Me Cheeta

by Cheeta

  The only thing to do was put it all out of my mind and enjoy the escarpment’s delights. Somewhere in America, I’m sure, there’s a box of photographs that Johnny took with his Box Brownie during the shooting of Tarzan Escapes. He was going through that phase all humans go through, of thinking he was quite a talented photographer. I hope in that box there’s a picture of us playing Find the Lady with the Gabonis. I had a great system going with Bomba, where he’d do the flickering magic with the three cards and I’d point to the queen, and Bomba would say to the rest of the Gabonis, “A monkey can play this game, fellers! You ain’t got nuthin’ to fear, fellers! Come on and find that sweet, sweet lady. She wants you to find her, fellers!”

  But they never could find her, those Gabonis.

  When I’m swinging upside down in my tire behind the Sanctuary, the contrails of the airplanes segmenting the little rectangle of blue visible above the climbproof wall appear to me like the wakes of yachts racing around Catalina Island; and the planes themselves look just like the flying fish who skipped beside us. If Lupe wasn’t coming to the shore for the weekend, Johnny would take me and Otto down in his new Continental, lingering at every stoplight for a little triumph of handshakes and a quick Tarzan yell, with Otto in his lap and me around his shoulders, my hands on the wheel, bamboozling the bums and lushes. Good morning, sir, I’m looking for the source of the Zambezi but I seem to have taken a wrong turn at Wilshire Boulevard! NDSN, as the stage direction used to go—Nobody Don’t Say Nuthin’. Umgawa! I loved him and he loved Otto and me and we loved each other and I felt, at those moments, almost entirely unendangered.

  Occasionally, on a Lupe weekend, Peter Lorre—a very special human being and a wonderful actor whose beautiful manners were largely unaffected by his addiction to morphine—might pick me up and I would spend most of my time on the yacht club lawn with him and his wife, of whom I was very fond, trying to apologize for upsetting the black and white ornaments they would arrange with great thoughtfulness in a kind of courtship dance on their checkered board, outrunning the unpredictable geysers throwing rainbows over the grass, and accustoming myself to my lowered status, my starvation rations of affection, my ten-minute poolside audiences.

  It was on one of those weekends that Flynn arranged for a steer to be slaughtered and sunk beside his Sirocco with lead weights and a buoy to attract some “motherfucking fish” and maybe “a few hungry merbroads.” Kate Hepburn was staying with Bogie and Mayo on Santana and she rowed me out there herself in the tender, I remember, to where Allure was moored beside the Bogarts, and there they were, the World’s Most Perfect Male and the Latino Tornado. Lupe was wearing a British naval officer’s cap at an angle, which somehow managed to articulate a tolerant contempt for everything aquatic. Tarzan and His Mate.

  Otto snuffled around in the swell, like a great dumb happy seal, getting ready to shake himself dry over Lupe’s chic little brass-buttoned jacket, bless him. I wanted to throw him a fish. Johnny spent the afternoon lined up on the stern of Allure with Flynn and Bogie, rods out, alpha males at peace. There was a strong atmosphere of closeted male defensiveness coming off them, exacerbated as the day wore on by their failure to catch any fish for their females, who talked and drank with a smattering of beta males in the bows. The very special human beings glimmered in the ocean glare, as did the slightly less special ones who ferried them their drinks.

  At some point in the evening, after Otto had been dragged, sopping, belowdecks, and I had been amusingly established with one of Ward Bond’s Cuban cigars and a margarita, I began to notice how connected everything seemed to everything else. OK, it was the margaritas working in me, and the champagne cocktails, but I was no more than reasonably well mulled.

  I’m a drinker, never made a secret of it—always have been, until my time at the Sanctuary—but I’ve always known when to stop. And I’d even argue that there’s a little more dignity in sharing a couple of cocktails, some caviar and a good cigar on a yacht with Katharine Hepburn and Nunnally Johnson than there is in washing down your sugar-free seventy-fifth birthday cake with a can of warm Diet Pepsi and a SpongeBob SquarePants hat askew on your head. I’d mixed it a little, but I wasn’t anything like as oiled as Mayo Bogart or Lupe or Ward was. No, it was the feeling, the absolute conviction, that although the humans and the dead steer in the water, the fish, Otto and I were all part of the same thing, they would never understand that they were all—it sounds banal now when I say it, it sounds ridiculous, and I wouldn’t presume to claim anything like a human intelligence (all I know is as much as you can know from dedicating a quarter of your life to watching TV) but it was a feeling you get only once or twice and when it comes you have to trust it: it was like the feeling I’d gotten from Connie Bennett’s star-powder, but infinitely stronger, realer.

