The Ape Man's Brother (4 page)

Y
ou went to the movies, you saw all manner of things in the newsreels about us. Saw us climbing trees and doing this or that, Big Guy bending those iron bars and so on, and it was only natural that Japanese-America and Hollywood came calling.

This was sometime after we had been in New York, and we had learned the language reasonably quick and reasonably well; well enough to do simple interviews.

We flew out there in a smaller zeppelin than the one that had brought us to New York. We landed in a field near the ocean. There were reporters and cameras everywhere. We did interview after interview.

“What do you think about our world?” a reporter asked The Big Guy.

“Busy,” he said.

“What do you think about our women?”

“I think about The Woman all the time.” He called her that, same as me, but they thought he just didn’t know how to say women, and so it was reported that he thought about women all the time. This led to women throwing themselves at him in even greater abundance than before. He ignored them even when a fine doll would toss a pair of underpants in his face, or a room key. It wasn’t a moral code that kept him from humping them; it was a sincere love for The Woman, who was back in New York teaching anthropology at a university. Me, I was damn near screwing anything except a hole in the ground. But The Big Guy was truly lonely. While we were out there in moving picture land, sometimes he would go out on the hotel veranda and look up at the moon and howl. Sometimes he whacked off. This was a behavior he had been taught to modify in public; out there he just put his hand in his pocket, but he knew I didn’t care. That was just SOP for us back home. While he was at it I read a magazine and drank a cup of coffee. This was the kind of activity that our handlers were always afraid of. Fearing we might go primitive during an interview, and frankly, it was a legitimate concern. It was hard to figure things out.

“Where is your home?” reporters asked.

The Big Guy shook his head. They thought he was being coy, but it was an honest answer. We had no way of knowing where our home was, not after that long flight. And in fact, old Dr. Rice wasn’t telling either. The crew had been sworn to secrecy due to scientific research and Rice wanting to keep the place unknown due to fear that it would soon be swamped by explorers and curiosity seekers. There was also this: No one except him and the navigator truly understood its locale, and to be honest, most people thought it was a big publicity hoax, that The Big Guy was some Hollywood muscle man, and that I was a fellow with a disease that caused me to grow hair all over my body. We never did shake that whole hoax business. It still follows us around.

Anyway, there were all these interviews, and then we were given lines to learn and deliver. We made two pictures.

We got a few calls from the desk about the howling, but that didn’t stop him, and being the celebrity he was, no one wanted to really corner him on it. Besides, he had a look in his eye when approached about such behavior that made you feel as if he were just looking for a reason to reach down your throat, grab your asshole, and pull it up through the big middle of you.

As for the pictures we made while we were out there, they were terrible. We were the real deal, but we couldn’t act our way out of a paper bag with a pair of scissors. We didn’t really understand what acting actually was. They had these scenes where “natives” would attack, and me and The Big Guy would just actually beat the hell out of them. We had to really work to play at it; play of that sort wasn’t in our nature. You showed up with a weapon, even if it turned out to be made of balsa wood, and waved it around, it triggered our defense mechanisms. We broke up a lot of stuntmen.

Also, on the second picture there was an unpleasant incident with a lion. There were lions on the lost world where we lived, but they were lions without manes, and they were much bigger. Our greatest fear in the form of jungle cats on our world wasn’t actually the lion. It’s what are called by those who study bones, saber-toothed tigers, thought to be extinct. Maybe everywhere else, but not where we are from. And the dinosaurs in those two pictures we made—stop motion and men in suits—were just plain silly, and didn’t look anything like the real deal. But damn it, there I go again. Distracted. I was talking about the movie we were in and how a supposedly tame lion on the set went wonky and jumped on the girl who was playing The Woman (we portrayed ourselves, The Woman did not), and The Big Guy strangled it as easily as a kitten. He was a hero up to that point, because there had been considerable panic on set, but when the cat was dead, The Big Guy jerked off the loin cloth they had given him to wear (we, of course, never wore any), yanked it up by the tail, and diddled it in its dead ass right there, then threw it on the ground, put his foot on its neck, lifted his head and howled. This was his way of showing dominance, acceptable behavior where we came from when there had been a life and death struggle. It wasn’t necessary for an antelope, and some of the creatures were a bit too large for this act of dominance, but, still, it was considered just part of our way of life when it came to big dangerous predators. It was a way of showing who was boss. This, in civilization, however, was looked down upon even more than whacking off in public.

