LITMIR.BIZ

       4 America Ahoy!

      Janos, or Johann, Weissmuller was seven months old when he made the same trip, on SS Rotterdam out of Holland to New York in February 1905 (in steerage, though, not in MGM luxury). So he was too young to experience crossing the Atlantic in the way I did. I got to know that ocean in March 1932, with Tony Gentry and Captain Mannicher and Gabe DiMarco and Earl and Julius and the rest of the guys. It was a great time. Humans, it turned out, were on the whole a delight.

      Tony, or ‘Mr Gentry’, was the kind one with the sprightly alpha air and the spiffy line of white skin down the centre of his sleek head. The lopsided one with long, mournful ears and the bubbles of flesh in the crooks of his nostrils was Captain Mannicher, and so on and so forth. It wasn’t hard to pick things up. ‘Whisky!’ meant if you went to the other side of Forest Lawn, opened a number of doors, retrieved a bottle and brought it back to Mr Gentry, you got a banana. ‘Get my hat’ or ‘Smokes, please’ meant…well, you follow—there were a lot of banana-based interactions between Mr Gentry and me.

      By now I was consuming so many bananas that I had taken to imitating the humans and using the stalk to unfurl the skin petal by petal. You missed the chewiness but discarding the skin enabled you to get through them quicker. ‘Come on, kid, you’re going to Hollywood,’ Mr Gentry would say, as he worked on another task with me. ‘You ain’t gonna meet Dietrich if you can’t fetch her a smoke. You want the banana, do it again.’

      ‘Elephants’ meant taking a bucket of water from Mr Gentry and climbing up the shelters on to the backs of the bristly giants and sluicing them down. ‘Giraffes’ meant carrying armful after armful of hay up to a kind of bier on a pole and avoiding being licked on the way by the creature’s hideous two-foot-long blue-black tongue. ‘A key’ was an intricate glittering thing. ‘Somersault’, ‘Do it again’ and ‘Again’ all meant performing the back-flip I was so adept at. ‘Hold Number Four’ was where I’d come from, ‘the Atlantic’ was the river without banks we were crossing to get to ‘America’, which was where all the humans lived. ‘Cheats’ or ‘Cheatster’ or ‘The Cheater’ was me.

      ‘Bluffing or packing’ was simple enough. The humans sat around displaying fans, like male turacos in courtship, made up of prettily coloured cards. The longest display, again like turacos, was rewarded with ‘chips’. When Mr Gentry said something like ‘It’s my notion that you ain’t packing nothing, Earl,’ or ‘He’s bluffing, Cheats’, it was my job to circle the table while the others showed me their fans. Mr Gentry would ask me, ‘Bluffing or packing?’ with a raised forefinger. Whichever word he lowered the forefinger on, I had learned through a long afternoon of withheld bananas, I was at that moment to display wildly, and he would make his call based on the Cheatster’s ‘advice’. As far as I could tell, bananas seemed to be allocated on a completely unreadable basis for this task.

      Of course, I didn’t have any idea of what was going on most of the time. I was a very young chimpanzee and had only just started to read human beings. But, frankly, I hadn’t had any idea of what was going on in the forest either. It wasn’t any more confusing being on Forest Lawn, and at least I was hanging out with a higher consciousness, and who doesn’t want to do that? Death seemed very distant among the humans. Also, I was struck by how deeply they seemed to love animals. And a further plus was that I was eating more bananas than possibly any other chimpanzee on earth. Whatever Forest Lawn was, I liked it!

      The only problem was that with my fetching and carrying Mr Gentry’s cigarettes and whisky all the time, and my smoking and drinking ‘imitations’ at the card displays (they weren’t imitations, I was smoking and drinking) proving so popular, everybody else decided that they wanted a chimp familiar too. Earl, my banana-denier, was the first to follow where Mr Gentry had led, and one day I was surprised to see Frederick scuttling across the ‘deck’ with one of Earl’s dirty brown cigarillos between his lips.

      Frederick was a nervous little chimp and spent most of his time huddled inside Earl’s shirt, puffing on a cigarillo so that it seemed Earl’s chest hair was constantly on fire during the card displays. He couldn’t do back-flips or feed the giraffes but he could smoke, that kid, and drink, and of course Forest Lawn rehab programme, with its fierce commitment to relaxing us, encouraged him to do both to his heart’s content. But when another of the bluffing or packing boys sat down to the game with his own chimpanzee helper (a stranger to me, and the first of many ‘Bonzo’s that I would come to know over the years), anxiety kindled inside me. I was beginning to notice just how imitative human behaviour was. If Mr Gentry or Captain Mannicher burst out laughing, betas like Earl, Julius or DiMarco would immediately follow suit. I could see where all this was heading.

      Sure enough, the next day Stroheim was squatting beside Julius on top of the wheelhouse, engaged in some lesson requiring a large amount of bananas. I could see that Julius was having a little difficulty with him, since Stroheim kept breaking off to pant-hoot at the elephants, which were obviously causing him distress, but all afternoon Julius kept him at it. I stayed downwind of them, and tried to put them out of my mind, tumbling with Bonzo in the giraffes’ mound of straw and generally keeping my head down. But bluffing or packing came round all the same, with the humans in a state of high hilarity. Mr Gentry and me, Earl and Frederick, Baxter and young Bonzo, Captain Mannicher, DiMarco and, making a grand entrance, wiry little Julius with—like the big dog the small man tends towards—the

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