Me Cheeta (33 page)

It happens with actors. Look at De Niro. There’s been that musty been-lying-in-straw joylessness to his work for so long. You can just tell he’s had to be beaten around the head in order to be
dragged in front of the camera, can’t you?
Meet the Fockers?
Don stopped it halfway. So, yes, clambering off my stool again to perform a little rodeo dance in my excremental dungarees, or hunching behind the wheel of my ill-fated Spyder, I think I lacked some of the conviction that real art requires.

But it’s the days and the miles and the absences that I’ve been trying to capture in my work, the feeling of waiting in the mesh back of our pickup at a gas station in a little square in Boca Raton at dawn, Mr. Gentry getting breakfast, and seeing all the streetlights flick off at the same moment all the sprinklers come on and the Amoco disk suddenly spooked into spinning as if to say that something or somebody
has
just been and gone. These could be great, these paintings, but I just don’t seem to have the technique right yet. I’m trying, though, I’m trying, and they’ve got something about them. Absence haunts them. Impressions of America—$150 a pop. Treat yourself. And remember that you’ll be helping Don’s mom.

It’s been a very lucky life so far, I may have said. Mr. Gentry saved it twice. Funnily enough, I do think that the reason we lasted as long as we did is that we got off to the right start that day in the slush at the Selig Park zoo. Neither of us mentioned what must have been heavy on both our minds: what had happened in Trefflich’s office. And I was happy to let drop the fact that he’d gone out for an hour and stayed gone sixteen goddamn years, since I didn’t have his damn Luckys to give him any more anyway.

Throughout his life Mr. Gentry absolutely adored working with chimps and we quite liked working with him. He had an idea that he particularly wanted to use me for which cropped up at intervals throughout the years, but mostly he worked with me and a cast that altered but usually consisted of me, Doozer, Goofy, Bingo, our female, and Mary-Lou the pony. Doozer was our star, what with the show-stopping, or show-slowing anyway, backflips he could do
while riding Mary-Lou around the venue; Goofy and I had a hoe-down routine and the cars (he was supposed to be a blond girl in a convertible whom I was chasing, dinner-jacketed as Bond); Bingo played the drums. We had a
Maltese Falcon
routine and a
Gone With the Wind
skit, in which I was Sydney Greenstreet and Leslie Howard respectively, but the act’s real high points were merely the hugs we’d give Mr. Gentry and he’d give us throughout. Those were the good bits, the bits you could sense an audience really responding to: just a little bit of real affection between a human and an animal. That’s all you really wanted to see—us liking you.

“Aah, the
Falcon!
Seventeen years I’ve been waiting for that little item, sir!” I met Sydney Greenstreet once: didn’t like him. English. Money was always tight: it gushed in little flash floods over the years, but never for long enough and always just after Mr. Gentry needed it. We weren’t ever the sort of act that was going to make it to the St. Louis Zoo, the blue-ribbon live venue for chimps, let alone the ultimate goal, a slot on
Ed Sullivan
or
The Hollywood Palace
on ABC or, holiest of holies, the
Colgate Comedy Hour
, later the
Colgate Variety Hour.
We did bits and pieces: parties, clambakes, residencies at nightclubs, stints with circuses.

One time in the early fifties Mr. Gentry got involved with a German-Jewish producer named Jack Broder, who managed to get me a bit of screen work in a B called
Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla
, three or four days’ dreaming for me. It was a vehicle for a pair of Martin & Lewis impersonators, called Duke Mitchell and Sammy Petrillo, whom you’ve never heard of because it’s their only picture. Petrillo’s impersonation of Jerry Lewis was uncannily accurate. He was every bit as unfunny as Jerry, and Jerry’s less funny than
Chaplin.
(I mean: Lewis, Hope, Skelton, Gleason—in the fifties I sometimes wondered whether I’d ever laugh again, and wasn’t surprised when Colgate had to get rid of the
Comedy
bit.)
Anyway, I’m pretty sure that a billion monkeys given a billion cameras and a googol of years would never make anything as speciesshamingly bad as
Brooklyn Gorilla
(we’d make art films, actually, I believe, rather good ones) and I don’t seriously expect that the Academy is going to give me the honorary award because of my work in it. I’m guessing it won’t even be in the citation.

And, what else? Anything else? Where was I when JFK was shot? In a cage. The Cuban Missile Crisis? In a cage. Moon landings? In a cage. HUAC, MLK, RFK? Cage. Could make a great movie—
Cheeta: Witness to History!
Wasn’t I thinking anything? Surely there must be some choice anecdotes? What about Mr. Gentry? All right. Here’s the anything else.

