Me Cheeta (37 page)

Still, I’ve got a million years to get it right.

And here, at last, are the entertainment center and the DVD library. Sorry about the little tantrum before. Here are all the classics Don loves and here, on six disks,
The Tarzan Collection:
the eleven pictures with him and me that I’m condemned to be shown three or four times a year for the rest of time. I just can’t stop myself. I can’t bear to watch and I can’t tear myself away, and I know I shouldn’t, but there we are flickering in silver and I can’t stop. You think it’ll make you feel better. And every time I say: That’s going to
be the last. I can’t stand them, but I’m terrified Don will notice and stop the screenings.

I know. Hysterical, isn’t it? I’m so very, very
lucky.
Twenty-five years of pining, and counting. My heart has tinnitus, a continuous, faint, high-pitched background scream I never expect to be free of:
Love friend sad stay stay heart pain big stay heart pain big stay.
Is he still trapped in the hell-hole where I abandoned him, with his awful wife and her mad daughter? I don’t know, and I don’t think I’m going back down to Acapulco any time soon.

There’s also the possibility that he’s—oh, say it—dead, which might be a release. All I’ve ever heard from Don is that he’s no longer with us, and I knew that anyway. In my head he’s still alive, waiting to be saved. I keep him alive, anyway, because I love him. And I was going to suggest you put on a quick ten minutes of
Tarzan and His Mate
, just to see how incredibly beautiful he was, but now Don’s mom is making a racket in the kitchen and, wow, it’s a real bad one. She’s pleading with him and Don has whacked on some whalesong in a fury.

“I can’t hear you,” he snaps, which is, like, maybe the fault of the whalesong, Don?

“Please do this for me. Please help me. I can’t do it alone.”

“No. No way. What did you ever do for me?”

“I’m sorry. But help me go now. Please. You only need half a bottle.”

“No. It’s illegal.”

I’m out of here. I hate the sound of arguments. And Don is bitter about his mom. I try to creep as unobtrusively as possible through the living area, hunched down low and not looking, and all I hear under the whalesong is Don’s mom sobbing at the painting table. “IIII’vvveee ggggooootttt aaaaa bbbbiiiiiiggggeeeerrrr
dddiiiiiccckkkk tttthhhaaaaannn ooootttthhheeeeerrrr wwwwhhhaaaallleeesss. IlI’mmmm ttthhheeee gggrrreeeeaaaattteeeesssttt,” the whale’s saying, and there’s the shaky breaths of her grief, and Don saying, “I’m sorry,” and then, “Come here, Cheets, come here.”

He wants a hug, and I give him half of one. Don’s mom lifts her head to say, “And you’re keeping
him
alive!”

Maybe. But if she thinks that insulin’s going to fix her Alzheimer’s she’s nuts. I’m such a coward with scenes—I skedaddle as best I can. Out through the sticky terrace door and into a beautiful evening. The sky has already got a few of the animals you’ve made out of the stars lighting up in it. Hello, Bull, hello, Crab, hello, Hunter.

Beautiful, clear desert evening. Squeakers and Daphne giving a few dusky barks. You used to think they were people, orangutans—it means “man of the forest” or something. The weedwhackers have shut up. Sanctuary. Oh, if I could only paint this, this moment with the midges lit up and a couple of faint high-traveling dots that might be billionaires ballooning in the troposphere or just satellites off which
Tarzan and the Leopard Woman
is rebounding, but which are, most likely, those swimming specks—are they imperfections or microscopic life-forms?—falling through my own eyes.

I’m seventy-six years old. Fifty’s good for a chimp. I’m an immortal miracle and life is very beautiful, but I think I’ve had enough, dearest humans: I can’t stand it without him anymore. I just can’t stand a ninety-seventh viewing of
Tarzan Escapes. But
how can I die? I am the Cheater of Death. How can I die? Why can’t I die? I have my hopes that perhaps this book’ll be the thing that finishes me off. Or maybe he’ll read it and lift off from his wheelchair and come rescue me for a change and… Oh, Lord, please dry up my heart! I think. Oh, please, silence my tinnitic heart! Jane’s Law? It doesn’t work. The hurt
doesn’t
die down. It
doesn’t
have to.

I plod off toward the flowerbeds, though I know full well I’m out of cigarettes. It’s not such a great night tonight, really: it’s that time of year once more and I’ve been waiting for a phone call from the Academy requesting my presence, and I think the bastards have left me out again. Have these guys even
seen, say, Tarzan’s New York Adventure?

