldn't you?"
"I wouldn't know," Adrian shrugged, "I've never had any friends to catch up with."
"Folks you're next," the ticket booth operator called them all forward before Natalie could respond to this. "WHOA!" the man gasped at the sight of Adrian's rack. "Sir, could you bring that over here, please?"
"Why?" Adrian's question was answered as the ticket taker waved to several nearby guards, who promptly grabbed for his suitcases. "Don't, don't roughhouse them," he begged as they took them off the rack and opened them up, "Some of the stuff in there is fragile!"
"Sir, do you really need all this?" one of the guards looked at him quizzically.
"Here, here's the thing: I'm not one hundred percent comfortable going into your park unprotected," Adrian told him, "Trust me, it's a matter of life and death that I have what I have there—and you missed a button too."
He buttoned it up for the guard, who stared down at his shirt. "Well anyway," he continued slowly, "We're going to have to clear all this before you can take it into the park."
It was close to ten minutes later when all of Adrian's suitcases were fully checked and verified by security. By then the park was packed close to capacity, making the detective feel all the more uncomfortable.
"So where's our first stop?" he asked his expanded group as they weaved their way through the crowd toward the Hub, where several Disney employees in formal suits were standing on top of a raised platform near the entrance to Tomorrowland.
"Dad promised we could go on the new indoor roller coaster first," Josh looked up at his father.
"And that we will," Paul smiled at him, "How about it, Mrs. Davenport?"
"It's Mrs. Teeger now, but yes, I guess that's fine," Natalie nodded.
"I don't think so," Adrian glanced over some trees from which the sounds of buzz saws and blowtorches could be heard painting out a loud melody, "From what I can see from here they're not quite done yet. Still working on the outer façade and some of the…hold up a moment."
He'd spotted an empty paper cup lying on the sidewalk. Unchaining suitcase #6 from the rack, he pulled out a long metallic arm with a three-fingered claw on the end. He walked over to the cup, picked it up with the claw, and dropped it into the nearest trashcan. "Good as new," he told the group once he rejoined it, "This is going to be fun. In fact, we can all help clean up the park together if you want. I brought at least four of these in…."
"Hey look up there," Julie pointed up at the castle. For a human figure was now gliding—no, FLYING from what Adrian's naked eye could see—through the air, and somehow gravity wasn't affecting him, even though the detective couldn't make out any wires or other means of suspension. Half the crowd had noticed him too, for there was many pointing of fingers and excited whispers around them, including among the Disney executives on the platform. "That's incredible!" Molly was gasping, "How does he do that?"
"This is the magic kingdom, honey, anything can happen," Sandy told her daughter, lifting her up to give her a better view of the man's aerial show.
"True," Adrian was frowning, "but something's not right here."
"Mr. Monk, please, I'm sure this is just some pre-show event," Natalie tried to reassure him, "Boy, this is realistic. He looks like he's really flying."
"Should he be flying that high?" her boss countered. The man was at least two hundred feet in the air now, high enough that he was little more than a speck in the blue sky.
"Gee, you're right, he is rather far up," Paul's brow furled, "I hope he does know what he's doing, since…OH MY GOD!"
For the man had now taken a sudden plunge toward the ground out of control, as if some higher force was abruptly shut off his power source. The crowds gasped in horror as he fell out of sight behind the trees, followed by a very loud and very sickening thud echoed from the construction site all over the park. Screams rang out all over the place, and several people fainted in shock. Without thinking, Adrian squeezed his way under the rope holding the crowds back. "Come on," he waved to Natalie, "I think we've got a murder here."
"Well, so much for the nice easy vacation I was hoping for," Natalie shrugged in resignation to her friend as she followed the detective toward the man's abrupt grave.