LITMIR.BIZ

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Shearer, valuable assets to be cosseted and packed in cotton wool. Hence the tiny protective crates in which we found ourselves snugly ensconced on the quayside. We were housed in pairs, each of us safe inside our own ingenious little slatted wooden shelters, where the raging alphas could never get at us. It was typical of the Metro touch. Once you were in with Metro, you were in. You had everything you could have asked for.

      So there was Gerard and me together, Frederick and little Deanna in the next crate. Stroheim and Spence, the wannabe-alphas, were in their own individual shelters, thankfully out of sight. Cary I didn’t see. Gerard and I lounged through the afternoon, secure for the moment, stuffed with strange fruit, protected from the downpour and our enemies.

      Throughout that weird and disorienting day, other animals that had been chosen by MGM were set down around us in their own personal shelters. It was absolutely ingenious, an incredible system. Packed in tight were a pair of leopards, dozens of baboons, spider monkeys, blue- and red-tailed monkeys, bush-pigs, mongooses. There was a sudden mouldering stink of snake, and I realized that a python had been set down on top of Gerard and me. But because of our shelters, none of us needed to come into conflict. It was as if you’d taken the jungle and poured all the death out of it. Here, by the jetties on the Zimbugu river, in the human settlement of Kigoma, I saw for the first time a forest live cheek by jowl in peace together, thanks to the intervention of Irving Thalberg, Prince of Hollywood.

      Gorged on exotic fruit, Gerard and I occupied ourselves in trying to throw the leftovers through the slats of our shelter at the leopard, which was chafing round its own shelter beside us. He was closer than we’d ever seen a leopard before, but he seemed not to notice whenever a scrap struck his flanks. We displayed at him for a while, but he was oblivious to us. We groomed nervously, and towards dusk the rain slackened and a bank of released scents rose from us all like mist—the must of the snakes, the musk of the monkeys, the loam smell of the bushpigs, and other odours that were as indescribable to us as new colours.

      With all these smells, we were excited into sound, and up went the hoots and barks. There was Spence’s voice, then Frederick’s. There were growls and grunts and whistles, the call-and-response of the turacos, the squeakings of the marmosets, the hypersonic trilling of the snakes, or whatever the hell it is they do, and there were other voices I’d never heard before and couldn’t possibly describe to you. I realized that there were hundreds upon hundreds of us in our shelters here in Kigoma. Maybe the whole forest was being evacuated! Maybe every last one of us down to the termites had, in Thalberg’s eyes, potential star quality!

      And at that moment, as we all celebrated ourselves, the sinking sun shot a sideways gleam across us and illuminated a shining wall standing upright in the river—what I later learned was the 420-ton, 215-foot freighter SS Forest Lawn. Anyway, with the freighter lit up on the river like that, it seemed, to my ears at least, as if our chorus of voices formed one great ironic cheer of utter relief to be getting the hell out of Africa.

      And that’s my last memory of the place, pretty much, because soon afterwards I fell asleep and when I woke up it wasn’t there any more and never came back, for which deliverance I owe every human being on this planet a drink.

      Not all of us went on to be stars, or anything more than extras, but I can say with some pride and great fondness that Forest Lawn carried probably the biggest concentration of simian, avian and pachydermatous acting talent that has ever been assembled. For years afterwards you’d come across elephants, antelopes or zebras you recognized from Forest Lawn, dumb animals that had quite forgotten where they came from. Elephants—let me tell you definitively—forget. But I remember it all perfectly.

      The primary purpose of the place seemed to be as a rehabilitation centre. It appeared the humans recognized how traumatized most of the animals were by their experiences in the jungle because we were all subjected to a lengthy period of complete rest and relaxation. This consisted of almost permanent darkness, coupled with a total lack of potentially distressing or dangerous social interaction, and strictly no exercise. Indeed, many of the animals required such intensive therapy that they adhered to this routine throughout the whole of their stay on Forest Lawn. We were encouraged to sleep and, soothed by the constant low hum and initially rather uncanny gentle rocking, also to unwind in general and let our shattered nerves repair. You could actually feel the tension drain out of you. Gerard and I spent virtually the whole of our time snoozing in one another’s arms.

