Me Cheeta (11 page)

I think he was as surprised as we were to find that the wooden frame of the partition, which he’d been slamming against for five or six days, had finally come loose. His follow-through tangled him up in the ripped hangnail of mesh, giving Tyrone and me a brief
second to consider our options—but when I glanced at my shelter-mate, he’d already swiveled around and was presenting his rear. Fantastic, I thought, just great: a submission display, and he hasn’t even
done
anything yet. Stroheim was propping himself up and bristling, though whether at me or at the dumb, winded square of wire, I didn’t know. The world, probably—Stroheim just bristled at it in general. And now he began to pant-hoot, spiraling swiftly into a scream as he unhooked himself. There were no exits here, no opportunities for calming down and cooling off, and I was terrified. I could submit, I suppose. But to submit to Stroheim, who had cavorted while the others broke my mother’s body? I was incapable of it.

He came at me as I sprang onto the front mesh, and I was able to climb high enough to evade the impact. The wire twanged and bucked in my grip. I didn’t have a plan, but as Stroheim circled back around and leaped at me, I instinctively let go of the mesh, dropped underneath him into the straw and scuttled around the side of the shattered partition frame into Stroheim’s shelter, pulling the frame after me, where it jammed against the wall. Furious, he slammed into it, but the partition held. He set himself to batter it down, still shrieking, and I sat waiting for him and for the end.

Wherever you were—inside a shelter or out, among humans or chimpanzees—it seemed the jungle came after you. There was no escape, nowhere you were safe. I’d crossed the Atlantic to America and here I was, back precisely where I’d started: chased by Stroheim. The bald, bullying, banana-snatching, boneheaded brute. And a name suddenly comes to me out of the past: Moose Malloy, that great hulking slow-witted patsy “no wider than a beer truck,” forever blundering after his lost love Velma in the Dick Powell-Philip Marlowe picture
Murder, My Sweet
(1944). Moose, who was too big for his brain. Years later, when I first saw
Murder, My Sweet
,
I immediately thought: Stroheim! You see, though he was a killer, you couldn’t help but pity Moose. And I could never—can’t you tell?—pick the pity out of my hatred for Stroheim.

So I waited for the mesh to break and Stroheim to come tumbling through, but with each blow the poor dolt was wedging the door
shut.
If he’d just put his fingers through it and tugged backwards you wouldn’t be reading this now. But no: all Stroheim knew was that you opened partitions with bashing. Bashing—that was how it had always been done! He was just too damn stupid to murder me. After a while of incensed thumping, the idiot gave up and folded himself into one of his catatonic deepwater sulks and we slept.

That happened in the evening after the second coaching session of the day. The following morning classes were canceled. Instead, a large rolling shelter entered the courtyard, and supervised by the coaches, we were all reloaded into the smallest shelters yet, made entirely of wire. Or, no, not all of us. My coach patrolled the front of the shelters, consulting his notebook and directing the other humans as to which of us were to be moved on. About a quarter of us were rejected, among them Stroheim.

“I’m gonna leave you boys to it,” my coach said. “Don’t ever feel happy doing this.”

“No point in bellyaching about it. You got a fair enough deal. More’n fair.”

“Yeah, yeah. They’re helping people, I suppose.”

“Hey. It’s show business. Cruel business.”

Yeah, but it’s not. There
are
crueller businesses.

We were loaded into the back of the shelter, stacked on top of each other, and I noticed Tyrone and Bonzo, and my new shelter-mate and various other faces that were vaguely familiar from
Forest Lawn
before darkness and the familiar jolting overtook us again. And when the jaws of the shelter opened, the world would have
changed again—that was how these things worked. They put you into darkness and then scrambled the world.

A short haul this time. Something about the accelerating rhythm of these periods of blackness made me feel that we were getting closer to wherever it was we were going. I could not believe that it was simply the human way to keep moving us from rehab center to rehab center forever, and I had a hunch that what was happening was a
process of selection.
We were being narrowed down, from
Forest Lawn
to Trefflich’s, from Trefflich’s to the coaching institute, and it was something to do with our performances in the coaching sessions. And yet that couldn’t be right, because Frederick had been rejected and Bonzo, who’d hardly shone during the sessions, was whimpering below me. But, still, I felt we were getting nearer to
something.
Stroheim had been rejected, and perhaps this had been the plan all along: to return us to the forest, a forest without its Stroheims, a forest regained.