  Kate had, with somewhat predictable competitiveness, initiated a game of charades, and while the dead cow bobbed forlornly in the Pacific, my dear friends and Academy Award winners wordlessly became drunks and adulterers and murderers (Macbeth—Bogart) and petrified forests and white whales and midsummer nights (Hepburn) and cherry orchards and little women (Johnny) and the Bible (Lupe). I realized, with no great surprise, that I was guessing them right every time. I wasn’t guessing them, I knew them.

  It came to my turn and I doused my cigar in my champagne flute and gave them Hamlet. Bereavement. Depression. Madness. Suicide. Revenge. Murder. (No animal, I feel it worthwhile to mention at this point, has ever won an Academy Award. Not one. No animal has ever been nominated.) But I gave them Hamlet. And Kate got it even before I was halfway through the first ghost scene. How the hell did she get it unless there really was this connection? I marked her answer with a backward somersault and followed it with King Kong and she got that too. So I did another backward somersault. Tarzan and His Mate—she got it straight off! And yet all of this seemed to mean nothing to her—it seemed to mean nothing at all that this connection was happening. She was chatting with Flynn, and Mayo was arguing with Bogie, and the party began to shift its weight and stir its stumps from the bows, as if it hadn’t just witnessed something almost inexplicable. Still retaining this sense of mellowness, carrying it like an egg on a spoon, I knuckled over to Johnny, made him scoop me up and gave him to understand how much I loved him.

  “Cheeta drunk!” Bogie said. “Like Mayo. After sex, a woman oughta turn into a pinochle table with three other guys. She’s no good. No damn good. My wife is a lush and I can’t do a goddamn thing to help her, Johnny boy.”

  He was pretty drunk himself—a serious drinker, Bogie, and sometimes a mean and violent one, although he was a very special human being and one of the gentlest and most decent of men. I tendriled my arm around Johnny’s eyes and clambered onto his head in the manner he sometimes liked.

  “Lupe and I got married too young, or something,” Johnny said. “You know what it’s—no, Cheeta—you know what it’s like. She’s a night person, I’m a day person. She drinks, I don’t. She smokes, I don’t. You think, why knock yourself out? But I reckon we’re turning the corner now. Cheeta, no! Bogie, you should just give Mayo a little more time.”

  I stepped from shoulder to shoulder using the handhold of Johnny’s ear as a swivel and settled my chin on the cliff of his forehead, transmitting my love, my connection with him and with them, the steer, fish, Otto, etc. My Tarzan. I had just had a brilliant idea: Tarzan and Cheeta! They needed to title the next one Tarzan and Cheeta. I was his brother, his son, his constant companion, you see. I was there to save him from being alone. That was the point of me, to stop him from dying of loneliness. I was there to stop the loneliness that arrived with Jane, engulfing the two of them. And then I was the household servant, who cranked the fan and turned the spit for the roast and milked the antelopes. “Thank you, Cheeta. I don’t know what I’d do without you.” You would die of loneliness, dear Jane. You’d be found dead among your state-of-the-art bamboo and elephant-grass labor-saving devices, with your head in the swamp-gas oven. Thalber
g and Mayer and even Sol Lesser knew this, which is why the final frame of every Weissmuller-Cheeta picture is not Tarzan himself, or Jane or the Boy, but me. They needed me to be there at the end when they waved off their guests. Always me, staving off their threefold loneliness. Me, Cheeta.

  “I’ve given her time,” Bogie was saying, “I’ve given her chances. I’ve given her the best doctors, the best treatments. But three days on the outside, she’s drinking again. I could give her a thousand years, a million chances, and she’d do the same every time.”

  “If you had a million monkeys working on a million typewriters,” Nunnally butted in, quietly and very frighteningly, “for a thousand years, then one of them would write The Complete Works of William Shakespeare.”

  “That’s just it!” said Johnny. “I thought never in a million years! I used to think: my God, I love Otto more than my wife! Come on—off, off, Cheeta. And now I just think maybe this is it, it’s just suddenly… come good. Jesus Christ, I’ve got my own lush to deal with. For Chrissakes, off!”

  With great reluctance, I let Johnny peel me off him, limb by limb. Love clings. Love clings. It’s a centripetal force. He was still talking, and Flynn was now shouting from Sirocco about yet another bet. The insecure fucking alpha and his sporting wagers. The great arm-wrestler, high-diver, best-of-threer, let’s-make-it-more-interesting cow-killer, fish-killer, bird-killer, gorilla-killer. A race back to Newport, a couple of cocktails at the yacht club, back to Allure by dawn, and let the girls sleep it off in the meantime. Flynn had a cannon on the port bow of Sirocco with which he once sank Lionel Barrymore’s skiff, but it was OK: Flynn was slightly more special than Lionel.

  I left them to it and clambered through Allure’s hatch. You’ve had a million humans, at least, writing away for much longer than a thousand years, and only one of them ever managed to produce The Complete Works of Shakespeare. Only the one! Well, well, what’s the big deal? I wasn’t sure whether Nunnally was actually proposing this, as some sort of hideous battery farm of art. It’s the sort of thing you might do. But then again, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad—the adrenaline-based drugs, the intravenous feeding tube, the esprit de corps, the motivational quotes over the PA…

  A swell must have gotten up because I was having a great deal of trouble keeping my feet on my way from the bulkheads to the galley, where I was hoping to bulk up with a little caviar. Mayo lay fully clothed, very small and pale, face down and scrunched up like the embryo in an ostrich egg, on one of the berths, breathing quickly and lightly. Betty Bacall killed her, really, but that was afterward, and it wasn’t Betty’s fault, or Bogie’s—it wasn’t anybody’s fault. Umgawa. Blame love. Allure moved on its swell, and with the movement the boat made its sounds, and among them were the other sounds I had heard that afternoon three years ago from behind the kitchen door in the house on Rodeo Drive. Like an old household servant I listened, and having listened was powerless to stop. Lupe Vélez had “Lure—which women crave and men are powerless to resist!” She purred and grunted and shrieked and coughed and sang and said, “Gary!” at the very end, which was followed by a brief sharp exchange of words and then silence. I waited. I waited a long time for an ape to wait, and then I entered the cabin.

  My first thought was that there had been a murder, a multiple one; my second was something to do with octopuses and bears. Lupe, on her side facing away from the door, was interlaced with another pair of legs, which doubtless belonged to Ward Bond, over which lay Otto, huge, and doggily asleep. I’m not accusing Otto, God rest his soul, of anything here other than having his peripheral consciousness sexually abused. Oh, Lupe, your trespasses are unforgivable. If she had been turned face up, I would have ripped out her throat. Or am I deluding myself? I couldn’t have done it—not in front of an animal, in front of Otto. Her bullfighter’s bottom was presented instead and I bit it, and she stirred, squirmed, muttered fragments of words and returned to sleep, where she had just sat on a nettle. Me, I’m the secret patron saint of mystery bruises. I felt very drunk, and heavy and sick of human love, as though Lupe’s blood had got into my mouth and was poisoning me. She tasted quite different from Maureen.

  I loped up the ladder and dozed on the deck, dreaming in snatches about an idea for a movie I still think would work, about an ape on an island, an uncharted island in the South Seas or the Indian Ocean, wherever, called Skull Island, why not, where every full moon the islanders stage their ceremony of blood sacrifice and a human is drummed up out of the torchlight for terrible convergence-with this ape. The animal is roped between the two posts on the bone-littered altar, screaming, writhing in terror, as the human looms over it and clutches its tiny wriggling body in its fist. The twist? Instead of killing the ape, the human falls in love with it.