Observers on the set took this out of context and thought it to be deviant. The set was abandoned for the day and no one would talk to The Big Guy for awhile, and certainly wouldn’t turn their backs on him. Me, I was proud of him. That said, the rest of the shoot was a nervous event.

Anyway, Hollywood is Hollywood, and there was money in the picture and money in us, and the public was waiting, even though the first picture had gotten the worst reviews of any film ever made. What counted was it had been a big financial hit. The director, who was devastated, and not anxious to do another film with us, or anyone else, retired from the movies and went into advertising, but when asked about his work in later, nostalgic interviews, said he had worked at shooting pornographic slides.

That was the end of our movie career as actors, even though that lion screwing incident didn’t end up in the last picture we made. It had been filmed, but that part of the movie was removed, though there was gossip about it from some of those on the set who had seen it. That gossip grew into a larger crowd that claimed to have witnessed the incident. If all of those who claimed to have seen it had, then the movie set that day would have been packed with a thousand people for a scene that only contained The Big Guy, the actress, me, and the lion, a skeleton crew, and a mess of false tree and brush props.

We went back to New York.

The rumors didn’t kill our popularity. Not at first, (we’ll come back to that) because there wasn’t any actual revealed evidence it ever happened; it seemed so bizarre to Americans on either coast, and in the middle of the country, it was mostly thought of as an anecdotal story.

As for future pictures, they hired an actor to play The Big Guy, and got that damn chimpanzee to play me. When the actor pretended to kill a lion, or some beast in the movies, he put his foot on it and howled. No diddling allowed. The chest beating and the howling were correct, but the other thing missing just sort of dulled the situation. But, from an acting standpoint, our replacements were better and the movies still made money and made us even more famous. They made eight movies back to back about us with that actor pair, all of them major hits. There were lunch boxes and thermoses and tee-shirts and bread and milk products with our pictures on it. I still have a lunch box with a thermos, and for the right price, I’m willing to let it go.

By the time the first four pictures came out, the two with us, and the first two with the other guy and that chimp, we were rich as fresh-whipped butter. Something I learned about my adopted land was that if you had money, and if you were making other people money, you could diddle a lion at high noon in Times Square and most everyone would get over it, even the kids, as long as you didn’t have the actual film to prove it, of course.

N
ow the odd thing was, in a short time, the actors who played us became better known than us, and many people forgot that we were the real ape-men of the jungle—me being a little closer anthropologically in that department. We were old news, and that damn chimpanzee, even after he quit playing the part, as I said earlier, got special attention each year on his birthday. Cake and candles. We didn’t get that. But, we did get royalty checks, so there was a trade off. In that way I prefer what we got to what that damn ape got, though I still bristle at his popularity, and that now, so many years later, me and The Big Guy are mostly forgotten and the memory of the actor and that chimpanzee have taken our place.

The whole thing began to get to Big Guy. The whole thing being the world we were living in. He just couldn’t understand it. He discovered alcohol, and he could drink a lot of it. That stuff was to him like nectar to a bee. He became bourbon’s bitch. He was so drunk most of the time The Woman began knocking on my door late at night to ask if she could sleep on my couch while he raved and cursed in our ape-man tongue. Sometimes when he drank up all the hotel room booze, he climbed out the window, down the side of the building and into the street, and away he would go, dressed in clothes but not wearing any shoes.

He drank his way from one end of town to the other. One night he climbed over the walls of the zoo, bent bars, and let all manner of wild animals out. It was kept out of the papers, but a couple of tigers ate a bum and two orphans who were sleeping under a bridge. They weren’t tax payers, so it was easy to sweep under the rug. Way Big Guy saw it animals were supposed to be free. They could kill or be killed in a wild world situation, but cages, that bugged him, bugged him big time. In a way, I think he came to see the hotel, and even the whole of New York, as nothing more than a kind of cage that held him back from where he wanted to be, from the life he wanted to live.

