Problem. We already had zoos. So what could we do? Answer: No cages!! We’d let the beasts roam free!! Like in Africa!! And the wildlife park was born.
The concept had limitations. The animals were dangerous so the park couldn’t be near major population centers. It had to cover a large area to accommodate grazers such as rhinos and giraffes and antelope, so the only cost-effective way to create these parks was to grab up huge tracts of cheap, unusable land, like floodplains or the vast acreage under high-voltage towers.
The result was that visitors would have to drive long distances to a deserted, inhospitable area to see lions from the comfort of their cars. I know it sounds crazy now, but this was the late seventies.
The long drive time and ominous high-tension power poles meant a low volume of visitors. Consequently, the bottom line dictated that staff be cut to the minimum. People willing to deal with lions and fifty thousand volts often tend to have personal problems, like mild schizophrenia or heavy drinking.
Shake this cocktail up with a huge perimeter to maintain and you have the perfect prescription for a breakout. These parks were always susceptible to animal escapes. A band of chimpanzees escaped in Arlington, Texas, and lived off garbage for weeks. It was the subject of many crude jokes about the future birthrate in that area. The police weren’t laughing. They set up dragnets to haul in the monkeys. It was rumored that not all of the chimps were caught. One of my friends joked that they nabbed a couple of them teaching at a local junior college.
In San Diego it was a single pigmy hippo named Bubbles who made her break for freedom. Bubbles escaped into the nearby suburbs and also lived on trash. The story barely got any play. After all, it was just a single little hippopotamus. How far could she get?
After a week, Bubbles was still free. The Los Angeles newspapers started carrying the story: “Bubbles Eludes Capture Again.” “Wildlife Officers Bamboozled by Bubbles.” They followed her trail, anticipated the garbage cans they thought she would raid, but she defied expectations again and again. She would double back, jump ahead, revisit old garbage cans right before garbage day. It was as though she had inside information.
They needed help. They brought in a hippo expert from the San Diego Zoo, one of the top zoos in the world. Interviews on television confirmed what we all began to suspect. Bubbles was one smart hippo. And thus she captured the imagination of the nation.
If there is one thing that runs deep in the human soul—if there’s one thing that Disney can count on—it is that we are all suckers for smart animals. Television commercials have shown talking dogs and cats for years. Even though they mainly talk about food, litter, and occasionally insurance, we are still amused. A staple of the sitcom has been the pet that is smarter than its family. I was in the pilot of a sitcom in which the lead often talked to his rat for advice. A rat. For advice.
When you think about it, if the only issues that concern you are food and comfort, why not listen to your dog?
Sidenote: our household is no exception. We are beholden to our smart pets and always turn to them in moments of crisis. They are often the focus of our attention and concern. Once I made up an objective list of the relative intelligence in our home from smartest to the stupidest:
1. Blackberry (rabbit)
2. Ann (wife)
3. Bandit (cat)
4. William (eleven-year-old son)
5. Robert (sixteen-year-old son)
6. Thistle (rabbit)
7. Rosie (rabbit)
8. Stephen (me)
9. Campion (rabbit)
10. Fleury (rabbit)
11. Tugger (turtle)
In my defense I need to point out that I never have gone to Tugger for any advice or comfort.
But I digress.
Bubbles was not only a “smart” hippo, but a hippo that was smarter than several humans, including a hippo expert. That was all the press and the public needed. Bubbles was becoming a folk legend.
San Diego TV news stations interviewed locals whose trash cans were knocked over and looted in the night. Bubbles’s charm was evident by people laughing and smiling as they cleaned up the mess in their back alleys: “We heard a noise. Thought it was kids or something. Now they tell us it was a hippopotamus, I just don’t know. Sounds crazy to me.”
Articles about Bubbles appeared on the front page of papers all over California. “Day 12: Bubbles Still on the Loose!”
