Me Cheeta: The Autobiography - James Lever

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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

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