Zoo Story (5 page)

Lex Salisbury, Lowry Park’s hard-charging CEO, was well aware of the risks. A tall man with light blond hair and the swagger of a silverback gorilla, Lex was gambling millions of dollars and his own reputation in a bid to transform his institution into one of the most dazzling zoos in the country. Lex was often hailed as a visionary, even by people who didn’t like him, and of those there were plenty. He was living proof that visionaries can be hell on the minions who toil beneath them. Depending on the circumstances, he could be inspiring or vengeful, seductive or tyrannical. He spoke of zoos and their mission with religious intensity—a passion so pure that it made audiences visibly swoon—but treated Lowry Park as his own fiefdom. He did not tolerate employees who challenged him. He had a beguiling smile, a taste for the kill, and a penchant for appearing in publicity photos and even the zoo’s annual reports in bush khakis and a safari hat, as though he had just jetted in from the Serengeti. “Blond, blue-eyed, with chiseled good looks,” a reporter once wrote, “he resembles the great white hunter portrayed by Robert Redford in
Out of Africa
.”

Lex’s reputation had been sealed a decade before, when he was the zoo’s general curator, and one of the groundskeepers took to calling him “El Diablo Blanco.” According to the legend, this groundskeeper had studied Lex’s already volatile management style and pronounced, “One day, El Diablo Blanco will run this zoo.” Among discontented members of the staff, both past and present, he was still known as “the White Devil.”

Lex was aware of the nickname and did not let it trouble him. He enjoyed being larger than life and did not mind instilling a healthy fear in his employees if it helped him take Lowry Park to the next level. He had a talent for getting things done, no matter the cost. More than anyone else, he was the architect of the plan to import the elephants and create a new zoo around them. He had spent several years attending to all the details. He had traveled to Swaziland to see the elephants in the game parks and to help select the four who would be brought to Tampa. Negotiating the purchase, he had comported himself favorably in the exalted presence of the Swazi king, Mswati III. Back in Florida, he had lobbied the Tampa city council to grant the zoo more land for its expansion and for the funds to build the new facilities to house the elephants. He had personally insisted on implementing a protocol that would allow the keepers to work with the animals more safely. With the arrival of the wild elephants, he wanted to push Lowry Park into the forefront of defining what a zoo could be, all that it might accomplish. If such boldness courted the wrath of PETA, so be it.

Lex knew what could be accomplished if he had the support of the city. Fifteen years before, when he was hired at Lowry Park as a young assistant curator, he had witnessed another transformation. Lex had been brought to the zoo, in fact, as part of a larger team whose job it was to turn around an institution that had become a civic embarrassment.

The city’s zoo had started in the 1930s as a tiny menagerie—a handful of raccoons and alligators, a few exotic birds—and then had slowly grown into a larger collection of lions and tigers and bears and even one elephant, a female Asian named Sheena who had been transported from India on a jet in 1961, making her the zoo’s original flying elephant. The undisputed star in those early years, Sheena performed twice a day in a circus ring and then gave rides to children. Admission was free. The place was sometimes called “the Fairyland Zoo,” because the animal attractions were merged with a panorama of storybook houses and scenes re-created from Mother Goose and other children’s tales. Kids skipped across the Rainbow Bridge and darted among replicas of the Seven Dwarves, Humpty-Dumpty, and the Big Bad Wolf and the Three Little Pigs. They clambered onto a small train that chugged and curved across the grounds, and spun on the Tilt-a-Wheel, and threw food over a fence within reach of Sheena’s trunk. Just north of the zoo stood Safety Village, a miniature replica of Tampa, with a shopping mall and a fire station and a tiny City Hall, where police officers tutored young citizens in how to recognize traffic signs and use crosswalks and repel the advances of molesters. Second-graders even got to ride small electric vehicles as they practiced braking at stoplights on Happy Drive and Polite Boulevard.

Nick Nuccio, the Tampa mayor who had started it all, called the zoo “a children’s paradise.” As the years passed, though, Lowry Park aged poorly. What was once quaint became dreadful. The train rusted, and two toddlers were injured when a kiddie roller coaster derailed, and Sheena the elephant was shipped off to Canada, where she died of a heart attack. Worst of all was the soul-killing collection of dilapidated cages where the animals kept dying from abuse. Years later, adults who had visited the old zoo as children still shuddered when they recalled the grimness of the place. The National Humane Society declared it one of the five worst zoos in America.

