“It’s Jason,” I heard, and I let him into the building. But when I got the knock at my door and looked through the peephole, I saw instead a woman in full makeup with short dark hair—à la Louise Brooks—in a long-sleeved, pink and yellow dress.
“Who is it?” I sang, sticking my eye to the peephole.
“Jason,” said the woman.
It was his voice.
I opened the door.
“What the hell?” I said.
“I’m in deep disguise,” he said.
“Come on in. You look great. But don’t you get tired of wearing makeup and high heels and playing to men’s sexual objectification fantasies?”
He ignored this.
“You’re going out dressed like that?” he said.
I was in a simple summer dress.
“I’d dress like a man, but I can’t pull it off with these boobs,” I said.
“Well, I’m not going out with you recognizable like that. Do you have a wig?”
“No.”
“Scarf? Hat? Where’s your closet?”
“In here,” I said, taking him into the bedroom. “Are you gay?” I asked, as he plowed through my wardrobe.
“Your generation just loves to label, doesn’t it? No, I’m not. Here, this scarf will work. And this hat.”
By the time he was finished, my hair was wrapped in a scarf and covered with a big hat. I was taller than he was, and had bigger feet, and I noted with some distress that he had succeeded in making me look like a man—in drag.
“What did Dewey say?” I asked.
“He said that he met with two men involved in the bonobo project. They wanted out of the project, they hated the people they were working for. One of them was a guy named Hufnagel. He found Dewey via the Internet. The other was a guy named Bondir, nickname Frenchie.”
“Bondir is dead. He’s the guy who washed ashore in Coney Island. The French police say he died fifteen years ago. We’d better go. Let me get my weaponry.”
“I have a gun,” Jason said.
“Where?”
“Holster strapped to my inner thigh.”
“Would you use it?”
“If I had to,” he said without hesitation. “In strict self-defense.”
“All the same, I’m going to bring my pepper spray. And my camera flash attachment,” I said.
“Where are we going?”
“A fund-raiser at the Sad Marquis.”
Where better for women’s righters to meet than the Sad Marquis, across from the World of Beauty Multicultural Unisex Salon on West Twenty-third Street. The Sad Marquis is a tongue-in-cheek, S&M-theme eatery where you can get grilled chicken over field greens, raspberry mousse in a chocolate shoe, and for a few extra bucks they’ll spank a man at your table. I kid you not. According to a bit I heard on the news, it had been doing a booming business with women at the conference, and not only because of the discount coupon enclosed in their registration packet.
I’d been by the Sad Marquis before, and seen the news coverage on it when it opened, but I’d never been inside. The windows were blackened, to heighten the “taboo” of it, though this wasn’t real S&M, but a watered-down version for the tourist trade. As far as theme restaurants go though, this one beat the heck out of Planet Hollywood, no pun intended. The place was painted black with the occasional splash of red here and there. All the wait staff were in black leather, of course, and a hostess in a leather cat suit led us to our table, which was next to one of several cages around the dining area, each holding a giddy feminist. Other giddy women took pictures.
A handsome young man wearing nothing but a leather G-string approached us.
“Hello, my name is Anton, and I’m not worthy to serve you,” he said, and went into a recitation of the drink specials. A plate of hors d’oeuvres, vegetarian or mixed, was included with the price of our admission.
“Mixed, please,” I ordered, more to vex Jason than anything else.
“Vegetarian,” Jason said in a whispered falsetto. “You promised, no meat around me.”
“Vegetarian,” I corrected to the waiter.
“Thank you,” Jason said.
“Just for the record, are there any members of the animal kingdom you don’t like? Other than omnivorous people?”
“I wouldn’t even kill a fly,” he said.
“You don’t kill flies? You just … let them hang around?”
“We keep nothing around that they can eat.”
“So … they eat out. They’re someone else’s problem. Like mine. I have to kill your share of flies too.”
