Me Cheeta (36 page)

Now, shall we have a peek at the entertainment center (2006), ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, or should we just leave it there, with the legend at peace in his Palm Springs hideaway? Shall we exit the den and find ourselves by the front door?

Yes, let’s do that. Come on, out, the lot of you. Shoo. I’m a very old chimpanzee and I’m tired and the tour’s over. Oh, yeah, I promised you a quiz, didn’t I? It’s very simple. Where is he? Have you seen him? A prize if you get it right. Now, please, go and pester Mickey Rooney.
Vamanos
, humans. We’ve got Don’s mom coming over tonight and it can be very stressful if she’s not feeling well. There’s my statue: touch it for luck. And there’s the road. Hit it, please. One day soon I will be driven down it myself, in a sort of bubble on wheels that a friend of Don’s is welding together, all the way from Palm Springs to the wet cement of the Hollywood Boulevard Walk of Fame. If you ever see a chimpanzee passing in a Plexiglas pod at fifteen miles an hour through the Coachella Valley, like an old mad pope giving his blessing to the sinners of California, that’ll be me
en route
to further Immortality. I can’t wait: it’ll be the first time I’ve been out of Palm Springs since the last time. Now fuck off, dearest humans, and leave me alone with my memories.

“What an absolutely lovely home you have here,” said Katrina to the landlady of our villa.

I thought, Jesus, hold on, it looks like a bit of a dump to me, and downed another of my complimentary satsuma juices. On the other hand, I thought, Ooh-huh-ooh-hah-ooh-hah-ooh-HAH-ooh-HAH-ooh-HAH-ooaaaaa-HA-fucking-HEEEEEEEE! A surprise vacation, a Romeo y Julieta earmarked for me later and, who could tell?, maybe a couple of Coco Locos under the sun-kissed moon. And no Don! We’d nearly canceled when he fell ill, but it was just too much of a waste of money for Katrina and Mac (a lovely couple who worked for an august-sounding American publication called the
National Enquirer)
and me to miss out.
Arriba! Caramba!
Tequila! Mecheeta!

“Well, it used to be nicer before all this crap got in the way ofthe ocean,” our landlady said, gesturing with clattering bangles at a cluster of latecomer condos. She let us through the iron gate in the concrete wall and onto the villa’s terrace, a depressing courtyard where the sun didn’t reach. The pool was very small and had an out-of-season look. A pile of straw in one corner wouldn’t have looked out of place. Hell, it was only a base. “I’m Maria,” the old
woman said in a faintly Dietrichian voice. Her smile was like a rather demanding technical accomplishment she’d learned long ago. “Mi
casa es sucasa.
I hope the journey was OK?”

OK? Listen, I’d been expecting to fly to England for
Dolittle
but instead they’d locked me in a cold vibrating chamber at Kennedy and we must have taken the Atlantic Tunnel or something. Whereas that bath of blue light I’d just had, that groovily tilting funhouse packed with solicitous señoritas… that was fucking
flying.
I’d had the chicken. Then I had the beef. Then I had the chicken. Then I’d had a
gin-and-tonic
and some minichimichangas and Mac had heaved me over to the window to show me, way below us, the ever-safer ocean, as blue and empty as the sky. Miracles and meals all courtesy of those wonderful folks at Aeromexico, with a little nudge from my stardom. From the air, the white splat of the city around the bay resembled a colossal mound of guano, excreted by vultures the size of airplanes flying every half-hour from LAX. A semicircle of huge off-white hotels now rimmed the beach, like the canines and incisors of a display grimace: somewhere among them, like a crumb, was the Hotel Los Flamingos. Perhaps we’d bump into Grace Kelly, and I’d get a chance to apologize. Or do it again. Such a long time since I masturbated … and now a female in her late thirties came skipping over the tiles toward us.

“Here comes our lovely daughter Lisa!” Maria shouted weirdly, as if describing a contestant.

“Hi, guys!” Lisa said. “Woosie’s had a really good walk!” Her leopard-print wrap clashed with her mother’s zebra-pattern turban. I cheeped impatiently: come on, give us the keys, get the humans unpacked and showered and let’s get out of this dump and hit the town, the three of us—Katrina and Mac and the legendary Cheeta—going Coco Loco in the palm-scented breezes at the Hotel
Los Flamingos, if they still had palm-scented breezes in 1983. Call it a sentimental journey. Trotting along behind Lisa, a trim young Mexican in white ducks and polo shirt told us that he’d walked Woosie and done his meal and he’d see us tomorrow. He shook hands. “Hola, Cheeta!
Muy grande
movie star!”

