Me Cheeta (9 page)

I glanced behind me to see the twilit room transformed. Screaming humans were stampeding headlong toward its edges. It was the sort of chaos you might see when you ambush a family of bushpigs. Hugely and blackly above it, blotting out nearly all of the dream, was the silhouette of a colossal ape, its fur bristling. Kong, my brother! I gestured at him in excitement, and you won’t believe me, he saw and gestured straight back! The poor humans were desperately emptying the room, vaulting over their seats in terror to escape the thing—and who knows where Kong went because, when the room was finally emptied and I dropped back down into it, he seemed to have melted back into the dream, which read, simply, “The End,” and then went blank. I guessed that it figured: with none of the dreamers left, the dream was over.

There was nothing for me to do but pick over the rather large amount of extremely appetizing nuts and delicious little morsels of something that was sometimes salty and sometimes sweet that were lying spilled on the floor. Having eaten pretty much all I could find, I sauntered out into the darkening New York evening, feeling fifty feet tall.

What the hell had I got to lose? If they caught me, they caught me—there was no glory in scampering abjectly around in search of hiding places. I felt intoxicated by Kong’s example. After all, there was no need to fear
humans!

In this new expansive mood, I strolled down the comparatively empty sidewalk, looking for action. A rambunctious simian romp, that was what I was after. The first place that looked promising was some kind of food store where I picked up a couple of sticks of something with a hideous rind and a sensational inside. I don’t
think they even saw me. The next joint I left with a couple of hats and a cigarette case—but no matches, alas, so I dumped the case with the hats. I boosted an armful of oranges from a sidewalk display and spent a diverting five minutes tossing them at passersby from a striped canopy that jutted out of a tower.

For a while it was pretty good fun snatching sticks off of old males and females, until a plan took shape in my head. What I needed was a
drink.
Yeah, a drink, a smoke, and a game of bluffing and packing. I’d noticed places all over where the smell of booze was alluringly heavy, and it was easy enough to slip into one.

Rendered invisible by the head-high shelf of tobacco smoke, I was able to reconnoiter the joint without being noticed. All along one side of the room there was a raised counter at which humans sat. Behind this was a glittering wall of whiskey, inaccessible but reachable. I swung up onto one of the high wooden chairs and then onto the counter, where I was distracted from my goal by an unattended half-drunk glass of what I recognized with joy was Scotch. Here’s mud in your eye, as Mannicher used to say.

“Hey, Jimmy! Like a refill for my friend here. Smoke?” asked a human standing behind me, offering me an already burning Lucky.

I took it, and you know, it’s a pity more animals don’t smoke. It’s one thing that Don, who’s a great guy in nearly every respect and who loves me more dearly than anything in the world, just doesn’t get. There’s been a blanket ban on smoking inside the Casa de Cheeta for the seventeen years I’ve been there. The last officially sanctioned cigar was out on the deck on, I think, April 9, 1998. And then you catch a glimpse of George Burns or Jack Nicholson on
Entertainment Weekly
and you could weep, because nobody has any damn idea how hard it is for a world-famous chimpanzee, noted in
Guinness World Records
for his astounding
longevity and health, to shoplift cigarettes in historic Palm Springs.

So far this year I’ve managed to snatch one pack, containing six cigarettes, from the handbag of an apologetic post-grad zoologist whom Don refused to allow to light up even in the garden, and a single forgotten or abandoned Camel Light from an ashtray outside the doors of the Desert Regional Medical Center Hospice. I ought to try getting them smuggled in disguised as toothpaste, like Joe Cotten in
Citizen Kane.

And finding them is just the beginning. They then have to be concealed at the back of the herbaceous border behind the pool, and when Don’s lit the stove for coffee but has, for some reason, left the kitchen, I have to make it to the shrubbery, disinter one, run across the lawn and into the kitchen, get it lit (never easy when you’re not inhaling) and beat it back out to the cage, where I can hunch my back to the Sanctuary and, goddamn it, smoke, never forgetting to bury the butt. There’ve been some close shaves but I’m pretty sure no real suspicions have been aroused.

