The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore (3 page)

Anyway, point being: who was the one and only chimpanzee among the hundred-some-plus sampling of members of my own birth species,
Pan troglodytes
, who, like the human children, never ceased to tap on the box? That’s right,
c’est moi
. I, Bruno, somehow understood on some fundamental level (as Lydia realized in hindsight, after the experiment was over and the unexpected results had been properly tabulated, scrutinized and pondered over until they succeeded in twisting some anthropo-chauvinist take out of the data) what it means to be human. And Lydia remembered me—me, Bruno, the chimpanzee who had fallen in love with her—and she sought me out, and found me, and began to bring me out of my animal darkness.

I
think it had been some months since the experiments, some months since the Plexiglas box and that daylong procession of peaches, when Lydia came back for me. I had been returned to my family of uneducated slobs, to my mother and my father, my aunt and my uncle, my brother and Céleste. All of them sadly ignorant, broken and disaffected by lifetimes spent in diaspora.

I’m a Chicago boy, Gwen—I grew up in the Primate House of the Lincoln Park Zoo. Zoo records indicate that I was born with no complications on August 20, 1983. My mother, Fanny, had been born and raised there, had spent the entirety of her sad dull life in the very same zoo. I’m young enough to have been raised mostly in the considerably larger and sleeker modern facilities that were built to replace the outmoded sewer which had previously housed the great apes, and my mother never tired of silently reminding me and Cookie how good we had it. My father had a somewhat more interesting background. He wasn’t born in captivity, but in the Old Country, in the northeastern part of what was then Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. At the time he was born there was some sort of bloodbath going on in Zaire, and the swarms of starving refugees fleeing hither and thither would butcher chimps
for bushmeat. At a young age my father saw his mother and father murdered and subsequently devoured. He was forced to watch while they dismembered his parents with machetes, drilled spits through their corpses, cooked them over a fire and ate them. The two adult chimps they killed and ate because they were hungry, but they refrained from killing the baby right away because there was little meat on him (he was more valuable alive). Instead they tied him to a stick by his wrists and ankles, which they carried around with them for several days until they crossed the border to the Central African Republic and arrived at a populated area, where they sold my father to a German trader who illegally trafficked in exotic animals. The German was a man in a big yellow hat, who starved and beat him, and put him in a cage, which was transported from one place to another until he wound up on an airplane that landed finally in Germany, where he spent five years in the Berlin Zoo before a mysterious chain of exchanges and communiqués put him back on a plane, which this time landed at O’Hare, where he was loaded into the back of a van and conveyed to the Lincoln Park Zoo, where he was introduced to a jejune and somewhat mentally obtuse female chimp whom he was expected to shtup immediately, and whom out of boredom he eventually did. Thus my brother Cookie was conceived, followed three years later by me. The Germans had named him Rotpeter, meaning “Red Peter,” after the streaks of distinctly ruddy coloration in his fur. My father never quite lost that touch of aboriginal uncouthness. He’d known freedom only to have it cruelly revoked—whereas I, Bruno, was born in captivity, became free because I learned language, committed a transgression, and now, as you see, am in captivity once again. My father, though, had—however briefly—experienced life the way it was meant to be lived. He knew what he had lost, and this knowledge fueled him with an indignant rage that as a child—even in my terror of him—I admired. Not so my mother. She had never
known Zion. She was born in the ghetto, a zoo-child of zoo-parents. And she suffered my father’s boorish machismo and womanizing with the same matter-of-factly passive acceptance with which she accepted her own confinement from birth. Rotpeter screwed my mother often but would also slip it in her sister whenever he felt like it. See, we shared our habitat with my maternal aunt, Gloria, and another adult male chimp, Rex—pitiful Rex!—who coupled with Gloria whenever Rotpeter was feeling too fucked out or overfed to swat him away, but Rex would never have dared try anything with my mother. Because Rotpeter was Alpha Male (not a hugely impressive achievement when there are only two adult males in the habitat) and because he had been born in the boondocks of Zaire and didn’t put up with anybody’s shit (at least not that of anybody he could physically overpower), he simply felt biologically entitled to every wet hole in the cage: my mother, her sister, and I could swear the disgusting fart already had a lecherous eye trained on little Céleste, who good Christ was still a child then, even younger than I, scarcely weaned from the teat.

Perverse, isn’t it? That I should sit keeping my poor dull downtrodden mother company, letting her comb the bits of filth out of my back fur while not twenty paces away my father is fucking my aunt? You’d think I grew up in Appalachia. This is the sort of background I came from. Oh, and I should tell you about the frog.

There was this frog—wait. Not now. Not just yet.

I think a general description of my early childhood is in order. The summers weren’t so bad, because they let us romp around on the grass outside. The whole family would spend most of the day lolling around in the trees and hammocks on this sort of grassy artificial island they’d built for us. We had enough space to move about as we liked, but there was a concrete ditch with a moat in
it surrounding the island, and beyond that, a wall that was too high and steeply sloped for us to climb. The humans would crowd around the ledge of this wall and look at us. If it got too hot we could retreat inside to our dank dark room in the primate house, as they left the door open for us and we could come and go as we pleased between the shade and the outdoors. Those who inhabit zoos live like harem women: an idle life of well-provided imprisonment for the sake of others’ titillation. I suppose that sort of a life is luxury to those inclined to value their freedom less than their freedom from want, but Bruno the Prideful wished to be nobody’s pet. He wanted out, our Bruno did, out.