We’d always been big in Mexico, where everyone had a Tarzan yell:
“Aahheyyeyyeyeyyehhaaah!”
the kid added, and Maria turned and snapped, “Woosie! What d’you think you’re doing, you silly thing?” and I looked around warily for the dog and there was a thin old man rising unsteadily from a wheelchair, starting to do
his
Tarzan.

“Aah-eeh-aah”
he said, and my heart was suddenly raving.

Dearest humans, once the Project’s finished, perhaps you can turn your attention to peeling away all the crud of days and weeks and suppressions and accommodations that the world layers over us. Can you do that? I can see it’s a bit to ask. But underneath it’s all sparkling. All that pointlessness and waste just took itself off—it burned off like mist—and there we were, sparkling. I ran to him and threw my arms around his legs and he tottered back into his chair. Then I was in his lap and Johnny was saying my name over and over, and I could feel his chest heave up and down beneath mine. I was all over the place, like birdsong.

“Ah, what a lovely moment,” said Maria.

“Goddammit,” said Mac, “I’m going to need them to do that again.”

Johnny held me and sobbed. I clung on.

“Mac, for Chrissakes, get a move on, you need to get this,” Katrina said.

I could feel the thinness of his thighs under my feet. “Chee’a,” he said, “Chee’a,” and eventually he unpicked me so that we could look at one another.

The world was still going by, quietly putting its layers back down. His hair was white, and wild because it was thin, and his face had lost its symmetry. The skin on his cheek where I kissed him was rougher, and I could feel the bones of his shoulders: they were coming to the surface. In the folds of his throat was a little plastic valve, and under his opened shirt I could feel another hard, inorganic shape. “Goo’ Chee’a,” he kept saying, and there was something wrong with his voice, like only half his mouth was helping. Most of his words were just breath. But he was Johnny. I kept touching him in amazement, as if I was thumbing through a sheaf of paper on which I’d somehow randomly typed
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare.
Johnny, Johnny, Johnny, Johnny,
Johnny!
What a piece of work is a man!

Maria came over to us. “Is that a lovely surprise, Woosie dearest? Is that a lovely surprise? Where do you want to do this?”

“What I probably want,” said Katrina, “is to get him inside, like you said on the phone. I hope we can get everything we need in there.”

They did get everything they needed, though it was a squeeze with the six of us crammed into Johnny’s single bedroom. What Katrina wanted was him back in bed, with me by his side. I wasn’t going to be leaving his side, anyway. She wanted Mac to be able to get the IV stand in, and the oxygen cylinder, and the clouded plastic container on his flank. She wanted Mac to get Maria vacuuming out the gunk from the hole in his throat, and the cannula’s crusted twin ends disappearing into his nostrils. What she needed was the worst “after” for the “before” that they would have. Johnny submitted to it all, like someone who had grown used to submitting, and we posed together while Mac took his time. There was his dear chest, which America had grown up with, had learned about time from—and now America was going to learn even more about time from it.

Katrina wanted to know what the secret of the Weissmullers’ enduring love was. Maria said she didn’t know but that it was a miracle, and I watched Johnny drift away from the humans’ conversation. He gripped my hand. “Umgah, Chee’a,” he half breathed. I still felt scattered, like the golden light rippling on the underside of a bridge.

“That’s right, Woosie, Cheeta,” Maria said. “Is this chimpanzee person getting the same as us for this, if I may ask?” Katrina couldn’t divulge that, but it was substantial, with the whole thing being syndicated. How blessed did Maria feel by her marriage, despite the hardships?

“Uh… totally blessed?” said Lisa.

“Every day is a precious blessing,” said Maria, “and we hope that, when he recovers from these recent setbacks, Johnny will continue for many, many years surrounded by the love and care of his family.”

What did Johnny think? We waited. The overhead fan was having difficulty coping with us, and it was unpleasant in the room. There was something wrong about Maria, and the daughter was like a double exposure. Johnny stroked my hand against his face. “Umgah,” he said. His mind came and went a bit, Lisa explained.

Mac had taken down a framed certificate from the wall and asked Mr. Weissmuller if he’d sit up with it: the visible print of the certificate read “Sporting Immortal,” layered over a sepia portrait of Johnny in a swimsuit marked USA.

“Soon as… they ca’you… Immor’al… you star’… dyin’,” Johnny half breathed.

“Ooh. You’re damn well going to make your eightieth,” said Maria, “and then there’s our silver wedding! I’m not missing that!” There was no telling how long he might go on for, with a fair wind. Years and years! He’ll outlive us all!

