by Cheeta
Well, I happened to be running through this list when, by an incredible coincidence, Mr. Gentry flopped back into the Datsun, sighed deeply, and said, “What a waste.” This meant another three hours on the Interstate back to Barstow, which was fine by me. I wasn’t doing anything. “You know who’s working at Caesar’s Palace, though?” he said, pulling out of a long, weary U-turn. “Your old co-star. You want to stop and say hi?”
Yes, Maureen had been divorced by John Farrow and was now working in the Palace under the name of “Jane Parker,” as an escort offering correction to the older gentleman who found the English accent a turn-on. She was scarcely making enough to keep the casino sweet, though, and dealt Quaaludes and various uppers, just kidding, just kidding you there…. Maureen was in fact in Scottsdale, Arizona, a contented widow and grandmother who enjoyed doing summer stock on the East Coast and the occasional TV cameo back here, and who was, even as we turned the Datsun around, mixing the first drink of the afternoon in preparation for her daily telephone marathon with her seven children. Maureen had got what she wanted.
But her old on-screen love was working in Caesar’s Palace as a greeter, along with Joe Louis. The sub-duty manager put a call through but he wasn’t in his room. He guessed he could be anywhere. They could try the Tannoy. No, Mr. Gentry didn’t think it mattered that much. The sub-duty manager wanted to help and did it anyway. He was quite taken by the whole thing, and annoyed by our bad luck. “Nine times out of ten, you’d have caught him.” Normally the countess would be here, but she’d gone back to Cheviot Hills for the week with her daughter. The countess? Mr. Weissmuller’s wife. It really was incredibly bad luck we’d missed him: he could only be playing golf. The sub-duty manager’s name was Chris Jehlinger, by the way. He was delighted to meet a legend of the silver screen: he’d grown up with me. I wasn’t normally so badly behaved, Mr. Gentry apologized.
We could call around the golf courses, or he might be out with friends, Chris admitted. He really wanted to help. Maybe it was the air-conditioning that was upsetting Cheeta. Mr. Weissmuller had been working at the Hotel for three months. He sure was a friendly guy, he was a riot when he and Joe got together. Still giving that yell, yes, sir. There was a picture in the Imperial Lounge, if we wanted to see it. There I was, in silvery light on a nest of twigs, holding his hand and Maureen’s, looking like a minister on the verge of uniting in matrimony a couple about whom he has grave doubts.
Chris suggested we wait at the pool bar and have a drink on Caesar’s before going back to Barstow—after all, he might well come back at any moment. Cheeta was going crazy, he was probably looking forward to seeing his old pal. He was excited by the picture, was what it was. He definitely seemed to recognize it, didn’t you think? Mr. Weissmuller had had these terrible business difficulties the last few years. Yes, that was true, he’d been bankrupt. His business manager—Chris wasn’t sure of the details exactly, but certainly it was sad and just went to show. The hotel was pleased to be able to help him. He was a fine man and what had happened was a scandal. You get some sharks in Hollywood. The biggest thing was his daughter’s death. Chris had absolutely loved the movies as a kid. Bo Roos, that was the guy, exactly. Chris would make sure that Mr. Weissmuller was aware where we were the moment he came back—Mr. Weissmuller started at eight thirty, so he ought to be here by seven, seven thirty? Five hours? No, we had to go, Mr. Gentry said, he didn’t like driving at night. Cheeta was just being silly now. We could always come back some other time.
Never have I regretted not having bothered to learn American Sign Language so much. Some chimps can sign you stuff like “love friend sad stay stay stay car no heart pain big stay stay stay” but I’m not one of them. No, not “heart,” I don’t think they actually use “heart.” What did I think would happen, though? That I could offer him consolation? Bring his daughter back? Indict Bo Roos? What did I possibly think could happen other than half an hour of awkward interaction between two washed-up old has-beens?
