by Ralph Helfer
“Ease the safety off very carefully. No click!”
He looked like a madman.
“I don’t want to hear a click. No click! You hear? No click!” His hand was trembling.
I nodded. I put my hand over the safety. There was no click. The deer, after he’d finished his drink, stood like the prince he was, looking into the forest and assuring himself that all was well. His nose sniffed the air, but we were upwind. He knew nothing of us.
“Now, lock your sights and aim where his heart is. Just to the right of his shoulder joint where it meets the body.”
I couldn’t stop looking at the buck’s stunning head, with the touch of white around his quivering nose and his crown of horns. His eyes were the most beautiful things I had ever seen, and I felt as sure as I had ever been about anything that God had given this deer those eyes to see the beauty of what He had created. If I shot this deer, it would be like shooting God.
Uncle Chan was so close I could feel his lips on my ear, smell the coffee on his breath.
“When you ease that trigger back, do it slowly, you hear?” he rasped. I nodded. “Brace the butt of the gun tight to your shoulder. It’s got a kick.”
In my head, I was screaming at the deer, Run, please, run! and yet the weight of the gun was still against my shoulder. I was just eight years old, and this man was as close to a father as any I’d known. As much as I loved that deer, I also desperately wanted my uncle’s approval, wanted him to think I was brave and strong. If I didn’t take the shot, what would happen to us? My mother worked so hard to pay our share at the apartment, I knew she could never afford one of our own. I put my finger on the trigger.
“What are you waiting for? Do it! Do it, you stupid boy—do it now!”
I pulled the trigger. The explosion was like thunder breaking in the quiet of the forest. The bullet arched toward the deer.
In one move, the expert that he was, my uncle stood up in full view, rifle at the ready, and fired one shot through the heart of the buck. I had deliberately shot so that my bullet lodged in a tree behind.
I hadn’t been able to do it, but it didn’t matter. The prince was dead.
“You stupid, stupid son of a bitch!”
My uncle sent a resounding slap across my face, knocking me to the ground.
“Get up, you coward. GET UP!” I scrambled to my feet, stumbling from a wave of dizziness, in time to see him unsheath his bowie knife.
He’s going to kill me! I thought. How would he explain my death to my mother? “Please, Uncle Chan, please don’t do this. I’m sorry. Truly I am. Please don’t kill me.”
Tears flowed freely down my face, and hot urine ran down my leg. I was shaking all over.
He handed me the knife and dragged me by the arm toward the dead deer, pushing me hard until I fell on the body. I felt his warmth, and his body smelled like the forest itself.
“Skin that deer,” he roared.
He pointed to the spot where I was to start. My hand was shaking so badly that it took three tries before I could even puncture the skin. As soon as I made the cut, the innards belched forth. Stomach. Intestines. There was blood everywhere. I wiped the tears from my face and smeared blood across my cheek. This is God’s blood, I thought. The stench was unbearable. I vomited over and over. I tried to get up but slipped in the blood. Finally, mercifully, my mind went blank. My whole system wound down and shut off, and I was in shock.
To this day, I don’t know how I completed the task that my uncle had set before me. The blood on my face dried, with no more tears to smear it. The deer’s skin came free of the body. The head stayed with the antlers. The whole time, his dull, lifeless eyes, now covered in blood and slime, were fixed on me.
We draped the skin over the hood of the car and tied the antlers on the front—a hood ornament. The meat was cut into quarters and wrapped for the freezer back home.
I peeled off my clothes and stood naked while my uncle poured buckets of cold water over me from the stream. I wasn’t even embarrassed for him to see my nakedness. All of my dignity was already gone. Like the deer, I was dead.
5
After that horrible day hunting with Uncle Chan, I pledged my life to a crusade against animal cruelty. Whether it’s changing the way animals are trained for the movies, or raising awareness about conserving their habitats in the wild, I have been on that crusade every day since.
