Me Cheeta: The Autobiography - James Lever

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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

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