Читать книгу Me Cheeta: The Autobiography - James Lever - Страница 11

I’ll always have a soft spot in my already well-tenderized heart for New York, and not only because it’s generally agreed that some of my very best work, including the now classic ‘hotel-room sequence’, can be found in Tarzan’s New York Adventure (1942). The last of the truly great Tarzan pictures, New York Adventure was built around the simple but brilliant conceit of getting the Boy out of the goddamn way (he’d been kidnapped, or something). Without Johnny Sheffield there to muddy everything up, the central Tarzan-Cheeta-Jane relationship was free to return to its original clarity. I like to think I managed to make a reasonable job of the opportunity.

I don’t know whether I’d go so far as the New York Times reviewer—‘Cheta (sic) the chimpanzee who well-nigh steals the picture runs amok in a swank hotel boudoir, shakes hands with astonished clerks, causes havoc with hat-check girls, babbles over telephones and even makes wise-cracks nearly as intelligible as Tarzan’s…More than anyone, the monkey turns the Tarzans’ excursion into a rambunctious simian romp’—but the truth behind that ‘picture-stealing’ performance, and the real reason I quote from that review, was that I was simply playing from life. The famous nightclub sequence with the hat-check girls? That was for real. All I had to do was dredge up my memories of a little spree I’d had in Lower Manhattan, the summer of 1933. By then I’d already spent several months in New York. Rehab. But right from the get-go America seemed to be some sort of paradise.

The morning we docked was spent overseeing the unloading of the stock into smaller mobile rehab units. I was touched to see how delighted the dock-wallopers along the pier were by the sight of the rescued animals, crowding round the shelters, offering bits of food and cigarettes, calling and waving. If not quite on the same scale as, say, Gloria Swanson’s reception on her return from Paris with crowds strewing gardenias and roses in the path of America’s Sweetheart (while she secretly nursed a near-suicidal guilt over the child she’d just aborted in order to stay on top), Forest Lawn nonetheless received a welcome that, I think, would have satisfied even my old friend the great MGM publicist Howard Strickling. It was a very moving moment, and confirmed everything I’d suspected about humans—they were the happiest damn things I’d ever seen in my life. And they loved animals.

‘Sonofabitch, this goddamn Depression,’ Mr Gentry muttered inexplicably, as the longshoremen manoeuvred the shelters about. Christ, I thought, if they’re like this when they’re depressed…‘Soon as Earl gets this lot sent off to Trefflich’s you know what I’m gonna do, DiMarco?’

‘You’re gonna quit with the poisonous snakes.’

‘I might do that. And I might take a walk down to the corner of Fulton and Church where I hear a little place called the White Rose Tavern has opened for business. And I suggest we make a Noble Experiment on our first legal drinks in the United States of America.’

‘We takin’ the Cheater, boss?’

‘The Cheater of Death? Sure we are. Gentlemen, I propose we embark on a little stroll.’

Which was what Julius, DiMarco, Mr Gentry and I did. Now, I don’t know whether or not April 1933 was some sort of an economic peak in American history—I’m an entertainer, not a historian, never claimed to be one—but it seemed to me like you humans must have been going through a quite mind-boggling period of success. Over the course of that first awestruck walk I saw lines of men and women patiently attending huge vats of steaming soup, not shoving or fighting for it as we’d have done, but respectfully observing a hierarchy that extended back down the street for hundreds upon hundreds of humans. They also had a miraculous system of circular receptacles on the trails beside the streets, into which humans would toss scraps of food for other humans to discover and relish. Even in the gutters there could be found pieces of exotic fruits, which I saw several humans scoop up and savour! New York wasn’t, good grief, a ‘jungle’, as it’s so often described—the forest, now that was a jungle, with its everyday infanticide and cannibalism: there were no leopards, no snakes here, ‘Nothing to fear but fear itself!’ was the boast I would keep hearing. And I thought I began to understand why Forest Lawn had been refused entry to America while the death-snake was still at large. This land was a haven dedicated to freedom from Death. The whole damn place was a rehabilitation centre!

