Me Cheeta: The Autobiography

I forgive you, Rex.

Anyway, I was unsurprised and quite relieved when I found out that evening that they didn’t need me any more. Rex had had a word. And that, folks, was the end of that.

2 Early Memories

Once upon a time in a land far, far away…or quite far away, anyway. It’s eighteen hours even if you get a direct flight from Vegas. And there’s nothing much there now anyway except some farms and red mud. Don Google-Earthed it. Once upon a time I was a little prince in a magic kingdom. I can’t remember anything before my memory of Stroheim, as if that was the thing that shook my consciousness awake. He fell out of a fig-tree chasing after a blue-tailed monkey. Thump went Stroheim, and I was off and running, once upon a time—but let me tell this straight, dearest humans. You must know how it ends…

There was Mama and me and my sister, and we lived in the forest below an escarpment with about twenty others, whose names I’ll have to change. I slept high up in a nest of leaves that Mama would prepare in the crook of a branch, with Victoria curled round me and Mama round her. In the mornings Mama would take us across the stream to fish for termites. Victoria would ride on her back and I would cling underneath. The water was cold and fast-flowing and pressed against me as we crossed but I always felt safe. And when we climbed into the trees and moved through the canopy, Victoria would climb behind us on her own, following Mama’s soft hoots.

When we got to the termite mounds, Mama would strip a twig and insert it into one of the holes, leaving it in long enough for the termites to clamp their mandibles on to it. You were supposed either to crunch them off one by one or slide them through your mouth in one go, or just mop them up with the back of your wrist. You’ve seen it on National Geographic. Me and Victoria were too young for termites and I liked it very much when she copied Mama and groomed me, or held me up by one leg to dangle upside down.

What else did I like? Figs, moonfruit, a big yellowy-green fruit that fizzed when you ate it, passionflower buds, Victoria, Mama, holding on to Mama’s hair to ride her, being suckled by Mama, playing with Frederick, Gerard and Deanna, the taste of the leaves that Mama would chew into a little sponge to dab up fresh rainwater, the flashing orange on the heads of the turacos, dreams of the escarpment and, most of all, rain dances. I didn’t like termites, palm-nuts, the faces of baboons, the tree that had killed Clara, the smell of the python we chased after, Marilyn, whom Mama had to fight, young males charging at Mama if we were on our own, nightmares, the mewling of leopards, Stroheim.

You’ve never seen a rain dance, have you? They were us at our best. For hours beforehand you’d feel the electricity building in the air. You’d climb up into the lower canopy to escape the humidity, and it would slither up the trunk behind you. So you’d climb higher, until finally you’d be perched in the topmost branches, high over the rest of the forest, panting and sticky with moisture, too tired even to reach for one of those fizzing yellowy-green fruits whose name, dammit, escapes me.

From across the forest you’d hear the low coughs given out by other tree-climbers. No birds. No insects. Only our low, muffled coughs, echoless in the wet air. Then the first pant-hoots: the long low hoots, the shorter higher breaths. Mama and the others in our tree would respond with their own hoots, counting themselves in, and then the pants would climb higher, flowering into screams, and the screams would link into a continuous long chorus, and as the rain began to leak a few drops Mama would start pounding on the trunk, shaking the branches, like she was trying to wake the tree up too, and you could hear us all through the forest, drumming up the storm. And over it all, our alpha, Kirk, summoning us to gather for the dance.

We’d climb down from our tree and follow his call through the forest. In my memory it’s always dusk as we sight Kirk, walking upright at the apex of a long-grassed ridge and howling in the strengthening rain, looking terrifying up close, twenty times my own size. He seems to be coaxing the thunder towards us, reeling it in. The other grown-ups, like Cary and Archie, are quieter but also in a trance and visibly shaking. The thunder swings through the upper canopy, approaching in huge, looping leaps until finally it’s upon us, above us, all over us, and the air suddenly turns into rain.

The mothers clear themselves and us children away into the sloe trees to watch. We’re absolutely rapt. Kirk, illuminated by lightning, charges down the ridge at an astonishing speed. Then Cary, who’s clever, discovers rocks can be made to bounce up and smack satisfyingly into the foliage. Cary can always do certain things Kirk can’t. Archie is smaller than the others and finds a branch to whack against a tree-trunk, leaving a series of white scars. They are our heroes, and Victoria and I are too enthralled by it all to eat our sloes. And soon, as it always is, the wicked thunder is faced down and slinks off, cowed by our vigour, sent on its way with a kick by the youngsters, like Stroheim and Spence, who are pelting down the charge-route in imitation of Kirk. The rain falls as applause and we drink it up. Mama and Victoria and I share out sloes between us.