Apparently there was a system of swamps that Bubbles was ducking into as home base. The park rangers just didn’t have the manpower to cover such a large area. And there was too much garbage to cut off Bubbles’s food supply. The situation was getting out of control.
That’s when the San Diego Sheriff’s Department stepped into the picture. The solution? Shoot Bubbles. After all, Fish and Game couldn’t handle the problem, the park rangers couldn’t handle the problem, and no matter how cute a pigmy hippo was, she was still a wild animal. During the sheriff’s interview they showed file footage of high-powered rifles being loaded with very long bullets.
Outcry! Explosion! Chaos! A cute story turned not so cute. It was unthinkable. Shoot Bubbles? The hippo had done nothing. She was just foraging. She had displayed no hostility. She just had a taste for trash. The midnight raids were amusing. To be ransacked by Bubbles was almost a bragging point. It was like hearing Santa on your roof on Christmas Eve. Now they were sending in lethal force?
The story went national. Animal rights activists had a face to go with their cause. And it was the face of a hippopotamus. People who had never protested anything, people who had missed out on Vietnam, were getting ready to march. Phone calls to newspapers, television stations, and houses of government streamed in.
The assassination of Bubbles was put on hold. There was an emergency meeting. Police met with government officials and animal experts. A new plan was hatched. A trap would be set. A tranquilizer dart would be used. If the tranquilizer didn’t work, a dozen armed police would be ready to finish the hippo off.
I remember that day. I was doing children’s theater with the Twelfth Night Repertory Company. We were driving in a carpool to our first school. All we could talk about was Bubbles. The subject touched on some archetypal nerve connected to our metaphoric midbrain. That responsible people would shoot Bubbles as a first option chilled us like the witch in Snow White.
Memories of Davy Crockett and the abusive Disney Corporation hung in the air. Could such horror be possible in a good world? I was the voice of optimism. I told my friends in the car, “Things like that don’t happen. The animal park people and the zoo people are in charge. It was on the news. They’ll use a tranquilizer dart.”
Just the thought of a tranquilizer dart gave us comfort. All of us had grown up with Marlin Perkins and Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. Jim Fowler often used the tranquilizer dart. It was a good thing. He used it to relocate wild pigs that were tearing up a farm in Borneo. Once he used it to get a Bengal tiger to the animal dentist. It was about as close to a sure thing as exists in this world. Bubbles would be fine.
In San Diego the trap was set. A pile of garbage was laid out by the bank of the swamp. Animal control officers stood poised with dart guns a few yards away. Behind them, cops, armed with high-powered rifles.
In Los Angeles we performed at our first school. We ran out to the car afterward to hear the news. Nothing. No word of Bubbles.
The day wore on. No sightings. Not a word on the radio. I got home. My girlfriend, Beth, was in the bedroom switching channels for any updates. We sat on the bed and held hands fixated on the television screen. Finally, there was a news break in the early evening. Bubbles was dead.
My heart stopped. I went numb. Beth exploded into tears. I stared at the set stupidly. I was so sick and so sad. I couldn’t even cry. I held my pillow and watched the report.
Bubbles was not shot by the police. She came out of the water and was shot by a zookeeper with a tranquilizer dart. She was scared and disoriented. She began running in panic.
When the drug took hold, she fell on a tree stump. Animal Control ran to secure her. But she was heavy. Very heavy. The tree stump pushed against her diaphragm. She suffocated before they could lift her off of the stump.
The story gripped the world. Sorrow filled the hearts of everyone I knew. Children cried in school. Moments of silence were taken for Bubbles.
Protestors who had marched in San Diego to save Bubbles now carried signs: “Bubbles LIVES” and “Bubbles, we will NOT FORGET.” One middle school in the area made a resolution to change their name to Bubbles Junior High School. The principal said that this event had stirred the student body unlike any in the school’s history. He held an emergency meeting of students and faculty. The name change was voted in by acclamation. The principal said he was behind them all the way. The head of the student body was interviewed by the local media. She said that they felt Bubbles embodied all of the traits they hoped to embrace in adulthood: intelligence, resourcefulness, and the desire to be free. (They left out an insatiable taste for garbage.) The camera panned to rows of children, singing the new school song: “Hail, all hail, Bubbles Junior High.”