Any remaining anxieties I might have been harbouring about being separated from the other chimps were overwhelmed by the storm of sense-impressions of Lower Manhattan, and the bewildering fact that every second person on the street seemed to know my name: ‘Hey, Cheeta!’, ‘Where’s Tarzan, bud?’, ‘You’re in the wrong jungle, Cheeta!’ Either that or they called out, ‘Kong! Hey, Kong! You takin’ that thing up the Empire State, mister?’ It was a case of mistaken identity, perhaps. Perhaps I’d somehow been here before. I mean, what was going on? My head swam with it all—the humans crowding round smiling at me and shaking my hand, the stacked towers of shelters that hinted at the promise of unimaginable fruits should you clamber to their crowns, the glossy black shelters on wheels that sped by and kept the humans penned in on the ‘sidewalks’…

It was a sort of prophecy in a way, my unforgettable procession down the sidewalks of Manhattan seventy-odd years ago, shaking hands and grinning at people who knew my name. I was a nobody; I was a novelty; I wasn’t who they thought I was. And nowadays when they do know who I am—it’s exactly the same. There’s the scrutiny, the handshake, the ‘Hey, Cheeta, how’s Tarzan, buddy?’, the pause…If you want to know what being famous feels like, what it means—and I speak as perhaps the most famous animal alive today—then picture a human and a chimpanzee facing each other in awkward silence, with nothing to be said, the faint inanity of the interaction stealing over both of them. That’s what fame is.

Anyway, we stepped off the sidewalk and descended some stairs into a cavernous shelter. I’m not ashamed to admit I was already salivating at the prospect of this ‘legal’ booze in the White Rose Tavern when my nose caught a thick whiff of leopard, with top-notes of monkey. No, not topnotes, I thought, as we entered the tavern, a great smoggy stench of monkey.

Mr Gentry greeted a rather solemn young man in shirtsleeves and striped tie—the Son, I was later to learn, in ‘Henry Trefflich & Son: Animal Importers’—and was soon laughing with him about the mamba; DiMarco was doing pratfalls to illustrate. I could see Earl and several other men at the far end of a corridor wrangling a shelter on to a trolley inside which Frederick was hopping and whining; I could see the wire mesh of shelters through which delicate little monkey-fingers curled. My heart sank. Quite obviously this wasn’t a ‘tavern’ but some kind of further rehab centre.

‘And this is him, Henry, got him half trained already—the Cheater. The Cheater of Death,’ said Mr Gentry, unfurling me from his leg, which I’d quietly coiled myself around. He held me out to the pale young man. ‘Cheats, let me introduce to you the son of a friend of mine—Henry Trefflich the Younger.’

I sensed something unnatural or false in his gesture. It made me nervous and I scooted away from Trefflich back behind my protector’s leg.

‘We’ll get acquainted later over a banana or two,’ Trefflich said to me, threateningly. ‘But he needs a new name. Got a couple of Cheetas upstairs already.’

‘Hell, they’re on a different order, ain’t they? You can’t be changing the Cheatster’s name,’ said DiMarco. ‘Cheatster saved my life, man.’

‘Well, maybe not, if he’s going with the LA order. I don’t know how much more stock MGM are after. But you wouldn’t believe what’s happening with the private buyers here. Dad says we sold more chimps in ‘thirty-two than the last ten years together. You know for why? It’s that great lummox Weissmuller. The ladies go crazy for him. It’s, uh…subliminal. They want Tarzan—they end up buyin’ a chimp.’

As Trefflich talked, I felt Mr Gentry’s hand trying to detach my arm from his leg and I clung tighter, but I was just a kid, with a kid’s sinews, and there was another force in the room beyond Mr Gentry’s strength, a gravity that was pulling me away from him and towards Trefflich.

‘Dammit, Tony, you got yourself a friend there,’ Trefflich said.

‘Yeah. I’m going to miss you, little feller,’ Mr Gentry said, his clawing fingers continuing to insist. He went on talking to Trefflich. ‘Me and the boys’ve been up all night snake-hunting…’ Their nerves were shredded after the mamba, he said, and they needed to take the weight off for an hour or two before coming back to do the paperwork. ‘Come on, Cheats, off now.’

My grip finally went and Trefflich advanced with both arms out to shovel me up into his clasp, so I gave him a warning shriek and bit him as hard as I could on the side of his wrist. To no effect whatsoever, except to send a juddering pain up the roots of my teeth, and a sharper, thinner hurt into the roof of my mouth. I knew they’d have some kind of magic protection. By the time the shock had subsided, Trefflich had hold of the back of my neck and I felt very strongly that I had somehow passed to the other side of the room.

‘Half trained, Tony?’ Trefflich said. My teeth were still jangling horribly, and I thought there was a cut in my soft palate. I jigged up and down in an attempt to shake the pain. ‘Exactly which is the half you got trained, huh? Chrissakes, look at that! Look at the toothmarks he’s left in the metal.’

Around his wrist was a band of dense, shiny material in the middle of which a white, glassed-over circle displayed—oh, this is gonna take forever: his watch-strap. I’d bitten his steel, chain-link watch-strap. And I wonder sometimes just how much the gentleness of my character was formed by that little lesson in the pointlessness of violence. It’s a rare chimp who has bitten so few humans as I have over the years. Or so many famous actresses, come to think of it.