I love rain dances. When I grow up, I think, I’m going to be in them.

We were the only ones in the forest who made art or fashioned tools, the only ones who co-operated, the ones with the most sophisticated and highly evolved culture. We thought there was nobody like us. And our queen was Mama. My mother was the queen of the world.

She was extraordinarily beautiful, and not only in her children’s eyes. I know now how to describe her coat: it was the colour of Coca-Cola refracted through ice, a deep black harbouring a secret copper, and yet there was also, especially when she sparkled with rain, a faint blue nimbus around her as if she were coolly on fire. Broad-backed and not tall, she had a low centre of gravity and huge hands and feet, which meant that even the way she moved was serene. Her eyes were direct and emitted a soothing amber light. She’d lost only a few teeth and the tatter in one of her ears she wore kind of rakishly, a concession to imperfection, like the abscess on her upper lip. Kirk held sway over us, but it was Mama who shored him up, and calmed Cary and the other rivals, did the grooming and reconciling and generally stopped everyone killing each other.

Forgive the boasting but it’s true. She was respected and loved where Kirk was merely feared. It was Mama to whom both Kirk and Cary came screaming for reassurance. She was always two steps ahead. She could figure out how a squabble between Cary and Archie over Marilyn would lead to Veronica being battered by Kirk. She gave Marilyn a real dressing-down when she ate Veronica’s baby, Jayne. We even used to visit with Stroheim’s crippled mother Ethel, since Mama realized it would do the nervous Stroheim good if his mother could rise a little up the hierarchy. She endured the beatings she had to take with grace and was pretty handy in a ruck.

I remember riding her on our patrols, led by Kirk across the stream and through the ravine guarded by Clara’s tree, six or seven of us in single file through the deep grass—so deep only I, sitting on Mama’s back, could see above the blades—and down again into the forest of moonfruits and figs where our territory overlapped with that of the hostiles who roamed the other side of the escarpment. We would fall silent, grinning nervously, and I’d feel my mother’s hair bristle scratchily erect beneath me. Here, the thrashing of a branch might mean a baboon or a battle. I’ve never seen a hostile properly—I find it difficult to believe in them. Hostiles to me are black blobs who answer our calls from the ridge on the horizon. We listen an enormous silence into existence. Above us white-faced monkeys pitter-patter through the canopy; turacos flash their orange crests. Now there’s something in the silence. Everyone touches each other. We’re all here. Phew! Keep calm, everyone. We certainly do seem to need to give each other a hell of a lot of reassurance all the time. Everyone OK? And immediately there’s a pant-hoot from ahead of us and a tree quivers and a male hostile drops to the ground with a crack of branches.

We panic. Kirk and Cary are on their feet and hooting. I find myself squashed into Mama’s back as Spence and Stroheim scurry behind her, frantically embracing each other, her, me, anything. If only Kirk had a stick or some rock or something! But it’s all right. It’s all right. It’s not a hostile, only old Alfred, who used to roam with us and now lives on the other side of the escarpment. We never do meet hostiles. Still, you can’t be too careful.

But I remember this incident because Stroheim, his nerves too taut, came barrelling out from behind the shelter of Mama’s legs, screaming, and caught Alfred with a kick on the side of the head just as he was turning his back to be groomed. Everybody else panicked again, but Mama was there first, to sink her teeth into Stroheim’s arm and hustle him away from the maelstrom he’d nearly created. Give her an awkward social situation and she always blossomed. She was the one who coaxed the sulking Stroheim down from his tree to join in the general grooming session everybody needed after all that. It was Mama who kissed and cradled him, nuzzled the wound (not serious) in his arm and meticulously picked over every inch of his back while Stroheim pretended that that was the least he deserved.

His problem was that he just couldn’t act to save his life. Ricocheting downwards between the branches of the fig tree as that blue-tailed monkey scampered away, poor old Stroheim was already, before he hit the ground, composing his features into an expression of wholly unconvincing unconcern. Breaking his ribs? Sure, that was what he’d been meaning to do—potential alphas liked nothing better!