But it was not a forest, or a narrowing down. It was an enclosed, yellow-lit space with a corridor of tiny individual shelters stacked three high on either side, in which dozens of apes and macaques stared or displayed. Once I’d been unloaded, tethered and bundled into my new shelter, I was able to look across at my new fellow-rehabilitees and I felt the mamba brush me. I remembered the flicker of its body as it passed over DiMarco and me, the touch of death.

Pretty much every chimp or macaque I could see was in drastically bad shape. Right across from me, on the highest level of the shelters, was an old female chimp unlike any I’d ever seen. Her chest and belly were so hugely swollen that it would have been impossible for her to stand up. She was breathing in rapid little pants, as if she couldn’t get the air to stay down. Below her was a chimp covered in a pale liquid, which I supposed it had just thrown
up. It wasn’t moving. There were macaques with peculiar, white-dusted eyes, macaques with open red wounds on their chests. There was something that looked half human, the size of an ape, but almost completely furless. I don’t want to go on describing them. There was absolutely nothing, I thought, that even the humans could do for these poor creatures, no way they could be saved. We were in a hospital for incurables. It was a place of death. I felt it instinctively—I recognized it like I’d recognized it in the mamba’s mouth. These were already the dead, because nobody was getting out of here alive.

So, this was it. The end of the line. Was this really what the rescue, the rehabilitation and the coaching all came down to in the end? Oh, man…. Despite the best efforts of all concerned, it seemed that the plan—this brave but ultimately doomed attempt to save us from death—had failed. All that goddamn effort, and we might as well have stayed in the jungle.

Yet, yet, yet… it seemed like such a
mistake.
What had been the point of the coaching sessions? Frederick had sailed through them but hadn’t even made it through the selection this morning. I remembered how surprised I’d been at that. Nor had the other couple of chimps who’d excelled, come to think of it. And—why was Tyrone here? And suddenly I understood: it wasn’t them who’d been rejected, dimwit. It was us. It was me.
They
were the ones who had been kept on.

When I say mine has been a lucky, lucky life, I don’t mean merely that I’ve been privileged enough to watch Fred Astaire perform his famous “golf-dance” on the first tee at Pebble Beach, sending five balls in a row arcing into the Pacific with five windmilling pirouettes. Or that I’ve been lucky enough to sit at the feet of Robert Benchley by the Garden of Allah pool while he recited
Leaves of Grass
to a rapt Cocteau, with dawn coming up. I mean
lucky.

I was pressing myself against the mesh, screaming the place down, as were the rest of us new inductees, when a couple of humans approached down the corridor between the shelters. One was clothed in white. The other, I was surprised to see, was my coach. Unlike Tony Gentry, he had come back.

“This is the one,” he said, arriving beneath my shelter. “Jiggs. This one’s going to Metro. Your guys need to learn to count a little fucking better.”

“I’m afraid that’s your responsibility. We make the purchase and collect what we’re given. I can only think you made some error at Lincoln Heights.”

“Sure I made an error. Letting your guys do the loading was the error. Shoulda done it myself. You realize how valuable an animal this is? Oughta put your man in that cage instead of this animal, teach him how to listen. ‘Don’t touch the larger chimp in the end cage.’ Told him twice. Told him twice.”

They opened my shelter, let me tumble out and leashed me. I leaped into the coach’s arms—and it wasn’t a leap of faked love, either. It wasn’t meant to be me here, it was meant to be
Stroheim.
The larger chimp in the end cage had been me, at least until we performed our little switcheroo-dance. Lucky. Very, very lucky. And lucky, lucky,
lucky
Stroheim.

“The delivery is still for a dozen animals, Mr. Gately. This leaves us with eleven.”

“Yeah—my other stock’s in Culver City being auditioned right now. So I guess you’ll have to whistle for it. Or call up Louis Mayer, ask him if he’s interested in selling.”

“A hundred eighty dollars for twelve animals, Mr. Gately. It’ll be a hundred sixty-five for eleven.”

“Hunderd senny-five for eleven animals and the aggravation,” said Coach Gately, without humor.