2
Slowing Down
On a sunny Saturday morning in the fall of 1975, just outside Flagstaff, Arizona, I did bump into an old colleague. It was the last tour we ever did, and we’d pulled over at a little roadside zoo to do a quick meet-and-greet, and there, next to a sign directing you to the zoo’s biggest draw—a series of footprints left by a brontosaurus—was Stroheim. He didn’t recognize me. He didn’t even see me. The notice saying Do not feed the animals. Do not introduce anything through the bars had gained fresh underlinings and exclamation marks in a still unbleached black, as if after the fact of some unfortunate incident. He was mad. In the sweat-darkened stripe across his concrete floor you could see the map of his insanity: his insane tos and insane fros. To the delight of a thickening crowd, he was masturbating away with the zestlessness of the classic twenty-a-dayer, seeing nothing, inside or out. His baldness was worse, almost complete. Poor, poor Stroheim… children were shaking my hand—“Hey, monkey! You found a buddy?”—and not quite understanding my protests and squirmings, Mr. Gentry hustled me away, down toward the vanished dinosaur where I was re-engulfed by the ice creams profferred at me from all sides like microphones. I felt all done in with feeling for him, as if he were my brother. My brother, who couldn’t act to save his life.
From the mid-seventies into the eighties I lived in Barstow with Mr. Gentry. Life was quiet. I was biding my time, though I wasn’t quite sure what I was biding it for.
Our stage work had dried up, not helped by a large-scale shift in human attitudes toward chimpanzees and animals working in entertainment. Supposedly, we were no longer funny. I was more than happy to admit that I was long past my best, though I worried for the younger chimps. (On the other hand, I thought, if chimps aren’t picking up major leads any longer, then so much the better for my reputation. My oeuvre would grow in stature as the years went by!) There were the occasional appearances at parades, or for educational purposes at high schools, so it wasn’t a total withdrawal from the entertainment industry. But I knew that as an actor, I was finished. I’d been finished since Dolittle. I’d been finished since Tarzan and the Huntress, when I was age fourteen. The older I got, the more it struck me that what I really was was a child actor.
In Barstow, I was part of the family. Actually, I was the family. I ought to mention here that there had been a Mrs. Gentry, but Mr. Gentry and she had had their problems. She claimed that he was more attached to his animal colleagues than he was to her, and she probably had a point. So, there were just the two of us. I watched a lot of television, avoiding old classics when they came on, was amazed by the coming of videocassettes, which were such fun to tug apart that the inevitable scolding was worth it. I fooled around in my tire, ate and slept and did my best not to think about the past.
I’d made a decision in ’73 in Las Vegas. Yearning after the past was going to finish me off. From now on I would stamp down on those thoughts, like you stamp on the flames still springing up from a forest floor after a fire. I was just going to think about the present and bide my time. So I thought about the present, and by the time I was no longer yearning after the past all the time, I started worrying about the future.
Since ’74 I’d put on quite a bit of weight myself. I heard the tree my tire hung from giving sarcastic creaks whenever I labored up into it. But Mr. Gentry was really letting himself go. He didn’t exercise, he drank in the evenings though he only had me to keep him company, and he’d never smoked enough. He may have been pining for Mrs. Gentry. Clambering up around his neck was no longer advised because of his back, touch football ceased completely, and one afternoon his nephew came over to help convert the downstairs rumpus room (or “the dump”) into a bedroom. As soon as stairs become the enemy, something’s seriously amiss. “I’m going to end up in a wheelchair at this rate,” he told his nephew. He had none of the positivity I encounter in my visits to the hospices—the positivity I’m increasingly convinced is the key to immortality.
“I don’t want to hear any
of that talk,” said his nephew. “You could lose a few pounds, is all. You give me a pen and paper and I’ll write you out a menu planner, right? Things you can’t have, things you can….”
“Listen, Don,” Mr. Gentry said, “I’m not gonna last forever, and I don’t want to spend my life worrying about what I eat, OK?”
So that was the first time I met Don. He was as skinny then as he is now, but he had a hell of a lot of long, unhealthy-looking hair, especially around the back of his head. He came over to Barstow from Palm Springs more and more frequently, to help with things that Mr. Gentry could no longer manage, like fixing a cage door I’d busted or carrying in the big sacks of monkey chow with which we stocked the pantry every quarter. I must say, I found Don ever so slightly annoying at first: he loved to play touch football with me, and as he did, he’d talk to me about movies. “Hey, what’s it like, being a big star?,” “How’d you get your break, Cheets?,” “You got a number I can reach your agent on?”
