Me Cheeta (6 page)

Janos, or Johann, Weissmuller was seven months old when he made the same trip, on the SS
Rotterdam
out of Holland to New York in February 1905 (in steerage, though, not in MGM luxury). So he was too young to experience crossing the Atlantic in the way I did. I got to know that ocean in March 1932, with Tony Gentry and Captain Mannicher and Gabe DiMarco and Earl and Julius and the rest of the guys. It was a great time. Humans, it turned out, were on the whole a delight.

Tony, or “Mr. Gentry,” was the kind one with the sprightly alpha air and the spiffy line of white skin down the center of his sleek head. The lopsided one with long, mournful ears and the bubbles of flesh in the crooks of his nostrils was Captain Mannicher, and so on and so forth. It wasn’t hard to pick things up. “Whiskey!” meant if you went to the other side of
Forest Lawn
, opened a number of doors, retrieved a bottle and brought it back to Mr. Gentry, you got a banana. “Get my hat” or “Smokes, please” meant… well, you follow—there were a lot of banana-based interactions between Mr. Gentry and me.

By now I was consuming so many bananas that I had taken to imitating the humans and using the stalk to unfurl the skin petal by
petal. You missed the chewiness but discarding the skin enabled you to get through them quicker. “Come on, kid, you’re going to Hollywood,” Mr. Gentry would say, as he worked on another task with me. “You ain’t gonna meet Dietrich if you can’t fetch her a smoke. You want the banana, do it again.”

“Elephants” meant taking a bucket of water from Mr. Gentry and climbing up the shelters onto the backs of the bristly giants and sluicing them down. “Giraffes” meant carrying armful after armful of hay up to a kind of bier on a pole and avoiding being licked on the way by the creature’s hideous two-foot-long blue-black mouth-tentacle, or “tongue.” “A key” was an intricate glittering thing. “Somersault,” “Do it again” and “Again” all meant performing the backflip I was so adept at. “Hold Number Four” was where I’d come from; “the Atlantic” was the river without banks we were crossing to get to “America,” which was where all the humans lived. “Cheats” or “Cheatster” or “The Cheater” was me.

“Bluffing or packing” was simple enough. The humans sat around displaying fans, like male turacos in courtship, made up of prettily colored cards. The longest display, again like turacos, was rewarded with “chips.” When Mr. Gentry said something like “It’s my notion that you ain’t packing nothing, Earl,” or “He’s bluffing, Cheats,” it was my job to circle the table while the others showed me their fans. Mr. Gentry would ask me, “Bluffing or packing?” with a raised forefinger. Whichever word he lowered the forefinger on, I had learned through a long afternoon of withheld bananas, I was at that moment to display wildly, and he would make his call based on the Cheatster’s “advice.” As far as I could tell, bananas seemed to be allocated on a completely unreadable basis for this task.

Of course, I didn’t have any idea of what was going on most of the time. I was a very young chimpanzee and had only just started to read human beings. But frankly, I hadn’t had any idea of what
was going on in the forest either. It wasn’t any
more
confusing being on
Forest Lawn
, and at least I was hanging out with a higher consciousness, and who doesn’t want to do that? Death seemed very distant among the humans. Also, I was struck by how deeply they seemed to love animals. And a further plus was that I was eating more bananas than possibly any other chimpanzee on earth. Whatever
Forest Lawn
was, I liked it!

The only problem was that with my fetching and carrying Mr. Gentry’s cigarettes and whiskey all the time, and my smoking and drinking “imitations” at the card displays (they weren’t imitations, I
was
smoking and drinking) proving so popular, everybody else decided that they wanted a chimp familiar too. Earl, my banana-denier, was the first to follow where Mr. Gentry had led, and one day I was surprised to see Frederick scuttling across the “deck” with one of Earl’s dirty brown cigarillos between his lips.

Frederick was a nervous little chimp and spent most of his time huddled inside Earl’s shirt, puffing on a cigarillo so that it seemed Earl’s chest hair was constantly on fire during the card displays. He couldn’t do backflips or feed the giraffes but he could smoke, that kid, and drink, and of course the
Forest Lawn
rehab program, with its fierce commitment to relaxing us, encouraged him to do both to his heart’s content. But when another of the bluffing or packing boys sat down to the game with his own chimpanzee helper (a stranger to me, and the first of many “Bonzos” that I would come to know over the years), anxiety kindled inside me. I was beginning to notice just how imitative human behavior was. If Mr. Gentry or Captain Mannicher burst out laughing, betas like Earl, Julius or DiMarco would immediately follow suit. I could see where all this was heading.