‘Stop jigging, kid, I can scarcely write,’ Trefflich was saying. ‘Oh four oh nine three three, uh…little…Jiggs, brand new US citizen.’

Mr Gentry approached me as I squirmed in Trefflich’s clasp. That exquisitely straight white line of scalp down the centre of his glossy brown head somehow imbued him with an aura of rectitude that made you trust him. He stroked the side of my head and made shushing noises. ‘We’ll be right back, Cheats, OK? You’re in good hands here. Wait a minute, uh, DiMarco, you got any smokes?’ DiMarco held out the pack of Luckys he liked to wedge between bicep and rolled shirtsleeve and, flourishing the pack, Mr Gentry disappeared down the passageway that led out of the room. ‘OK, Henry, you can let him go now,’ he said, when he returned. ‘Watch this. Smokes, Cheats, go get me my smokes!’

Well, for pity’s sake, you had them just a minute ago, I thought. But I desperately wanted to please him, to do something for him that would bind him to me, so I scampered off down the passageway between the caged galleries of monkeys, looking for the Luckys. There they were, in plain sight on top of a bucket of sand. I grasped them and lolloped back between the dumb grey monkeys, not in any expectation of a banana or an orange, but only of pleasing him.

When I got back to the room there was nobody in it but Trefflich, and it was another sixteen years before I saw Tony Gentry again.

So it was that the kaleidoscope of America dwindled to a shelter in another rehab centre. Of course I was grateful, and impressed by the sheer number of animals who had been rescued, but I wasn’t altogether convinced that I was in any need of further rehabilitation.

I was sharing my shelter with Bonzo and a couple of other males the same age as us, but there wasn’t much cause for interaction. Trefflich’s was like Forest Lawn in that most of us slumbered through our days, roused only by the internal alarms of our hungers going off and the light traversing the room. It grew more and more difficult to hold anything in mind other than breakfast and dinner. Our muscles whispered at us about things they recalled doing, but only very faintly. Our dreams became incoherent and naggingly repetitious. Every once in a while we’d stir our stumps for a gallivant around the shelter, or while away an hour or so with a good long groom…

Please, dear reader, please don’t for a second think that I’m not grateful. Each second of my life is a record-breaking triumph that I owe to you, to human protection and intervention. In me, the shelter system has magnificent proof of its efficacy and I salute the ambition of the whole project. By the time Trefflich’s heart killed him in 1978 he had been involved in the rehabilitation of around 1,450,000 monkeys, mainly rhesus macaques. Nearly one and a half million macaques had either passed through Fulton Street or been helped in their resettlement by a single man! I suppose the only tragedy was that he didn’t live to complete his work. So much more remains to be done, and one trusts that many millions more macaques will benefit from a Trefflichian vigour. But I was a foolish little thing in ’33 and, I’m sorry to have to admit, I began to feel the whole process of rehabilitation weigh a little heavy on me.

If I squeezed my head against the mesh at one corner of our shelter I could see a section of window where the sky mooched from grey to white. This was the corner the others would vacate when I approached, where I had banked up straw for myself so I could look out and dream about America. Out there were the sidewalks with humans who knew your name, the rolling shelters and the great towers, and Tony Gentry sitting in the White Rose Tavern with a fan of cards. I’d no idea whether the other animals feared or yearned for the other side of the mesh; maybe it was just me who’d been corrupted by the energy of America on my walk through Manhattan. But I thought I could read messages of sorrow in the toes of the macaques where they gripped the wire, in their sudden maniacal pacing and the listlessness of their unceasing masturbation.

Several times a day Trefflich would enter our gallery of shelters and remove one of us for a short period. Only once or twice was it a chimp, and never a macaque. Most often it was one of the parakeets, or one of the many little rat-like things that snuffled about in transparent shelters, twitching their flamboyantly excessive ears from time to time but never doing anything else. Nearly always the parakeets and big-eared rat-things came back, but occasionally, I noticed, they didn’t, and I wondered about the fate of these non-returnees. Had they completed their rehabilitation? In which case, what had happened to them? Were they just cast back into the jungle and left to take their chances? I couldn’t really see the big-eared rat-things having that much fun back in the jungle: I’d have eaten one myself. And this thought made me nervous. There were pythons and leopards in Trefflich’s rehab centre and they’d have to be eating something. And if the parakeets were python food, wasn’t it possible that the same thing applied to us? What the hell was all this rehabilitation for? What was the point of animals?

Time passed. We slept and masturbated and nothing happened, except that I became more and more obsessed by these profound philosophical questions, as unanswerable as the mesh of our shelters was unbreachable. I was compulsively bashing my head against them as usual one morning when another occurred to me. Why was Trefflich’s helper struggling with one of the macaques in the shelter opposite us? These shelters of ours, I should explain, had an outer and an inner section. When Trefflich or his boy came to remove our excrement (what did they want with it? Why were they harvesting it?) we would be hustled into the inner section behind a second door, and I now saw that this particular macaque had trapped itself in the mesh. Its paw had gone right through the diamond of wire, trapping its wrist, and the boy was having to shove hard at the door to squeeze the now-screaming monkey’s pinky-grey fingers back through. But as he did so, he simultaneously swung the door back on to himself. It juddered painfully against his head and a dozen macaques scampered out past him and into the space between the shelters. Hello, I thought.

They’re not stupid, rhesus monkeys. I believe they share something like 92 per cent of their DNA with chimpanzees. They may be inscrutable and standoffish, and hardly pleasant to look at, with their pale ginger fur and pleasureless frowns—I could never see Johnny’s fourth wife Beryl without being reminded of a macaque—but they get things done. In a group, they have an almost insect singleness of will. Thick as thieves, they consulted briefly in a knot, then scattered themselves across the room, working on the bolts of the outer doors of the other macaque shelters. Of course, the door of the room itself was closed, and I doubted they would have the smarts to get that open, but I applauded and pant-hooted in excitement anyway. You go, macaques! And, you know, wasn’t it a pretty clever tactic to go for the other doors in the first place, so that Trefflich’s boy would be outnumbered?

Now that the macaque shelters were springing open, a little delegation had in fact scampered over to the main door. Second by second Trefflich’s boy’s day was getting worse. He stopped trying to chase the macaques and instead took out a set of keys with which, I suppose, he meant to double-lock the remaining shelters. And at that moment my feelings about rehabilitation came clear to me. I hated it. I suddenly needed to get the hell out of there very badly—not to go anywhere in particular, only to, Christ, only to be free. And then a little ginger ball sprang on to the door of our shelter and flipped the bolts.

Panicking parakeets fluttered through the air as we evaded Trefflich’s boy and knuckled into the maelstrom of macaques. Big-eared rats were hopping among them, looking flummoxed, and some busy little critters twitched their high-held tails. I shouldered my way through the monkeys to the door, which was a breeze. I’d worked out harder doors on Forest Lawn. A swivel knob and an outward push and the stairwell lay open to us. But beyond this door, I knew, there would be others. There’d be a whole succession of doors and Trefflich, and other impossibilities. Instinct told me all this in a moment, as macaques eddied around me and down the stairs. Instinct told me too: always escape upwards.

For a second I vacillated, looked around to see Bonzo and our shelter-mates, and Gerard (my heart brimmed at his face) and various others behind me, and then I pelted upwards into the dark of the stairwell, not in fear so much as pure joy. The door at the top yielded to a push and we opened out on to an escarpment. All around were the termitaries of the humans and beautiful, beautiful, climbable America.

I do love Palm Springs. You’ve got the cool, dry air from the desert coming down from the mountains; a low crime-rate; half a dozen championship-standard golf courses that Don can drive me around while he hacks away. Impeccably liberal, pro-animal, pro-environment views are standard among the humans you meet. But you wouldn’t want to be young here. There’s nothing to climb. It’s a flat, bungaloid city. Whereas New York is the greatest climbing city in the world. I’d advise any young ape looking to break into the entertainment business to find a human backer living privately in New York. You may not make it—and you certainly won’t if Don and the No Reel Apes campaigners get their way—but you’ll have a better time clambering around the place, especially if you live on a block with an old-style iron fire-escape like the one that invitingly ushered us down the back of Trefflich’s building.

Down we all swung like a waterfall, six or seven chimps and twenty or so macaques. We hit the streets with a certain simian swagger, I like to think, if a little scrambled by the question of what to do with our freedom. It wasn’t as if we had a plan to return to Africa, raise children and retire. What to do? What does any organism ever do, except survive?

The rolling shelters in the street slowed themselves so their occupants could gawk at us, and the braver macaques vaulted up on to them. I saw Gerard hesitate, then rush into the crash of the rolling shelters but I couldn’t make myself follow: with their glossy depths of glazed black, their frictionlessness, their somehow angry speed, they reminded me of the mamba.

