The Ape Man's Brother Read online

  Dr. Rice was not only our roommate, but a man who began teaching us his language and certain customs long before we reached the shores of Japanese-America, and later European-America. We also made friends with the navigator, Bowen Tyler, of which adventure books have also been written, most of them exaggerated lies, and by the same liar who told the stories about The Big Guy and me, though I will admit he got a few things right, if only perhaps by accident.

  Anyway, we were given pants, and I took to mine right away, but had to learn about unfastening them and pulling them down when the urge to let loose with inner workings arrived on the wings of nature. I ruined several pairs of pants before I got that right. The Big Guy wore the pants all right, but he didn’t like shirts at all and wouldn’t wear them for the longest time, and he never did really take to shoes. I liked them, but there were none in the zeppelin that would fit me.

  The days passed. On we went. Over mountains and jungles and more water and land dotted in the water, and finally back to more water again; a blueness that appeared to stretch out until it linked up with the sky.

  …

  As I was saying, during the trip I began to learn words of English, which was the main language spoken by Americans, even the Japanese side. I learned that at one time there had been a war, and one side of this huge country we were going to had been taken over by the Japanese, but in time they united. Still, the West Coast was called Japanese-America, the East, European-America. On the zeppelin there were also a few Japanese. During the trip I began to see the differences in them and the others. Before, when I had seen them as a group, except for the hair on the faces of some, I hadn’t realized they were different; to me they were all the same, people like The Big Guy, but smaller. I learned to say “please” and “thank you” and “pass the peas,” and for a long time I thought all food was called peas. I also learned words like “fuck” and “shit,” “damn, hell, goddamn” and the like, but it took me some time to learn how to use them in properly in polite conversation.

  So we flew and we flew and The Big Guy and The Woman were often together, much to the disappointment of flame-head, or Red as he was known. You could see the anger coming out of him. He looked easily as savage as the wildest things me and The Big Guy had ever encountered. But from previous experience, Red knew going up against The Big Guy would lead to him losing a few parts, so with steam almost blowing out of his ears, he held his temper and watched them stand beside each other, look at each other and smile and say nothing, and sometimes they held hands, and I am sure there were times in secret places that they did more than that.

  When we were near our destination, New York, they gave me and Big Guy some fresh pants and shirts, but neither of us wore shoes, The Big Guy because he wouldn’t, and me because as I said, none fit. We didn’t really need them. The bottoms of our feet were hard as wood and we could step on thorns and glass and not have them penetrate. They also gave The Big Guy a tie for some reason, and he used it to bind back his long hair, which The Woman had trimmed considerably, after combing out burrs and thorns and minor wildlife. She even gave me a good brushing, and I liked it so much, that I did it myself several times a day. I liked the way it made my hair shine.

  We had never seen buildings before, and in the wheelhouse, looking out of the glass, those buildings looked like odd mountains at first. When the craft docked at what they called the Empire State building, I was almost beside myself. So was The Big Guy.

  “Son-of-a-bitch,” I said.

  “Very good,” said Dr. Rice. “That is a proper usage of the word, if not the literal meaning.”

  “Thank you,” I said. I tell you, right then I felt like one sophisticated motherfucker, that motherfucker word being something I learned later.

  [9]

  Me and The Big Guy were all the rage. We were paraded about like circus animals and asked to do all manner of things. Big Guy bent metal bars and broke ropes with his chest and climbed up the sides of buildings like a big bug. I couldn’t bend the bars, but I could break a lot of ropes and climbing was my middle name. It’s actually Uchugucdagarmindoonie, but that’s not important. Besides, looking at it now, spelled out, I have to say that is only a close approximation, so we just won’t worry about it.

  Anyway, we were taken here and there, poked and probed by doctors, and on one occasion a greased finger was jammed up my butt, which resulted in an unexpected thrill. We were needled and measured, asked to run and be timed, asked to climb and be timed. They watched us eat, watched us talk English in our peculiar way. They listened to the old language, the language we knew, and they made notes. They were amazed at how hard the bottoms of our feet were. They were equally amazed at the overall condition of The Big Guy’s muscles and teeth. Mine they were equally impressed with, especially my more pronounced canines.

  Next thing that happened was we had lessons in manners.

  We learned to sit in chairs, sleep in beds, take baths, eat with utensils instead of our fingers, and to take our time about meals. We had to grasp the idea that no one or anything was going to spring on us from under the table or out of a closet and wrestle us all over the room for our food. This was one of the more difficult changes for the two of us, due to us having come from a world where when food was found you wolfed it down to make sure you got to keep it, or to make sure it didn’t bite you back; and you eyed everyone and everything around you suspiciously, lest they be reaching for your chow. They soon learned how engrained this was when one of our table companions reached casually for the salt shaker, only to end up with Big Guy grabbing him by the head and flinging him across the room. He thought the man was going for his baked trout.

  To make sure the man understood The Big Guy’s dominance, The Big Guy not only finished his own trout as quick as a wild pig snuffing up a grub worm, he ate the man’s trout as well, jumped to the middle of the table and started stuffing the dessert (a cake) into his mouth as fast as he could reach with both hands.

  Instinct and experience taking over, me knowing how much that big bastard eat, and having gone to bed hungry because him in the past, I too leaped onto the table and started snatching, which led to a mild grapple between the two of us which resulted in my being bit on the shoulder and having a handful of cake stuffed in my ear and a random carrot shoved in my nose.

  What could you expect? We were savages. But we did learn some civilized activities. We learned to drink, and I learned to smoke (Big Guy never took to it), and I learned to chase women. Big Guy had his woman, and he stuck with her. They had even taken to living in the same hotel room. But me, well, I was a goddamn celebrity, and I had groupies. They all wanted to hump Mr. Hairy. I rush in here to say this was a title given to me by the newspapers for a time (fortunately it didn’t stick) and one I never embraced. But the women embraced me, and I came to find them attractive, not just usable. I began to like to wear suit coats and ties, well-creased pants, and shoes, though I always had to cut them open at the front so my toes had room. In short time I took to wearing open toed house shoes. It became all the rage with the kids. The sale of house shoes went up, and pretty soon I was modeling them in magazine, wearing a tux with those fuzzy shoes on my feet. They pretty much became my trademark. I was loved by the young and the sophisticated, disliked by parents and the clergy.

  I went to fine restaurants and learned to order wine. I will tell you truthfully, I took to the life. It beat climbing trees to flee wild animals. It beat looking for fruit and eating bugs and worms, or chasing down some swift animal with a stick or a rock. I liked the nice rooms in the great hotel where we were kept. I liked the bed with its clean, cool sheets better than I liked a leafy nest on the ground or the crook of a tree. I liked room service. I liked the women who slept with me; or rather I liked what we did. No particular woman ever stayed with me more than a day and a night. I wouldn’t let them, even though there were many who wanted to. There were just too many opportunities, too many offers, and I took advantage of it.

  I was dri
nking until late, smoking cigars and sometimes a pipe. I was learning to tell jokes and talk in a sophisticated manner. I knew how to get my arm around women’s shoulders without being awkward, and I had gained quite a reputation in the tabloids as a ladies’ man.

  And I was becoming famous and admired. Maybe not as much as The Big Guy, but it was a new experience for me. Back home I was, to sum it up in crass and modern terms, just another monkey, because even though he was different from the rest of us—perhaps because he was—he was always held in higher esteem than me. At home, I was just like everyone else there, but in New York, I was special.

  In time this fame led to The Big Guy and myself becoming movie stars.

  At least for awhile.

  [10]

  You 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.

  [11]

  Now 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.