Talk to Me

by T. C. Boyle

  ‘The chimp. The famous chimp that resurrected the Today show back in the early days of TV? But you’d be too young to remember – I’m guessing he was gone by ’57. I was just a kid myself but I definitely remember seeing him in his little suit and all that… Actually, I wonder if in some subliminal way the seeds were planted back then – that would be wild, wouldn’t it? The whole arc of my life, from being a kid glued to our little fishbowl TV to grad school and Moncrief and now Sam. And you.’ He was feeling good, riding the high of the meeting and of having her there beside him in her short dress and heels while the breeze lifted her hair and she turned her pretty face to him. ‘But J. Fred Muggs, that was just an animal act, nothing like what we’re doing.’

  Still, that animal act had saved the show – and made it #1 in its time slot. And though the fields of ethology and psychobiology were in their infancy and no one had any idea of teaching him ASL or penetrating his thought processes, J. Fred Muggs eventually acquired a vocabulary of over 500 words, and his responses to them – and the gags the show’s producers came up with – entranced the viewing public, children and adults alike. Which was no small thing, since when the Today show premiered in 1952, it had barely made a ripple. Morning TV had been the province of children’s programmes to that point, and the show’s producers had come up with something entirely new – a show that was geared towards adults as well, albeit in a casual way, featuring a mix of news, weather reports, comedy sketches, toy demonstrations and children’s books read aloud for the benefit of the kids getting ready for school, with host Dave Garroway acting as a kind of laid-back uncle, concluding each show by holding up his palm and intoning, ‘Peace,’ long before the hippies co-opted the phrase. It would prove to be a winning formula but no one knew that at the time – all they knew was that the show needed a jolt, needed something that would strengthen its hold on the children as well as the adults, and what that something would be – puppets like Howdy Doody or a clown like Clarabell? – nobody quite knew until J. Fred Muggs appeared on the scene.

  Like the majority of chimps exhibited in circuses and zoos or channelled into research, Muggs had been captured in the wild. His mother had been shot out of a tree while cradling him in her arms, the standard procedure for acquiring infants without risking attack. There was no notion of ecological impact or maintaining wild populations – chimps were just another animal species whose sole value lay in what they could bring economically, like the lions and tigers of the circus or the seals trained to balance a ball on their uplifted snouts for the thin reward of a sardine. Muggs was one of the lucky ones. Nine out of ten infant chimps died in transit, but Henry Trefflich, the veteran animal importer who’d collected Muggs and exhibited him in his pet shop in Manhattan, saw that he was held and nursed through the entire transatlantic journey, and that made the difference. When he was ten months old, two former NBC pages bought him with the notion of training him as an animal act for TV. Unfortunately, they got confused as to the time of his audition for the Today show and missed it altogether, but one of the show’s producers spotted him in a café up the street, where Muggs was dunking a donut in a cup of coffee like any other morning commuter, and brought him back to the studio.

  Garroway wasn’t particularly happy about it – A monkey act, for Christ’s sake – nor was the newscaster, who promptly quit. But from the moment Muggs appeared opposite Garroway, who spun out an endless array of improvisatory jokes while the chimp sat there in his lap, variously pretending to read the newspaper or listen to a children’s story Garroway read aloud while the camera hung over his shoulder, the ratings steadily climbed. Which ultimately was all that mattered. Garroway could have been a monkey himself, could have squatted in a cage full of monkeys, could have gone to Africa and paraded through the jungle with Muggs on his back, and the ratings would only have risen – and the ad revenues along with them. The show soared and Garroway became a certifiable star, but his celebrity hung heavily on him – he suffered from depression, and the fact that Muggs’ fame quickly eclipsed his own didn’t make things any better.

