Unfortunately, there wasn’t much of a kingdom left any more, and that’s what this meeting was all about. Jack thumbed through his script while Wilson talked, wondering what sort of part he might get. A monkey, sure, but what kind of a monkey? They were all fucking monkeys, but Jack would probably be the one at the bottom of the cast list. That’s how things generally went. Japan had surrendered, the war was over, and it was supposed to be a new world, but his monkey suit still stank.
The suit stank because it was made of old hair and glue and leather, marinated for years in human sweat, but it stank most of all, Jack thought, because it was out of work. Gorilla Girl, in 1944, had come at the peak of the cycle for horror pictures, and jungle pictures too. Now people wanted ‘realism’, whatever that was, and times were tough on guys who played gorillas. Ray Corrigan, the big, rugged-looking fellow sitting at the far end of the table, had somehow finagled a second career playing cowboys. Talk said that he was planning to sell his suit to the first comer who could meet his price, but Jack didn’t believe it. The suit was a lifeline, a meal ticket, a union card, a faithful friend. Without it, a man would be nobody. A day labourer, like Jack had been too often in the last few years. Jack turned to his left and bummed a Lucky Strike from Charlie Gemora, the tough little Filipino who had been employed as a simian thespian since movies were silent. Then he realised that Wilson was talking again.
‘And now they think they can play us off against each other,’ the blond man said. ‘If there is a job, they pay peanuts. If it wasn’t for Monogram, we’d all be starving. Art Miles here got a feature there a while ago, right, Art?’
‘Right. Spook Busters. But that was almost two years back. With those goddam Bowery Boys. They must be thirty years old, easy, but they still act like juvenile delinquents.’
‘Yeah, but it was a job,’ rasped grey-haired Emil Van Horn as he ground the stub of a Kool into a glass ashtray. ‘I worked with the best. Abbott and Costello. Bela Lugosi. W. C. Fields. And now I can’t get arrested.’
‘Lugosi’s not doing much better himself,’ drawled Ray Corrigan, ‘and Fields is juggling for God now. People don’t want entertainment any more anyway, just social justice pictures and all that stuff.’
‘Which brings us to you, Jack,’ said Bill Wilson, transfixing his colleague with a bright blue gaze. ‘You’re the only one here who’s worked the suit at a major studio in the last year. Columbia, wasn’t it?’
‘Yeah, right,’ said Jack, suddenly in the spotlight. ‘Two days, playing stooge for the Three Stooges.’ He got a little chuckle, and hated himself for liking it.
‘So it’s not going great for any of us,’ continued Wilson. ‘And now I hear Willis O’Brien has cut himself a deal over at RKO.’ Everybody groaned. O’Brien had worked on the greatest monkey movie ever made, and nobody would ever dare deny it. King Kong. It had come out fourteen years ago, in 1933, but it was a show nobody had ever forgotten. The only problem was that it used some kind of trick photography instead of a man in a suit. If O’Brien scored again, every other monkey in Hollywood would be a dead duck. ‘That’s why I decided to write this script,’ said Wilson, tapping with one fuzzy finger at the pile of pages in front of him. ‘The Gorilla Gang. This is our way out, gentleman. Instead of waiting for jobs and then fighting each other for ‘em, we should be working as a team. You know, we should all hang together, or swing on the same vine, or something.’
‘We’re all bananas on the same bunch,’ muttered Jack. ‘No difference between us.’
‘That’s right, Jack!’ grinned Wilson, his white teeth flashing. ‘And that’s what this script is about. A bunch of apes get hit by some of this atomic stuff, you know, and suddenly they’re smart! They evolve! So they form a gang and they fight for money and power, and there’s some laughs and some tears and some scary parts, and we all end up as lovable as King Kong or Frankenstein. I tell ya, it’s a winner.’
‘I don’t know about this evolving stuff,’ rumbled Corrigan.
‘Jesus, Ray, it’s only a movie! Don’t make a federal case out of it!’
‘Who’s gonna put up the money?’ demanded little Charlie Gemora, vocal for the first time. ‘Us?’
‘Don’t worry,’ Wilson reassured him. ‘I know there’s not enough cash in this room to pay for the credits, much less the movie. But if we can get all the top ape actors in town to come in on this project, then we’ve got a little clout. Maybe even a money magnet. Come on, you know what we’ve got that they haven’t got. We’ve got the suits.’
‘They could make their own,’ suggested Van Horn as he squinted at the cover of Baker’s screenplay.
‘They couldn’t afford to make six suits. Not for a low-budget picture. Not like our skins. They’re special. Each one of these suits has a story. You all know that, even if you don’t want anyone else to know what it is.’
‘So you sell the show to Poverty Row, and we all get through the year,’ sighed Arthur Miles. ‘That’s not bad, but what happens in 1948?’
‘We’re not going to sell it to the studios,’ Wilson insisted. ‘At least not the way you mean. Hollywood’s changing, and the government’s going to take the studios apart. Gentlemen, we’re going independent. You’ve heard of United Artists, and Liberty Pictures. People are producing their own movies. Alfred Hitchcock. Frank Capra. And there are people ready to distribute them. We get financing, and then we each own part of the action. Maybe we’ll get to make some sequels. What if we hit it big, like the Mummy, or even the Bowery Boys? How would you like a piece of that?’
‘Who did you say was gonna pay for all this?’ asked Emil Van Horn.
‘Don’t worry! The script will bring in the financing,’ said Wilson. ‘And anyway, we’re not accountants, we’re actors. And right now, we’re having a party!’ He pulled a battered briefcase from under the table and extracted from its interior a cellophane package of paper Dixie Cups, and a bottle of Old Crow to fill them. Jack looked around the table, populated by six simians sitting in the afternoon sun, their hirsute bodies surmounted by the heads of six worried, middle-aged men. Some of them looked hopeful, the others only thirsty. Jack reached for his shot of whiskey and downed it in one gulp.
II
Jack let the script fall into his lap, leaned back in his ragged easy chair, pulled the chain on the lamp beside him and sat thinking in the dark. With his eyes shut, he hardly noticed the intermittent blue flashes of the neon drugstore sign two floors below his rented room. On the inside of his eyelids, he was replaying scenes from the pages he’d just finished reading, and he had to admit a lot of it looked pretty good. The script was bullshit, really, and he knew there were things wrong with it. He was even pretty sure some of the words weren’t spelled right. Yet a few of those scenes were just about foolproof. The gorilla lurking in the shadows near the uranium dig, who suddenly understands the words that men are saying and answers back. The gang forming in the jungle, shouting slogans and waving torches as they anticipate their attack on civilisation. Their savage conquest of a small South African town. The Gorilla Gang on the rampage as bank robbers, wearing zoot suits and fedoras, driving cars and brandishing machine-guns. Their daring foray on a diamond mine, which takes a shocking twist when they discover a cave that serves as the hideout for a group of fugitive Nazi officers. Among them is Hitler himself. After a wild, triumphant battle against a greater evil, the beasts are hailed as heroes, pardoned, and appointed international agents to fight tyranny around the world. The end.
The story was corny, Jack knew that, but it could work. Obviously Wilson had written the star part for himself, but they all had good scenes. The Gorilla Gang could save everybody’s ass. There was just one problem.
During the fight in the cave, one of the monkeys was going to die. The funny guy, the one who kept slipping back into his jungle ways, the one everybody liked. His death scene was a real tearjerker, guaranteed to make everyone remember Pearl Harbor and all that, but at the end the character would be dead. If there were mo
re movies, he wouldn’t be in them, and the man playing him wouldn’t be making any more money. As soon as he saw the words on the page, Jack felt his guts turn into a bag full of ice cubes. He knew, as surely as if God had whispered it into his ear, that he would be asked to play the monkey who didn’t make it.
He picked up his towel and his bar of Lifebuoy, walked down the hallway to the communal bathroom, made sure it was unoccupied, then did what he had to. Afterwards he washed his hands and face, then looked at himself in the mirror for a long, long time. Water trickled down his face; he looked like a crying child. Was this the look of a loser? Why did everybody think as soon as they saw him that they could walk right over him? The mirror might have known the answer, but it didn’t say, and after a while he got tired of waiting.
Back in his room, Jack fished in his pants pocket for the shred of paper with Bill Wilson’s number on it. He put on his last clean shirt, checked in the closet to make sure his monkey suit hadn’t walked away, and headed downstairs to the drugstore to make his call.
