Me Cheeta (35 page)

Don was sick of getting nowhere, but what he wanted to do with himself he wasn’t sure. Something with animals, he thought. And this was what annoyed me, and still does a little about my dear friend—he’s so down on humans. Don loved animals but I could hardly let him get away with some of the things he said about humans—you were like a virus, you were going to blow up the planet, you loved war (no, you don’t, you hate it!), you were “the only animal that deliberately, cold-bloodedly kills” (first time I heard that nonsense), you were cruel, you didn’t care about the environment(!), and I don’t know what all. Whereas animals didn’t lie or cheat or steal, etc. They didn’t leave you. Don’s OK and everything, but he doesn’t believe in human beings the way I do.

Pretty soon Don was coming over two or three days a week—this was 1981, something like that—helping out Mr. Gentry by bringing groceries and stuff from the pharmacist, or just coming around to sit and chew the fat with me. He was coming to see
me
as much as Mr. G., I began to understand. Along with the groceries,
there’d always be something for me: a particularly “delicious” fruit (which wasn’t), a flower that was meant to squirt water from a plastic bulb but just dribbled, a videocassette specially for me to mess up
(that
I liked). Most often it’d be some slightly foolish chimp- or monkey-themed trinket like a key ring or a refrigerator magnet, which was no good to me at all but I appreciated the thought. One time he brought a whole pad of artists’ paper and a tray of little circles of paint.

“You’re crazy,” Mr. Gentry said. “You can’t afford this, Don. How much did it…?”

“Three bucks or something. Nothing.”

There was a price tag still on the pad. “Nine dollars ninety-nine cents? This is artists’-grade paper, you idiot. What’s he gonna paint, the
Mona Lisa?
And he won’t be able to use those paints anyway—they’re too fiddly.”

He was right. I gave it a shot and it was hopeless: hard little circles of paint that needed too much water and came out disappointing shadows of themselves. I slightly disheartened Don, I think, by going through them for supper: the lemon, the lime, the orange, the strawberry, coffee, mint and the black one I decided not to bother with. But still, it was Don that got me started.

Not long after that, Mr. Gentry abandoned all positivity. “There’s nothing that anyone can do. It’s just life. And if you think I’m stopping smoking now, you can forget it. Happens to everyone, sooner or later.” That pessimism. Bad sign. “Hopefully it’ll be later. I don’t mind for me, it’s him.” Don tried to interrupt, but Mr. Gentry overruled him. “It’s a totally impossible idea. I’ve spoken to UCLA and they’re just about the best. It’s cognitive research; they’ve got a stake in the animals’ welfare. You haven’t any experience whatever, Don. You don’t have enough money for yourself. And it’s not a pet, it’s a full-time job. You’d be throwing your life away.”

“I love him,” said Don.

“Don’t be fucking ridiculous,” said Mr. Gentry.

“They’ll kill him.”

I thought, Oh, come on, they’ll never kill me. I’m still
Cheeta.

“Don’t be fucking ridiculous. It’s not some roadside zoo. And it’s not a disease unit.”

“Oh, that’s such bullshit. A bunch of torturers in white coats who like to slice up innocent animals’ brains. Then they wash the blood off and go home to their lovely wives.”

“You don’t even—there’s nothing wrong with a lovely wife, Don,” said Mr. Gentry. “You don’t even know what you’re talking about. Supposing he lives another five, six, seven, ten years? You’d be throwing your life away. Look, I know UCLA’s not perfect but what else can I do?”

“You can let me have him.”

Mr. Gentry sighed. “Let me call MGM. He must have made them a lot of money over the years. They ought to be able to put the word out, find somebody who can take care of him. If not, then it’s your funeral.”

The old guys in the Palm Springs wards have a bit of a crush on me, I think. Don really hit on something when he came up with this as something to do. It’s good for my profile to do a bit of charity work, and I love the idea of giving something back to you humans besides what I humbly refer to as my “art.” In the long run that’s not going to last, like I say, but the old guys seem pretty inspired by the idea that I will. There’s one guy who shouts, “Call Mr. Guinness!” whenever he sees us. “Tell him his book’s out of date.”

I get a lot of requests to perform something comical and I give them the lip-flip, which is all I can manage these days. I think, Lay off, I’m a painter, not a comedian. But mostly they just want to
touch me. It’s not a very beautiful exchange, physically, I imagine. I’ve seen how much my head’s getting like a coconut, how my fur’s going white in these kind of random clumps, how my fingers have swollen into the joke-shop rubber suckers of the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and I always try to duck the reflection you get when you’re going through the sliding doors back into the Sanctuary. I wouldn’t want to touch me. As for them—well, you look at them now and wonder what they’re going to look like in another fifty years. What’s left to happen that already hasn’t?