Me, I was digging it. I got so I kept my body hair trimmed close, dressed nice, wore a monocle and a top hat and very nice suits. I took to going to jazz clubs, learned to play the bongos, smoked big cigars. I liked having an evening martini, wearing my bathrobe and slippers. I even did a little record album with a couple of those cool jazz cats; one of them on bass, one on sax, and me beating the skins. I got so I could lay down quite a few French phrases and a smidgeon of Italian. And there was another thing. Me and The Woman, all those nights she slept on my couch… Well, we got close. We talked about The Big Guy. We worried about him. We cried over him. We hugged each other in sympathy. In short time I was laying the pipe to her like I was running a gas line from here to Cuba. We didn’t mean for it to happen. It just did. The Woman told me that before I took her to bed, she and The Big Guy hadn’t had sex in three months. He had found a substitute for sex: whisky, beer, wine and vodka, as well as his favorite, bourbon, and sometimes a little rubbing alcohol taken from the medicine cabinet over the sink. He had even been known to drink hair oil. He had the itch bad.

He had also became a bigger spectacle and public disgrace. Shedding his clothes. Running naked through the streets. Climbing the Empire State building, all the way to the top where the zeppelin dock was. Swimming in public fountains, pulling one of the stone lions down from its pedestal at the New York Public library. Just got hold of it and yanked that big sucker off its pedestal and broke it to pieces. He even swam out to the Stature of Liberty. Can you imagine that. I can’t swim at all, but he swam all the way out there, climbed it because he can, had a hot dog from a vendor, and swam back; all of this done without a stitch on, just like in the old days.

Here’s something I’m really ashamed of. I began to be embarrassed of The Big Guy. My best friend. My brother. We had done a lot of things together in the old days that were no worse than the things he was doing now, in the new days. Bless me, but I was starting to shake my head and cluck my tongue. To be honest, I really enjoyed banging his old lady. That doesn’t mean I quit feeling for him. Late at night, holding The Woman in my arms, after I had drunk my martini and had my fun with her, I would think. Shit, that’s tough on the old boy, me with his girl and him not knowing, and me not telling, and her not telling. But that didn’t change me. I stayed the same. That sweet, warm, woman and the cool, clean sheets, and the toilet where you could sit and read without fear of being attacked by some manner of beast, were much too satisfying to want to give up.

…

Now, I told you about that red-headed man who had loved The Woman and thought he was going to end up with her, but after The Big Guy came along, he might as well have been the balls on a brass monkey. She had no interest in him, and now, of course, her interest was in me. Or at least it was to some degree. I won’t kid you. Sometimes I would awake and find her missing from my arms. She would be sitting in a chair by the great open window that led out on the veranda that overlooked the light-winking city, naked, her blonde hair dangling, the moonlight nestled in those scars on her shoulders, her breasts spear-tipped from the cool air, and I could tell she was thinking about The Big Guy. Somewhere, maybe he was thinking about her. It was hard to say. He seldom came back to the hotel anymore, which is why he didn’t miss her from his bed. He slept atop buildings, or in the park, or on a bench, usually clutching a bottle of booze in a brown paper bag. I had brought him home many a time in that condition, until I finally gave it up. Nothing changed him. I even talked to him about The Woman. I didn’t mention that me and her were doing the nasty—though I would never have thought of it that way in the wild—but it didn’t change him. I like to think had he come to his senses that me and The Woman could have shook hands and just been friends and they could have gone back together, the way it was supposed to be. But he didn’t change. The alcohol had numbed his senses—a lot. But he knew something wasn’t right between me and him and him and her, even though he didn’t know it was what it was; he trusted us both too much for that. I could tell the way his beautiful eyes rested on me that he knew our friendship was washing up on the rocks, yet I’m certain he didn’t actually suspect me of such treachery as taking from him the thing he loved the most in the world, The Woman; well, that and his freedom, his desire to go back to the way things were. I think he might have been willing to share her, and maybe The Woman would even have gone for that—she was progressive, but it just didn’t occur to him that she needed him in her arms and in her bed. Like I said, that ole John Barley Corn had him by the nuts.