Life went on in its predictable day-to-day way even though the heart of the day-to-day seemed not to beat anymore. In some way we felt like the world was no longer safe, no longer smiled, and certainly could not take a joke. It was probably the finality of it all—the death, the tears, the singing school children that contributed to the story being buried. Buried for about two months when a remarkable event occurred.
Tending the animals at the wildlife park, a worker saw a pigmy hippo coming out of the water. While shoveling dung he noticed the hippo’s ankle bracelet. All of the hippos wore ankle bracelets with their names on it because one pigmy hippo looks like another pigmy hippo.
He called management. He called his coworkers. This news was big. The hippo that came out of the water was Bubbles! Bubbles! Bubbles was alive and still at the park!
All of the experts shook their heads at the apparent miracle. Then reality sank in. The hippo that escaped, that was killed, that was the focus of national news and consequently became a folk legend, was not Bubbles. Never was. After a quick head count in the hippo compound, they realized the escapee was a hippo named Rosie. Rosie was the unintended heroine.
This story slipped onto a back page of the first section of the Los Angeles Times. It was never on the TV news again, even though in my opinion, this story was even bigger. There was now a middle school in Southern California named after a living hippopotamus. A hippopotamus that had done nothing in particular but swim and eat. Imagine how upset Luther Burbank would have been to know his legacy was bumped for a sea cow, or more accurately, a “river horse.”
It was a story that took on the moral power of what heroism is and what it is not. In a post–Davy Crockett universe we have hungered for meaning. In the void, we will hang our affections almost anywhere. The Bubbleses of our world are trumpeted on the front pages of our papers and on television—while the Rosies of our age toil, strive, live, and die unnoticed.
In my grandmother’s front yard in Throop, Pennsylvania, with my constant companions: my coonskin cap and Betsy, my rifle.
4.
LAND OF ENCHANTMENT
AS AN ACTOR I’ve worked in a lot of different places. I’m not special. It’s part of the job. People get into acting thinking that it is a road to comfort. It’s usually just a road to a Comfort Inn. The tradition of travel is so much a part of the profession that when I was fired from a television show, they gave me a suitcase as a parting gift.
Where you shoot a film almost never has a connection to the story. Everything depends on the budget. Cold Mountain, which takes place in the American South during the Civil War, was shot in Romania. Eastern Europe provided cheaper locations and a nonunion crew that could survive on vodka fumes.
A producer offered me a part in a movie about oil-rig workers in Houston, Texas. I was excited because I have relatives who live in the Houston area. But before the fantasy of visiting Walt and Syma became reality, he told me the movie would be shot in Cape Town, South Africa.
The Time Traveler’s Wife was shot in Toronto, not because of any story elements but because the Canadian government gave the movie company money and tax breaks to shoot in some of the state-run insane asylums. I shot in three of them. You had to make sure you got off the elevator on the right floor on that shoot. One night, the wardens came into the dining hall with Tasers drawn and told us to stay in the cafeteria, as there may have been an escape.
Usually, when you work in exotic locales, the producers brief you on any local problems for your safety and to meet the requirements of their insurance policies.
In Jamaica, we were given insecticide to protect our feet and ankles from “cow ticks.”
In Thailand, we were warned that feet are profane and can never be pointed at anyone. You can never point a shoe at anyone. You could never put shoes on the pillow of a bed. You could face jail time by going outside the hotel with your shoes on your head. Truth.
In Rio it was kidnappings, in Alabama you couldn’t swim in the lake where they dumped medical waste, and my favorite of all was the Houston film shot in Cape Town. The producer told me the only local problem was if you jumped into any east-flowing rivers or streams. There was a small parasitic fish that could swim up your penis and live there forever. I didn’t do that movie.
When I got cast in the 2007 film Wild Hogs, we were told we would be shooting in Santa Fe for a couple of months. This was remarkable. The movie took place in the United States. It was such a relief we didn’t have to fly to Croatia. But the Disney people never called with any warnings about the exotic nature of the locale. I was unprepared. As a public service I’d like to give a brief advisory for anyone planning to spend time in the area.
The first big surprise I had about Santa Fe is that you can’t get there. It is rumored to be the seventh-largest tourist destination in America, but there were no flights, not even an airport, or at least not a public one. The best you could do is get to Albuquerque, rent a car, and drive across the desert for an hour.
I drove to the hotel. Within thirty seconds I made my second discovery. There was no oxygen. Or at least not in normal amounts. I would have sold my soul for an Aqua-Lung. The city sits at about seven thousand feet above sea level. I wheezed from my car to my room. I had a phone message that they needed me at the location for a costume fitting. I wheezed back downstairs where a Teamster was waiting to take me to the set.
The set that day was up one of the local mountains at a national park situated at eleven thousand feet. As a point of reference the base camp for Mount Everest is at sixteen thousand feet.
On the way up the mountain, I got dizzy and nauseated at the same time, like when I was fifteen years old and made out with a girl who had just eaten a chili dog. I had been in town less than an hour and already I had altitude sickness. The makeup artist told me not to worry, everyone on the movie had altitude sickness. The assistant director warned me that besides the nausea, I might not be able to sleep through the night. He told me that to counteract this I needed to drink water constantly. It occurred to me that the “drinking water constantly” remedy was directly related to the inability to sleep through the night. I asked how serious the altitude sickness could get.
“Most people acclimatize in a couple of weeks. For some, it takes years. Rarely, someone gets HACE,” he said.
My alarms went off. It came from my fear of acronyms. “HACE? What is HACE?” I asked.
“Severe altitude sickness. Marked by disorientation, bleeding in the brain, and death.”
“Anything else I need to know about this place?”
“The coffee’s great.”
After a haircut and a costume fitting, a Teamster drove me back to the hotel. Certain I had a rapidly developing case of HACE, I decided to go out on the town before my brain started bleeding.
I drove to a nearby cluster of restaurants. I parked my car
and strolled down the sidewalk. I was surprised by how many women seemed to live in Santa Fe. It was a ratio I could have used in high school. I heard someone shout my name. I turned around and it was Wendy, an old theater buddy from New York. She hugged me and pulled me into a bar for a drink. The bar was filled with women. The bartender was a woman. The busboys were busgirls. I was clearly in the minority. I asked Wendy if she noticed the strong female current. “You’re kidding,” Wendy said.
“About what?”
“Don’t you know?”
“I guess not.”
“Santa Fe is the lesbian capital of the world.”
“Really? I didn’t even know they had an election.”
“Stephen, why do you think I’m here? This city is built and nurtured by lesbians. It’s the lesbian burial ground.”
“I had no idea, Wendy. Thanks for the heads-up.”
Wendy finished her drink, gave me a hug, and vanished into the night. I headed back out to explore. The complexion of the city came into focus. It all made sense. Just like in music, when you pluck the fundamental tone, you start a string of sympathetic vibrations. I could see the societal effects of being in a culture dominated by lesbians.
All of the bars had names that paid homage to the empowered female, like “Sister Act” or “Cowgirls,” instead of male-dominated bar names that for some reason often refer to playing cards, such as “Jack of Clubs” or “Joker’s Wild.”
Lots of lesbians in a culture meant lots of Volkswagens and minivans. For some reason, lesbians preferred boxy, slow-moving automobiles. They also seemed to spend a lot of time plastering them with bumper stickers. The stickers were spiritual (“In GODdess We Trust”), musical (“Madonna—Like a Virgin”), and nostalgic (“Kiss My Grits”).
The Dangerous Animals Club Page 4