“You are a bloodthirsty woman.…”
“What about snakes? If you confronted a cobra and had to either kill it or be killed …”
“Well, in self-defense. But when was the last time you had to defend yourself against a cow, for example?”
“There’s a cow in Ohio who tracks, captures, and eats chickens,” I said.
“So?”
“Neither here nor there. Just thought of it.”
“I’m beginning to wonder if you and I are on the same side,” Jason said.
“Me too,” I said.
As Edgar Rice Burroughs said, it is remarkable how quickly friendships are formed in the midst of a common jeopardy. But I could sympathize. It’s a tough job being a pharisee in a world full of publicans and sinners—the work is never done.
One of the event organizers said a quick hello and dropped an information packet on our table before running off to the next one. In it was a glossy pamphlet about the Diogenes Project and some press clips.
The already dim lights went down and a spotlight went up over a podium in front of a screen. A short, dark-haired woman decked out in Prada walked up and blew into the mike. I recognized her. It was Belle Hondo, a maverick globo-feminist who wears makeup and had chastised some of her hard-core feminist sisters the years before in a big Op-Ed piece for “spending too much time and energy obsessing over Barbie’s unnatural figure while there are millions of poor women in the third world being treated like soulless chattel.”
“Can you hear me?” she asked.
“Yes,” the audience said.
“I’m glad to see so many women here today,” Hondo said. “We’ve all heard the stories of how feminism is dead, how we no longer have clear leadership or purpose, how feminists today are like the carpetbaggers after the Civil War.”
There was some light booing, and a voice in the back said, “We’re not dead, we’re just resting.”
Hondo continued. “We haven’t won the war, but we’ve won most of the big battles. The country is tired of fighting and wants to get on with Reconstruction now.”
Only a third of the women at the conference called themselves feminists, she pointed out, and every feminist seemed to define the word feminist differently. But while card-carrying feminism was in decline, Western women continued to gain power and prosper overall.
“What we have lacked is a guiding vision to lead us forward. Dr. Karen Keyes has a vision, a bonobo utopia. I think you too will be inspired by the example of these remarkable animals and by Dr. Keyes,” she said, and then gave a précis of Dr. Karen Keyes’s career—a doctor of zoology and anthropology, who had devoted her life, like Jane Goodall, to observing and preserving African chimps in their own environment, specializing in the bonobos for the last ten.
“Please join me in a warm welcome for Dr. Karen Keyes.”
A tall, pretty woman with short, curly blond hair, freakishly large blue eyes, and the face of a cherub stepped up to the podium.
“Thank you for coming,” she said, and cut right to the chase. “Bonobos are a female-dominated chimp society centered largely in the jungles of the country formerly known as Zaire. Their DNA differs from ours by just one percent. They are our closest primate cousins. And they are the horniest chimps in the world.”
When the hoots and hollers quieted down, Keyes went on about the threats facing the bonobos and their diminished numbers—
“less than twenty thousand of them left in Africa, and we’re losing scores every day. And now I’d like to introduce them.” Then the spotlight went down and the film began.
Horniest chimps in the world might seem like a hard claim to quantify, but it was a well-deserved accolade for these noble beasts. According to the film, these chimps have sex an average of eight times a day, hetero, homo, and mono, to resolve conflict, to obtain food, and just plain for fun, and we saw plenty of it in brilliant color on the screen. When aroused, the bonobos’ genitalia became very red and pronounced. They made a lot of noise.
This was the new vision of feminism, female rule maintained with a lot of noisy sex? Come to think of it, it was a pretty winning recruitment pitch. It beat the hell out of “a woman without a man was like a fish without a bicycle,” or the anti-sex feminists’ dictum that all heterosexual sex was a form of rape.
The bonobos were the last large mammal to be discovered, we heard, in 1929. They have longer legs than other chimps and often walk erect. They part their hair in the middle.
“Bonobos French-kiss, they grin, they laugh, and are a bunch of happy, peace-loving chimps,” said Keyes’s voice on the film.
After the film ended, Keyes took a few questions.
“How do the male bonobos like this arrangement?” someone asked.
“The bonobo males are interesting,” Dr. Keyes said. “They don’t mind being dominated by females because the females have sex with them. A lot. And they have peace within their community. It’s the external threats we have to worry about—civil wars, poachers, encroaching civilization, deforestation, pollution, hungry people who hunt them for food. All these things threaten the bonobo population, and other chimps. A few zoos have small bonobo populations but we want to preserve them in their natural environment.”
After Keyes exhorted the crowd to give generously, she stepped down from the podium and was surrounded by interested women. Jason and I waited for a moment for the crowd to thin and then approached her.
“Dr. Keyes,” I said. “I’m Robin Hudson. This is … Jason.”
“I’m in disguise,” he whispered.
She was not at all surprised by this. “Ms. Hudson,” she said. “I’ve been quite anxious to talk to you but your staff wouldn’t put my calls through. Let me finish up here, then perhaps we can go somewhere to talk.”
Right after she left, Jason said, “Excuse me, I have to go to the … ladies’ room.”
While he went off and Keyes courted rich women, I hung at the bar. Suddenly, I felt a terrible chill run up my spine and was moved to look toward the door. That’s when I saw De-Witt, standing near the door, scanning the room with narrowed eyes. Her eyes caught mine for a second, but she didn’t recognize me in my Tallulah Bankhead getup, which, I thought then, was probably a good thing, since she’d tear a strip out of my hide for not returning her interview tapes. I looked away, and when I looked again, she was gone.
CHAPTER TEN
When Keyes returned, the three of us slipped away in the limo the conference had provided for her.
“I’m heading over to the Jackson Hotel and Convention Center,” she said. “Where should I drop you?”
“I’m heading toward east Midtown, the All News Network,” I said.
“Have you heard from my friend Dewey?” she asked.
“Sort of,” I said.
“Where is he? What do you know?”
“He was beaten after meeting with a man or men who knew where the bonobos are.…” Jason began.
“Is he still alive?”
“Yes. He’s in a coma, slips in and out of consciousness, Mostly out,” Jason said.
“One of the men Dewey allegedly met, a Frenchman named Luc Bondir, is dead now. Another is missing. I am pretty perplexed about what is going on, so I can’t tell you much more than that,” I said. “Why did you call me originally?”
“Dewey had contacted me just before I left Kinshasa to come to New York and told me you’d been asking questions. He wanted to know if you had contacted me.”
“Do you know what questions I was asking and who I asked?”
“I’m pretty sure Dewey heard this from one of the scientists he’d made contact with. I don’t know anything more about it. Dewey was kind of secretive, a lone ranger.”
Jason nodded when she said this. He started taking notes.
“And what’s the deal with the missing bonobos?” I asked.
About two years earlier, she said, a dozen bonobos disappeared, six male, six female. The bonobos move around a lot, the females in particular are peripatetic, so there was a chance they had migrated, or been slaughtered by poachers. But then she began to hear rumors that they had been abducted and smuggled out of Zaire. Subsequent investigation led her to believe they were somewhere in the New York area. That’s when she contacted Dewey.
“How?” I asked.
“I got his name from a mutual friend, made contact through an Organization website, and then we exchanged encoded and anonymized E-mail,” she said. “He said he’d look into it. I didn’t hear from him again until I received an encoded E-mail saying he was hot on the trail of the chimps and had been contacted by a scientist working with them. He suggested I might want to attend the women’s conference in New York, where he would contact me. As I said, I heard from him the last time just before I left for New York last week, when he asked if I’d spoken with you or been contacted by you. I was waiting for Dewey to contact me. When he didn’t, I got worried and remembered you. I called you.”
“I see,” I said. “Help me out with this. Why would someone steal a dozen bonobos? I mean, first of all, why would someone want a dozen horny chimps around all the time? Nothing personal.”