  When Santana hove to before dawn, I was leaping at the stern rail with such an appearance of distress that Kate obliged me by rowing me back in the tender to dry land. By half past seven I was breakfasting on fruit at the Newport Beach Yacht Club, while Peter and Karen Lorre worked their way through the Los Angeles Inquirer’s crossword.

  I sometimes think when I make my rounds of the wards, when Don and I tour the hospices and the Buzz Lightyear wings, the most famous animal in the world bringing what succor he can to the terminal—and Don will always start off with his joke about my statue getting around more than I do myself these days, since kids are forever finding new ways to unscrew it from the plinth outside the Sanctuary—that I’m the future. Not just of my species, either. I’m the future of all the species. I can see us in our wards, our aviaries and vivariums, cosseted survivors who enjoy TV as we submit to our daily jabs, the precious ones, becoming individually famous as we become fewer, astounding the world a thousand times a second by smashing longevity record after longevity record, our sex lives and diseases the subject of global augury.

  I am seven years older than any chimpanzee who has yet lived, and there is nothing that says I am ever going to die. I am about survival. I want to live forever. But you, dearest humans, I want to say, you do all this for us and leave nothing for yourselves! I have this terrible suspicion sometimes. I worry that you don’t at heart really care all that much about surviving—sentiments I feel are best expressed by a very beautiful poem written by a Mr. Edward Robins Richardson, which I saw engraved on a sundial one evening at the Joe Cottens’ years ago:

  Let us with zest drink deep the draught

  Of Life, and care not if the wine

  Is neither nectar nor divine

  Elixir, for we have loved and laughed

  Amid our tears. If we should fall

  In reaching for the big brass ring,

  Or if, like Ic’rus, we take wing

  Too near the sun… well, then we fall.

  At least we flew! At least we chose

  To burn! And when our heyday cools

  And we’re near dust, if we were fools

  The hell with it. The hell with those

  Who feared to rush dream-drunk, headlong

  Into th’dance! Say this, when we set

  Out for the realm unconquer’d yet:

  Say, They lived. Judge us right or wrong

  We drained our cups.

  That says it all, I think. Given a million years on a typewriter I very much doubt that I, or any other ape, would be capable of composing something with quite that martial, apocalyptic swing. So beautiful, and so true. I can’t disagree with a word of it. I … I love it. How did you become so defiant?

  I never saw Otto again. I saw Lupe just once, and it was the last time Johnny saw her too. Or, no, hang on, I think maybe they ran into each other again at the start of the forties, when his next marriage was already in trouble, in Toots Shor’s restaurant in New York. But I saw the last of their marriage when I stopped by the Casa Felicitas for a little roughhouse on the lawn one evening a couple of months later, during the prepping of Tarzan Finds a Son! The poor dumb mutt Otto was missing. A stranger had entered the house at night and abducted him! There were
no leads, no clues! Leopold and Loeb were going at Johnny’s ankles like buzz saws, the parrot was screaming, “Hola, Gary! Hola, Gary!” in a loop, and Lupe was a duenna, a bruja, a djinn undergoing an expansion, filling the two-story room, the house, with black smoke—she could have filled Radio City Music Hall.

  “Ees a estupeed dog! Ees better off dead! Ees good the dog ees dead! Because the dog tried to keell me when I was fucking another man! On your stupid boat, John-ee! And so I sent it to hell!”

  I may have been doing a fair bit of screaming myself at that point, I admit. Johnny walked over to the parrot on its perch and, seeming to have an innate knack for the technique required, wrung its neck. “Goodbye, Gary,” he said, which I think means he’d already played it out in his head.

  So, I killed them both, Otto and Gary. I set that death loose. I put the blood on his hands.

  Lupe set out into the realm unconquer’d yet six years later, in December 1944, by drowning herself in a toilet bowl. As I write, she would have been a hundred years old to the week. She’d been making B’s at RKO, and even those were waning. Her profile was going, and she knew it. Mannix didn’t even need to cover it up.

  5

  Funny Man!

  Perhaps it’s time for some happier memories.

  Sexual intercourse began in 1938, between Holiday with Cary Grant and Welles’s War of the Worlds update, when I lost my virginity to a number of voracious females not of my own species while simultaneously entertaining la crème d’Hollywood with a mischievous critique of Charlie Chaplin.