I took off down the sidewalk. Possibly I had some mad idea that I would run into Mr Gentry, and we could parade regally together through Manhattan again, I don’t know. But I saw immediately how much things were changed simply by the absence of his hand from mine. No human called my name, or sauntered up to slap palms now. Instead they stooped to grab at me or tried to corral me with the long cloth-covered sticks many of them carried. By baring my teeth and shrieking, I managed to clear a path through a cluster of them. But it was clear that I couldn’t survive long on the sidewalk and I ducked into a gap that opened up in the wall to my right.

My luck was good. I scuttled low past an old man in a booth and through a pair of doors (what is it with you and your addiction to doors?) and found myself in a cavernous dark room. Having nothing else to do, I rested there for a few minutes, thinking of Mama and Victoria. The silvery light coming in a beam from a window at one end of the room was the colour of the forest under a full moon. I thought of the three of us curled together in a nest of leaves: it had been a long time since I’d seen that light, and it calmed me. There was a whole rectangle of it illuminating the room and, when the light brightened for a moment, I was shocked by the number of humans scattered throughout the gloom. They were all facing away from me and the shifting moonlight was so soothing that I felt no urge to leave.

After a while I began to decipher the shapes within the light up on the wall. Real humans formed, snapped away and re-formed. And once I’d deciphered the humans, the sound in the room became their speech. It was exactly like a dream, I thought, all chopped up and shuffled, and then it hit me that that was what it was, a dream, dreamed on to the wall by the silver-haloed heads in front of me.

After a few minutes the dream-story became intelligible to me. The humans were hunting for a female lost in a forest. Something wicked had stolen her. But in order to rescue her, her friends had to defeat various predators. The humans watching in their seats screamed at the succession of predators Jack and Carl and the rest had to battle with in order to get to Ann.

At this point things went a little crazy. Ann, who turned out to be a tiny little creature no bigger than a termite grub, had been stolen by a chimpanzee. Jack and Carl rescued her and the chimp lumbered after them, only to be captured himself. I have to say, my attention was flagging a little, but when Jack and Carl turned out to have a ship rather similar to Forest Lawn, I sat up again. And when the chimp’s name was revealed to be Kong, as in all that ‘Hey, Kong!’ I’d experienced on my first day in Manhattan, I thought, I know this dream. They’re going to take him to New York, right? And so it happened! Now, hold on. Don’t tell me he’s going to escape from his rehab centre…

As Kong busted out of the miniature rehabilitation unit and went in search of Ann again, I found I was scarcely breathing, so strong was my desire that my dream-brother should win out, should survive this ordeal. By now the humans in the room were screaming pretty much continuously. Kong retrieved Ann and started to seek some place of refuge. Up, I was thinking, safety is up. Come on, old Kong, you know that, get up somewhere! And, goddammit, he did, in a fantastically enjoyable clambering sequence that culminated with him surveying New York from the escarpment at the summit of its topmost tower, Ann cradled in his palm, tiny and vulnerable but very beautiful: the sweetest little human being in the world, in Kong’s protection.

What a finish. The most amazing, inspiring dream imaginable. I felt tremendously happy and proud of Kong for a second before I sensed human fingers scrabbling at my arm and there was the old guy I’d sneaked past at the door suddenly ahold of me. A flash of my teeth loosened his grip enough for me to free myself and I blundered off through the blackness, smashing into invisible objects in my way. I heard the old fellow shagging along behind, so followed my instincts: up, and towards the light from the window.

Luckily for me, there were little staggered ledges I was able to use to scramble up the wall that led to the shaft of light. Having gained the bottom shelf of the window I hoisted myself into what turned out be a cramped little room almost entirely filled by a fat young human lounging in a chair. A piercing shaft of very white light emitted by the machine behind him half blinded me, but I tried to display at him as frighteningly as I could. I needed to get him out of the way of the door he was blocking. And my display seemed to work fine, except that the panicking fat boy could do no more than flail and flounder in his chair, still in my way, so I displayed more angrily, waving both hands wildly above my head, bristling my fur and shrieking. At that point I heard an upsurge in the screams of the dreaming humans below.

I glanced behind me to see the twilit room transformed. Screaming humans were stampeding headlong towards its edges. It was the sort of chaos you might see when you ambush a family of bushpigs. Hugely and blackly above it, blotting out nearly all of the dream, was the silhouette of a colossal ape, its fur bristling. Kong, my brother! I gestured at him in excitement and, you won’t believe me, he saw and gestured straight back! The poor humans were desperately emptying the room, vaulting over their seats in terror to escape the thing—and who knows where Kong went—because, when the room was finally emptied and I dropped back down into it, he seemed to have melted back into the dream, which read, simply, ‘The End’, and then went blank. I guessed that it figured: with none of the dreamers left, the dream was over.