I’m getting distracted. What Don can never know is how many, many times I’ve charmed a reaction out of an indifferent or unwelcoming human by plucking a cigarette from between their fingers and taking a good toke. To convert Bette Davis from a “Puh-lease, this is a restaurant not a freak-show” to the hostess of a riotously memorable evening at Sardi’s is not an easy trick, and would have been an impossible one without a cigarette. A smoke broke the ice between me and an initially hostile Bogart, for instance. A smoke set me and Gary Cooper up for life. Sharing a fat stogie with a member of a different species—what better way to forget, for a moment at least, what Charlie Chaplin once described, with his unerring knack for perfectly inane pseudo-poetry, as “man’s cosmic loneliness”?

It needed that Lucky in the New York bar to get the evening under way, an evening that ended with me sinking Repeal Specials (legal lager and a shot of Canadian bourbon) with Benny, Red, Kreindl, Hal, Crelinkovitch, Tall George and the rest, hanging upside down from the ceiling fan and catching the coasters they skimmed up at me. What else? There was that bowl of indescribably delicious nuts (I loved American food, I was finding) I won for a rolling sequence of backflips—and I also seem to remember pant-hooting for quite some time down a shiny black thing that contained a succession of miniature but angrily squeaking voices called “wives.”

I learned more about acting in that bar, I believe, than under a dozen different trainers at MGM and RKO. I think most serious actors will tell you they learned nine-tenths of their craft from life and stole the other tenth. Or the other way around if you’re Mickey Rooney. Acting classes? They’re OK—but you either got it or you ain’t. And all you really have to do is watch and copy. That’s all. When the boys applauded the end of another Repeal Special I just clapped ’em back and they loved me for it. And when they grinned … That bar was the place where I first developed my failsafe standby: the double lip-flip. A human grins at you, you give him a look, then flip your upper and lower lips back to reveal your pink gums in imitation of their cushiony pink mouths. I might possibly have overused that one over the years, but it’s still funnier than anything Red Skelton ever did. The boys loved it when I lip-flipped, awarding me a new name for it: “Louis.”

The evening broke up with a slight altercation between Benny and Kreindl, which I sensed had much to do with the privilege of my further company. “You take Louis to flop at Turney’s, he’s gonna ask for something, you mushhead. It’s gotta be worth twenty, thirty bucks to someone and Turney ain’t having a slice.
Who found it in the first place, huh? We did, and we’re gonna keep what’s coming to us.”

This was Benny, I think, and he was the one who took my hand. By now the city was dark, with lonely pools of light splashed here and there across the sidewalks, but I was still joyful at life, and full of nuts and Repeal Specials, and couldn’t stop jolting and tugging at Benny’s grip, trying to shake him out of his human plod. All the feeling of that very first parade through the streets with Tony Gentry was in me—if I can make it here, I remember thinking, I can make it anywhere!—and too happy to hold it in, I pulled away when Benny was trying to reset his grip, saw a wall of tempting handholds and ledges and set off up it.

I was Kong the Mighty, scaling the summits of New York. I was also unprecedentedly drunk. But inspired in a Harold Lloyd-ish fashion. By traversing a number of ledges I managed to find myself at a vertical section of simple jutting stones, which led me up toward a metal box, from which a wire ran across to the other side of the street. Beneath me, Benny had stopped yelling quietly at me and started yelling loudly as I shimmied toward the wire, which gave off a buzzing hum. Every chimp has a feeling in his hands that’s hard to explain, that itches for a good branch, or a vine with just the right kind of give, and that wire looked as if it had just the right kind of sag to it.

Terrific fellow by the way, Harold Lloyd, quite unlike Chaplin. A demi-ape. Harold had a nine-hole golf course on the grounds of Greenacres, the mansion he’d had built in Beverly Hills, where the fast set was always welcome to swing by for a few holes. But it was really an eight-hole course, with a specially constructed fake ninth. From the tee it looked like an almost insultingly easy, ideally flat green, with the pin dead center. A seven-iron, no sweat. It was, however, an algae-mantled pond, into which,
especially if you were playing as the light began to fail, perfect drive after perfect drive would inexplicably disappear. Now that was funny. That was
fun
, with golfers striding angrily up to the green and sinking into it themselves, and Harold’s wife, a frail, beautiful thing called Mildred Davis, mixing martinis on the terrace behind.

