by Cheeta
In the Golden Age, however, things were very different. Actors formed only a tiny minority of the population, so maybe some of the studios’ scare tactics did pay off. Certainly for an animal, there were powerful disincentives….
Our journey from the east took a week and a half of almost intolerably cramped intensive rehab. In the thirties and forties, most MGM employees traveling out to the coast from New York would take a sleeping compartment on board the 20th Century Limited, which departed Grand Central at six in the evening. Before the passengers woke the next morning, the sleeping cars were tacked onto the Santa Fe Chief in Chicago, and two whole days later they’d be in Union Station, L.A. Very civilized. But for us there was just a long period of darkness, semiconsciousness, tasteless fruit left to rot in our dungy straw, and a herky-jerky rhythm that didn’t soothe like the rocking of Forest Lawn.
And for me, perhaps for the other escapees too, there were bad dreams on the journey: I dreamed I was climbing one of the towers of Manhattan, and that the old man from the city-forest was climbing after me, trying to swat me with his stick so that I fell. As I dropped through the sky I looked into the shelters in the sides of the tower and saw humans displaying wrathfully at each other, or embracing each other, or giving smiles that were really grimaces of fear—a multitude of humans who seemed to contain just as much violence as we chimpanzees did.
Whenever the vibrating motion and noise of the sleeping compartment ceased, we would all wake and cry out nervously to each other in the sudden stillness to check that we still existed. I could distinguish Bonzo and Frederick and Tyrone among the different calls, and I thought at those times that you could hear the residue of troubled dreams in most of our voices but I don’t know, maybe it was just me… maybe it was just me who was fretting about whether humans were really the answer after all. So the world spun under us and we traveled west toward the Dream Factories.
We were unloaded, reloaded, unloaded again. For the first time since Forest Lawn we smelled leopard, rhinoceros, lion and musty python (those things sure do reek), and heard turacos sending out relays of warning. And I thought I understood at last—our rehabilitation was over. It came to me like an epiphany. This was surely the reason we’d been deprived of the touch of each other, of the comfort of mutual grooming, or those kisses of reassurance that meant so much to us. We’d been deprived of it so that we would cherish each other now we were finally considered ready to return to the forest! So that we—and I guessed this included the rehabilitated leopards and snakes—would do it right this time. The humans had helped us see the error of our foolish ways, and now it was up to us to make the most of our second chance!
But when the slats of my shelter were broken down, they merely revealed another of those landscapes like the docks at Kigoma, another transit camp for animals, which I was beginning to know all too well. Another shelter, Tyrone and I cast together once again, another reconnoiter around its eight corners, turning up nothing. I knew the drill by now: the insufficient straw, the diamond mesh. We could see a brick pillar, a stretch of wall, and a fraction of one of the leopards’ shelters. And then, suddenly, the dividing partition between us and the next shelter along was thrumming with the aftershock of a heavy impact, and there, bipedaling around his shelter, his hair bristling up like the Bride of Frankenstein’s, was Stroheim.
Always a pleasure … a little bit heavier than the last time, but that was to be expected. What was shocking about Stroheim was his head. He’d always had this rather noticeable central part be tween his two wings of hair, which were long and lay sideways. He used to look like a human schoolboy, furious at having been patted on his just-combed brow. Now this central part had become a barren desert. As I watched him display, I saw his familiar old gesture of dropping both hands onto his head and fiddling at the edges of the bald patch, plucking at the remaining hairs there. With full weight of shoulder, he crashed his slab-hands against the partition again, barking at me to show off his teeth, but still, though I feared him, I couldn’t quite bring myself ever to believe in Stroheim. He subsided, and hating myself for my gratitude to my godawful shelter, I turned away and began the long process of grooming poor shy little Tyrone down from his shock.
Stroheim’s hair-pulling business worried me. Was it anything to do with this new rehab center? There was a general air of low morale around the place, as if even the best efforts of the program could not prevent the animals turning in on themselves. Certainly our shelter was on the snug side, and the leopard opposite seemed completely sunk in despair. But there were humans who occasionally toured our shelters and at least they were diverting to look at as they observed us, doubtless assessing our recovery.
Always, for some reason, these humans were accompanied by children, who offered us morsels of delicious American food through the mesh. To my surprise, they demonstrated a better grasp of the prevailing realities than the adults, who frequently attempted to interfere with these vital nutritional supplements. But the children’s actions made sense to me. They dispensed supplements to those animals that showed the most vitality—in other words, those who seemed most worth assisting. So the chimpanzees did well compared to those whom the program was failing, those whom you knew were alive only after long scrutiny of their ribcages, which slowly gained and lost faint stripes of shadow if you peered closely enough into the tangled straw. Unreconstructed jungle violence, which Stroheim demonstrated, went unrewarded by supplements. It all made sense.
And this extra human food was crucial. Something had happened to the quantity of fruit we were getting; it was radically less than what we had been used to at Trefflich’s. By the time the twice-daily ritual of winning supplements from our human coaches came around, you were ravenous. There were two of them to about fifteen of us, and every mouthful of food they deigned to grant you was a complete fucking performance. And it wasn’t at all like Forest Lawn and its cheerful abundance: you got a single, bright little bean hardly worth the chewing each time you did something the human liked. The little beans were highly addictive, however, and you were so hungry you’d chow down on as many as were offered.
So when Tyrone and I were led out of our shelters on tethers into the courtyard, we were already desperate to please. Each of the coaches carried a short length of smooth stick—“the broom handle,” or “ugly-stick”—with which they threatened to beat us if we failed to imitate them. They went at us two at a time. And for me, seeing the coach raise the ugly-stick above his head brought back memories of the gaunt old man from the New York forest and I couldn’t suppress a pleading grimace of fear.
“That’s right, gimme a smile. Gimme a great big Gable grin, Jiggs. That’s good.”
But Tyrone was confused by the ugly-stick and was beaten heavily before he could produce the fear-grimace on order. It took only a single hard blow across my back to understand that a leap of faked love into the coach’s arms was required, and here again Tyrone suffered badly when he bit the human’s shoulder. I’d come close to biting my own coach, but the memory of Trefflich’s watch held me back.
There was no joy in the coach’s face, no love in his voice—he was a relentless man, he bored it into you. He lessened the world, made it hard even to think of what there was outside the corridor of actions he’d laid down for you. Oh, yeah—pain, that was what was outside that corridor. So after you’d clapped for him, and kissed him, and “laughed” for him, donned a hat and drunk a glass of water, then gone and fetched the little tan notebook in which he wrote notes at the end of the session, you were left with the feeling that there was really nothing between you—a foretaste of that emptiness all actors, all auditionees, know. The one time I felt emboldened enough to fish a cigarette from the pack in his chest pocket, I got a couple of cracks from the ugly-stick. I was only fooling around. But there was no love in the man, only dull, inexpressive alphadom.
Mornings and evenings, this routine on the tethers. Almost the worst of it was hearing the others taking their beatings. With my exp
erience on Forest Lawn, I’d been fortunate. It seemed, I don’t know, somehow natural for me to do a triple-backflip-handclap-double-lip-flip-and-grin. You didn’t even need to ask me. Not so for the rest, and they got the brunt of it. Bonzo was hopeless; he was continually bewildered into mistakes by his fear. When we returned to the shelter I’d try to reassure him with strokes and grooming, but after a short time he’d slink away into his corner and slump motionless for hours.
Frederick was good: he’d picked up plenty of coaching on Forest Lawn and was quick with the fetching. And there were two or three other apes who were awarded full rations of colored beans. Being older, Stroheim was less moldable. For this reason I think they cut him more slack. Certainly we rarely heard him scream, and when he knuckled back into the shelter he never seemed cowed and was soon displaying away boneheadedly in his own little fiefdom. I didn’t rise to it. I was slipping into the lassitude of the program. We all were.