“It was a rat hole,” one city councilman remembered.

In the 1980s, in response to widespread concerns about the appalling conditions, the old zoo had been torn down and a new zoo had been built. Today the cages were gone, replaced by more spacious enclosures where the animals were separated from the public not by bars, but by moats and raised walkways. In the section of the zoo devoted to Florida species, visitors wandered a boardwalk that led through stands of pine and palmetto, where black bears dug under logs for grubs and whooping cranes strutted their mating dance, and tiny Key deer darted in the shade. Waiting at the end of the boardwalk was a bunkerlike building where the guests descended into darkened subterranean chambers to gaze through picture windows into crystalline pools made to look like freshwater springs teeming with bass and snapping turtles and manatees who dived and spun and nibbled on romaine lettuce.

Around Tampa, Lowry Park was hailed as a jewel. More than a decade after the improved version was opened to the public, area residents remained so pleased—and so relieved by the abolishment of the forlorn cages—that they still referred to it proudly as “the new zoo.” Mayors and city council members applauded the zoo’s dedication to its endangered species and its long, steady climb from shame to redemption. At ribbon-cutting ceremonies for new exhibits, the politicians beamed for the news cameras and posed with massive scissors. Every year at budget time, they nodded in appreciation when Lex reminded them that the zoo was a paragon of fiscal caution. The zoo, Lex assured the city council repeatedly, was living within its means even as its capital construction projects blossomed.

A nonprofit organization, the zoo relied on Tampa’s benevolence. Leasing its grounds from the recreation department, it occupied fifty-six acres of a city park that stretched along the western banks of the Hillsborough River. This was the place that had given Lowry Park its name, the same spot where the old zoo had once stood. The location was hardly prominent. The park was miles north of downtown, tucked inside a sleepy, slightly run-down neighborhood filled with bungalow houses that had long needed a fresh coat of paint and dusty streets that seemed frozen in time. Cats slunk under old cars covered in yellow blankets of pollen. Thick beards of Spanish moss, bleaching gray under the monstrous Florida sun, dangled from the branches of live oaks above forgotten yards where no one appeared to have lifted a rake since the Eisenhower administration. Some of the houses lined the zoo’s exterior fence, their backyards scarcely fifty feet from some of the exhibits. On many mornings, the residents woke to the duets of the siamangs and the piercing cries of seramas.

For all its successes, the zoo lingered in the shadows of its competition. It was dwarfed by central Florida’s other two major animal attractions—Busch Gardens of Tampa, a couple exits away on 275; and Disney’s Animal Kingdom, located outside Orlando, barely more than an hour away. Both were gargantuan tourist meccas that combined roller coasters and other theme-park thrills with carefully scripted safari tours through counterfeit savannas that teemed with lions, zebras, hippos, giraffes, and Nile crocodiles. Busch Gardens had a Serengeti section so huge it single-handedly outstripped the size of all of Lowry Park’s exhibits put together. Animal Kingdom, literally ten times bigger than the Tampa zoo, featured a 145-foot-tall replica of a baobab tree, with a tapestry of dolphins and baboons and hundreds of other animals carved into its massive trunk and a movie theater hidden inside the tree’s maze of fake roots. As the theater darkened, swooning children donned special glasses to watch an animated 3-D short called
It’s Tough to Be a Bug
, starring a host of adorable insects who danced in a chorus line and belted out show tunes that chronicled the travails and triumphs of cockroaches and dung beetles.

With its limited budget, Lowry Park had no hope of competing against Disney’s armies of Imagineers or Busch Gardens’s beer-drenched millions. It had no 3-D movies, no flumes, no rustic trains chugging through the jungle, no skycars that sent the guests soaring above the animals. By necessity, its charms were more intimate. The only ride in the entire zoo was a jungle carousel that offered children a spin on the galloping backs of handcrafted endangered animals. It was unclear if their endangered status rendered the ride any more meaningful than a typical merry-go-round. It didn’t matter. Lex and the zoo’s board of directors recognized that they could not duplicate the scale of Busch Gardens or Disney’s Animal Kingdom. But they didn’t have to. They were running a zoo, not a theme park. The entrance fees were lower, the expectations of the guests less grandiose. People didn’t come to Lowry Park hoping to twist upside-down on a screaming roller coaster or to laugh at an animated bug. They came to see real animals, and the zoo had plenty of those. In fact, the zoo’s collection was not that much smaller than what awaited them at Busch Gardens or Disney.