And that was how things ended between them, and Stroheim never knew that I’d saved his goddamned life. Gately led me out of the place on the end of the tether, avoiding a small ginger-and-white cat that tripped out tinklingly across his path on its way into the embrace of one of the white-clothed humans. Mixed emotions were slopping toxically around in my belly: selfish relief, of course, and the pure joy of being away from there. But I was still stunned by what I’d seen, and perfectly aware that Bonzo, Tyrone and the others were not heading with us out into the bright, bright blue. Did it, I wondered distractedly, ever rain in America?

Gately led me into his rolling shelter and, tying my tether tightly to the door handle, put me up beside him on a long seat at what turned out to be, when the city started to roll past us, its front end. I was guessing it was a city around us, though I saw very few humans, only rolling shelters. A hillside was called HOLLYWOOD-LAND, and I thought, That’s going to be helpful, if they start having signs up to identify everything. I could do with knowing the names of a few things.

It wasn’t a city that asked you to climb it, like New York; it was a city, I noticed, of gateways. Either side of us, hundreds of colossal gates rolled by, implying the presence of a species of colossal human. Behind these gates you could make out patches of forest, and
orange trees
, and
palms!
I didn’t get too excited: in truth, I knew it was just one of those brief periods of respite you got before another grueling session of rehab began. Straw, mesh, excrement and the same old overripe fruit. Have you any idea how time
drags
in the shelters?

I suddenly felt very low, as Gately rolled us under the arch of one of the gateways, definitively low, finished with it all. I knew that I simply wouldn’t be able to make it through another long session. Another shelter. The shelters didn’t even
work.
Another session of
rehab and I’d be like Stroheim, tearing my hair out. I was through. Enough. You never think that the insistent little voice in your head forever urging
survive, survive, survive
might ever grow faint or silent, but in the end it does. And I really do like to think of myself as a survivor. I’ve survived seventy years in this industry. I’ve survived turkeys like
Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla. I’ve
even survived that old soak Benchley’s godawful all-night Whitman recitals at the Garden of Allah—oh, man, I’m a survivor, all right. But I was ready to quit then: I thought, I’m done. Done like Tyrone.

Gately brought everything to a halt, stretched over to untether me from the handle and flipped open the door.

We were in a forest. Chimpanzees were hooting from the tree-tops. Gazelles were grazing on the lower leaves. In the shade at the edge of the trees, a number of zebras were browsing the long, tawny grass. Spores and seeds and butterflies floated billionfold through the warm air around me. There were parakeets too, in vibrating colors, and humans sitting and standing in groups among the animals. My heart capsized. Oh, you faithless, doubting fool of an ape! You quitter! They’d done it. The humans had done it. We’d done it together! The joy of it straightened me up onto two feet and I bipedaled around in crazy circles, hooting back at the chimps. I was dancing for joy. I was rain-dancing in a rainless land! Gately came around the side of the shelter, removed my tether and took my hand. Together we made our way toward the forest, watching Frederick loop down the branches to greet us.

I was such a
kid
when I first arrived in the States! Basically, I didn’t have a clue what was going on. Of course everything was bewildering, but scanning back over what I’ve written, I wonder if I’ve perhaps been guilty of touching up my history with darker shades than were really there. Probably gone over the top a bit, to be
honest: forgive me. My memory, my child’s eye, has acquired a little Dickensian distortion. Plus I did want to give a push to No Reel Apes, and anyway, I want to sell a few books here, and I’m told the childhood-adversity stuff plays well these days.

Sure, difficult childhoods can make great artists—it’s the thread that links Van Gogh, Dickens, Herman Melville, Hitchcock, Frank McCourt, Dave Pelzer, Kirk Douglas, Margaret Seltzer and me—but this is not one of those autobiographies that Don likes so much, with those huge-eyed children staring accusingly at you from their covers, their faces blanched out like lemurs’. It’s only that I felt obliged to touch on some of the problems that Don and the attractive Dr. Goodall are eager to highlight for their No Reel Apes campaign. Cruelty to apes in the name of entertainment is obscene and
must stop
, though of course it can lead to some absolutely tremendous movies, and I personally had a wonderful time in Hollywood. Which, as I’ve said, saved my life, so there are two sides to each story. But do support the campaign if you can, which—get this—proposes the replacement of living primates in cinema with computer-generated ones.