I have wandered again. I was telling you about the red-headed man.

You see, Red, as most people called him, never gave up on The Woman. One look at her and you would know why. She was a stunner, as I have said, but there was something else about her. It was—and this is going to sound like a cheap romance story—her soul; it reached out to you and embraced you. Corny as that sounds, I don’t know any other way to describe it. She was something. For Red, though, I think it was that he thought he had her locked down, and when the lock broke, he couldn’t accept it. Maybe if he had been the one to break it off he would have been fine. He was that kind of guy. Everything on his terms. Only thing was, The Big Guy wasn’t interested in terms. Red knew that any interference there would just lead to him having his head pulled off like a grape plucked from the vine, so he bided his time. When things fell apart for The Big Guy and The Woman, he was waiting, and I am certain (without actual evidence, I admit) he was the one who finally leaked the lion diddling event to the public. We were told at first it was destroyed. Another time were told it existed, but that it was lost, and finally that it was stolen. And then it showed up. I think Red bought it from someone, maybe the director who had gone into advertising. I can’t say. But he got his hands on it.

That wasn’t what happened first, though. That wasn’t the first brick pulled from the pile. There were several. I guess I should have snapped to it, but I admit that I had been for the most part civilized and my instincts were not as sharply honed as they once were. Two or three times I thought I was being followed, and had noticed someone in the streets that I had seen twice earlier that day. New York is a big city, but people cross paths with one another now and again, so I didn’t think much of it. It wasn’t until The Woman and I had come back from a party, a little liquor-buzzed and hot to trot for the old bed room, when I smelled something. We had just come in through the door, and even though I was a bit drunk, and as I have said, civilized, something kicked in. I got a whiff of someone having been in our hotel room. Not a maid. I knew all their scents, and had had relations with several before me and The Woman took up together, and once or twice when she was out of town. This was the scent of a man with too much cologne. I peeled The Woman off of me, told her to wait, and sniffed about. My sniffing eventually led to a little camera fastened into a light fixture over our bed. Way it was rigged, when you turned on the light it came on and started snapping pictures, and when you turned it off, it still snapped for awhile. That way it had you in full light, and then, because our window always had the big curtains thrown back, and there were lights from the city resting on our bed, we could be easily photographed doing whatever we were doing, and frequently we were doing a lot.

At first, I was elated, thinking I had found the camera before any photos could be taken. Then it occurred to me that the only reason I knew someone had been in the room was the cologne. A strange thought passed through me. What if, with my senses dulled, I had missed somebody having entered our room before, when they weren’t wearing cologne? The camera could have taken many photos, and it only had to have its film replaced from time to time, something that could easily be done when we were out of the room. What if there were already photos of us?

I pulled the camera out and showed it to The Woman, who gasped. You see, there was some part of us that played like this was all a momentary fling. That when it came right down to it, all was right with her and The Big Guy, or soon would be, but that camera made us realize otherwise. We knew he didn’t know and that things weren’t right between them, and if he saw photographs of us together, it might be too much for him. He might turn savage, or even do something to himself. He just wasn’t right anymore.

“Perhaps it’s blackmail,” The Woman said.

I nodded, thinking perhaps that was it. I suppose The Big Guy could have had someone do it, to check up on us, but that didn’t seem likely. Unlike me, he never learned guile. I learned it when we lived in our lost world, and I had perfected it in civilization. Maybe whoever had set this photographic trap would want money instead of showing it to The Big Guy, but I tell you, right then I had a hunch who it was and what it was about. It came to me like a tick crawling into my arm pit that Red was behind all this, that he had hired someone to follow us, and to plant that camera, and what he wanted wasn’t money. He wanted revenge.