Still, you’re probably wondering how a passionate but poor boy from Chicago’s South Side ended up in Hollywood, surrounded by lions and tigers and chimpanzees and elephants. How did I accomplish my dream?
You certainly wouldn’t have known to look at me that I’d grow up to share my life with exotic animals. I was an introverted child. Small for my age, with a thick bush of curly hair and glasses, I stayed in the background, unnoticed and inconspicuous most of the time. But I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t completely obsessed with exotics, and my encounter with the deer only deepened my love of all things wild. There was never a doubt in my mind that I wanted to work with animals, especially exotic ones, when I grew up. My career has always felt less like a choice than the fulfillment of a destiny.
The snow lion dream, which would recur throughout my life, was not my only childhood lion dream. When I was about ten years old, I had a dream that gave me a goal that I would spent the rest of my life trying to achieve: honest, open, and—dare I say it?—loving communication between animals and humans.
In the dream, I was walking in the alley behind our house in Chicago. Every minute detail was clear; I could smell the stink of the rotting garbage, hear the women yelling to one another as they put their laundry on the lines. I felt afraid, as I did in real life; cats and rabid rats battled for meat in these alleys, and the cats didn’t always win.
At the end of the alley, though, there was a bright light, and I walked as fast as I could toward it. Soon I reached a hilly meadow area, carpeted in scented grass and filled with scattered trees, illuminated by the cleanest and most beautiful light I had ever seen. And everywhere in the hills were different animals, all kinds—tigers and antelopes and giraffes—sleeping and grazing and playing with one another. It was truly idyllic, the most beautiful place I had ever seen.
Directly in front of me, there was a massive tree with a miracle underneath it—a full-grown lion with a gorgeous mane, and sleeping cuddled into his side, a baby lamb. I approached the two of them, and I was flooded with a truly astonishing feeling of acceptance and love. As the lion watched, I knelt down to pet the lamb, filled with the overwhelming sensation that this was my true family. I had come home.
It felt less like a dream than a visitation, to be honest, and I can still remember every single detail to this day. It’s a biblical image, although I didn’t know that then. Whatever it was, it had an incredibly profound effect on me, and I was more sure than ever that I would find a way to spend my life with exotic animals.
In my eleventh year, I inched just a little bit closer to realizing my impossible dream. That was the year we moved to Southern California.
My dad had called, trying to patch things up with my mother one last time, and she went for it. So I, my mother, aunt and uncle, sister, along with Polly the parrot (the very beginning of my animal collections), drove to Southern California in Chan’s beat-up old truck. It took almost two weeks (we had no fewer than ten flat tires on the way out), and when we got there, we found my dad shacked up with another woman, but we decided to say good-bye to Chan and Anne, find our own place, and see what California had to offer anyway—and I’ve been there ever since.
As far as I’m concerned, it was in California that my life really began, because that’s when my life with animals started in earnest. For the first time, I was breathing fresh air instead of smog and car exhaust. I could go to the zoo, hike in the Hollywood Hills, and above all, have the freedom to keep a real collection of creepy-crawlies in my room.
The comedienne Carol Burnett grew up in our building. She was my best f
riend and, for a time, my girl. The neighborhood was rough, and home wasn’t always happy for either one of us. She got a kick out of helping me catch snakes and other things that go bump in the night. We would sneak off to the hills and spend hours on our bellies, catching and studying and collecting various creatures. Nothing teaches like experience, and I got a great education in snakes and insects—an education that would serve me well working these animals later in my life.
I had my first real job working with animals when I was in junior high school. It was a part-time job at a pet shop called the Hollywood Aquarium, and I was paid seventy-five cents an hour—not a lot of money, but every little bit helped at home. And although the pay was rotten, I felt fortunate to get any kind of a job working with animals.
The owner was Sylvester Chichester Lloyd, a bespectacled man with a large stomach, in his late sixties. He always wore the same style of clothes, khaki suspenders over a khaki shirt and pants.
