Me Cheeta (3 page)

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 spot Kirk, walking upright at the top of a long-grassed ridge and howling in the approaching rain, looking terrifying up close, twenty times my own size. He seems to be coaxing the thunder toward us, reeling it in. The other grown-ups, like Cary and Archie, are quieter but also tranced 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 that 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 vigor, 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 cooperated, 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 color of Coca-Cola refracted through ice, a deep black with an accent of 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 center 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, calmed Cary and the other rivals, did the grooming and reconciling and generally stopped everyone from 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 move up a little in the hierarchy. She endured
the beatings she had to take with grace and was pretty handy in a ruckus. She was so beautiful, so smart; she was so
young.

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 barreling 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 felt the need of 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 as if in search of what it is in some that makes their every cell crave dominance.

His problem was that he just couldn’t act to save his life. Ricocheting downward 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 melees that ensued, and his supposedly indifferent saunter toward 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 had no confidence; he had an excess of confidence. He didn’t know who he was supposed to be. 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 of 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 leopard-skin 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 borrowed 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.

And everywhere I looked the two of us were bound together in mythic partnership,
solemnized
as a couple, and in reality I hadn’t seen him for over six months… but another time. It’s not the point of the story—please forgive the digression, the point 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 cabanas 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 XIV 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 mustache, and for her to hiss over her shoulder at the laboring 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 fog on the Louis XIV 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, bipedaling 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 neighbors like that in Palm Springs until, thank Christ, she got some therapy and 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 outranked him, so fair enough, I guess.