Nothing that he did convinced. Whenever the big lummox did manage to catch a blue-tailed monkey he was somehow never able to keep it in the mêeés that ensued, and his supposedly indifferent saunter towards the empty fruit trees was heartbreaking to see. And acting was so very important, so central to everything we did, because of the hierarchy. Acting big, acting injured to save yourself from worse, acting unconcerned to avoid conflict, acting yourself into a credible rage. Stroheim hadn’t played enough as an infant because Ethel’s withered leg isolated her—but he was huge for his age. He didn’t know who he was supposed to be, so his acting was hopeless. Since human beings have both a mother and a ‘father’, you should be able to imagine it easily enough. How, if the two things that made you are constantly fighting, it can just rip you apart.

But we only had mothers, who would build us nests from leaves, and soothe us when we whimpered in our sleep, dreaming of the bird that was red, blue, green and gold at the same time; or the escarpment, where I always imagined there was a paradise of figs, tended by wiser, gentler apes than us. Our mothers woke us by blowing in our faces. They were always with us, only abandoning us for a moment to climb an awkward tree and shake down fruit for us. I can remember waiting and waiting in the grass for what must in fact have been only a minute while Mama shook away at the branches of the tree above me, and how, out of the canopy, came dropping one of those fizzy yellowy-green fruits…whose name now drops from an obscure branch of memory into my beautiful home here in Palm Springs, gently rotating as it falls. Wild custard apples.

I was a little prince, whose mama was the queen of the world, and then everything changed.

In ’39 or something, I remember being at this theme party in Marion Davies’s beach-hut—you could have fitted a beach inside it—with Nigel Bruce, the English actor you’ll remember as Basil Rathbone’s sidekick, an excessively slow-witted Dr Watson. The theme was Movie Stars. Wallace Beery had come as Rudolph Valentino. Joan Crawford had come as Shirley Temple. Shirley Temple had come as Joan Crawford. Gloria Swanson had come as Gloria Swanson. W. C. Fields had come as Rex the Wonder Horse. Rex hadn’t been invited. Champion the Wonder Horse had come as Rin Tin Tin. Nobody had come as Charles Foster Kane. And Nigel Bruce, who was a friend of Johnny’s and had arranged to borrow me from MGM, had come as Tarzan. He wore a loose pinkish body-stocking on which were printed leopardskin shorts. Nigel was an absolute brick and had furnished me with a cigar so that if anyone asked he could tell them I’d come as Groucho Marx. I strained at Nigel’s hand, convinced I was bound to see Johnny somewhere in the ballroom. I swore I saw him, thought I saw him again, caught a glimpse of bare flesh and leather that turned out to be a Red Indian, and then saw him again…

It was just a pity for Nigel and for my misused heart that Melvyn Douglas, Walter Pidgeon, George Axelrod, Louis Calhern, F. Scott Fitzgerald, at least two of the Hearst sons and Myrna Loy had all come as the King of the Jungle. Some were in body-stockings with the seams showing, some stripped down to impressively authentic loincloths: all of them (apart from Fitzgerald, who had accidentally left his in a cloakroom) accompanied by leashed chimpanzees, mostly obtained on day-release from Hearst’s zoo at San Simeon. And, meanwhile, Johnny was nowhere to be seen. But then again, how was I to know what to look for? He might have been blacked up as Al Jolson or masked as the Phantom of the goddamn Opera.

But I’m getting off the point, which is that the unifying theme behind all of Marion’s beach-hut parties was Drunken Sex. I ended that night in one of the little cabañas that were dotted around the grounds, watching my new friends Ronald Colman, Paulette Goddard, Hedy Lamarr, Harry F. Gerguson, a.k.a. ‘Prince Michael Alexandrovich Obolensky Romanoff ‘ of Romanoff ‘s restaurant, and about half a dozen other very special but not so famous human beings copulate en masse and thinking, Bonobos. They’re like a bunch of fucking bonobos.