There was nothing for me to do but pick over the rather large amount of extremely appetizing nuts and delicious little morsels of something that was sometimes salty and sometimes sweet that were lying spilled on the floor. Having eaten pretty much all I could find, I sauntered out into the darkening New York evening, feeling fifty foot tall.

What the hell had I got to lose? If they caught me, they caught me—there was no glory in scampering abjectly about in search of hiding-places. I felt intoxicated by Kong’s example. After all, there was no need to fear humans!

In this new expansive mood, I strolled down the comparatively empty sidewalk, looking for action. A rambunctious simian romp, that was what I was after. The first place that looked promising was some kind of food store where I picked up a couple of sticks of something with a hideous rind and a sensational inside. I don’t think they even saw me. The next joint I left with a couple of hats and a cigarette case—but no matches, alas, so I dumped the case with the hats. I boosted an armful of oranges from a sidewalk display and spent a diverting five minutes tossing them at passersby from a striped canopy that jutted out of a tower.

For a while it was pretty good fun snatching sticks off of old males and females, until a plan took shape in my head. What I needed was a drink. Yeah, a drink, a smoke, and a game of bluffing and packing. I’d noticed places all over where the smell of booze was alluringly heavy, and it was easy enough to slip into one.

Rendered invisible by the head-high shelf of tobacco smoke I was able to reconnoitre the joint without being noticed. All along one side of the room there was a raised counter at which humans sat. Behind this was a glittering wall of whisky, inaccessible, but reachable. I swung up on to one of the high wooden chairs and then on to the counter, where I was distracted from my goal by an unattended half-drunk glass of what I recognized with joy was Scotch. Here’s mud in your eye, as Mannicher used to say.

‘Hey, Jimmy! Like a refill for my friend here. Smoke?’ asked a human standing behind me, offering me an already burning Lucky.

I took it and, you know, it’s a pity more animals don’t smoke. It’s one thing that Don, who’s a great guy in nearly every respect and who loves me more dearly than anything in the world, just doesn’t get. There’s been a blanket ban on smoking inside the Casa de Cheeta for the seventeen years I’ve been there. The last officially sanctioned cigar was out on the deck on, I think, 9 April 1998. And then you catch a glimpse of George Burns or Jack Nicholson on Entertainment Weekly and you could weep, because nobody has any damn idea how hard it is for a world-famous chimpanzee, noted in the Guinness Book of Records for his astounding longevity and health, to shoplift cigarettes in historic Palm Springs.

So far this year I’ve managed to snatch one pack, containing six cigarettes, from the handbag of an apologetic post-grad zoologist whom Don refused to suffer to light up even in the garden, and a single forgotten or abandoned Camel Light from an ashtray outside the doors of the Desert Regional Medical Center Hospice. I ought to try getting them smuggled in disguised as toothpaste, like Joe Cotten in Citizen Kane.

And finding them is just the beginning. They then have to be concealed at the back of the herbaceous border behind the pool and, when Don’s sparked up the gas for coffee but has, for some reason, left the kitchen, I have to make it to the shrubbery, disinter them, run across the lawn and into the kitchen, get it lit (never easy when you’re not inhaling) and beat it back out to the cage, where I can hunch my back to the Sanctuary and, goddamn it, smoke, never forgetting to bury the butt. There’ve been some close shaves but I’m pretty sure no real suspicions have been aroused.

I’m getting distracted. What Don can never know is how many, many times I’ve charmed a reaction out of an indifferent or unwelcoming human by plucking a cigarette from between their fingers and taking a good toke. To convert Bette Davis from a ‘Puh-lease, this is a restaurant not a freak-show’ to the hostess of a riotously memorable evening at Sardi’s is not an easy trick, and would have been an impossible one without a cigarette. A smoke broke the ice between me and an initially hostile Bogart, for instance. A smoke set up me and Gary Cooper for life. Sharing a fat stogie with a member of a different species—what better way to forget, for a moment at least, what Charlie Chaplin once described, with his unerring knack for perfectly duff pseudo-poetry, as ‘man’s cosmic loneliness’?

It needed that Lucky in the New York bar to get the evening under way, an evening that ended with me sinking Repeal Specials (legal lager-beer and a shot of Canadian bourbon) with Benny, Red, Kreindl, Hal, Crelinkovitch, Tall George and the rest, hanging upside down from the ceiling fan and catching the coasters they skimmed up at me. What else? There was that bowl of indescribably delicious nuts (I loved American food, I was finding) I won for a rolling sequence of back-flips—and I also seem to remember pant-hooting for quite some time down a shiny black thing that contained a succession of miniature but angrily squeaking voices called ‘wives’.