Even before the elephants arrived, Lowry Park was blessed with an abundance of “charismatic megafauna”—zoo jargon for larger animals immensely popular with the public, such as the rhinos and the bears and the manatees. The most beloved species were typically mammals, because people identified with them more readily than with an emu or a moray eel and because they loved to watch the animals court and mate and nurse their babies. Humans found it easier to project their own lives and emotions and assumptions onto such creatures. They responded with special fervor when the mammals exhibited traits that were discernible, even across the barriers that separated them, and behaved in a way that declared their individual character. It made it easier not just to connect with the animals but to believe the animals were opening a window into their mysterious inner selves.

Out of all the charismatic megafauna, none had more personality or was more beloved than the king and queen of the zoo.

The alpha chimp
crouched at his throne. Every morning, he claimed the same spot on the shelf of rocks beside the waterfall, a perfect vantage point from which to survey his domain. The rocks were replicas, airbrushed to look like a weathered canyon wall; the waterfall was an illusion, too, a stream pouring from a PVC pipe. But there was nothing fake about Herman. He had reigned at Lowry Park for three decades, longer than any other animal or any of the humans who worked here. He was the zoo’s most famous resident, its living memory, the walking embodiment of its history. Each of the zoo’s sixteen hundred animals was assigned a number. Herman’s was 000001.

By now the years were catching up with him. His chin hairs had gone gray. He grew winded more easily than in the past. Still, he seemed to miss nothing. If one of the other chimps in his group was upset, he offered comfort. If a dispute erupted, he stepped in. Often, though, he held himself apart from the others and stayed at his stony perch. Tired of standing, he lay down on the rock shelf, studied the black nails of his fingers. His empty gaze suggested not just boredom but a deeper weariness. Who could blame him? He had never asked for the responsibilities of an alpha. This existence had been thrust upon him long ago. Several lifetimes ago. On another continent, in another century.

“See the big monkey?” a mother said to her child.

At the sound of the woman’s voice and the sight of her blond hair, Herman jumped to his feet. Suddenly he was alert and energized, delighted to find someone he could impress. He marched back and forth along the shelf, parading like a general. He rocked and swayed, puffed up his chest, bristled the thick black hair on his shoulders and back, all to make himself look strong and powerful.

The woman smiled and laughed. Clearly the big monkey liked her.

“Isn’t he funny?” she said, and her child nodded.

They were so trusting, the moms with their golden bangs and their tanned shoulders, shining in the sun. They almost never caught on to what was really happening. But sometimes, if the women stood there long enough, watching Herman strut, a hint of recognition played across their faces. Possibly they had encountered other males who acted this way. In a bar, maybe, or in the last hazy hours of a party.

When the moms turned and left, taking their children with them—and all of them left soon enough, whether they’d figured it out or not—Herman cried out after them. He knew when he was being dismissed. After more than thirty years at Lowry Park, he had endured more than his share of rejection. For the record, he was not a monkey. Chimpanzees are apes. It was understandable if some of the moms were offended. No one goes to the zoo expecting to be propositioned by an ape. The women might not have taken his advances personally if they had understood that Herman’s mixed-up libido was not his fault. If they had known his background, they might have understood how things had gotten so turned around inside him.

His early life had unfolded like something coauthored by Dickens and Darwin. Born in the wilds of west Africa, he was taken from his mother as an infant—he almost certainly saw her die, trying to protect him—and then sold in an orange crate for twenty-five dollars. He was raised as a pet for the first few years, then was eventually brought to Florida and donated to the zoo, where he was installed in a cage and taught to depend on the imperfect love of strangers. He charmed Jane Goodall, threw dirt at the mayor of Tampa, learned to clap and smoke cigarettes—whatever it took to entertain the masses. Whatever was required to survive.