I was gloomily perched on a Louis Quatorze dressing-table which had doubtless once stood in the Palace of Versailles, yawning into my bottle of Canadian Club while my colleagues toiled through their biological necessities at inordinate length, when I became aware that a note was missing from that alluring olfactory chord of urine, vomit, fungal infection, menstrual blood and sweat that characterizes any human gathering. Not one of the six or seven women was ovulating. It wasn’t necessary, I brooded, for dear Paulette to remove Paul Henreid’s phallus from her mouth, which still sported its packing-tape Charlie Chaplin moustache, and for her to hiss over her shoulder at the labouring Colman, ‘Don’t fucking get me pregnant, Ronnie, OK? Come on my ass.’

How I envied them, these humans who, like bonobos, didn’t confine sex to the times when conception could happen. That, I suddenly saw, made all the difference in the world. How happy they looked! How easy and gay the scene was! How much fun—no matter how comically, almost endearingly, protracted. (Not to boast, but I used to pride myself on never taking longer than fifteen seconds over a female’s pleasure, managing on several memorable occasions, with sparkling technique and due consideration for my partner, to get it down to less than two or three.) There in my bourbon fug on the Louise Quatorze table I was wondering why the hell it couldn’t have been like that for us. Why did it all have to be hierarchy, and possessiveness, and blood and shoving?

I guess love has its mysteries. Thanks to good old National Geographic and Discovery, which we have on pre-select in the den, I’ve puzzled out a few things I didn’t know then. At the time I didn’t have a clue why, when Mama began to swell, everything turned into such a circus. Why it was impossible for the three of us to go anywhere without a wake of screaming males, their hair up like iron filings, bipedalling around in a delirium of insecurity and violence? When Mama was actually mating with Kirk, Cary, Lon, Archie, Stroheim, Spence, Mel or Tom—those were the relatively quiet interludes, lasting for a good ten seconds at a time. But the rest of the time we just walked in a forest of out-thrust penises, which was always one misplaced gaze away from going up in flames. We tiptoed gingerly through a minefield of erections.

The tension between Cary and Kirk was a constant scream in our nerves. And every flare-up had to be followed by the long reconciliations we needed, reconciliations that increasingly ended in fresh fights that had to be reconciled. Everyone was either fighting or reconciling all the time. (We used to have some neighbours like that in Palm Springs until, thank Christ, she kicked him out.) Spence had had a finger broken by Cary, who had a wound in his shoulder from Kirk, who was carrying a fractured ankle after a tangle with Lon and Cary. And Mama couldn’t help because she was the flashpoint. Her sumptuously taut vaginal swelling, twice the size of her head, was a blazing beacon of division. When Mama presented for young Spence, Kirk clamped Spence’s foot between his teeth and hurled him away with a wrench that ripped off a toe. He out-ranked him, so fair enough, I guess.

Around the time that Mama’s swelling was approaching its height, Cary killed a pair of colobus monkeys, and with the others occupied by the feast, Mama slipped away with us down to the stream to drink. Archie knuckled out of the trees with a greeting of quiet pant-grunts and Mama, he and Victoria groomed each other for a while, then Archie crossed the stream, shaking a branch to make us follow. Mama swung me on to her and we set off behind him: I lay straddled on her back, looking out for the many-coloured bird or marmosets or turacos in the canopy. Victoria knuckled along quietly after us, holding a termite-stick she’d made out of a msuba twig, and Archie led the way, impatiently shaking branches at us if we lagged behind.

When we tried to turn back, he came hoot-screaming and charging out of the shadows, and I tumbled off Mama’s back as she went sprawling under his impact. He grabbed her by the leg and dragged her down the slope, kicking and pummelling her, then stalked back past us with his hair bristling and sat down, waiting for her to stop screaming and come to him, which she did. She had to: she had us to look after, you see. He apologized with kisses and caresses, and groomed her for a while before we set off again. This was the beginning of what National Geographic refers to as a ‘consortship period’. Discovery calls it ‘Honeymoon in the Trees!’

Where did Archie take us? Over the hills and far away. Past the place where we’d met Alfred, through strange forests of moss-covered trees to the higher ground beside the escarpment, where the clouds clung and little groups of banded mongooses scurried around, carrying frogs in their mouths. We nested in a giant msuba beside a termite mound, and Archie kissed Mama’s wounds and groomed her and apologized for hours and mated her again and again. Next day Mama and Archie took Victoria and me termite-fishing, and as a special treat Archie showed me how to make a termite-fishing stick.