Sure enough, the next day Stroheim was squatting beside Julius on top of the wheelhouse, engaged in some lesson requiring a large
amount of bananas. I could see that Julius was having a little difficulty with him, since Stroheim kept breaking off to pant-hoot at the elephants, which were obviously causing him distress, but all afternoon Julius kept him at it. I stayed downwind of them and tried to put them out of my mind, tumbling with Bonzo in the giraffes’ mound of straw and generally keeping my head down. But bluffing or packing came around all the same, with the humans in a state of high hilarity. Mr. Gentry and me, Earl and Frederick, Baxter and young Bonzo, Captain Mannicher, DiMarco and, making a grand entrance, wiry little Julius with—like the big dog the small man tends toward—the bulky Stroheim.

“Gentlemen, I would like to introduce to you
my
assistant, Dempsey,” said Julius (Dempsey?), “who will be cutting the pack for us tonight. Some cards, please, for Dempsey.”

Cutting a “deck” (I know, very tricky) of bluffing or packing cards was something Mr. Gentry had been helping me master. But cards are terribly difficult for a young chimpanzee to manipulate, and my attempts at cutting had never elicited the full banana of approval from Mr. Gentry. There was room for improvement, to be honest—I either dropped or ate them. As the oldest chimp on
Forest Lawn
, Stroheim could be expected to make a better job of things requiring more developed motor control—that must have been Julius’s thinking—but it never came to that.

Stroheim was staring at me with his muddy brown eyes and his hair erect, making a series of threatening pant-grunts. He ripped his hand out of Julius’s and thumped up onto the table with a heavy, hollow
ber-bang
, hooting at me in an aggressive four-square posture—arms out, knuckles down, ready to spring. I abandoned to him the banana I was peeling and scampered around the back of Mr. Gentry, who stood up, making a rucksack of me. Bonzo and Frederick had scattered, squealing but ignored by Stroheim, who
was still bristling and pant-grunting at me even though he was now in possession of both my banana and the cigarette I’d left burning on the table. We were straight back in the jungle.

“Are we playing cards or having a tea party?” Captain Mannicher asked, reasonably enough. “Get it out of here, Julius. And the rest of them. Put ’em back in their cages and we can get on with our game.” Stroheim had retracted himself into a sullen bundle and was puffing gloomily on my cigarette as if savoring the shift in mood. “And Cheats as well, Tony. Enough. We’re gonna have some serious poker tonight.”

So we were all trooped back into Hold Number Four. I didn’t mind it as much as you might think—I’d been wondering about the safety of my shelter ever since I’d seen Stroheim gibbering around the wheelhouse roof that afternoon. Without shelters there
was
no rehabilitation program. The program’s key principle—not to be constantly threatened by death (a
good
principle: mark me down as a “pro”)—was dependent on them. After the light and the wind of the Atlantic, the hold seemed black with dreams and comforting thick smells: feces, urine, rotting fruit.

“Hardly the goddamned Ritz down here, is it?” said Julius, admiringly.

“Smells like the, uh, the Tijuana Hilton,” said Baxter, “but with better room service,” which confirmed my suspicions that we were indeed recipients of some special treatment on
Forest Lawn.

Earl peeled off with Bonzo and Frederick, and Julius hit a little cluster of moonfruit-like globes on a stand (whose sudden light stirred up a fluster of cheeps and squeaks from those expecting dinner). He and Baxter were leading the banana-clutching Stroheim and me back toward our shelters—and I thought, We’ll be back in our shelters in a second anyway, and what can he do while there are two humans here?
That’s
my
goddamned
banana!
and I jinked sideways and plucked it—ha!—from Stroheim’s grasp.

Unfortunately, my momentum carried me into Julius’s legs, and in catching his balance, his hand separated from Stroheim’s, freeing him. Stroheim swiveled, ducked Julius’s grab and—he had this way of instantaneously converting his sullenness to ferocity—charged shrieking into me, catching me and clutching hard so that we spun over painfully into the side of a shelter. For a moment I was winded, and then, dropping the banana in the hope that that’d be enough for him, I skittered out of reach and doubled back toward the humans. I figured they were my best option. But Earl and Julius were backing away from me with expressions I had not yet seen on human faces, and I had time to think,
Surely
between the pair of you, you can handle him—and don’t forget, guys, it was my banana in the first place, before they started to shout.

