Me Cheeta (7 page)

Not able to stand any more of it, I knuckled outside with a couple of bananas and gingerly dropped down to the deck, keeping an eye out for the death-snake. Away across the Atlantic, I noticed that some of the stars had formed themselves into a thick cluster in a way I’d never seen before, all crushed together like a broken-up moon.

Day came slowly. Mr. Gentry, Earl and Julius came up on deck for coffee and descended into the holds again. Nobody had any news of the death-snake. But now I saw that, where the star-cluster had been, there was a solid gray mass, high and steep like the escarpment in the forest. It didn’t move, and when I looked again a while later, it still hadn’t moved. It was, surely, the other bank of the river!

Captain Mannicher and members of the crew began to walk cautiously around the deck now, each of them holding a long piece of wood, scouring the planking with their gazes. I shuffled over and held out an arm to DiMarco, and he allowed me up into the crook of his elbow. “All your fuckin’ fault, kid,” he muttered soothingly. “We’re stuck here until we kill it or it kills us. You
bad
chimp. No America for you.” I was very grateful for the consolation, the human touch.

We moved slowly around
Forest Lawn
while the gray mass stayed where it was and I suddenly noticed that DiMarco was unaware that the death-snake, blacker in daylight, was pouring itself out of the grille of a bent-over kind of funnel thing about ten yards ahead of us. It noticed us, though. Opening its terrible, terrible black mouth again it slid toward us, veered away toward Mannicher (“It’s the—the—the fucking
thing!”
he managed to get out) and held its position, switching its head from side to side as if uncertain whether to go for the captain or DiMarco and me, scenting the air with its tongue. It didn’t look disoriented by its surroundings at all.
It looked like it was spoiling for a fight and simply couldn’t decide which opponent was nearest.

So there was America and there was me. And between us, Death.

We were the nearest. DiMarco was slow to see it, and by the time he did, it was gathering speed across the gap. They’re
fast, black
mambas, you’ll remember from Discovery, and they like to strike high. Two or three feet of its body was raised above the ground as it rippled over the planking. “Oh, Jesus,” breathed DiMarco, because he could see that any chance of outrunning the thing had already gone in the previous second. He must also have seen the awful black of the inside of its mouth. And it flowed up into the air, four, five feet off the ground and still rising as it struck, and we were suddenly tumbling down on the deck with the heavy body of the snake whipping over us.

It was one of my fucking discarded banana skins that DiMarco had stepped on, we later worked out. It had taken his legs from under him just at the moment of the mamba’s strike.

Captain Mannicher and the crew ran over to the snake as it sprawled, somewhat surprised, or as surprised as a snake can ever look, and momentarily vulnerable. A couple of them managed to jam its head down against the deck with their wooden sticks and, with a long knife, Mannicher decapitated it.

And still the snake’s head and half a foot of its body continued to slither on toward him, and we watched it, pleading with it to die so that we could go to America.

It did. But to this day, I retain a loathing for two things in particular. (Three, if you count Mickey Rooney.) I fear snakes. And I cannot stand the taste of bananas.

That was April 9, 1933: my official date of birth, if you look at the website. The day of my arrival on American soil. As is almost traditional in these cases, my name was misspelled at Immigration.

I’ll always have a soft spot in my already well-tenderized heart for New York, and not only because it’s generally agreed that some of my very best work, including the now classic “hotel-room sequence,” can be found in
Tarzan’s New York Adventure
(1942). The last of the truly great Tarzan pictures,
New York Adventure
was built around the simple but brilliant conceit of getting the Boy out of the goddamn way (he’d been kidnapped, or something). Without Johnny Sheffield there to muddy everything up, the central Tarzan-Cheeta-Jane relationship was free to return to its original clarity. I like to think I managed to make a reasonable job of the opportunity.

I don’t know whether I’d go so far as the
New York Times
reviewer—“Cheta (sic) the chimpanzee who well-nigh steals the picture runs amok in a swank hotel boudoir, shakes hands with astonished clerks, causes havoc with hatcheck girls, babbles over telephones and even makes wisecracks nearly as intelligible as Tarzan’s…. More than anyone, the monkey turns the Tarzans’ excursion into a rambunctious simian romp”—but the truth behind that “picture-stealing” performance, and the real reason I quote from that review, was that I was simply playing from life. The
famous nightclub sequence with the hatcheck girls? That was for real. All I had to do was dredge up my memories of a little spree I’d had in Lower Manhattan, the summer of 1933. By then I’d already spent several months in New York. Rehab. But right from the get-go America seemed to me to be some sort of paradise.