Don was an actor too, but he was finding it hard to get anywhere, let alone into pictures. He wasn’t quite sure of his direction in life, I could tell from snippets of conversations between him and Mr. Gentry. Mr. Gentry would talk about Mrs. Gentry and feed me my post-supper cigarette, and Don would talk about acting and disapprove of my cigarette. Don thought L.A. was a jungle, filled with the usual vultures, crocodiles, jackals and sharks that always got mentioned when people were feeling negative about Hollywood. The two of them agreed that it was a worthless place filled with crooks and cheats and always had been; then they put on a classic movie. I scurried off because I feared sighting some of those old familiar faces.
Don was sick of getting nowhere, but what he wanted to do with himself he wasn’t sure. Something with animals, he thought. And this was what annoyed me, and still does a little about my dear friend—he’s so down on humans. Don loved animals but I could hardly let him get away with some of the things he said about humans—you were like a virus, you were going to blow up the planet, you loved war (no, you don’t, you hate it!), you were “the only animal that deliberately, cold-bloodedly kills” (first time I heard that nonsense), you were cruel, you didn’t care about the environment(!), and I don’t know what all. Whereas animals didn’t lie or cheat or steal, etc. They didn’t leave you. Don’s OK and everything, but he doesn’t believe in human beings the way I do.
Pretty soon Don was coming over two or three days a week—this was 1981, something like that—helping out Mr. Gentry by bringing groceries and stuff from the pharmacist, or just coming around to sit and chew the fat with me. He was coming to see me as much as Mr. G., I began to understand. Along with the groceries, there’d always be something for me: a particularly “delicious” fruit (which wasn’t), a flower that was meant to squirt water from a plastic bulb but just dribbled, a videocassette specially for me to mess up (that I liked). Most often it’d be some slightly foolish chimp- or monkey-themed trinket like a key ring or a refrigerator magnet, which was no good to me at all but I appreciated the thought. One time he brought a whole pad of artists’ paper and a tray of little circles of paint.
“You’re crazy,” Mr. Gentry said. “You can’t afford this, Don. How much did it…?”
“Three bucks or something. Nothing.”
There was a price tag still on the pad. “Nine dollars ninety-nine cents? This is artists’-grade paper, you idiot. What’s he gonna paint, the Mona Lisa? And he won’t be able to use those paints anyway—they’re too fiddly.”
He was right. I gave it a shot and it was hopeless: hard little circles of paint that needed too much water and came out disappointing shadows of themselves. I slightly disheartened Don, I think, by going through them for supper: the lemon, the lime, the orange, the strawberry, coffee, mint and the black one I decided not to bother with. But still, it was Don that got me started.
Not long after that, Mr. Gentry abandoned all positivity. “There’s nothing that anyone can do. It’s just life. And if you think I’m stopping smoking now, you can forget it. Happens to everyone, sooner or later.” That pessimism. Bad sign. “Hopefully it’ll be later. I don’t mind for me, it’s him.” Don tried to interrupt, but Mr. Gentry overruled him. “It’s a totally impossible idea. I’ve spoken to UCLA and they’re just about the best. It’s cognitive research; they’ve got a stake in the animals’ welfare. You haven’t any experience whatever, Don. You don’t have enough money for yourself. And it’s not a pet, it’s a full-time job. You’d be throwing your life away.”
“I love him,” said Don.
“Don’t be fucking ridiculous,” said Mr. Gentry.
“They’ll kill him.”
I thought, Oh, come on, they’ll never kill me. I’m still Cheeta.
“Don’t be fucking ridiculous. It’s not some roadside zoo. And it’s not a disease unit.”
“Oh, that’s such bullshit. A bunch of torturers in white coats who like to slice up innocent animals’ brains. Then they wash the blood off and go home to their lovely wives.”
“You don’t even—there’s nothing wrong with a lovely wife, Don,” said Mr. Gentry. “You don’t even know what you’re talking about. Supposing he lives another five, six, seven, ten years? You’d be throwing your life away. Look, I know UCLA’s not perfect but what else can I do?”
“You can let me have him.”
Mr. Gentry sighed. “Let me call MGM. He must have made them a lot of money over the years. They ought to be able to put the word out, find somebody who can take care of him. If not, then it’s your funeral.”