The Chicago winters tended toward bone-achingly frigid temperatures unbefitting the constitutions of tropical mammals like us, so every year we all spent November through usually, what, March, April even, cramped up indoors with less than half the roaming room we had in the summer. And the smell. How did it smell? The room smelled the way I presume any room might smell in which seven large naked primates are forced to live together for five consecutive months, doing all their eating and drinking and sleeping and fucking and fighting and farting and pissing and shitting within the confines of the same four walls—one of these walls, of course, being a thick sheet of glass provided for easy voyeurism. In the winter the room quickly took on a putrid mustiness, the primitive carpet of cedar planting chips almost immediately becoming so sodden with urine and sweat and other bodily miasmata you could practically watch the fetid steam waft up from the floor to smoke the glass opaque with fog and give us the closest thing we ever got to privacy. By the time the city thawed in the spring we were all half-crazed with cabin fever, bitchy and snappish, leaping at each other’s throats at the faintest provocation. Particularly my father, Rotpeter, who was a heavy smoker. Ah yes, my father’s smoking. In the summer, some of the humans would stand at the
ledge smoking cigarettes, and my father, an extraordinarily perceptive ape, learned from watching the smoking humans the physical semiosis for
Hey, can I bum a smoke?
—which is: pantomiming the act of taking two drags of a cigarette by making a prong out of the index and middle fingers, puckering the mouth into a half kiss and touching the fingers twice to the lips. So when he saw someone standing at the ledge smoking a cigarette, he would look the person dead in the eye and make this gesture, and the smoking human would be so amused at his adorable mimesis that he or she would go ahead and throw him a cigarette. If it happened to land in the moat around our island (which it often did due to the lousy aeronautical properties of a cigarette), he would stoop to retrieve it, dripping from the water, and lay it out to dry on a rock. If not, he would pick it up, give the human a grateful thumbs-up gesture that he’d also learned from the passing
sapiens
and put it in his mouth. At first he would only mock-smoke them because he did not realize you had to light them to make them work, and in any event he obviously did not have anything to light them with, either. Eventually someone realized this, and the man (he was, as I recall, or let’s say I recall, a heavyset fellow in a Bears T-shirt) thoughtfully lit the cigarette for him, took a few puffs to get it going, then, correctly estimating the parabolic trajectory needed to vault the moat, using his ring finger as launching mechanism and his thumb as fulcrum he catapulted the burning missile over the Wall, over the moat, and onto the grassy shores of Monkey Island. My father actually smoked a cigarette then, and not long after he was hooked. He started adding a lighter-flicking gesture to accompany his can-I-bum-a-smoke gesture, and soon some kind soul threw him his own plastic cigarette lighter, which he also learned to use, and he immediately began to burn through his stockpile of cigarettes that people had previously thrown him but which he’d had no means of lighting. He hid his lighter and his cigs in a cache he surreptitiously
dug in the planting chips in the interior part of our habitat, which he concealed with a rock. That was because the zookeepers were predictably horrified the first time they caught him smoking. They had tried to take the cigarette away from him, and Rotpeter threw a fit. After that, whenever a zoo employee happened around—they were easily identifiable by their light-brown uniforms—my father would hide the cigarette behind his back, or, if they got too close, would grind it out and then keep his foot over the butt. So he was able to fool them for a while, until the winter came and again we were all shut up inside, where for five months we chimps and the lowland gorillas would stare at each other from across the hall through our respective windows while the occasional gaggle of humans walked by between us, pausing awhile to gawk at the funny monkeys.

That’s when the zoo authorities got wise to the fact that my father hadn’t quit smoking: because now, in addition to the usual lush aroma of fecal matter, the habitat reeked of cigarette smoke. They tore the place up looking for Rotpeter’s stash, but he’d hidden it so well they never found it. Whenever the brownshirts arrived on a raid my father cleverly—oh, so clever, Rotpeter—cleverly sat on top of the very rock covering the cache. They never found it. He ran out, though, not even halfway through the winter, and the cravings made him moody and irascible. The next summer, the zoo employees posted a conspicuous sign outside the ledge looking into our habitat that must have said something like P
LEASE
D
O
N
OT
G
IVE THE
C
HIMPANZEES
C
IGARETTES
, though we were on the other side of the sign and did not know exactly what it said and, as all of us were unlettered, would not have been able to decipher it anyway—making my father furious with confusion as to why his bum-a-smoke gesture, though still amusing, failed to make good as often as it had the previous year. This, by the way, was the summer I met Lydia, and it was the same summer as the Frog Incident.

The Frog Incident: at some point during the time between the experiment with the peaches and the time Lydia came to fetch me for acculturation, a frog—yes, a frog, you know,
ribbit
—had somehow made it into our habitat. Curious Rotpeter was intrigued and entertained by this hapless amphibian: he managed to catch it, and began to play with it, flopping it back and forth in his hands and laughing at it, letting the terrified creature struggle away and get a few hops out before he snatched it up again. It was a perfect blue-skied summer day on a weekend, so the zoogoers were out in droves, and a large group of humans huddled at the ledge, pointing at my father and laughing at him laughing at the frog. Then what did Rotpeter, my father, do? He proceeded to fuck it. Yes: he fucked the frog. He played with himself till hard, pried the frog’s mouth open, rammed his schlong down its throat and began to rape it. The frog kicked its legs in agony, and there was a gruesome squishy sucking wet slurpy pumping squelching noise like
skwerploitch, skwerploitch, skwerploitch
(don’t make that face, Gwen)—which I imagine was distinctly audible even up there on the other side of the Wall. Once or twice the frog succeeded in hobbling away a few inches in a feeble attempt at escape, and Rotpeter would grab it by the leg, drag it back, reinsert himself and continue to take his pleasure with it. This is more or less what I recall, or imagine I recall or may as well recall overhearing among the humans who stood at the ledge, looking on in horror, and—as the urge to document is weirdly intrinsic to your species—videotaping it: