by Richard Klaw
This technique was used to smashing success in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy for the role of Gollum (also played by Serkis) and later re-used for Jackson’s bombastic 2005 remake of King Kong. Serkis, wearing gorilla dentures and covered in little dots, did battle with green foam-rubber mallets and tennis balls that became the dinosaurs and other creatures plaguing Kong on Skull Island. His performance was so inspired that when the Planet of the Apes franchise was relaunched in 2011, Serkis was the first person who came to mind to play the super-intelligent Caesar. Now armed with a facial capture system that tracked every twitch of his eyelid, Serkis was able to portray a hyper-realistic chimpanzee, incapable of speech, but telling the audience everything they needed to know with his eyes, his facial expressions, and his body language. He is the gorilla man for the twenty-first century.
It seems incongruous that it would take millions of dollars in technology, computers, and high-definition camera rigging to effectively replicate what Charles Gemora did while wearing a homemade costume. As the movies have matured, so have the movie-making techniques. But one thing has remained unchanged: the audience’s eternal fascination with our closest living relative in the animal world. Our notions of primates and primate behavior have changed dramatically in just a few decades, thanks to the popularity of nature documentaries and a cadre of dedicated professionals in both academic and entertainment circles who have raised awareness for the real and tenuous situation of the Mountain gorilla and other species. And yet, despite all of that, Rise of the Planet of the Apes was one of the top-grossing fantasy movies of 2011. Maybe it’s because we recognize ourselves in these creatures—both our similarities and our differences. The gorilla men of Hollywood serve as a very real metaphor for that concept, and their performances will continue to thrill and delight and always plant the seed of doubt within us as to just how far up the evolutionary ladder we’ve really climbed.
DR. HUDSON’S
SECRET GORILLA
Howard Waldrop
After a devastating car accident, an actor awakens in an unfamiliar body. The Mad Scientist, the Evil Assistant, and the Beautiful Woman introduce the man-beast to his fresh identity and usher him into his new life. Fueled by his obsession of bad ape movies, Waldrop masterfully explores what it means to be human.
I do not remember anything, after the wreck, until I put my finger to my ear.
And felt the fur scratch against my hairy neck.
The fur from the back of my hand.
Later, after I had tried to rip the bandages from my head, and from somewhere behind me a needle had descended and pricked me, and l passed out; later, I awoke.
I lay still. I was on my back and watched the rise and fall of my smooth chest. My head was ringing from the drug used on me. Little blue circles swirled like a gnat swarm in my eyes. Slowly I raised my hand into my line of sight and saw its hairy back, like a glove made from a shag rug.
I pulled it to my head, found the edges of the bandages which started just above my brow. The brow was thick and long as a bicycle handlebar.
I lay back. Even that small movement caused my head to scream and slip sideways, and I went over.
Late for showtime. Critic’s screening of new, solid blockbuster movie, seventeen stars, studio hype. Wet night, slick streets. Down the Canyon road, around the turn, headlights catch a dog or a cat or a small child, stomp the brake, good Michelin tires grab the road, Triumph says good-bye highway, sailing, sailing the lights of LA look nice tonight and are they getting close no time to scream now...
I come up from the memory and shiver to find I have awakened myself groaning.
The groan is a hurricane inside an echo chamber, long, low, wet, with lungs and strength, hurt strength behind it.
The head pain is gone. Again, I look down my body at the hugeness, the shagginess, the alienness. My body.
I need to take a dump. I cannot move well enough to get—where? To the corner of the cage. For I am barred in. It is ten body lengths long, five wide. Through one corner is a slanted running trough of water. Through the other, a fountain with a steel foot pedal. Outside the cage is dark. It is night, or the lights are off.
I am hurt. I do not understand what has happened. I do not think I am still dreaming. So this is what it is like to begin to lose the mind. I am afraid. I try to cry.
I see him staring at me while I open my eyes. The place is bright again and the light hurts.
He looks like Albert Einstein. He looks like a thousand mad scientists. He looks like...he has a large nose, unkempt white mustache, a fringe of hair from the temples around his head. His eyes are grey and quite gone. I have seen those tombstone eyes on the Strip, asking for change to support a habit. I saw them once in the Army, in Nam, on a guy who’d lived through an ambush when no one else had. He was over the edge. He was gone. His eyes looked like those in photographs of factory workers from the 1890s, all shiny like little steel balls.
Little steel balls with lights burning inside them.
“Tuleg! Tuleg!” he yells. “He is awake.”
I twitched from the loudness of his voice. The blue gnats threaten my sight, then subside.
I try to move.
He watches me. He does not say anything. He studies the way I try to use my fingers. I cannot place them flat so I can push myself up. I realize I am trying to use them as my own hands. And that will not work. These are twice as large.
A door opens somewhere. My vision is still fuzzy. Beyond the bars of the cage is a blur. Light comes from somewhere, then goes.
And before me stands the Evil Assistant.
He is huge, he must be huge. He looks like an oak stump stretched out by chains. He is bald, a muscular Erich von Stroheim, and he moves like an acrobat. He is wearing khaki pants (I can only see the waistband. The cage is raised about a meter off the flooring of the—room?—the cage is in) and a real undershirt, the kind with thin shoulder straps and no sleeves. He is rubbing pizza sauce from his mouth as he walks in. He looks at me and scratches his chest with his right hand.
“So?” he says to the madman.
“So!?” says the other. “I have succeeded. You helped with the operation, you saw! A man’s brain in the body of a gorilla. He lives! He will live, of that I’m sure.”
“Mmm,” grunted the man. He turned to leave. “Call me if you really need me.”
I listened to them talk. I could not believe it. Was I making up this dialogue? Was I still asleep?
I looked at the Mad Scientist. He stared back as if I were golden, silver, a flying saucer, the Loch Ness monster.
The Evil Assistant went out the door. There was something about him I did not like. He seemed familiar.
Rondo Hatton. He reminded me of Rondo Hatton, the Creeper. He did not need acromegaly. He was an ugly man.
The Mad Scientist leaned on the cage and stared at me.
Time passed and the scientist was gone. I managed to get up and hobble my way to the trough. I took a dump.
Gorilla shit is dry, almost all the liquid is gone from it. What I had eaten, or rather what the former owner of the body had last eaten, I do not know.
When I finished I lay back down. My head hurt. My body hurt. I sank into slumbers.
Sometime later I felt another needle go into my skin. I was too weak to fight back. My sleep was filled with dim nightmares.
I saw beyond the cage a hospital stand with an empty IV bottle attached. Intravenous feeding, saves time, saves trouble.
I stood, went to the latrine, shuffled my weight across to the water fountain, stepped on the pedal and doused my face with water.
It did not feel the same as it did when I had done it...when I was a man. It felt as if the skin there was made of leather sewn on the outside of my normal face. I pushed on it, pulled at it with my clumsy hands. I pulled my fingers and tried my toes.
I stepped on the pedal, ran water into the fountain. I held my hairy, notebook-sized hand over the drain. There was light, from indir
ect source, in the room.
I watched the drain fill, the water rise over my hand like a river flood covering a forest. Then I took my foot away from the handle.
I stared into the basin.
Gorilla eyes. Tiny. Brow swept back to a sagittal crest. Head like a cinderblock. Thick. Ugly.
I sat on the floor, my toes curled in. I could not believe it. I sat that way until I realized how I must look. Like a gorilla. A gorilla trying to solve the mysteries of the universe. I got up and began to pace the cage, slowly. Then I stood with my hands through the bars. Gorillas don’t do that. Humans do that.
gorilla gorilla
The most nearly human, the most frightening primate. No one believed the stories the natives told. Old men of the woods. They live there, they beat their chests, they drive you off. They kill. They have teeth the size of knives. Pliny wrote about them. The Romans knew them, and later the Spanish and the Portugee. And they did not believe, either.