My job was to clean all the cages: guinea pigs, mice, white rats, snakes, lizards, and birds. I was also “allowed” to change all the filters in the fish tanks when they needed to be cleaned, and I even helped feed a live goldfish to a piranha once a day.
Mr. Lloyd had little or no interest in the welfare of the animals who paid his bills. One morning I found our large boa constrictor nearly dead. He was a prominent fixture in the store, and been featured in a large cage right as you walked into the shop.
“The boa’s dying, Mr. Lloyd,” I said quietly, figuring he’d find a way to blame me. The truth was that the snake had been sick for months and hadn’t accepted food since I had started working there. Its scales were dull, and it had slimy yellow mucus oozing from its mouth.
Mr. Lloyd ignored me.
“Shouldn’t we call a vet?” I asked.
“No,” said Mr. Lloyd, without looking up from his paper, “too expensive. It would cost more than the snake is worth.”
“What should I do with it?”
“Leave it. It looks good for the customers. They don’t know it’s sick. Even if it dies, well, just leave it. It won’t stink for a week. Nobody will know.”
Occasionally a call would come in to Hollywood Aquarium from the studios asking for snakes, white rats, a fish tank setup, or even one of our beautiful cockatoos to work in a scene, and sometimes I helped to carry the equipment. This was my first taste of Hollywood, and I was fascinated by the glamour I saw on the sets. The lights were bright, and the women were gorgeous, and I would stare for as long as I could at the artificial scenery: the snow-covered Alps, a lush jungle, New York’s neon-lit Times Square. To my surprise, even Chicago’s elevated trains were represented.
Mr. Lloyd took a call one morning from a studio asking to rent some scorpions. When he was finished, he turned to me.
“Ralph, my boy, tomorrow is your big day. They want me to work a couple of our scorpions in a movie and I am going to, uh, allow you to do the job. My back’s been acting up a bit, and all that bending over will only irritate it. If you do a good job I’ll give you a ten-cent raise, bringing you up to eighty-five cents an hour! How about that?”
I knew he was afraid to touch them or he would have done the job himself. Thank God I had already gone through my apprenticeship with bugs, both splashing around Chicago’s Gory Creek with my friend Leon and an Amateur’s Guide to Snakes and Reptiles, and later with Carol in the Hollywood Hills. My experience had taught me that although these big black scorpions looked terrifying, their sting was no more serious than a bee’s. They were actually very easy to work with.
And they were in great demand. Before the advent of computer graphics, the industry referred to a certain kind of movie as a “special effects” film, and we were the special effects. If they needed a mammoth dinosaur or colossal alien creature, they took an image of an exotic animal like a lizard or a scorpion and enlarged it against a special background, lending the “monster” the illusion of incredible size, power, and strength. Sometimes it would be necessary to “dress” our monsters, which meant adding claws, fangs, scales, extra tongues—all easier said than done on a miniature scale.
This particular scene was supposed to be a battle between two monsters. My job was to hold two scorpions by their stinger tails and have them fight each other. Then I turned them loose in a large sand pit so the camera could see their raised stingers. The animals “fought” by locking their claws together, which didn’t hurt them in the least. That was it—we were done. Eventually they’d enlarge the film so my scorpions looked bigger than an apartment building.
The producer gave me a five-dollar tip. I couldn’t believe it! I wondered all the way home if I should tell Mr. Lloyd about the tip, but I knew that if I did, he would take it from me. My mother could buy a week’s supply of food with that money.
So ended my first studio job. I didn’t know then that providing Hollywood with exotic animals would become my livelihood for many years to come.
I learned a lot at Hollywood Aquarium. Mr. Lloyd was the first person I’d met who used animals for his own personal gain without any thought for their welfare. Unfortunately, he wouldn’t be the last. I was to learn, over the next many years in the animal business, that not everyone who works with animals is motivated by love. And it was from Mr. Lloyd that I learned you can tell a lot about the way a person will treat the humans in his life from the way he treats the animals.