But they want to touch me. They’d never admit to something so unscientific, but they want to be sure death doesn’t get
them
and they want to cop a feel just to be on the safe side. I’m lucky. I’m the luckiest chimpanzee in the world. More, I’m the luckiest non-human primate in the world. (I’m six years older than the oldest gorilla, baboon, orangutan and so on.) Frankly, I’m the luckiest animal in the world. That’s pretty lucky. No wonder they want a touch and can’t help asking, “Has he got a secret?” though with the positive attitudes I hear, I don’t think any of my guys has anything to worry about. There is no secret, anyway, as I’ve said. It’s as easy as breathing. If there was a kind of tips list, then I’d answer: “Luck, positivity, the absence of deadly snakes and no sudden loss of profile.” (It’s the
dip
that can kill, I think.) If there is one thing that they’re missing, I’m tempted to say, “Cigarettes.” Look at the humans
everyone
agrees will never die, the True Immortals: Bogie, Jimmy, Mitch. Not Brad, Tom, Arnold.

Don’s answer would be, “Insulin.” Every morning he rolls the little bottle between his palms to prepare the stuff, pinches up a little tent of flesh and injects. Twenty years I’ve been a diabetic: twenty years of injections from Don, and they don’t seem to be doing me any harm, I’ll say that. Maybe he’s right and the insulin does have special properties—Don’s mom seems fascinated by the little
bottles and she’s not a diabetic. She unlocks the little fridge while Don’s in the den and stands there for long minutes, fearful of being discovered, weighing them in her palms.

The Sanctuary hasn’t really changed that much since I first came here. That’s good. Sanctuaries shouldn’t change. The name’s changed though: it’s the C.H.E.E.T.A. Institute now, otherwise known as the Casa de Cheeta. The first sounds like a robot lives here, and the other makes me seem like a porn star. I preferred the Sanctuary, which is how it was twenty-six years ago when Don drove me up here after the funeral in Barstow was all done and dusted.

“No weeping and wailing,” Mr. Gentry had said. “Death’s nothing to be afraid of.” But nobody at the ceremony took any of that seriously, I’m pleased to say. It was cruel, said the humans, but he hadn’t taken care of himself. It was his own fault. He just hadn’t taken enough care….

“I never want to have to go through that ever again,” said Don, and, hating death, we drove away from Barstow, down Route 15 through Victorville, where poor scooped ‘n’ flayed Trigger rears up emptily, to San Bernardino, then on to Route 10 to Palm Springs and sanctuary. And, with the exception of one brief trip, I haven’t left here since.

What has time done to the place? Well, if you come out through the sliding doors, which you just flip this little black plastic thing to unlock (you wouldn’t be so kind as to give us a hand?), then put your shoulder to one side and—it sticks a bit—shove (thanks again), here we are on the deck, which is about ten years old. Heavy-duty plastic table with midge bodies, tidemarked umbrella and, if you’ll follow me, here we are in the garden! Note the plastic objects the childish animals toy with lying scattered around the
lawn, see the midges doing galaxies and comets above our deflating crocodile in the pool, do not approach the flowerbeds, thanking
you.

To your right you’ll see that my mesh cube is now one of a series: here’s Jeeter rolling his big red inflatable exercise ball around on the gravel of his shelter. He’s been with us since ’95. Careful, though, he’s not used to you and these kids … you know what they’re like, with all their vigor and mischief. He’s used to me and he nearly fucking killed me, so watch those fingers.

And if you’ll look up there—no, up
there
… there’s Daphne lolling in her rope-cradle with that lovely unflustered long-limbed orangutan grace. She moved in in ’98. You may remember her from such classics as the West Palm Springs Savings & Loan Take it Eazzzy Secure-Rate Tracker Account campaign and the Old Woodsmoke Quick-Burn Bar-B-Q Chips and Bar-B-Q Fluid shoot, with the apron and
that
expression.

On the other side of the warped MDF floor, behind the old cement-filled rain barrel, you may observe an elbow of Daphne’s shelter-mate Squeakers, who arrived in 2000. Squeakers is a male (with those characteristic orangutan facial flanges, nubbly like basketballs) and the much-loved veteran of
Funky Jungle Disco!, No Freaking Way: Drugs Are Wack, Rainforest Detective Agency
and sundry other entertainments for human children.