      At regular intervals there was an explosion of stark light as a rescuer interrupted our twenty-hour naps with a fresh bucket of exotic fruit. I would take the chance to look around and do a who’s who of our party. There were various birds stacked up in little boxes not much bigger than my head, a delicious assortment of edible monkeys, some equally delicious-looking bushpigs, a fat and hairy chimp with a black face and a gentle expression, a number of pythons taking the weight off, six or seven other chimps and a charcoal-grey snake that I instinctively feared. Stroheim and Spence were both displaying and hooting like idiots—I didn’t respond; like, get with the programme, we’re here to relax. ‘Here you go, boys,’ our kind rescuer would say, poking bits of fruit through the slats of our shelters. ‘Here you go, you poor little fucked-up lonely little hairy fucking bastards.’

      To be honest, what changed everything for me on Forest Lawn was a fruit—the banana. My first banana! I remember thinking, Why don’t we eat these? Why didn’t we have these in the forest? I had a similar feeling years later, sipping my first properly mixed martini in Chasen’s—a pulse of surprise that it was legal. Same as my first snort of cocaine off Constance Bennett’s breasts. The flesh: firm with a kind of memory of a snap to it, but melting as you held it in your mouth. This is the banana, not Connie’s breasts. The skin: a sensationally chewy contrast, with the added bonus of a chompable fibrous stalk to round it all off. I’m still talking about the banana here. The flavour: like a cleverer flavour than any other fruit. The size: the perfect shape for a single lateral mouthful.

      My second banana was, I’m ashamed to say, supposed to be Gerard’s, but he, like many of the other chimps, had become so lethargic on the Forest Lawn discipline of constant sleep and catered meals that he hardly even stirred when the rescuer brought the fruit round.

      We developed a routine, this rescuer and I, whereby I’d cling to the slats of our shelter as he approached and make grabs at his bucket. ‘You’re a little fucking Dillinger, aintcha, you little smartass sonofabitch?’ he’d croon, as I rummaged through the bucket in search of the bananas. Sometimes he would hold up other fruits for me—a custard apple, a fig, half an orange—and wait for my reaction before he handed over the only thing I wasn’t silent with disapproval at. Other occasions he’d hold out his two hands, a fruit distending either fist differently, and allow me to peel open one set of fingers—the banana, thanks very much. Then four figs on the floor outside the left of the shelter versus one banana on the floor outside the—banana, thanks. (All this, by the way, accompanied by a backing track of impatient screaming from Stroheim, who had, I noticed, progressed in the meantime to the dizzy heights of the dominant male in an environment of one.) Finally, a whole bunch of bananas was wafted at me, withdrawn and set down out of reach by the charcoal-grey snake. Tricky, but whatever was necessary, I’d do it. At long last I was managing to put on some weight, even though the rising difficulty of obtaining my bananas was increasingly doing my head in.

      The human showed me a small, intricately glittering object and opened the front of the shelter, all the while making reassuring noises: ‘All right, you goddamn little fucking Edison, you little Greenwich fucking Village fucking pointy-head, work this one out.’ He slowly placed the intricate object on the floor to the other side of the custard apples, within reach. I understood that if I were to choose the custard apples I would be denied the glittering thing. I got that. What the glittering thing had to do with bananas was anyone’s guess.

      Again, he fixed his eyes on me, picked up the glittering thing and opened the shelter’s front. Then he slowly replaced the glittering thing and waited, all the time staring at me and muttering kindly, ‘You’re not so fucking smart after fucking all, are ya, H. L. fucking Mencken?’ I didn’t have the faintest whiff of an idea what was going on—I’m a comedian, not an intellectual,

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