One day I sold a customer a scarlet macaw. It cost him three hundred dollars. That was a big sale—probably the biggest Mr. Lloyd had seen in some time, and I was due for a big tip. He had promised that on any sales over fifty dollars, he would give me “something nice.”
“My boy, today I’m taking you to lunch. You deserve that after making such a big sale.”
Lunch! I didn’t want lunch. I wanted some money so I could buy things that were needed at home. But I didn’t protest, and at noon he locked up the store and put out the CLOSED FOR LUNCH sign. We headed for the drugstore on the corner and sat at the counter. I wanted a Salisbury steak.
“No, no, boy. Get something special. How about liver and onions? It comes with French fries.” He seemed to know a lot about the dish. “Give us liver and onions and a roast beef plate.”
While the food was being prepared I went to call my mom. She had been sick for a few days, and my sister and I had finally ganged up on her and gotten her to stay home from work. When I hung up the phone, a piece of paper came out of the refund slot and with it a bunch of change—a whole handful. I was delighted!
“Look at this, Mr. Lloyd. The telephone emptied all this change after my call.”
Mr. Lloyd eyed the coins as though they were gold.
“Give them here, boy. You’re still on the clock, so that change is mine,” he said, scooping the coins from my hand. “Here, keep this for your call.” He left a nickel in my palm.
“You going to drink this?” Lloyd pointed to my glass of drinking water.
“I don’t think so, “I said. It was a good thing, since Mr. Lloyd promptly removed his false teeth and put them in my drinking water! The fake teeth stared at me all through lunch, and I spent the meal helplessly watching food particles float to the top of the glass. I noticed people at the tables nearby inching their chairs away.
During the meal, I attempted to put a newspaper that I found on the counter between the teeth and me so I didn’t have to look at them. I had only stopped eating for a moment when Mr. Lloyd reached over and sliced off a big chunk of my food for himself. Now I knew why he’d ordered for me.
I worked for Mr. Sylvester Chichester Lloyd during my summer vacations throughout the rest of high school, and I never did get that raise.
By the time I was in my teens, I had a fair collection of my own animals, and was making money on the side by renting them out to Hollywood productions. My mother’s faith in me was unfailing, and her support unwavering—until the dozen rattlesnakes I had collected for a Kirk Douglas movie escaped from my room. Carol found the last one pinned under
the broom of a very pregnant, very upset woman on the third floor. After that, Mom suggested that I find alternate housing for my creatures.
My uncle Irv, one of the sweetest men on the planet, and his family had preceded us to California. He and I went into business together, opening a pet store of our own called Nature’s Haven. Irv was a bookie, so he came up with the money, and I handled the animal end of the operation. Sometimes our worlds collided. Irv used the back room of the shop to take bets, and I remember hearing him trying to keep his cool on a phone call as I scrambled after a monkey that had escaped and was rampaging through the shop.
The superstar Cornel Wilde, who was in so many of the Cecil B. DeMille pictures, was a big animal lover, and he came in all the time. I think it was largely because of him that our movie rental business really took off. The prop guy would call and say, “I need a raccoon,” and I’d pack up the animal and go over and do the shot.
Often they’d need a stuntman to double the actor and work with the animal, and I was always happy to oblige. I’m small and wiry, and, happily, that body type was shared by many of the leading men of the day. I was on a special work-school program, which meant four hours of school, four hours of work. In reality, it meant four hours of school, four hours of work delivering newspapers or manning an Orange Julius stand, and four hours at the pet shop. I’d get home with just enough energy to eat dinner and listen to I Love a Mystery or The Shadow on the radio before bed. I certainly wasn’t complaining. I was able to help support my family, and my dream had come true—I was making a living working with animals.
After two years, I was ready to move on. With my sister Sally Ann’s help, I opened up Nature’s Haven: Wild Animal Rentals on a two-acre piece of property in Van Nuys, California. It had been a dog-and cat-boarding kennel, so it was well-suited for my use.