Great times, although less so for Mid, of course, who’d suffered terribly with drink and depression ever since dear old Harold had forcibly halted her screen career in a funk of jealous paranoia at the possibility of being overshadowed. But you can’t keep judging someone for destroying their wife, least of all when they have such beautiful, apelike grace and a highly amusing golf hole, and Harold will remain for me one of the greats, whatever time has done to most of his
oeuvre.

As for that wire, well, Kong the Mighty was about to demonstrate his incredible prowess on it when a human head suddenly emerged from the wall a foot in front of me. “Shut the fuck up, you bum!” he shouted down at Benny, and disappeared back into the wall. I thought,
Mmm, nice handholds
, forgot about the wire, shimmied up the window’s surround, and carried on up another vertical stripe of stones. It kept telling you to climb, the city. That was what it was saying:
Climb me.
And looking down from the plateau at the summit of that tower, I saw what I had perhaps been looking for all along in this leafless, treeless, greenless place—a rectangle of dark forest inlaid among the lights. I felt the gravity of home, stronger than all of America, and took the fast route down a fire escape, across a wide street and into the trees, pant-hooting with delight. Who knew? There might be chimps roosting in the branches—Tyrone, or Bonzo, or bushpigs scuffling through the long grass. The forest was sparse, sure, and the undergrowth was thin, but what did it matter when you could take a running jump up a tree trunk and
loop from branch to branch? So I swung my way through a sequence of trees until I was too exhausted to bother breaking off the branches I’d have needed for a nest, and fell asleep, drunkenly and dream-lessly.

And woke in pain on the ground with a human hand around my throat. There was dirt in my mouth and a heavy weight on my back pinning me down. I instinctively thought: Trefflich. Something was slipped around my head and I was flipped onto my back, bringing into view the sight of a couple of humans looking down at me from an early morning sky. Neither was Trefflich, of course—they had none of his well-fed sleekness. I made an attempt to flee but a choking pain in my neck stopped me. In a panic, I turned and rushed at the man who held me on the “tether” (as I would come to know it in Hollywood) and he beat me away with a length of stick. Raising his arm higher, he hit me again, and then a third time. I was dizzy with the surprise of it as much as the pain, and scrambled away as far as the tether allowed.

“Shit, don’t bust it up,” the second human said. “If you bust it up too bad, they might not take it back, Pops.” Both of them had the same thin beards and large eyes, but the second was very much younger than the first.

“Yeah. I don’t want to bust it up but I ain’t getting bitten, is all.”

“You bust its head, they’ll say it was us when we bring it in and we get nuthin’.”

I was whimpering at the end of the twine, keeping an eye on the older man’s stick.

“What’re you talking about, son? We ain’t bringin’ it in. Zoo ain’t got no money to pay you for bringin’ them in an absconder. This is good meat. Stewin’ meat. Chinese eat monkey stew on a reg’lar basis.”

“I ain’t eatin’ no monkey. That’s cannibalism, near enough.”

“It ain’t cannibalism. Ain’t no different from a squirrel or a pigeon once you got its throat cut and the fur off.”

“Or a nigger baby, Pops. I just ain’t eatin’ no monkey. Zoo’s gotta give a reward if you return their property.”

Chafing at the end of the tether, I was trying to rid myself of the twine around my neck by backflipping it off me. Down came the stick across my raised arm again. I screamed and, without thinking, did something you may have seen me do a number of times on screen. It may even be the first picture you have of me in your head. I leaped toward Pops and wrapped my arms around him, where he could no longer get at me with his stick. It’s the first action all chimps work out with their trainers, pretty much. When you see the chimp jump up into those human arms and cling there like a baby being comforted, sometimes it’s love and sometimes it’s the memory of fear. It’s very hard to tell them apart.

“Come on now, Pops. You can’t eat this monkey,” the younger man said. “It’s picked you for a pal. You ain’t been hugged like that in a time.”

Pops was trying to unpick my grasp from around his shoulders but I was too tightly wound around him, and it took his son to yank me off. I came loose and the old man threw the twine away from him.

“Take it back to the zoo, then, but you won’t get a nickel out of them. Just breaks my heart to see a workin’ man starvin’ and a bunch of monkeys and lions eatin’ like kings. It’s fucked up, when a beast eats better’n a man.”