The morning we docked was spent overseeing the unloading of the stock into smaller mobile rehab units. I was touched to see how delighted the longshoremen along the pier were at the sight of the rescued animals, crowding around the shelters, offering bits of food and cigarettes, calling and waving. If not quite on the same scale as, say, Gloria Swanson’s reception on her return from Paris, with crowds strewing gardenias and roses in the path of America’s Sweetheart (while she secretly nursed a near-suicidal guilt over the child she’d just aborted in order to stay on top),
Forest Lawn
nonetheless received a welcome that, I think, would have satisfied even my old friend the great MGM publicist Howard Strickling. It was a very moving moment, and confirmed everything I’d suspected about humans—they were the happiest damn things I’d ever seen in my life. And they
loved
animals.

“Sonofabitch, this goddamn Depression,” Mr. Gentry muttered inexplicably, as the longshoremen maneuvered the shelters around. Christ, I thought, if they’re like this when they’re
depressed
… “Soon as Earl gets this lot sent off to Trefflich’s you know what I’m gonna do, DiMarco?”

“You’re gonna quit with the poisonous snakes.”

“I might do that. And I might take a walk down to the corner of Fulton and Church where I hear a little place called the White Rose Tavern has opened for business. And I suggest we make a Noble Experiment on our first legal drinks in the United States of America.”

“We takin’ the Cheater, boss?”

“The Cheater of Death? Sure we are. Gentlemen, I propose we embark on a little stroll.”

Which was what Julius, DiMarco, Mr. Gentry and I did. Now, I don’t know whether or not April 1933 was some sort of an economic peak in American history—I’m an entertainer, not a historian, never claimed to be one—but it seemed to me like you humans must have been going through a quite mind-boggling period of success. Over the course of that first awestruck walk I saw lines of men and women patiently attending huge vats of steaming soup, not shoving or fighting for it as we’d have done, but respectfully observing a hierarchy that extended back down the street for hundreds upon hundreds of humans. They also had a miraculous system of circular receptacles on the trails beside the streets, into which humans would toss scraps of food for other humans to discover and relish. Even in the gutters there could be found pieces of exotic fruits, which I saw several humans scoop up and savor! New York wasn’t, good grief, a “jungle,” as it’s so often described—the forest, now
that
was a jungle, with its everyday infanticide and cannibalism. There were no leopards, no snakes here, “Nothing to fear but fear itself!” was the boast I would keep hearing. And I thought I began to understand why
Forest Lawn
had been refused entry to America while the death-snake was still at large. This land was a haven dedicated to freedom from Death. The whole damn place was a rehabilitation center!

Any remaining anxieties I might have been harboring about being separated from the other chimps were overwhelmed by the storm of sense-impressions of Lower Manhattan, and the bewildering fact that every second person on the street seemed to
know my name:
“Hey, Cheeta!,” “Where’s Tarzan, bud?,” “You’re in the wrong jungle, Cheeta!” Either that or they called out, “Kong! Hey, Kong! You takin’ that thing up the Empire State, mister?” It was a
case of mistaken identity, perhaps. Perhaps I’d somehow been here before. I mean,
what was going on?
My head swam with it all—the humans crowding around smiling at me and shaking my hand, the stacked towers of shelters that hinted at the promise of unimaginable fruits should you clamber to their crowns, the glossy black shelters on wheels that sped by and kept the humans penned in on the “sidewalks…”

It was a sort of prophecy in a way, my unforgettable procession down the sidewalks of Manhattan seventy-odd years ago, shaking hands and grinning at people who knew my name. I was a nobody; I was a novelty; I wasn’t who they thought I was. And nowadays when they
do
know who I am—it’s exactly the same. There’s the scrutiny, the handshake, the “Hey, Cheeta, how’s Tarzan, buddy?,” the
pause.
… If you want to know what being famous feels like, what it means—and I speak as perhaps the most famous animal alive today—then picture a human and a chimpanzee facing each other in awkward silence, with nothing to be said, the faint inanity of the interaction stealing over both of them. That’s what fame is.

Anyway, we stepped off the sidewalk and descended some stairs into a cavernous shelter. I’m not ashamed to admit I was already salivating at the prospect of this “legal” booze in the White Rose Tavern when my nose caught a thick whiff of leopard, with top-notes of monkey. No, not topnotes, I thought, as we entered the tavern, a great smoggy stench of monkey.