I learned more about acting in that bar, I believe, than under a dozen different trainers at MGM and RKO. I think most serious actors will tell you they learned nine-tenths of their craft from life and stole the other tenth. Or the other way round if you’re Mickey Rooney. Acting classes? They’re OK—but you either got it or you ain’t. And all you really have to do is watch and copy. That’s all. When the boys applauded the end of another Repeal Special I just clapped ‘em back and they loved me for it. And when they grinned…That bar was the place where I first developed my fail-safe standby: the double lip-flip. A human grins at you, you give him a look, then flip your upper and lower lips back to reveal your pink gums in imitation of their cushiony pink mouths. I might possibly have overused that one over the years, but it’s still funnier than anything Red Skelton ever did. The boys loved it when I lip-flipped, awarding me a new name for it: ‘Louis’.

The evening broke up with a slight altercation between Benny and Kreindl, which I sensed had much to do with the privilege of my further company. ‘You take Louis to flop at Turney’s, he’s gonna ask for something, you mushhead. It’s gotta be worth twenty, thirty bucks to someone and Turney ain’t having a slice. Who found it in the first place, huh? We did, and we’re gonna keep what’s coming to us.’

This was Benny, I think, and he was the one who took my hand. By now the city was dark, with lonely pools of light splashed here and there across the sidewalks, but I was still joyful at life, and full of nuts and Repeal Specials, and couldn’t stop jolting and tugging at Benny’s grip, trying to shake him out of his human plod. All the feeling of that very first parade through the streets with Tony Gentry was in me—if I can make it here, I remember thinking, I can make it anywhere!—and too happy to hold it in, I pulled away when Benny was trying to reset his grip, saw a wall of tempting handholds and ledges and set off up it.

I was Kong the Mighty, scaling the summits of New York. I was also unprecedentedly drunk. But inspired in a Harold Lloyd-ish fashion. By traversing a number of ledges I managed to find myself at a vertical section of simple jutting stones, which led me up towards a metal box, from which a wire ran across to the other side of the street. Beneath me, Benny had stopped yelling quietly at me and started yelling loudly as I shimmied towards the wire, which gave off a buzzing hum. Every chimp has a feeling in his hands that’s hard to explain, that itches for a good branch, or a vine with just the right kind of give, and that wire looked as if it had just the right kind of sag to it.

Terrific fellow by the way, Harold Lloyd, quite unlike Chaplin. A demi-ape. Harold had a nine-hole golf-course in the grounds of Greenacres, the mansion he’d had built in Beverly Hills, where the fast set was always welcome to swing by for a few holes. But it was really an eight-hole course, with a specially constructed fake ninth. From the tee it looked like an almost insultingly easy, ideally flat green, with the pin dead centre. A seven-iron, no sweat. It was, however, an algae-mantled pond, into which, especially if you were playing as the light began to fail, perfect drive after perfect drive would inexplicably disappear. Now that was funny. That was fun, with golfers striding angrily up to the green and sinking into it themselves, and Harold’s wife, a frail, beautiful thing called Mildred Davis, mixing martinis on the terrace behind.

Great times, although less so for Mid, of course, who’d suffered terribly with drink and depression ever since dear old Harold had forcibly halted her screen career in a funk of jealous paranoia at the possibility of being overshadowed. But you can’t keep judging someone for destroying their wife, least of all when they have such beautiful, ape-like grace and a highly amusing golf hole, and Harold will remain for me one of the greats, whatever time has done to most of his oeuvre.

As for that wire, well, Kong the Mighty was about to demonstrate his incredible prowess on it when a human head suddenly emerged from the wall a foot in front of me. ‘Shut the fuck up, you bum!’ he shouted down at Benny, and disappeared back into the wall. I thought, Mmm, nice handholds, forgot about the wire, shimmied up the window’s surround, and carried on up another vertical stripe of stones. It kept telling you to climb, the city. That was what it was saying: Climb me. And, looking down from the plateau at the summit of that tower, I saw what I had perhaps been looking for all along in this leafless, treeless, greenless place—a rectangle of dark forest inlaid among the lights. I felt the gravity of home, stronger than all of America, and took the fast route down a fire-escape, across a wide street and into the trees, pant-hooting with delight. Who knew? There might be chimps roosting in the branches, or bushpigs scuffling through the long grass. The forest was sparse, sure, and the undergrowth was thin, but what did it matter when you could take a running jump up a tree-trunk and loop from branch to branch? So I swung my way through a sequence of trees until I was too exhausted to bother breaking off the branches I’d have needed for a nest, and fell asleep, drunkenly and dreamlessly.