“Does he still swim?” Katrina asked. He liked to sit in the pool,
Maria said, on the steps, but he was naughty and you had to be careful. “Don’t you?” she asked Johnny.

“I go’be… carefuh… otherwise I migh’… die. Tarza’ drow’s!”

Katrina liked the idea of getting a photograph in the pool, possibly with Johnny wearing his medals. But the medals had all gone. “Still, we can manage the pool, can’t we?” she said, and Maria was left to help him with his trunks. Mac picked me up off the bed, and carried me out.

And I was already thinking, as Johnny shuffled out on white crane’s legs and was helped down the steps and seated in the pool, that what I really was to him was a rescuer. That I had saved him from Captain Fry’s cage, and saved him from the Nazis, saved him from the Leopard Woman and the Amazons, saved him from fire in
New York Adventure
and a sheer drop in
Secret Treasure. I’d
saved him from Jane; I’d saved him from Beryl; I’d even saved him, in a roundabout way, from Lupe. But I couldn’t see how I was going to get him out of this one.

Mac had finished his photos and Katrina had some further questions for Maria—it wouldn’t take more than half an hour and then we’d have to be back at the airport.

“You go insi’…” Johnny said, with some emphasis. “I’m ha’y ou’ here. Go’n! Si’ here for a bi’.”

“We can keep an eye on him from inside,” Maria decided, and to my surprise we were alone in the stuffy little concrete enclosure.
Umgawa
, that was what he’d been saying.
Umgawa
, as in “get help.”

I didn’t know how this had happened. I didn’t know that he’d arrived at this dingy wading pool because his friend Bo Roos had lent him enough money at high enough interest to end up collecting his house, or because his favorite daughter Heidi, whom I’d once felt aswim inside Beryl’s belly, was killed in a car crash at nineteen, or because Johnny Weissmuller’s Safari Hut Gift Shops and
Johnny Weissmuller’s “Umgawa Club” Lounges and Johnny Weissmuller’s American Natural Food Stores had all come to nothing, or because he was lonely after Allene left, or because of the stroke he’d suffered in Caesars Palace in ’74, or that the secret of the Weissmullers’ enduring love was simply that neither of them was ever going to leave, because what did either of them have to leave to? And it wouldn’t have mattered if I had, because none of those were the reasons anyway. It was just a human fucking mess, and I didn’t have a clue what I could do.

He sat there, three steps down and out of reach in the pool, with his back turned to me, and I gave a low hoot of dismay. Under the long strands of white hair he was bald. He might drown, I thought, and then that struck me as funny, my worrying about Johnny drowning. I came up to the edge of the pool and Johnny turned his head to see me and reached an arm out to the lip—if he leaned back and I leaned out we could touch. I managed to paw his fingers with a swipe, and almost lost my balance. “Chee’a. Frien’,” said Johnny.

“Bes’ damn frien’ … I ever ha.”

And that did it. What the hell. I stepped into the water. It went up to my waist on the first step and my shoulders on the second, and I suddenly remembered the panic and hatred I’d felt in the black water of Harold Lloyd’s fake ninth green and started, through sheer terror, to drown, and then with a stretching sweep Johnny pulled me up and off my feet and I was floating on the cradle of his forearms. I was having a swimming lesson! I was really good! I felt… no years old. Hard to die when Mr. Tarzan’s around.

We were Tarzan and Cheeta. We could do
anything.
He won five Olympic golds and was a superstar of the silver screen, and he was a good man. And I was the best damn friend the poor bastard ever had.

*  *  *

So it’s a perfect day, coming to an end now, in Palm Springs, California, and I’m flat out on the chaise having flipped through this memoir of mine. It’s not Shakespeare, sure, but I’m totally amazed at how well it’s turned out, given that I’ve just been randomly prodding at the keyboard. The
spelling
! And I think the whole Esther Williams chapter is, frankly, a masterpiece—so long as the lawyers don’t mess it about too much. I’m the one in a million, I guess. I’m so damn
lucky.

A bit sun-addled, I fall like an ideally humorous fruit the short distance off the chaise and shamble inside to the den. Twenty-five years since Acapulco, and not a squeak. There’s a new one of mine up in here,
Johnny #12,562
, I believe. To tell you the absolute truth, I’m not terribly good at painting. Some of the work being done now by gorillas frightens me when I put it next to mine. Koko from the Berlin Zoo has painted some still lifes that’ll knock your hat off, truly. Her colleague Michael’s done one of a dog that looks like a goddamn
dog.
In the ape art world I’m just another abstract expressionist dabbler. And they’re all meant to be him, anyway: I must have just randomly mistyped those other titles before. They’re all Johnny.