  Within a year there were Muggs comics, books, games and dolls, and Muggs was called on to christen ships and make appearances at supermarket openings while Garroway had to sit there before the camera day after day with an unpredictable animal in his lap, pretending to be genially amused when Muggs rearranged his hair or snatched off his glasses and flung them across the set. Muggs grew. His arms hardened. His grip, hands and feet both, was all but unbreakable. By the second year he’d begun to act out on the set, smart enough to know that once the camera’s red light flashed on, he could get away with anything without fear of being disciplined, though his handler crouched off-camera with the lead in his hand, ready to jerk him back if he threatened to bite or throw a tantrum.

  Eventually, the producers brought in a second chimp, an infant female they named Phoebe B. Beebe, introduced as Muggs’ girlfriend, in the hope of calming him down. But he wouldn’t be calmed. He began to bite, both as a way of getting attention and settling scores (like any star, he demanded immediate gratification of his every whim and he had a long memory for those who failed to provide it). He bit Garroway. He bit the comedian Martha Raye during a rehearsal. He began to run amok on the set, swatting at the microphones, the cameras, overturning furniture and throwing shrieking tantrums if anyone tried to stop him. By the time he turned five, in 1957, NBC retired him and brought on a younger, more placid chimp to replace him. It didn’t help. Or at least not with Garroway, who became increasingly more erratic as the years went on, wandering off the set in the middle of broadcasts, feuding with members of the crew, brooding endlessly over his career, which, when all was said and done, had been defined by a monkey act. By 1961 he’d left the show. Not long after, Muggs went into retirement in Florida in the company of Phoebe and his trainers, where he lived a placid, unhurried life under the sun while Garroway, his celebrity deserting him, cycled into depression and despair.

  ‘I don’t really remember him,’ Aimee said. ‘Or the chimp either.’

  He was driving. The sun burnished the water. Sam was asleep in the back and she was right there beside him, the two key pieces in the board game of his life, and never mind Melanie and Elise and Renee Flowers and all the rest of them. NBC, CBS. Borstein, Moncrief, Leonard Biggs. He was on a path and he was going to leave them all behind. He felt a sudden surge of happiness. ‘Why would you? I’m guessing you probably never even saw a chimp till Sam – and you didn’t know a thing about primate studies until you walked into my office, right?’ He laid a hand on her thigh. ‘Right?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, turning her face to him. ‘I guess. But at least the Muggs story has a happy ending.’

  ‘For the chimp. But what about Dave Garroway?’

  ‘Don’t you always say you can count the people in the world by the billions and the chimps by the thousands?’

  ‘That’s pretty harsh, isn’t it? But you’re right – chimp stories don’t usually have happy endings, but Muggs was lucky because his people actually cared about him, loved him even, instead of just using him. That’s rare.’

  ‘What about us?’

  ‘You think I’m using Sam? You think I don’t care about him?’ This was a sore point with him. Melanie had accused him – repeatedly, daily – of putting his career before Sam’s welfare. Or hers, for that matter. Bottom line is you don’t really give a shit about Sam or me or anybody else but yourself, she said, and slammed the door in his face. ‘No, really, Aimee – first rule of the behavioural sciences is do not fall in love with your subject, but that went out the window a long time ago, like the first month Melanie and I had him? You know me. You’ve seen me in action – you really think I’m not devoted to him? Totally?’

  ‘I love him,’ she said, giving him a fierce look. He’d never seen her angry – she was the most placid person he’d ever met, which was part of the attraction, because he definitely didn’t need another Melanie – but she was angry now.
‘Love,’ she said. ‘L-o-v-e. But you know what I worry about?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Is it really going to matter? Because the truth is we have nothing to say about it – we don’t even own him, your professor does. You’ve told me over and over how domineering he is, how manipulative, how he bullies you and everybody else – what if he decides to take Sam back? What if he doesn’t like the progress we’re making or The Tonight Show or whatever? What if he decides to give him to somebody else?’

  ‘I’m not going to let that happen.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m not either.’

  A STILLNESS

  The DOG, not the one he’d bitten, but the other one, was right there all of a sudden, and it was snarling and snapping its jaws at him, and here was the bitten one edging in behind it, brave all over again, though it bore the crusting red marks of his teeth in its narrow dog skull. He saw that and registered it but he didn’t move. A stillness had come over him. It was like a BLANKET, this stillness, and it took the COLD away so that he wasn’t shivering any more, wasn’t doing anything except dreaming in a way that closed the world out as if he’d never been part of it. His dream, which the DOGS had interrupted, was the one of her and the bath and her eyes and lips and smooth white skin. He had no concept of death as a generality, though he had killed things – a squirrel in the yard, a rat on the floor of his CAGE – and watched them transition from the animate to the inanimate, from things that moved and had a will of their own to another state altogether, the state of meat, rapidly cooling meat. Which he’d eaten because that was what meat was for, eating.

  But what was going on here? Was he close to death himself ? Death from an overdose of COLD, vasoconstriction, hypothermia, at the mercy of the elements? He didn’t know about any of that or the terminology of stages and conditions, and he didn’t care. He looked up and saw the sky with its faint fading trace of counterfeit sun and the clouds that were like drawn curtains and heard the fury of the DOGS turn to bafflement because he was giving them nothing back. They wanted to snarl. Their purpose was to snarl. But he wasn’t giving them the opportunity. The moment held. He felt nothing. Then the BIG MAN was there, flanked by the other two.

  One of them said, ‘Is he dead?’

  The other said, ‘His eyes are open.’

  The BIG MAN – the stinger was dangling on a cord from his belt, but he didn’t need it, not at this point – cursed and said, ‘Get those goddamned dogs out of here, will you? Jesus fucking Christ.’

  He wasn’t really paying attention and most of what they were saying he didn’t comprehend, but he felt a jolt of fear when the BIG MAN peeled the glove off his right hand and lifted his GUN from its holster. The GUN was an object of terror, worse than the stinger, but not even the sudden appearance of it motivated him now. Hate didn’t motivate him either, though he hated the GUN and he hated the BIG MAN and the other two and the DOGS into the bargain. He lay there as if the dart was already in him – and then it was and he didn’t feel a thing. No, he was doubly cold, doubly powerless, and it took all three of them to lift him from the cold crushed cane and carry him past the dead trees and the dead bushes and out to the road, where they flung open the door of the car waiting there and heaved him across the back seat like so much uninhabited meat.

  ALL THE TRIMMINGS

  Summer drew down, then fall, the days warm and dry and suspended on the winds that raked the canyons and flung grit at the windows every afternoon at cocktail hour, as if grit was just what you wanted in your gin and tonic. It was hard to believe she’d been on the project for nearly a year now, been here with Sam and Guy as if she’d never been anywhere else, never worried about late papers or Dr Lindelof or what she was going to tell her mother about her progress, her grades, the corrosive drip of the days that never varied and the apartment that had begun to feel like a cage. That was all behind her. She was here now and there was no other world but this one, the one confined to the low-slung ranch house with the oak trees all around it and the steers drifting through the chaparral out back and the hawks that rode the currents overhead, while Sam climbed his tree and turned his face to the sky as if contemplating the mystery of his own existence. The day after Halloween she called her mother to say she wouldn’t be home for Thanksgiving and probably not for Christmas either.

  ‘What are you telling me?’ her mother demanded, her voice a thin, steady complaint like the buzzing of an insect trapped in the receiver. ‘Is it Guy? Your professor?’

  She pictured her mother at the kitchen counter, the phone pressed to her ear, sun leaching through the pepper trees out front to illuminate the pans on the stove and decorate the wall behind her with long finger-like shadows that plunged and shifted with the wind. She could hear the refrigerator clicking on in the background – or was that the dishwasher? And the radio, the low hum of the radio tuned to the classical station. She felt a pang of longing. Her mother might as well have been a thousand miles away, though she was just two hours south, in the pink stucco house where Aimee had grown up in Calabasas, within earshot of the freeway. But that was in another lifetime.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it’s Guy. And he’s not just my professor, he’s my boyfriend, OK? But it’s more than that too. You remember you would always tell me how bad you used to feel for the farmers’ kids when you were growing up in Springville? How they could never go on vacation because of the livestock? Well, that’s how it is with Sam. We can’t go away, not even for a couple of days.’

  ‘I find that hard to believe. He’s just the one animal, right? And it’s not as if you have to milk him twice a day – and you have other students there too, didn’t you tell me? And volunteers on top of that?’

  ‘Yes. But I’m the one, Mom, the one he needs like twenty-four/seven, the one he talks to the most—’

  Her mother made a dismissive noise. ‘But he doesn’t really talk, does he?’

  ‘He does. It’s just that his language is gestural, like with the deaf ?’

  ‘What can he say? Can he say, I don’t know, “My tooth hurts, take me to the dentist?”’

  ‘More or less. But we’re careful about his teeth – he brushes three times a day, did I tell you that? More than most people.’

  ‘OK, fine. Bring him here then. Does he eat turkey? Turnips? Sweet potato pie?’

  ‘He does. He’d love it. But it upsets him to break his routine and to have to sleep anyplace but here, where everything’s familiar – in his own house, in his own bed. I mean, you can understand that, right?’

  There was a pause. ‘Ultimately? No. I want to meet this prodigy – both prodigies, the ape and the professor both. If they can’t come here, why don’t I go there then? And bring your sister along too? Claire would love to see you – and Sophie too. She’s almost four now, and really, when was the last time you saw her?’

  ‘I don’t know, like last year? But sure, I guess you could come, if that’s what you want. But it wouldn’t be much of a Thanksgiving – I mean, there’s no place for you to stay here,

  really…’

  The truth was she didn’t want her mother interfering – or criticising her, which was what it would amount to the minute she walked in the door and saw the way things were between her and Sam – who might or might not take to her – and between her and Guy too. Plus, there’d be the complication of her sister and niece, of whom Sam would be instantly jealous, and Claire’s husband, Bob, a thick-headed thirty-year-old bore who tried to cram as many clichés into a sentence as he could and never stopped talking long enough to hear a word anyone said in return. Which would embarrass her in front of Guy. And there was no telling what Sam would do with strangers sitting across the table from him, forking up turkey and mashed potatoes that could have gone to him, no matter how full he might have been or how often she heaped up his plate.

  The previous year, when she was still new to all this, she’d gone home for Christmas, so it wasn’t a problem, but Sam had been inconsolable and acted out the whole
time she was away, at least that was what Guy and Josh told her, and when she did return, for the first two days he pretended he didn’t know who she was. She’d felt terrible about that. As if she’d betrayed him. Even worse was the way she’d left, waiting till he fell asleep, then slipping out of bed and going straight to her car without saying goodbye or offering any explanation. And, of course, he woke the minute the engine turned over, his distant shattering screams the last thing she heard as she eased down the drive.

  ‘We can always get a motel room and have the elegant brunch at the Rodeway Inn or whatever, carrot sticks and celery with ranch dressing and turkey so dried out it might as well be jerky – if you want us at all, that is.’

  She was going to say, ‘It’s not that,’ and offer maybe to bring Sam down to Calabasas on a road trip, maybe after the holidays, if it was all right with Guy, that is, but she didn’t have the chance because just then she heard Sam beginning to stir upstairs in his room. He’d gone down for his half-hour nap after lunch and he was always cranky when he woke – he’d want his snack, Oreos and an apple, right away, because he had low blood sugar, or at least that was how she’d diagnosed it. ‘All right, Mom,’ she said, ‘I do want you to come, I do, or maybe I’ll come there, but I have to go – I hear Sam waking up from his nap and he’s going to want his snack. You know how he is when he doesn’t get his snack, like right away—’