Life shrank to hunger and the ugly-stick, the pulsing pain of your bruises and masturbation. Dimly you’d see the children who visited your shelter recoil, but you couldn’t stop yourself hunting for a little pang of pleasure in your misery. We were all at it, ten, fifteen, twenty times a day, and each time I vowed it would be my last. But my brain would circle around again, and coming across nothing else to rest on or hope for, I’d find myself back where I started, looking for that tiny throblet of pleasure, the only one going.
And worse, I was beginning to starve. Sure, I was getting my colored beans, but the center served up a menu heavily slanted toward fucking bananas. I could manage a nibble, but then my gorge would rise at the memory of the mamba, and I’d never be able to finish the things. Bonzo grew fat on my leavings. And I fell gradually into a disenchantment with the humans. I fretted and doubted, worse than I ever had at Trefflich’s. There were things I wasn’t seeing. Maybe this whole thing was a mistake, and you were just another bunch of mad apes who didn’t really know what you were doing. This treadmill of starving and beating—what was it for Was rehab permanent?
For a month we followed the routine, and my mind began to close down when I wasn’t “on.” Stroheim adopted a compulsive shuttle from his back wall to our partition, which he slammed against scornfully at every third or fourth pass. Tyrone and I were too fazed to notice him, too busy rocking back and forth and dreaming of elsewhere. I was up on the escarpment again, in moonlight, teaching Tony Gentry how to fetch wild custard apples for me, when Stroheim erupted through the forest and into our shelter.
I think he was as surprised as we were to find that the wooden frame of the partition, which he’d been slamming against for five or six days, had finally come loose. His follow-through tangled him up in the ripped hangnail of mesh, giving Tyrone and me a brief second to consider our options—but when I glanced at my shelter-mate, he’d already swiveled around and was presenting his rear. Fantastic, I thought, just great: a submission display, and he hasn’t even done anything yet. Stroheim was propping himself up and bristling, though whether at me or at the dumb, winded square of wire, I didn’t know. The world, probably—Stroheim just bristled at it in general. And now he began to pant-hoot, spiraling swiftly into a scream as he unhooked himself. There were no exits here, no opportunities for calming down and cooling off, and I was terrified. I could submit, I suppose. But to submit to Stroheim, who had cavorted while the others broke my mother’s body? I was incapable of it.
He came at me as I sprang onto the front mesh, and I was able to climb high enough to evade the impact. The wire twanged and bucked in my grip. I didn’t have a plan, but as Stroheim circled back around and leaped at me, I instinctively let go of the mesh, dropped underneath him into the straw and scuttled around the side of the shattered partition frame into Stroheim’s shelter, pulling the frame after me, where it jammed against the wall. Furious, he slammed into it, but the partition held. He set himself to batter it down, still shrieking, and I sat waiting for him and for the end.
Wherever you were—inside a shelter or out, among humans or chimpanzees—it seemed the jungle came after you. There was no escape, nowhere you were safe. I’d crossed the Atlantic to America and here I was, back precisely where I’d started: chased by Stroheim. The bald, bullying, banana-snatching, boneheaded brute. And a name suddenly comes to me out of the past: Moose Malloy, that great hulking slow-witted patsy “no wider than a beer truck,” forever blundering after his lost love Velma in the Dick Powell-Philip Marlowe picture Murder, My Sweet (1944). Moose, who was too big for his brain. Years later, when I first saw Murder, My Sweet, I immediately thought: Stroheim! You see, though he was a killer, you couldn’t help but pity Moose. And I could never—can’t you tell?—pick the pity out of my hatred for Stroheim.
So I waited for the mesh to break and Stroheim to come tumbling through, but with each blow the poor dolt was wedging the door shut. If he’d just put his fingers through it and tugged backwards you wouldn’t be reading this now. But no: all Stroheim knew was that you opened partitions with bashing. Bashing—that was how it had always been done! He was just too damn stupid to murder me. After a while of incensed thumping, the idiot gave up and folded himself into one of his catatonic deepwater sulks and we slept.