Moving on—you’ll get plenty of time to say hello to Squeakers later, and there will be a quiz—around the back of the garage, and do watch that cactus… meet Maxine, an olive baboon. Maxine’s been with us since 2002. She is twenty-nine years old, weighs forty-four pounds, is unusually gentle and loves to perform, or is habituated to perform at any rate. She’s showbiz through and through. The olive baboon, otherwise known as the Anubis baboon, ranges across a number of equatorial African countries… I can see some
of you getting bored—listen, has anyone got a cigarette? What,
none
of you? Jesus, never mind, never mind, let’s get on back to the house.

As we enter the Casa itself, you’ll observe the piano (1992) where never in a million years could I even come up with “Chopsticks.” If we ever manage to sell any CDs of my atonal noodles as “ape-music” I’d be pretty surprised, but it relaxes me, and Don does love a duet. Note the photograph of Uncle Tony on the wall above, in pride of place between a couple of Project posters. Without Mr. Gentry’s small but invaluable bequest, along with this magazine feature we put together way back when, Don and I could never have started this venture. The kitchen area is open-plan, obviously, and here is my easel, or “table;” same thing basically, since I tend to alternate a mark on the paper with a fingerful of paint down the hatch. I do find my art “nourishing,” ah ha ha ha ha.

So: this is the creative and commercial hub of the empire, where I earn the funds that keep Don afloat and allow him to be a full-time animal-carer.Yes, ‘twas here that the Artist actually conceived and executed
Errol Flynn Postpones Ejaculation by Thinking of Two Hundred Dead Horses
, no flash photography, please. Old refrigerator (’97), new lockable refrigerator of insulin on the worktop (2004)—ladies and gentlemen, you’ll note that no alcohol is allowed in the Casa de Cheeta. Since 1982, with Don’s help and one slip, I haven’t touched a drop. Twenty-five years, three months and two weeks, thank you for your commiseration: I put up with it a day at a time. I don’t suppose… no,no,stupid idea, forget it.

Now, can any clever little person tell me what there’s a lot of in here? Yes, that’s right, honey—monkeys! Since 1982, the Sanctuary has been very gradually overwhelmed by the monkeys people give to Don in the absence of anything else they can think of. Tribes of magnetic monkeys suspend the monkeys who await our grocery
requirements from the refrigerator door. Food is segmented by monkey cutlery on monkey plates and monkey placemats, washed down with water from a monkey-rimmed glass that lives on a monkey coaster. Monkeys hold our toilet paper and our monkey soap, they help us brush our teeth and tell the time and encourage us to grumble about Mondays. We haven’t got monkey wallpaper yet, and we don’t want any, thanks very much. There are now more monkeys in here than there are in the rest of America. But you can’t seem to stop drawing or molding us, dearest visitors—you can’t stop
drawing animals
, can you? You certainly can’t stop giving them to Don.

And now let us make our way down the hall (bathroom; bedroom where, quiet, please, Don’s taking his siesta; spare room which became a study in ’99 and where I’ve been working on these memoirs) and past the glass-front bookcase with its thirty or forty books, all about old feelings, feelings from the past:
Hurt, Shattered, Sickened, Broken, Lost, Ruined.
Not to worry, every one of them’s uplifting. Let’s keep on down the hall toward the heart of it all, where this godforsaken infestation of monkeys is whittled down to one. Here is the den.

Let us enter the Cheetarium. Here is the Memorabilia Corner. Here are my reviews, here are my portraits. That’s me with the attractive Dr. Goodall. There’s me with the guy from
The Guinness Book of Records
, smashing my own record even in that sixteenth of a second. And look—me with an honorary Oscar, photofuckingshopped into my clutches. There’s me and Don looking fifteen years younger, a commission in oils, and here’s our sofa, with our twenty-six-year-deep indentations in it. It seems impossible. The years accelerate like coins vibrating on countertops. It seems so impossible. Twenty-six years, or one hundred and four seasons of television.

Twenty-six years and they feel like nothing. If I should ever die, Don would be devastated. He loves me. He calls me his “everything,” and I’m very fond of him myself. Over there is the telephone table. On it, please observe, unstably erect in its crappy plastic cradle, the new complicated phone (2007) that resembles the old phone in that it never, ever, thrills to a call from Bogie or Kate or Van or Connie or Nunnally or Rita or Ty or Dolores or Niv (“He’s no longer with us”—I know, he’s in Switzerland) or Peter Lorre or Wayne or Huston or even Dietrich (“She’s gone to a different place”—Paris, I heard) or Maureen. Not one of them. Not one, once, ever.