The Avram Davidson Treasury (65 page)

“Where there is no food, there is no religion. Where there is no religion, there is no food. So my first father-in-law used to say. What a gonnif. Eat, my shaggy friend. Eat, eat.”

After quite some time, during which they both ate heartily and, truth to tell, noisily, Alfy gave grateful eructation. Gave a sudden exclamation. “Almost missed the news on the video! Finally I broke down and bought one. Many a movie big shot it will wipe out of business, they say, but me it wouldn’t wipe out. Pardon my back,” he said, as he turned to watch the small screen.

Dorothy gladly did so, for quite apart from her contentment in the immediate situation, she was also pleased to watch what many still called “video,” which was not yet to be found in every room of every house, rather like an ashtray.

Neither black and white screen nor sound adjusted immediately, and Alfy adjusted the rabbit-ear antennas; at length a voice was heard to say: “…meanwhile, search continues for the so-called Monster of the Hollywood Hills.”

“I’ll give them yet a Monster of the Hollywood Hills,” growled Alfy. “What are they trying to do with my property values? Communists! Holdupnikkes! Shut up, Alfy,” he advised himself.

Two men, besides the television news personality, sat before a background of greatly enlarged photographs and plaster casts.

“Well, Dr. William Wumple of the University of Southern Los Angeles Department of Primate Sciences, and Superintendent Oscar Opdegroof of the County Police Bureau of Forensic Zoology, won’t you tell us what your opinion is about all this?”

Professor Wumple said, “These photographs and plaster casts are of the foot-and-knuckle prints of the increasingly rare Sumatran mountain gorilla of Sumatra, and—”

“I grant you, Professor Wumple,” said Superintendent Opdegroof, “that there is certainly a resemblance. But the increasingly rare Sumatran mountain gorilla, a native of Sumatra in Indonesia, is vegetarian in its habitat. There is, as you know, no record of an increasingly rare Sumatran mountain gorilla, which inhabits the East Indies or Sumatra, ever having killed and eaten part of a credit bureau representative and concealed his bones in a plastic bag. The diet of this otherwise harmless creature is mostly the stalk of the wild celery plant which grows profusely on every wild mountain slope of the archipelago of Sumatra.”

“Depraved appetite,” said Professor Wumple, “may be found in any species. I refresh your memory with the fact that pachyderms are also herbivorous, and yet there is the classical case of the elephant named Bubi which fatally trampled and ate a young woman named Anna O. in the Zurich Zoo, who had heedlessly fed him leftover kümmelbrot from the table of her employer, a dealer in low-priced watch cases named Schultz.”

The television news personality opened his mouth, but it and the rest of him dwindled and vanished as Alfy switched off the set. “Look, so now to business. Um, what did you say your name was, unwilling though I am to force you out of your chosen anonymity?
Dorothy?
A girl in a gorilla suit, this I never encountered before,” he said, surprised; but rallied quickly. “My mother, she should rest in peace, told me that in her own younger days, if a woman so much as smoked a cigarette in the public street, she might as well have gone to Atlantic City with a traveling salesman. But now we live in an enlightened era. Lemme hear you squeal.”

“Squeal?” asked Dorothy, somewhat lethargic from food and rest.

Alfy nodded. “Yeah, squeal. Use your imagination. Say you’re strolling through your native jungle and you see, like, reclining under a tree and fast asleep because she’s lost from her expedition—what then, a bewdyful young woman. You never seen nothing like this in your
life
before! So naturally, you give a squeal of astonishment. Lemme hear.”

Dorothy, with only the slightest of thoughtful pauses, gave a squeal. Of, she hoped, astonishment.

“Bewdyful,” said Alfy.

Dorothy gave him a doubtful look. “No,” he said. “I mean it, I swear it. By my second mother-in-law’s grave, she should soon be inside of it. Hypocrisy is alien to my nature, even though I never finished high school, but was cast out in the midst of the teeming thoroughfares, what I mean
jungles
, which are the streets of our large cities. But of this I needn’t bore you, Dotty.—Now use your imagination again. You and this lovely young woman are going along a jungle trail in search of the mysterious Lost Temple of Gold. Her boy friend, the head of the expedition, gets knocked on the head by a falling coconut, and as he sinks to the ground, simultaneously you—and you alone—become aware that an unfriendly tribe of rotten natives are slinking through the underbrush to attack: lemme hear you convey this information to your lovely human newfound lady friend with a series of intelligent squeals.”