I might just go and have a bit of a think in my tire. I have this fantasy acceptance speech—we all have fantasy acceptance speeches—which I try to make as credible as possible, like you do, no thanks, I’ve given up.

Oh.

Oh! Oh, thank you! Ooh… and a light! Quick, shield it from the house with your body. Oh, that’s good. Ooh, that’s a godsend. You star. You’re a real friend. But what about … you don’t mean to say it’s your last one? Come on, we’ll share it, you and me. Mmm… so I was saying: they can stuff their Oscar. I know exactly how it’ll go, anyway.

“Honored Members of the Academy,” I’ll begin, after a twenty-five-minute standing ovation. I’ll be communicating via American Sign Language and surtitles, probably, or some genius interpreter in a black turtleneck. I’ll be wearing my old tux from the James Bond routine with Mr. Gentry. “This award, this much longed-for and, may I say, well-merited” (keep it light) “honorary Academy Award is not just for me…”

I’ll pause to survey the auditorium. Seat-fillers are scurrying down the aisles to occupy the places left by actors and artists who’ve gone for a bathroom break or a line or two of homeopathic powder. There’s Sean Penn, looking serious but heroic with his mane of integrity swept back, there’s Tom Hanks, his neck bulging twice as wide as his head, and DiCaprio looking like a fat rat—like a capybara, actually, Leo, the world’s largest rodent. There’s Niv,
with his hand furtively wandering under the bum of his date, and Bogie and Betty, untouchable. They’re
smoking. There’s
Mitch, there’s Hitch; there’s Clooney and Rooney; there’s Marlene and Maureen and Mel. The Lumieres, the Fred Astaires, the Mayers and the players, and dearest Dolores del. The stars are well and truly out. I don’t see Johnny, but I feel he’s here somewhere. The orchestra is under orders or too stupefied with reverence to dare interrupt. You can tell it’s going to be one of
those
speeches by the way Tim Robbins has gone all vindicated. And, of course, it’s the Oscars, so we’re live to the planet.

“Dearest humans. Colleagues. Esteemed fellow-toilers in the vineyards of Thespis! Friends, humans, countrymen! And you too, Dietrich, though you’re no friend of mine and I doubt very much that you’re human.” Pause. There’s a perceptible anxiety that maybe I’m drunk. I am! I’m absolutely and completely wrecked. How else could I get through this? But they can’t get me off without looking bad.

“Fellow
creatures.
This wonderful honorary Academy Award, the first ever awarded to a non-human, is not for myself alone but for all animals.”

That’s more what they were expecting. Halle Berry, who introduced me, stops looking worried and starts looking humbly intrigued. “This award is not just for me but for the two hundred horses of
The Charge of the Light Brigade
, for the elephant electrocuted by Edison at Coney Island, for the swan accidentally drowned by David Selznick during the shooting of
Portrait of Jennie
, for every animal that has ever suffered for its cinematic art.” Penn is loving this bit. He leads a sizable ripple of preemptively outraged applause. “And for all animals the world over who have given their time to entertain you—for every dancing bear and vaulting dolphin—this award gives them hope. Hope that though
I may be the first, I shall not be the last to stand humbled here in this auditorium, holding a statuette designed by Cedric Gibbons, whose wife, Dolores del Rio, I
did not fuck
, incidentally.” Whoops. “On behalf of all those animals, to all animal-lovers here and our billionfold TV audience, I would like to say…”

To say thank you? Or should I just roll around the stage, hysterical with laughter at the very idea of your expecting gratitude? Oh, yes, dear readers, I was just kidding before about the Project and rehab and all that crap, just being a cheeky monkey. Cheeta by name… I do know you’re terrible killers. I do know what happened to Kong in the end. A million monkeys? Now that really is a fucking stupid idea—you ain’t
got
a million monkeys anymore. And the Elephants’ Graveyard is full up. Penn’s looking expectant—he wants a full guilt-fest denunciation, though given the rap sheet that could take months, by which time the air-conditioning will have gone off, the buffet tables will be long emptied and savage bands of Oscar-winning actors, led by Chuck Heston and Liz Taylor, probably, will be roaming the aisles hunting down and eating the weak (Peter Lorre, Steve Buscemi). He, and others here, thrive on the self-hatred. They want me to say that, to an animal, your fears about global warming are as hilarious as the Kommandant fretting about the fire risks in a death-camp. They want to hear about my seventy-five years of incarceration. I go into a bit of a drunken reverie—thinking about my alternative memoir, provisionally entitled
Who Ate All the Fish?
—but luckily the audience just thinks I’ve been overcome with emotion. I can see Redford, and Goldie Hawn, and Jane Fonda, old Dickie Attenborough—good grief, they’re
all
waiting, drooling, to be told how bad they are. Actors! I pull myself together and address the world.