Mama hardly played with us because Archie was all over her, and if we tugged at her fur while she was being penetrated, she’d wave us off to play elsewhere. Victoria taught me how to climb. Archie on the other hand was having a ball—constantly either guzzling termites, in his horrible lip-smacking way, or mating. I tried a bit of mongoose and didn’t like it. It rained all the fucking time.

I remember, too, one evening near the end of the honeymoon, how we were surprised by the cries of a strange animal from far, far away. The distant hoots of the hostiles had died away at dusk, and then came these other cries—sudden pops, like sharp thunderclaps. Little sequences of these long-echoing thunderclaps, out of a stormless sky, far away but loud. Pop, pop, pop. Pop pop. In six months, I’d be sucking on a Lucky Strike and making prank phone-calls in a tavern in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. So. What happened was this.

We were on our way back to our old territory when we came across Kirk, lounging between the roots of a msuba in a shaft of sunlight that illuminated a haze of golden flies. He’d been stuffing himself with passion-fruit and his front was matted with juice and seeds. And then I saw the white bars of his ribs and all the turmoil in there and understood that the seeds were flies and the juice was Kirk’s blood. Archie darted towards him, then away, and Mama barked feverishly at the air and pounded the earth on all fours. Victoria raced back and forth, blindly, very fast, cheeping, and I realized that something very bad was happening. Archie darted up to Kirk in his cloud of flies, lifted his hand and let it drop. He recoiled and did it again. Kirk’s hand did nothing—and still I didn’t really make the connection that he was dead, like a bushpig or a blue-tailed monkey could be dead. It was too hard to grasp: Kirk, our heroic rain-dancer, our thunder-conquering king!

We moved on, quickly, without grooming, and Mama’s hair wouldn’t stop bristling beneath me. Death was still sticking to us: I became frightened because I thought I’d done something very wrong and was going to be punished for it. It hadn’t been me, I wanted Mama to understand. It was a leopard—or maybe he’d fallen out of a tree, like Stroheim! We crossed the stream back to where we’d been when Mama’s swelling started, and the feeling of Death forded the water with us. It climbed up among the empty nests of our old roosting-tree and slept beside us too, and when we woke we saw another adult male, whose name I didn’t know, caught in a tangle of branches high above, gnawed by the baboons or leopard that had left him where he was hanging and much more dead than Kirk.

Even Victoria and I knew it then, I think. What else could have done this if not the hostiles? All we knew about hostiles was that they were hostile. In fact, it was absolutely typical hostile behaviour, if you thought about it. Mama climbed to the crown of a custard-apple tree and pant-hooted in four directions, but got no answer: the whole forest seemed to be teeming with death. At a fast trot she led us up one of the deep-grassed ridges that spoked off from the escarpment and gave a view of the canopy below. But there were no black blobs moving in the tree-tops, no chains of dots leaving a wake through the long-grassed slopes; neither friends nor enemies. And then, where the ridge flattened and was reabsorbed by the forest, at last we heard a long, low hoot from ahead, and though Archie bristled, I recognized the voice as Spence’s.

Poor Spence was limping. Fucking hostiles, I remember thinking (my translation). He gave another weak hoot and tried to move towards us out of the trees and down the ridge, but wasn’t really able to. He whimpered and tried to lift his arm to show us, and Mama set me down in the tall grass and scampered up towards him, followed, after a nervous grin, by Archie. Victoria pitter-pattered after them, through the skeins of mist that scudded over the ridge. She caught up, and just as the three of them got to the edge of the trees, Spence suddenly disappeared and the hostiles came screaming out of the long grass towards them. I saw Cary drop down from the dark interior of the forest-edge, followed by more adults, and Stroheim.

Archie was engulfed in a tide of bristling black and that was the last I saw of him. I never saw Victoria again: the last I remember of my sister is the sight of her catching Mama up. I fled back down the ridge the way we’d come, suddenly capable of running, and when I fell, I looked back up the ridge and saw Mama running towards me, and a couple of hostiles—except they weren’t hostiles, of course, but Cary and Spence, who used to feed me bits of moonfruit—running shoulder to shoulder with her. She fell, or was tripped, and then Cary was stamping on her, and others were catching up. From the tall grass I watched her try to rise. Stroheim nipped in and out, capering with excitement, but I didn’t see him strike. It didn’t even occur to me to try to rescue her. I just took off down the side of the ridge where the slope was so steep I could almost fall down it into the upper canopy of the trees below.