The old guys in the Palm Springs wards have a bit of a crush on me, I think. Don really hit on something when he came up with this as something to do. It’s good for my profile to do a bit of charity work, and I love the idea of giving something back to you humans besides what I humbly refer to as my “art.” In the long run that’s not going to last, like I say, but the old guys seem pretty inspired by the idea that I will. There’s one guy who shouts, “Call Mr. Guinness!” whenever he sees us. “Tell him his book’s out of date.”
I get a lot of requests to perform something comical and I give them the lip-flip, which is all I can manage these days. I think, Lay off, I’m a painter, not a comedian. But mostly they just want to touch me. It’s not a very beautiful exchange, physically, I imagine. I’ve seen how much my head’s getting like a coconut, how my fur’s going white in these kind of random clumps, how my fingers have swollen into the joke-shop rubber suckers of the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and I always try to duck the reflection you get when you’re going through the sliding doors back into the Sanctuary. I wouldn’t want to touch me. As for them—well, you look at them now and wonder what they’re going to look like in another fifty years. What’s left to happen that already hasn’t?
But they want to touch me. They’d never admit to something so unscientific, but they want to be sure death doesn’t get them and they want to cop a feel just to be on the safe side. I’m lucky. I’m the luckiest chimpanzee in the world. More, I’m the luckiest non-human primate in the world. (I’m six years older than the oldest gorilla, baboon, orangutan and so on.) Frankly, I’m the luckiest animal in the world. That’s pretty lucky. No wonder they want a touch and can’t help asking, “Has he got a secret?” though with the positive attitudes I hear, I don’t think any of my guys has anything to worry about. There is no secret, anyway, as I’ve said. It’s as easy as breathing. If there was a kind of tips list, then I’d answer: “Luck, positivity, the absence of deadly snakes and no sudden loss of profile.” (It’s the dip that can kill, I think.) If there is one thing that they’re missing, I’m tempted to say, “Cigarettes.” Look at the humans everyone agrees will never die, the True Immortals: Bogie, Jimmy, Mitch. Not Brad, Tom, Arnold.
Don’s answer would be, “Insulin.” Every morning he rolls the little bottle between his palms to prepare the stuff, pinches up a little tent of flesh and injects. Twenty years I’ve been a diabetic: twenty years of injections from Don, and they don’
t seem to be doing me any harm, I’ll say that. Maybe he’s right and the insulin does have special properties—Don’s mom seems fascinated by the little bottles and she’s not a diabetic. She unlocks the little fridge while Don’s in the den and stands there for long minutes, fearful of being discovered, weighing them in her palms.
The Sanctuary hasn’t really changed that much since I first came here. That’s good. Sanctuaries shouldn’t change. The name’s changed though: it’s the C.H.E.E.T.A. Institute now, otherwise known as the Casa de Cheeta. The first sounds like a robot lives here, and the other makes me seem like a porn star. I preferred the Sanctuary, which is how it was twenty-six years ago when Don drove me up here after the funeral in Barstow was all done and dusted.
“No weeping and wailing,” Mr. Gentry had said. “Death’s nothing to be afraid of.” But nobody at the ceremony took any of that seriously, I’m pleased to say. It was cruel, said the humans, but he hadn’t taken care of himself. It was his own fault. He just hadn’t taken enough care….
“I never want to have to go through that ever again,” said Don, and, hating death, we drove away from Barstow, down Route 15 through Victorville, where poor scooped ‘n’ flayed Trigger rears up emptily, to San Bernardino, then on to Route 10 to Palm Springs and sanctuary. And, with the exception of one brief trip, I haven’t left here since.
What has time done to the place? Well, if you come out through the sliding doors, which you just flip this little black plastic thing to unlock (you wouldn’t be so kind as to give us a hand?), then put your shoulder to one side and—it sticks a bit—shove (thanks again), here we are on the deck, which is about ten years old. Heavy-duty plastic table with midge bodies, tidemarked umbrella and, if you’ll follow me, here we are in the garden! Note the plastic objects the childish animals toy with lying scattered around the lawn, see the midges doing galaxies and comets above our deflating crocodile in the pool, do not approach the flowerbeds, thanking you.