Two gorillas. The lowland, first, the one of the rain forest, and the mountain gorilla, he of the open hillsides. Dying, now, the bands breaking down, to the bulldozer, the city, the poachers.
Huge, the gorilla. Fierce-looking. Bestial, perhaps because he is so close to man, yet so far away. So strong, so heavy. Men twisted by nightmares.
The gorilla will fight, is shy. The beating of the chest is liable to be replaced by some other harmless activity. The males will protect the young and the females. They usually run and do not charge.
See the gorilla. Terror of the jungle. Killer of the Congo. King of the Apes. gorilla gorilla.
The Mad Scientist was named Hudson.
The Evil Assistant called him that the next day.
I watched them come into the room while they talked.
Then I stood.
“You see?” said Hudson. “He stands on two legs.”
I walked to the bars. I motioned with my hands. I wanted to know why?
Hudson watched me.
“You see?” he said to Tuleg. “He understands. He is still a man.”
I was clumsy. I couldn’t walk so well on two legs. I didn’t know how to walk on all fours. You can’t walk on four legs like a man would. I couldn’t do anything right. I sat down.
“He is uncoordinated,” said Hudson. “He can learn, though.”
“So, who’s gonna teach him?” asked Tuleg.
“We are,” said Hudson.
For the first time, there was authority in his voice.
The days passed. At first, they still gave me intravenous feedings and kept me groggy with drugs.
Then Hudson began to speak to me, like a child.
I tried to talk. What came out was nnnngmnnnnnnnng.
I wanted to write. I moved my hands like writing.
Hudson handed me a pen and paper, happy as a child.
My fingers were like tree limbs. My thumb was like a sledgehammer. One letter took up most of the page. I tried.
“You will get better with it,” said the Mad Scientist. “Don’t worry.”
I threw the pen down, tore the paper, clumsily, in half. I couldn’t even do that well.
“Nod if you understand me,” he said.
I nodded.
Hudson laughed and clapped his hands. “You do!” he said, dancing in little steps. “You do!”
I nodded again, my insides were turning with joy.
“Wait until I tell Tuleg!” he said, and ran from the room. I stood dumbfounded. We had been communicating, no matter how crudely. And he left. He left.
I did not want to be alone. I roared. I yelled, I shook the bars until my head began to spin and I had to sit, I sank to the floor and shivered.
I found that gorillas can cry.
I held the ballpoint pen in my hand and rocked myself to sleep.
The next morning, I realized what was wrong. Dr. Hudson was crazy, really mad. I had never thought of the meaning of the words “mad scientist” before. He must be mad to experiment so. But his madness did not end there. No. He is mad. He walked away when we were ready to communicate. He works to make me a gorilla, then he works to bring the man back out. And at the instant he does, he forgets me. He is mad.
Tuleg walked in by himself and shut the door.
I sat with the ballpoint pen in my hand, toes curled in, my knuckles flat on the floor. I stared back at him.
He stood with his arms akimbo. With his bald head, in the daylight, he reminded me of Boris Karloff in Tower of London. Mord, the Executioner.
He said nothing. Then he went to the cabinet in the far corner and drew out a long, thin stick.
I jumped. I had seen one like it before.
“Ha ha ha,” he said. His eyes said, “So you recognize the cattle prod, eh?”
He came toward me, moving his head to always keep eye contact with me through the bars. He reached the prod in and the sharp spark leapt like a knife. I felt as if I had been stabbed and clubbed at the same time. Smoke curled, and there was the smell of burnt hair in the air. I roared and leapt away from him.
But he moved far faster than I, and the prod touched again
and again
and again
and
I wrote with the pen, though he shocked me each second or so, and laughed as he did. I was quivering.
NO, I wrote, and he saw it, and knocked the pen from my hand. I reached for it, and he struck at me. The spark made my hand go numb. I watched the hair burn. I looked into his eyes.
“Fight me,” he said. “Why don’t you fight me?” He stuck the prod at my face. I tried to push it away.
Its touch blasted through my elbows to my teeth. I was crying, whimpering now. I lay down and curled up as best I could. He kept jabbing me, sending pain into me. I almost let go at each jolt. I bit my tongue in pain, felt blood run under my teeth.
The pain stopped.
“Damn you,” he said, throwing the prod on the cabinet shelf. “Damn you to hell, why don’t you fight me?”
He left. His words ran through my head. Why don’t you fight me?
Because I am a man. Because. Because...
The Evil Assistant was evil. Evil with all its connotations. Evil has motive. Evil strikes without warning. Sadism is an evil which needs no motivation. To give pain is human. Perhaps Tuleg gets sexual release in giving pain? I couldn’t tell. I did not give him whatever he needed. I will not. Not ever.
I have learned the meaning of the word evil. I do not like it.
There were hands on me.
Tiny hands.
I opened my eyes and winced where one of the prod burns had seared the flesh of my brow. I moaned and rolled to my side.
“You poor thing,” she said. “You frightened thing.”
Why, why, why when there is a gorilla, and a mad scientist, and an evil assistant, why...
Why must there be a beautiful woman?
I have seen all this before, I tell myself, as the doctor and the beautiful woman tend my wounds. I am so hurt, so stunned I can do nothing but lie and shiver. I am running a fever. My eyes feel made of grit and sand. I shake. Inside, I cry. They cover me with a blanket. I become dank, and cold by turns, and then burn for hours. I pass in and out of fever dreams. I see a jungle.
It is later, and I hear the Mad Doctor talk to the Beautiful Woman.
“I wouldn’t have brought you here if I didn’t want you to see it,” he said. “I wouldn’t have, if I had known what Tuleg was going to do. The brute! I hope he fries in hell. I’m going to send him away the moment he returns.”
“I told you when he came to work for you that he was a terrible man,” she said, her voice soft like an unswept floor.
“Well, he was a great help.”
“I’m sure.” Her voice sounded as if she had turned her back on him. “He helped you. Oh, Father,” her voice quavered, then she continued. “Why?” she asked. “Why do something as stupid, as pointless as this? What use is it? What can you prove by it? What?”
“But, Blanche,�
� he said. “If you could have known the heartache, the toil, the hours...”
“Can you imagine,” she asked, turning toward him sharply, “what that poor man is going through? Can you?”
“He will make me immortal, Blanche.”
“Oh Father, Father,” she said. I heard her footsteps and the door open and close, hard.
“She doesn’t understand. She just doesn’t understand,” said the old man, and moved some apparatus (the tinkling of glass and metal) around on the workbench.
I slept.
Tuleg must have come back sometime during the night. I opened my eyes and he was walking around the room, preparing food and tasting it as he put it in a bowl.
He brought it over to the cage.
“Here,” he said, putting it in through the bars. “Eat.”
He went back to the workbench. He took down, and began to clean, a Thompson submachine gun. He looked at me from time to time as he worked with it. “Eat, I said.”
I went to the bowl. It was filled with rolled oats, raisins, bits of celery and apple, sugar. I tried it and found it good. I was still running a fever, but I put the food in my mouth anyway.
My hand brushed my incisors. I felt them both. Long, curved, they were really there. They could crunch through meat as easily as a pair of pruning shears. They could punch open a tin can. They could kill a man. I shook my head.
I finished eating
Hudson came in. He and Tuleg must have talked before, because the scientist was not surprised to see him.
“Today,” he said to me, “we begin to teach you.”
“You were Roger Ildell,” said Dr. Hudson.
I nodded.
“You were killed in a wreck just beyond my home,” he said.
“At least, your body was. I was able to remove your brain before deterioration set in. I saved it. I saved your conscious mind.”
I nodded again.
“I used to read your reviews,” said Blanche, who was sitting at her father’s side. “The police are still looking for your body. My father and Tuleg removed all traces. They were very thorough. They were very methodical,” she said.