Down from its busted shelter flowed the charcoal-gray snake. It decanted itself, horrible in its ease of motion, raised its head from the ground, flashing its paler underside, and bared its mouth.

The inside of its mouth was
black.
It wasn’t the black of a chimp, or a crow, or a panther—it was infinitely more intense. It was what you’d arrive at when you got to the end of black. You just looked at it and thought: Death. That’s Death.

“It’s the fucking
mamba
, Earl,” Julius said, “the
fucking mamba!”

The snake moved with a quite hideous rapidity toward Stroheim, who was hoisting himself up the outside of a stack of shelters. It strained after him, five, six feet vertically upward, then fell sideways and magicked itself into the darkness behind a stand of lights.

When I think about it I sometimes wonder whether Louis Mayer was in fact right and that Thalberg
was
losing it. There was simply no chance that that snake could have handled an MGM family-oriented or comedy role. Warner’s could have used it, perhaps. TV,
sure, but not opposite Deanna Durbin. What had Thalberg been thinking in offering it a slot on
Forest Lawn?
The snake was like poor old Anna Sten (remember her?)—everybody in Hollywood, apart from Sam Goldwyn himself, knew it just wasn’t going to happen for her. Or it might have been that Tony Gentry had simply picked the snake up hoping for a straight-to-zoo sale. Whatever the reason for its presence on
Forest Lawn
, with the mamba’s escape the whole noble premise of the rehabilitation center collapsed. You try to make it out of the jungle and the jungle comes with you. Death was still here, shelters or not.

And, in a sort of chain reaction, the serenity of
Forest Lawn
exploded. Captain Mannicher was furious and used his hand against Julius. It was the first blow I had ever seen between humans. “We’re six hours out of New York!” he shouted. “Don’t give me this shit! Who the fuck do you think is liable? The longshoremen? They’re not even going to think about unloading the cargo! My men aren’t going to touch it. Don’t fucking tell me it was damaged in transit! This is your fucking liability. Your fucking problem!”

Mr. Gentry was behind Captain Mannicher, trying to groom him down from his display. “Pete, come on, this isn’t helping us….”

“Don’t tell me what’s helping, Gentry. I’ve got a million and a half dollars’ worth of cargo that the Port Authority’s not gonna let me unload until you find this fucking thing and I am gonna—listen to me—I’m gonna fucking
close you down
if it harms anybody on board this vessel.” It was fear-based aggression, I could see. And he hadn’t even seen the fucking thing yet!

I would like, by the way, to make the point again that it was actually
my banana in the first place
, not Stroheim’s, and in that sense it was all
his
fault. It was not easy to communicate this at the time.

“I’m not suggesting that anyone involved with the freight
company or the ship look for the mamba. Quite the contrary,” Mr. Gentry said, with calming gestures of submission. “This is a highly aggressive, deadly animal. No antivenom has been developed for it. It’ll be disoriented by its surroundings, which may mean it’s less aggressive, or it may not. But I and my men will do the searching. In the meantime, I suggest that you keep on all the lights we have and gather the crew here on the top deck.” “Rats, Tony,” said Earl.

“Yeah, I know. It’ll feed on rats, Captain, given its ‘druthers. Tell the men to stay clear of places where rodents might be found—the giraffes’ straw, the bulkheads, the binnacles, you know better than me. OK, Earl, come on, not your fault. Let’s go.”

“Don’t let the fucking lions out,” Mannicher said in farewell. “Never afuckingain, Gentry. And take fucking Bonzo with you!”

“This animal is safer where you are, Captain. The mamba won’t have any difficulty entering the cages in the hold and getting after the stock. In fact, that’s where we’re starting. So let’s just all keep our heads and we’ll solve this.” Mr. Gentry was very white where Mannicher was red. “And it’s not Bonzo, Captain,” he said, “it’s Cheater.”

A very special human being, Mr. Tony Gentry.

All that evening I stayed in the wheelhouse with Captain Mannicher and various other extremely anxious humans. As the night wore on they relaxed somewhat, having little else to do except display cards and drink whiskey. DiMarco was volunteered to travel with a number of others to the galley and return with something to eat, and by the time they came back, unscathed, the humans were again laughing and conversing in that reassuring way of theirs. “Skipper, a specialty of my country:
linguine alla nero”
said DiMarco, laughing and lifting the lid from one of his silver dishes and dangling a handful of writhing black strands in front of Captain Mannicher. All the men displayed and wept with laughter. There
was something terribly strange and not very human about them at that moment, as if they had gone slightly mad.