“I don’t know why,” she said. “They’re adorable, so at first I thought they might be part of the illegal pet trade.”
“Or some weird bestial porn or something.”
“But Dewey said no. They were being used in some experiment.”
“Well, why wouldn’t someone just steal the ones at the San Diego or Cincinnati zoo, instead of going all the way to Africa?”
“These are endangered animals. They are well-guarded in San Diego, and if they disappeared, the media there would make a big stink about it, I’m sure.”
“It had to be expensive to smuggle out those bonobos. Why not just buy some lab monkeys?” I asked.
“I don’t know, I just don’t know,” she said, tearing up. “And the thing is, these were ‘my’ bonobos. I knew them, they knew me. They let me observe them. They recognized me and smiled when they saw me. I gave them names. Want to see some pictures?”
She pulled out a packet of photographs of bonobo chimps in the lush Congo jungle, pointing out the ones who were missing by name. It was because she had given them all names, Binky, Popover, Ralph, Madonna (“she’s a classic diva, this one,” she said), and so on, that made me tear up too.
“So you see, I want to publicize the Diogenes Project, but not the missing bonobos. We don’t want whoever has them to panic in the face of a media frenzy and kill them. We want to find them.”
“I understand,” I said. “I noticed Alana DeWitt was at the fund-raiser. Do you know her?”
“Yes, she’s one of our biggest contributors,” Keyes said. “The female domination appeals to her.”
“I bet it does.”
“She’s not crazy about the sexual aspect,” Keyes said.
“No, she’s anti-sex. I interviewed her last week, coincidentally. Does she know about the missing bonobos?”
“Yes, I told her, in confidence. I know you’ll fall in love with the bonobos too.”
“I already have,” I said. “Have you heard about the female monkey who took over her community in the Tokyo Zoo? She’s not a bonobo.”
“Well, word is spreading. Or monkeys are evolving,” she said, and laughed through her tears. “We have observed more and more dominant females in other chimpanzee communities that have traditionally been run
by chest-thumper males. Perhaps the apes are evolving a little faster than we are.”
Whenever people use lower animal behavior as a parallel to human behavior, you have to look at the animals and wonder when was the last time one of them wrote a symphony, baked a pie, or built a stereo cabinet? When do they get any work done if they have sex eight times a day? Would they still have so much sex if they had bills to pay, or if they had other entertainment options, like television or video games? Or cigarettes? In lab tests, primates choose cigarettes over sex most of the time.
I put these questions to her, and she laughed again.
“The male-dominated chest thumpers aren’t building pyramids or writing epic poems either. They’re too busy fighting and killing each other,” she said. “Though there are chimps and gorillas who paint, and their artwork has been exhibited.”
“Do you think they would have so much sex if they were able to talk to each other?” Jason asked, looking up from his notebook. When his eyes met her eyes, he blushed and looked back down slightly.
“Sexual interaction seems to replace other forms of communication for them,” he continued.
“They communicate with sounds, gestures, smells, and with sex itself.… They love to make funny faces. And they laugh,” Keyes said.
“I thought man was the only animal that really laughed,” I said.
“Nature is full of surprises,” she said.
It was a lovely vision, her bonobo utopia.
I hated to cast a shadow over it. “You know, your life could very well be in danger. You should maybe lie low,” I said.
“But I have to be high-profile here. I need to raise money to save my babies,” she said. “I’m planning on using reverse psychology. Go about my business at the conference, happy-go-lucky, as if nothing is wrong. Not be alone if I can help it. Keep talking about how many of my endangered bonobos have vanished or been killed by civil war and environmental destruction. That way, it looks to the guilty parties like I am aware of the missing bonobos but blame other forces for it. See?”
“Yes,” I said. “That’ll work, hopefully.”
We exchanged all pertinent numbers when she dropped Jason and me off at the Jackson Broadcasting Building.
The Last Manly Man Page 11