That happened in the evening after the second coaching session of the day. The following morning classes were canceled. Instead, a large rolling shelter entered the courtyard, and supervised by the coaches, we were all reloaded into the smallest shelters yet, made entirely of wire. Or, no, not all of us. My coach patrolled the front of the shelters, consulting his notebook and directing the other humans as to which of us were to be moved on. About a quarter of us were rejected, among them Stroheim.
“I’m gonna leave you boys to it,” my coach said. “Don’t ever feel happy doing this.”
“No point in bellyaching about it. You got a fair enough deal. More’n fair.”
“Yeah, yeah. They’re helping people, I suppose.”
“Hey. It’s show business. Cruel business.”
Yeah, but it’s not. There are crueller businesses.
We were loaded into the back of the shelter, stacked on top of each other, and I noticed Tyrone and Bonzo, and my new shelter-mate and various other faces that were vaguely familiar from Forest Lawn before darkness and the familiar jolting overtook us again. And when the jaws of the shelter opened, the world would have changed again—that was how these things worked. They put you into darkness and then scrambled the world.
A short haul this time. Something about the accelerating rhythm of these periods of blackness made me feel that we were getting closer to wherever it was we were going. I could not believe that it was simply the human way to keep moving us from rehab center to rehab center forever, and I had a hunch that what was happening was a process of selection. We were being narrowed down, from Forest Lawn to Trefflich’s, from Trefflich’s to the coaching institute, and it was something to do with our performances in the coaching sessions. And yet that couldn’t be right, because Frederick had been rejected and Bonzo, who’d hardly shone during the sessions, was whimpering below me. But, still, I felt we were getting nearer to something. Stroheim had been rejected, and perhaps this had been the plan all along: to return us to the forest, a forest without its Stroheims, a forest regained.
But it was not a forest, or a narrowing down. It was an enclosed, yellow-lit space with a corridor of tiny individual shelters stacked three high on either side, in which dozens of apes and macaques stared or displayed. Once I’d been unloaded, tethered and bundled into my new shelter, I was able to look across at my new fellow-rehabilitees and I felt the mamba brush me. I remembered the flicker of its body as it passed over DiMarco and me, the touch of death.
Pretty much every chimp or macaque I could see was in drastically bad shape. Right across from me, on the highest level of the shelters, was an old female chimp unlike any I’d ever seen. Her chest and belly were so hugely swollen that it would have been impossible for her to stand up. She was breathing in rapid l
ittle pants, as if she couldn’t get the air to stay down. Below her was a chimp covered in a pale liquid, which I supposed it had just thrown up. It wasn’t moving. There were macaques with peculiar, white-dusted eyes, macaques with open red wounds on their chests. There was something that looked half human, the size of an ape, but almost completely furless. I don’t want to go on describing them. There was absolutely nothing, I thought, that even the humans could do for these poor creatures, no way they could be saved. We were in a hospital for incurables. It was a place of death. I felt it instinctively—I recognized it like I’d recognized it in the mamba’s mouth. These were already the dead, because nobody was getting out of here alive.
So, this was it. The end of the line. Was this really what the rescue, the rehabilitation and the coaching all came down to in the end? Oh, man…. Despite the best efforts of all concerned, it seemed that the plan—this brave but ultimately doomed attempt to save us from death—had failed. All that goddamn effort, and we might as well have stayed in the jungle.
Yet, yet, yet… it seemed like such a mistake. What had been the point of the coaching sessions? Frederick had sailed through them but hadn’t even made it through the selection this morning. I remembered how surprised I’d been at that. Nor had the other couple of chimps who’d excelled, come to think of it. And—why was Tyrone here? And suddenly I understood: it wasn’t them who’d been rejected, dimwit. It was us. It was me. They were the ones who had been kept on.
When I say mine has been a lucky, lucky life, I don’t mean merely that I’ve been privileged enough to watch Fred Astaire perform his famous “golf-dance” on the first tee at Pebble Beach, sending five balls in a row arcing into the Pacific with five windmilling pirouettes. Or that I’ve been lucky enough to sit at the feet of Robert Benchley by the Garden of Allah pool while he recited Leaves of Grass to a rapt Cocteau, with dawn coming up. I mean lucky.