“… I would like to say, as an animal, that it’s been a very special honor and a privilege to work with humans. How you love us!
How obsessively you dream us, and draw us, and see us in clouds and stock the bedrooms of your children with us! How touchingly hard you hope to cheat your destiny and stop eradicating us! We are your stars. We are
indispensable
to you, and you’ll never get over it when we’re gone. But I for one will never abandon you, no matter the pain and danger and constant mass murder, because you love and need us and it’s wonderful, it is
wonderful
to be loved and needed like that. And I believe in you! You’re the very best of us: no other species would even have come close to what you’ve done! You’re amazing. Thank you for being you! Thank you so much for this wonderful award! Thank you to everybody I’ve ever met! You are all beautiful human beings! I love you all!”

Pretty standard Oscar fare, albeit from the heart. But around Robbins and Sarandon there’s a kind of mutinous stir of disappointment, and now Penn is on his feet, starting to heckle. I’ve gone and lost my nerve, spoiled the party. “Dodos!” Penn’s shouting aggressively. “What about the dodo?”

“Calm down, sonny,” I gesture. “I’m a chimpanzee, not a fucking photographer!”

Fuck
you
care, anyway, Penn, I want to say, you’re already convinced that you’ll wipe us out and then yourselves. You campaign against it, but it’s what you think. You’re just a spasm of death. It’s March 2009 and that’s humanity’s current thinking—that everyone’s going to die, man and beast, and soon. Death, death, death—you’d think you’d created it, the way you go on! Anyway, that doesn’t go down too well, and booing breaks out and I can see Security hustling toward me. Great, my big night and I’m going to get
tasered.
Oh well. My fantasy always breaks down around here: I never can seem to figure out the right thing to say.

Dearest, gentlest, sweetest, smartest, tallest, kindest, funniest, maddest, most thoughtful, most beautiful, most sorrowing, most
suffering humans: who are you
really?
You are the
omnicidal. You
kill everything—everyone knows it. And even if you think of yourselves as wretched blood-soaked corpse-piling criminals, eye-deep in sin and despised by God for the terrible deeds you have done, I believe in you. Because of him.

I believe in you. I have a memory from way back, but I’m not even sure it’s a memory. Out of a predawn sky an airplane smashed into the forest one day and we scrambled out of the canopy and found some bodies in the hull and an unharmed baby. One of us carried it up a wild custard-apple tree and we all gathered around.

We didn’t quite know what this thing was. Its trusting gaze was the most vulnerable thing we’d ever seen, but there’s power in that. Somehow its defenselessness stays our hands. Then again, it’s fresh meat, and one of our group tries to snatch it in order to dash it to the forest floor. The thing starts to cry, scaring the ape into dropping it on a crisscross platform of branches—and it’s me who finds the scrap of custard apple in his hand, and me who puts it between the thing’s little lips and quietens it. It smiles. It’s just like a little baby, but more magical. I feel protective, and curious: how would it turn out if we brought it up? What harm could come of trying? Or maybe we should just play safe and let it fall. Who knows what it’ll grow into? And it’s nearly breakfast-time.

We sit around, pondering uncertainly. There are flashes of fresh white wood in the foliage where branches have been torn by the crash, and butterflies and other insects are already settling on them to drink the sap. The sun’s hitting the tops of the canopy now and hurrying down toward us.

Let it fall or raise it?

I pick it up. It
needs
me, I think. I’ll be its friend, its protector, its rescuer and consoler. It’s mine. “Umgah,” it says, and I almost go
and fucking drop it. And every day the planes keep crashing and the babies keep coming, and no matter how wrong everything goes, how far everything falls, I’ll always choose to pick you up, and one day, one of you…

I’m sick of being immortal, and I can feel myself changing now. Thanks for the Lucky. I’m falling to the lawn and becoming a figment, a myth. I am Cheeta—father, brother and son of Tarzan, friend to humanity. Always have been, always will be. And if, dearest humans, if you ever felt there was a sort of foolish animal missing from your side—but also looking over you and wishing you well, and maybe mocking you a little though only out of love—then that’s me. There are so many of us up here, among the stars, so many, and out of all of us I’m the one that’s on your side. I’m the one up there trying to be the best damn friend you ever had. Me. Cheeta.