“I want you to come and meet an old friend,” Mr. Gentry said to me, as he unlocked the truck cage one morning in Salt Lake City, Utah, summer of 1949. “He’s come a long way to see you.” Mr. Gentry had retained that sharp white line down the center of his scalp from the thirties.

He still had his air of rather dashing rectitude, a four-square feller who’d probably done something rather extraordinary in the war, which he never mentioned. I mean to say: apart from the one lie, he was a fair dealer.

He led me by the hand across a courtyard of cabins to his own: my suddenly heightened senses felt cold packed earth, wet grass, gravel, tile, concrete, sisal matting underfoot. “All the way from Africa!” Mr. Gentry emceed, as he flattened the door open butlerishly (and for one terrible second I thought, He’s going to say, “Stroheim!”) and there he wasn’t. A thinning-haired middle-aged man, who carried a lot of slack where some considerable muscles had once been, stood under the light fixture in a one-piece off-the-shoulder leopard-skin tunic, looking away, caught slightly in a daydream.

“Oh, sorry, Tony,” he said. “Me Tarzan! You Cheeta!”

I thought, No, me Cheeta, you some poor sap standing in a motel cabin in Utah wearing fancy-dress underwear and looking like a complete fucking fool.

You can feel gravity at moments like that. You can feel how every atom in your body wants to tear downward, feel just how much goddamn effort it is to stand upright on this planet. I gave Mr. Gentry
a look.
This was his big idea, and perhaps the reason for his visit to the Selig Park Zoo: to run an act around the “real movie Cheeta” and his friend “Tarzo the Jungle Man!” He couldn’t get any of the rights to Tarzan but he was sure that a chimp show featuring “one of the real movie Cheetas” in a jungle context was a viable long-term possibility, if we could only get the act itself to click. (Nobody has the rights to me, by the way.
I’m
Cheeta, for real, and large as life. Come and visit me in Palm Springs any time. Bring cigarettes.)

Mr. Gentry couldn’t cast himself as Tarzan, so over the years, in the fallow periods between residencies or tours with the regular act, or in those long lulls when bookings were down, he’d find another Charles Atlas type or college football player to be my mate, my partner, my son, my everything, and every time, dearest readers, every new time, my heart fell for it. Because all I was looking for, from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to Dolores, Colorado, from sea to shining sea, was him, of course. That’s the anything else.

So there was Mr. Gentry and me and Doozer and Goofy and Bingo and a score or so “Tarzo the Jungle Kings” and we lived in motel courts and trailers and cages in America, sometimes with a “Jungle Jane,” sometimes with a “Jungle Boy,” and played to houses that weren’t bad, weren’t great. Tarzo was a stevedore from Erie, Philadelphia, and a lifeguard from Bay City; he was a royal pain in the ass from Cleveland, Ohio, and an ex-linebacker for the Utah Saints; he drank, he was a morphine addict, he worried about his
father, he worried about the Reds, he worried about getting drafted, he fucked Jane and, once, Boy. And a glimpsed loincloth or wide bare back in the corner of my eye would have me lurching inside for a moment, even though I
knew
it wasn’t him. Ten minutes later, I’d go and do it again. As if my soul were the dumb boy in class whose hand shoots up instantaneously to deliver always the same wrong answer, a wrong answer that the teacher is fed up to the headachy back teeth of telling him is wrong, so
stupidly
wrong, impossible.

I was genuinely fooled for a moment in the cafeteria of a roadside zoo in Michigan in ’62, and behind a big top in North Carolina in ’55. And on top of that I was permanently being kidded by the padded shoulders of a thousand double-breasted suits. I was stiffed severally by unseen televisions giving the yell. And for ten minutes totally convinced by a half-glimpsed near-match at the newly opened Roy Rogers & Dale Evans Museum in Victorville, California, where Mr. Gentry had, perhaps unwisely, taken me to see Trigger, whose hide had been peeled from him and stretched over a plaster cast to make a beautiful permanent memorial.

And then a day came in the mid-sixties when Mr. Gentry opened the passenger door of our VW, where I was lolling about with my feet on the dash, and said, “Cheet-o, listen. I want you to hear something.”

We were in Chiloquin, Oregon, near where the world’s largest miniature railway is. I don’t think we’d done a Tarzo bit for a couple of years. Out of the blue and the swishing of the traffic, I heard, as strong and as happy and as youthful as ever, not lessened by anything like time:
“Aaaahhheeyyeeyyeeyyaaahhhhheeyyeeyyeee yyeeaaaah!
”

I piled out of the car to leap into the embrace of a strapping white-haired young athlete in T-shirt and jeans, grinning at his
own lung power, because—do you see how it was? I was like a chimp working in a university, failing the cognition test with the electric jolt over and over, just not getting it that the blue button meant
pain.