And woke in pain on the ground with a human hand around my throat. There was earth in my mouth and a heavy weight on my back pinning me down. I instinctively thought: Trefflich. Something was slipped around my head and I was flipped on to my back, bringing into view the sight of a couple of humans looking down at me from an early-morning sky. Neither was Trefflich, of course—they had none of his well-fed sleekness. I made an attempt to flee but a choking pain in my neck checked me. In a panic, I turned and rushed at the man who held me on the ‘tether’ (as I would come to know it in Hollywood) and he beat me away with a length of stick. Raising his arm higher, he hit me again, and then a third time. I was dizzy with the surprise of it as much as the pain, and scrambled away as far as the tether allowed.

‘Shit, don’t bust it up,’ the second human said. ‘If you bust it up too bad, they might not take it back, Pops.’ Both of them had the same thin beards and large eyes, but the second was very much younger than the first.

‘Yeah. I don’t want to bust it up but I ain’t getting bitten, is all.’

‘You bust its head, they’ll say it was us when we bring it in and we get nuthin’.’

I was whimpering at the end of the twine, keeping an eye on the older man’s stick.

‘What’re you talking about, son? We ain’t bringin’ it in. Zoo ain’t got no money to pay you for bringin’ them in an absconder. This is good meat. Stewin’ meat. Chinese eat monkey stew on a reg’lar basis.’

‘I ain’t eatin’ no monkey. That’s cannibalism, near enough.’

‘It ain’t cannibalism. Ain’t no different from a squirrel or a pigeon once you got its throat cut and the fur off.’

‘Or a nigger baby, Pops. I just ain’t eatin’ no monkey. Zoo’s gotta give a reward if you return their property.’

Chafing at the end of the tether, I was trying to rid myself of the twine around my neck by back-flipping it off me. Down came the stick across my raised arm again. I screamed and, without thinking, did something you may have seen me do a number of times on screen. It may even be the first picture you have of me in your head. I leaped towards Pops and wrapped my arms around him, where he could no longer get at me with his stick. It’s the first action all chimps work out with their trainers, pretty much. When you see the chimp jump up into those human arms and cling there like a baby being comforted, sometimes it’s love and sometimes it’s the memory of fear. It’s very hard to tell them apart.

‘Come on now, Pops. You can’t eat this monkey,’ the younger man said. ‘It’s picked you for a pal. You ain’t been hugged like that in a time.’

Pops was trying to unpick my grasp from around his shoulders but I was too tightly wound round him, and it took his son to yank me off. I came loose and the old man threw the twine away from him.

‘Take it back to the zoo, then, but you won’t get a nickel out of them. Just breaks my heart to see a workin’ man starvin’ and a bunch of monkeys and lions eatin’ like kings. It’s fucked up, when a beast eats better’n a man.’

‘You see it do those flips? This is a trained animal, Pops, has to be worth a dollar to somebody.’ But the old man had turned away in disgust, and I wasn’t sorry to see him go.

So the young man led me on my length of twine through the forest as the light strengthened, and I saw that what had seemed a pretty lush jungle at night was actually hard-worked land, dotted with clusters of rickety shelters where tattered children were playing and older humans lolled. Much of the grass had been ripped up and was now mud in which little lines of plants were growing unenthusiastically. Every tree had been brutalized and was missing half of its limbs. It was somehow dispiriting, neither forest nor city, a mess.

On we went, through the half-made shelters and mud, the tether digging into my skin, my arms throbbing from the blows and a hangover, of heavy alcohol and heavier fear, settling in me. We approached the zoo, and there were a dozen wire-mesh shelters in a line, most of them empty. In one, a pair of white parrots roosted. A few other animals were slumbering in corners. The whole place had an air of being semi-abandoned. The young man and I waited for maybe an hour, but nobody showed up, and in the end he must have figured there was no reward for him there. So he looped the tether through the mesh and walked away.

I could easily have untangled that tether and gotten out of there, but the truth is that New York seemed too dangerous to go through again. Another day of it would kill you. Great for an adventure, maybe, but it wouldn’t be long before you’d be found dead at the base of one of those high-scraping towers. Not everybody got away with it like Kong had. I huddled against the mesh of the empty shelter, hoping not to attract attention, and felt that on one side was rehab and on the other jungle, and neither was any sort of home.

After a while, a guy shambled up to the shelters and unlocked the gate. I whimpered at him, and before sundown Trefflich was round to collect a very chastened chimpanzee from the empty shelter where I’d been happy to be led. And by the time we finally left New York for California, every single one of the escapees had been returned to its cage, to use the more usual term, at Henry Trefflich & Son’s.