us morsels of delicious American food through the mesh. To my surprise, they demonstrated a better grasp of the prevailing realities than the adults, who frequently attempted to interfere with these vital nutritional supplements. But the children’s actions made sense to me. They dispensed supplements to those animals that showed the most vitality—in other words, those who seemed most worth assisting. So the chimpanzees did well compared to those whom the program was failing, those whom you knew were alive only after long scrutiny of their ribcages, which slowly gained and lost faint stripes of shadowif you peered closely enough into the tangled straw. Unreconstructed jungle violence, which Stroheim demonstrated, went unrewarded by supplements. It all made sense.
And this extra human food was crucial. Something had happened to the quantity of fruit we were getting; it was radically less than what we had been used to at Trefflich’s. By the time the twice-daily ritual of winning supplements from our human coaches came around, you were ravenous. There were two of them to about fifteen of us, and every mouthful of food they deigned to grant you was a complete fucking performance. And it wasn’t at all like
Forest Lawn
and its cheerful abundance: you got a single, bright little bean hardly worth the chewing each time you did something the human liked. The little beans were highly addictive, however, and you were so hungry you’d chow down on as many as were offered.
So when Tyrone and I were led out of our shelters on tethers into the courtyard, we were already desperate to please. Each of the coaches carried a short length of smooth stick—“the broom handle,” or “ugly-stick”—with which they threatened to beat us if we failed to imitate them. They went at us two at a time. And for me, seeing the coach raise the ugly-stick above his head brought back memories of the gaunt old man from the New York forest and I couldn’t suppress a pleading grimace of fear.
“That’s right, gimme a smile. Gimme a great big Gable grin, Jiggs. That’s good.”
But Tyrone was confused by the ugly-stick and was beaten heavily before he could produce the fear-grimace on order. It took only a single hard blow across my back to understand that a leap of faked love into the coach’s arms was required, and here again Tyrone suffered badly when he bit the human’s shoulder. I’d come close to biting my own coach, but the memory of Trefflich’s watch held me back.
There was no joy in the coach’s face, no love in his voice—he was a relentless man, he bored it into you. He lessened the world, made it hard even to think of what there was outside the corridor of actions he’d laid down for you. Oh, yeah—pain, that was what was outside that corridor. So after you’d clapped for him, and kissed him, and “laughed” for him, donned a hat and drunk a glass of water, then gone and fetched the little tan notebook in which he wrote notes at the end of the session, you were left with the feeling that there was really nothing between you—a foretaste of that emptiness all actors, all auditionees, know. The one time I felt emboldened enough to fish a cigarette from the pack in his chest pocket, I got a couple of cracks from the ugly-stick. I was only fooling around. But there was no love in the man, only dull, inexpressive alphadom.
Mornings and evenings, this routine on the tethers. Almost the worst of it was hearing the others taking their beatings. With my experience on
Forest Lawn
, I’d been fortunate. It seemed, I don’t know, somehow
natural
for me to do a triple-backflip-handclap-double-lip-flip-and-grin. You didn’t even need to ask me. Not so for the rest, and they got the brunt of it. Bonzo was hopeless; he was continually bewildered into mistakes by his fear. When we returned to the shelter I’d try to reassure him with strokes and grooming, but after a short time he’d slink away into his corner and slump
And this extra human food was crucial. Something had happened to the quantity of fruit we were getting; it was radically less than what we had been used to at Trefflich’s. By the time the twice-daily ritual of winning supplements from our human coaches came around, you were ravenous. There were two of them to about fifteen of us, and every mouthful of food they deigned to grant you was a complete fucking performance. And it wasn’t at all like
Forest Lawn
and its cheerful abundance: you got a single, bright little bean hardly worth the chewing each time you did something the human liked. The little beans were highly addictive, however, and you were so hungry you’d chow down on as many as were offered.
So when Tyrone and I were led out of our shelters on tethers into the courtyard, we were already desperate to please. Each of the coaches carried a short length of smooth stick—“the broom handle,” or “ugly-stick”—with which they threatened to beat us if we failed to imitate them. They went at us two at a time. And for me, seeing the coach raise the ugly-stick above his head brought back memories of the gaunt old man from the New York forest and I couldn’t suppress a pleading grimace of fear.
“That’s right, gimme a smile. Gimme a great big Gable grin, Jiggs. That’s good.”
But Tyrone was confused by the ugly-stick and was beaten heavily before he could produce the fear-grimace on order. It took only a single hard blow across my back to understand that a leap of faked love into the coach’s arms was required, and here again Tyrone suffered badly when he bit the human’s shoulder. I’d come close to biting my own coach, but the memory of Trefflich’s watch held me back.
There was no joy in the coach’s face, no love in his voice—he was a relentless man, he bored it into you. He lessened the world, made it hard even to think of what there was outside the corridor of actions he’d laid down for you. Oh, yeah—pain, that was what was outside that corridor. So after you’d clapped for him, and kissed him, and “laughed” for him, donned a hat and drunk a glass of water, then gone and fetched the little tan notebook in which he wrote notes at the end of the session, you were left with the feeling that there was really nothing between you—a foretaste of that emptiness all actors, all auditionees, know. The one time I felt emboldened enough to fish a cigarette from the pack in his chest pocket, I got a couple of cracks from the ugly-stick. I was only fooling around. But there was no love in the man, only dull, inexpressive alphadom.
Mornings and evenings, this routine on the tethers. Almost the worst of it was hearing the others taking their beatings. With my experience on
Forest Lawn
, I’d been fortunate. It seemed, I don’t know, somehow
natural
for me to do a triple-backflip-handclap-double-lip-flip-and-grin. You didn’t even need to ask me. Not so for the rest, and they got the brunt of it. Bonzo was hopeless; he was continually bewildered into mistakes by his fear. When we returned to the shelter I’d try to reassure him with strokes and grooming, but after a short time he’d slink away into his corner and slump
Similar Books