“Pretty darn good, eh? Pretty darn
perfect.
Say, ‘Me Tarzan,’ to Cheet-o, Brian. Don’t rush him.”

“Me Tarzan! Say, is this the one that, you know, the thing with Dolores del Rio?”

He was OK, Brian, best one we ever had, I think.

So, there was Mr. Gentry and me and Doozer and Kong and Katie and Marie-Lou the pony and sometimes Tarzo and Jane, and we lived on an escarpment in America in the middle years of the century, and they mocked me, continuously, for years. How could I ever move on, or forget? Over time, I guess the disbelieving hatred I had for the whole travesty slowly died down, like the deflating turquoise crocodile in our pool at the Sanctuary, into no more than a stale disgust. Because, to be absolutely honest, I didn’t want to move on. I
liked
the blue button. Even if I could, I’d never stop pressing it. Or did you know that already?

“Honey, will you swing by the riverbank? I’d like you to cash a check for some water,” Jane might ask, apropos nothing. Aargh! Oof, that
hurts
…

“OK, hon. I sure hope I don’t get caught in a line behind a leopard, though,” Tarzo worried.

“Why not?”

“He might be trying to change his spots. Hey, what’s that, Cheeta? Cheeta says he’s just spotted some tigers in the garden.”

I’d said no such thing. I hoped my expression of boredom and contempt might communicate this fact to the audience.

“Well, tell him not to. Tigers aren’t spotted, they’re striped!”

“Hey, what’s that, Cheeta? The most frightening animal in the
jungle is coming toward the hut? A crocodile? A lion? What is it? I fear none of them!”

“Oh, Tarz, darling,” Jane suddenly recalled. “I invited Mother to lunch today!”

Bum tish. At least she never turned up. Jane’s
mother.
Brrr…

Our new escarpment was paradisically biodiverse: a crocodile with a snappy personality lived down the river by the swimming hole where elephants always remembered to pack their trunks and shopping-obsessed vultures fretted about carrion bags. Snakes were gifted at mathematics, elephants supported Eisenhower, a baboon started out as a country singer before switching profession to hairdresser, and pythons had crushes on us, if you were to trust the mendacious lion that told you. Not so bad a place to be at all. So we continued in the jostling forest, fearing only Jane’s mother and the pelican, which might at any moment present us with an enormous bill, and at the end of every day Tarzo liked to relax with his new friends, a trio of toucans who lived in the refrigerator, though never—not once—would he sit down and play cards with me. Because of my
name
, you see. And because he wasn’t real. On the real escarpment, I’d played whist and brag and Find the Lady with him.

But I did actually see him for real, just the once, and also twenty times over, in the window of an electrical supply store in Bakersfield, 1963. He was still on the escarpment. Brenda was nowhere to be seen, although he had a son whom I guessed must be hers. He’d moved out of the Treehouse and into a house. He’d traded his knife for a high-caliber rifle and his loincloth for a safari suit. “Fatigues”—that’s the other word for what he wore. He was just like everybody else—and there were two dozen of him up there, driving Jeeps, shooting crocs, speaking what looked like fluent English. As long as you’re happy, Tarzan, I thought, and then the sponsor’s messages came on and I saw that he was so ashamed of
himself he’d even changed his name. Jim.
Jungle
Jim. I don’t know if it was all because he thought Jane would come back to him now he could drive and tell the time… but she wouldn’t. She was always going to marry within her own class, and he was just another divorced ex-pat drifter now. The sponsor’s messages were unending and I finally allowed Mr. G. to yank me away down the sidewalk. Why stay? There was nobody even there to say goodbye to.

In the meantime, while the elephants switched their support from Ike to Nixon to Goldwater (guys, guys, think what you’re doing!) to Nixon again, it did give me a measure of quiet satisfaction, I suppose, to see the increase in opportunities for chimpanzees. I don’t want to take all the credit, but I had been instrumental in getting that door open, and now that it was, hundreds of us rushed through, into advertising, entertainment and exploration. In gratitude to the humans, hundreds of thousands of us knuckled down to the daily grind of a career in medicine or academia, very rewarding jobs, of course, very worthy, but you had to balance the satisfaction of helping the humans’ War on Death with the insecurity and high burnout rate of the profession.