Dorothy did her best to oblige, and in the unpremeditated fervor of her performance, began to use gestures. Alfy was immensely pleased. “We’ll dub it, we’ll dub it!” he cried.

She was so excited that she found herself jumping up and down and scratching her pelt.

Alfy, watching her benignly, became concerned. “Even through your gorilla suit you’re sweating,” he said, “let me get you some ice cubes for your cold drink.” Running water over the old-fashioned all-metal tray, he turned and asked, “Why not take off your costume, you’ll be more comfortable, Dotty?”

Even as she opened her mouth to repeat that she wore no costume, Dorothy observed a strange woman come running across the dimly lit dining room adjoining the kitchen; and as she ran, thus she screamed:

“I’ll
give
you ‘take off your costume,’ I’ll
give
you Dotty, I’ll
give
you Shelley, I’ll
give
you Miffanwy—”

“Sandra, if you hock me a tchainik, I’ll—”

Dorothy reacted to Sandra with as little instinctive affection as she had to Hubbard E. Glutt; raising herself on her toes, extending her arms high and her hands out, her talons clawing and her fangs showing, she began to utter squeals of pure rage.

Sandra never for a moment showed the slightest sign of believing that she was confronted by someone in a gorilla suit; Sandra turned and fled, giving shriek after shriek of terror, horror and fright.

Dorothy pursued her down the street, sometimes erect, sometimes bounding along on all fours; till the lights of an oncoming car caused her to shinny up the nearest deciduous tree, whence she dropped upon a housetop, thence to another tree, and thence to another housetop. Until eventually she realized that she was absolutely lost.

Inadvertently scattering the inhabitants of a hobo jungle, she moodily drank their bitter black coffee and spent the night on a musty mattress in a culvert near their fire. The illustrated magazines of a certain type which those lonely and semihermitical men used to while away the hours of their solitude, she merely fed into the flames in disgust.

Much of the next day Dorothy spent in a eucalyptus grove destined soon to be “developed” into total destruction. She gave a lot of thought to her condition. It was no doubt the celery tonic in which the incompetent quack-doctor Songhabhongbhong Van Leeuwenhoek had administered the so-called glandular extract—containing as the soft drink must have done, certain elements very similar to the wild celery stalks eaten by the increasingly rare mountain gorilla of Sumatra—which had caused this change to come upon her. Of this she was certain.

Since it wasn’t concurrent with her monthly cycle, and seemed not even to be identical with the full moon, she wondered if its occurrence might have something to do with her sign: Aries on the cusp. Vaguely she remembered hearing of a certain economically priced astrologer mentioned by her mother before she left to become an Avon Lady in Anaheim—or so her father said; perhaps (Dorothy now wondered for the first time) he had been shielding some less respectable occupation.

Her thoughts were interrupted with the utmost suddenness by the appearance in the grove of a simianlike creature who appeared equally startled. For a long moment both stood still, each staring at the other. Was this another increasingly rare Sumatran mountain gorilla? Another victim of the celery and hormone tonic?—No. It appeared to be a man in a flea-bitten gorilla suit! And it held a bottle of something wrapped in a brown paper bag.

“Listen,” it said. (Or, though the voice was slightly slurred, it was a masculine voice—said
he
.) “In times past, honey, when I was a well-known star of stage and screen, I drank nothing but the best Madeira, with a preference for
sercial,
but when you’re down it’s all over with the imported vintages. Any kind of sneaky pete will do. Go on, my dear. Go on and take a hit.” His sunken snout came so near to her face that she sensed it wasn’t his first drink of the day.

The well-known former star of stage and screen took the bottle and slid the top of it up high enough so that he could uncap it and drink of its contents, and yet quickly slide it back down inside of the paper bag; for many people might object to someone blatantly imbibing alcohol in public—even in a eucalyptus grove which had formerly served as the site of a hobo jungle—for to do so is against the law.

Next, and though he had gallantly offered her a hit, he proceeded to do the following: turning slightly at an angle away from Dorothy, he fumbled his paw into his pelt and produced a second bottle, a smaller one with clear liquid in it; of this he swiftly drank and swiftly disposed it once again in a pocket of some sort; and next he took a much longer tug of the cheap wine.
Then
he offered it to her again, and as she hesitated, thinking of a tactful refusal, he said, “It’s only polite to offer, but to insist would be most
im
polite.—And jerked it away.