Mr. Gentry greeted a rather solemn young man in shirtsleeves and striped tie—the Son, I was later to learn, in “Henry Trefflich & Son: Animal Importers”—and was soon laughing with him about the mamba; DiMarco was doing pratfalls to illustrate. I could see Earl and several other men at the far end of a corridor wrangling a shelter onto a cart inside which Frederick was hopping and whining,
I could see the wire mesh of shelters through which delicate little monkey-fingers curled. My heart sank. Quite obviously this wasn’t a “tavern” but some kind of further rehab center.

“And this is him, Henry, got him half trained already—the Cheater. The Cheater of Death,” said Mr. Gentry, unfurling me from his leg, which I’d quietly coiled myself around. He held me out to the pale young man. “Cheats, let me introduce to you the son of a friend of mine—Henry Trefflich the Younger.”

I sensed something unnatural or false in his gesture. It made me nervous and I scooted away from Trefflich back behind my protector’s leg.

“We’ll get acquainted later over a banana or two,” Trefflich said to me, threateningly. “But he needs a new name. Got a couple of Cheetas upstairs already.”

“Hell, they’re on a different order, ain’t they? You can’t be changing the Cheatster’s name,” said DiMarco. “Cheatster saved my life, man.”

“Well, maybe not, if he’s going with the L.A. order. I don’t know how much more stock MGM are after. But you wouldn’t believe what’s happening with the private buyers here. Dad says we sold more chimps in ‘thirty-two than the last ten years together. You know for why? It’s that great lummox Weissmuller. The ladies go crazy for him. It’s, uh… subliminal. They want Tarzan—they end up buyin’ a chimp.”

As Trefflich talked, I felt Mr. Gentry’s hand trying to detach my arm from his leg and I clung tighter, but I was just a kid, with a kid’s sinews, and there was another force in the room beyond Mr. Gentry’s strength, a gravity that was pulling me away from him and toward Trefflich.

“Dammit, Tony, you got yourself a friend there,” Trefflich said.

“Yeah. I’m going to miss you, little feller,” Mr. Gentry said, his
clawing fingers continuing to insist. He went on talking to Trefflich. “Me and the boys’ve been up all night snake-hunting….” Their nerves were shredded after the mamba, he said, and they needed to take the weight off for an hour or two before coming back to do the paperwork. “Come on, Cheats, off now.”

My grip finally went and Trefflich advanced with both arms out to shovel me up into his clasp, so I gave him a warning shriek and bit him as hard as I could on the side of his wrist. To no effect whatsoever, except to send a vibrating pain up the roots of my teeth, and a sharper, thinner hurt into the roof of my mouth. I
knew
they’d have some kind of magic protection. By the time the shock had subsided, Trefflich had hold of the back of my neck and I felt very strongly that I had somehow passed to the other side of the room.

“Half trained, Tony?” Trefflich said. My teeth were still jangling horribly, and I thought there was a cut in my soft palate. I jigged up and down in an attempt to shake the pain. “Exactly which is the half you got trained, huh? Chrissakes, look at that! Look at the toothmarks he’s left in the metal.”

Around his wrist was a band of dense, shiny material in the middle of which a white, glassed-over circle displayed—oh, this is gonna take forever: his watchband. I’d bitten his steel, chain-link watchband. And I wonder sometimes just how much the gentleness of my character was formed by that little lesson in the pointlessness of violence. It’s a rare chimp who has bitten so few humans as I have over the years. Or so many famous actresses, come to think of it.

“Stop jigging, kid, I can scarcely write,” Trefflich was saying. “Oh four oh nine three three, uh… little…
Jiggs
, brand-new U.S. citizen.”

Mr. Gentry approached me as I squirmed in Trefflich’s grasp. That exquisitely straight white line of scalp down the center of his
glossy brown head somehow imbued him with an aura of rectitude that made you trust him. He stroked the side of my head and made shushing noises. “We’ll be right back, Cheats, OK? You’re in good hands here. Wait a minute, uh, DiMarco, you got any smokes?” DiMarco held out the pack of Luckys he liked to wedge between bicep and rolled shirtsleeve, and flourishing the pack, Mr. Gentry disappeared down the passageway that led out of the room. “OK, Henry, you can let him go now,” he said, when he returned. “Watch this. Smokes, Cheats, go get me my smokes!”