His voice had become increasingly slurred, and as he lurched off down the road, Dorothy considered the possibility that the clear liquid was vodka. It was only because he half-turned his head, and inclined it as though in invitation for her to accompany him, that she followed. Grotesquery prefers company, and she thought that she might as well go along—because she wasn’t sure what else to do. So follow she did.

Now and then some of the passersby looked at them, but nobody looked twice. Not only was this Hollywood, but this was the famous “Gower St. Gulch,” as outsiders in the know called it. To those on the inside it was merely “The Gully.”

To outsiders
not
in the know it might have seemed as if preparations were being made for the annual cattle drive to Dodge City, so numerous were the men in cowboy outfits. There was a slight stir in their ranks, seemingly caused by a dark man wearing a soiled khaki shirt and faded dungarees, moccasins and a pair of reddened eyes, who was standing on the sidewalk and shouting:

“Slant-eyed folks and Mexicans and Very Light Colored People, keep the hell outa the gully!” he yelled, in particular directing his cries to several people in war paint and feathers. “Leave the depictation of Native American Indian roles to jen-u-wine Native American Indians!—You,
you
, Marcus Garvey Doothit, professional named Marco Thunderhorse, I’m addressing myself ta
you
, don’t gi’
me
no bull about yer Grandmother bein’ a full-blooded Cherokee Injin!”

M. G. Doothit, a.k.a. Marco Thunderhorse, gave a scornful pout and said, “All I have to say to
you
, Amos Littlebird, is that sticks and stones and arrows and musket balls may break my bones, but ethnic epithets merely reflect upon those who hurl them.”

Scarcely had all this faded behind them when Dorothy and her lurching companion encountered a scowling young man bearing a sign which read:
SO-CALLED
“
SCIENCE FICTION
”
MOVIES
/
STOP LIBELOUS PORTRAYALS OF SO-CALLED
“
MAD SCIENTISTS
,”
SCIENCE IS THE HOPE OF THE PEOPLE
!

It was not yet the 1960s, but the winds were full of straws.

By and by they came to a high wire fence surrounding a barrackslike compound; and here the senior simian figure paused to drain both of his bottles and hurl them away. Then he approached the gate in, for the first time, a fairly good simulation of an apelike lope. A gray-haired man stepped out of a booth, beaming.

“Gee, good
morn
ing, Mr. Bartlett Bosworth,” he exclaimed. “Only last night I was saying to my wife, ‘Guess who I saw at AESSP this
A.M.
, sugar?’ And she says, ‘Who?’ And I told her, ‘Remember Bart Bosworth who played Greeta Garbo’s boy friend and also he played Mree Dressler’s grown-up handsome son?’ And she says ‘Sure! What’s he doing
now
?’ And I told her, ‘He’s imitating a gorilla for Alf Smatz, King of the D-Movies,’ and she says, ‘Oh gee, what a shame,’ and—”

Thickly, from behind his gorilla mask, Bart Bosworth said, “Both of you just take your pity and divide it in two and then you can both shove it.” And he lurched on through the gate.

The gray-haired man, no longer beaming, pointed to Dorothy and asked, “Who’s this?”

“Who’s it look like? Myrna
Loy
? My understudy.”

The gateman turned his attention to other arrivals. Ahead of them was a sign reading:
ALFRED EMMANUEL SMITH-SMATZ PRODUCTIONS
.
POPULAR ENTERTAINMENT AT POPULAR PRICES
. The way seemed endless, but Bartlett Bosworth evidently knew his way.

By and by they came upon a clearing in a jungle. Scarcely had Dorothy time to express surprise in a single squeal, when Bart Bosworth, uttering a huge and hideous hiccup, fell full length upon the synthetic turf and began to snore.

This dull and repetitious sound was interrupted by a short, sharp slap: a man in a long-considered-obsolete uniform of a moving-picture director (including turned-around cap), had occasioned this by striking his forehead with the flat of his hand. “Again!” he cried. “Again! Drunk yesterday, drunk the day before—get him up! Hot coffee, bennies if anybody’s got any, an ice pack. But get him
up
, get him sober!”

Although a shriveled-looking chap with the air of a superannuated yesman turned round and round like a dervish, shrilling: “Right, Chief! Yes, Chief! How coffee! Benzedrine! A nice pack!” others were not convinced.