Jack hurried past the blue and orange Rexall sign, pushed through the revolving door and into the pale glow of fluorescent light that bathed the store. Funny how it made everything look like it did on the big screen. Light was a big part of the magic, whether you were selling apes or aspirin. The store looked just about as big and fancy as a movie house too, and the phone booths were way at the back. As he approached them, passing row after row of toothpaste, tampons and razor blades, Jack began to feel like he was walking the last mile. Maybe he should wait for a minute, do something to build up his strength. He took a left turn towards the lunch counter and planted the seat of his pleated tan pants on the red leather seat of a shiny chrome stool. A punk with pimples and a paper hat asked him what he’d have, but didn’t really seem to care. Jack ordered a burger and a Dr Pepper, and was soon left alone with his thoughts. Not enjoying the company too much, he spun around on his stool and spied a little coloured kid hunkered down in front of the magazine stand. The kid was surrounded by row upon row of comic books, their covers fanned out like some deck of cards that held the secrets to mankind’s dreams and delusions. Action Comics. Marvel Mystery. Smash. Crack. Whiz. The kid had the latest Jumbo Comics in his clutches, and he was poring over it like he was studying for a test, his black and white sneakers rubbing together as he turned each page.
Jack understood the feeling. Way too old for comics himself, he nevertheless picked up a copy of Jumbo once in a while anyway, always shamefacedly telling the newsie it was for a son he didn’t have. The reason for the sale was right on the cover, of course: Sheena, the Queen of the Jungle. Even the way it sounded was like poetry: Shee Nada, Quee Nada. Jungle. Still, it was the pictures that counted, drawings of the impossibly gorgeous blonde in her leopardskin swimsuit, striding through the jungle and meting out bloody justice to humans and animals alike. Sometimes she wrestled apes, sometimes she stabbed the wicked priestesses of forgotten tribes, but she never let anybody get away with anything. She knew the good apes from the bad apes, just like she knew the good tribes from the bad tribes. She was never wrong. She had a sort of a boyfriend named Bob, and sometimes he carried her spear, but mostly she was there for every guy who had a dime to share with her. A lot of them were soldiers not too long ago, just like Jack was, but he had an even better reason to remember her.
Maybe the sweetest job he ever had, just after he got out of the service, came about when he hooked up with a blonde who ran a hoochie-coochie show called ‘Rita Wilson’s Jungle Rhythms’. Unless they caught a good gig with a house band, the rhythm was just an old Gene Krupa record with an extended drum solo, but Rita looked pretty fine in that leopardskin outfit she’d sewn herself, and she didn’t seem to mind where the monkey touched her when they danced, even if he couldn’t feel much through the paws. Jack could never quite figure out if she really liked it or just thought it was good for the act. Maybe she didn’t know either, but it didn’t matter much after the cops in Burbank raided a performance of ‘The Angel and the Ape’. Rita and Jack were charged with ‘lewd and lascivious behaviour’, and somehow he never forgot how splendid that sounded, no matter what it meant. Rita was a tough cookie; she just paid her fine and moved on, but Jack got a month of room and board from the county, which turned out to be more than he could get when he got out. He never saw Rita again.
A white plate clattered on the black marble counter. ‘Here’s your burger, bud,’ said the punk in the paper hat. Jack looked down at a dry disk of meat between two halves of a stale bun, and at a pale section of pickle about the size of a quarter. He wondered why he kept coming here, but deep down inside he knew. It was easier.
‘Hey, boy! This ain’t a liberry!’ bawled the soda jerk. ‘You gonna buy something?’ The kid at the magazine stand jumped like he’d been caught stealing, but actually he was guilty of a much worse crime: caught dreaming. He dropped the comic book and backed towards the door.
‘Wait a second,’ said Jack. The kid froze, trying to figure his odds. ‘Come back here, man, and take your book,’ said Jack. ‘I’m gonna buy it for you.’
‘What do I have to do for it?’ asked the kid, suddenly all angry and street smart.
‘You just have to read the whole thing,’ said Jack. ‘Now pick it up and take a hike.’
Summoning up all the dignity he could muster, the kid retrieved the comic book and walked away; he didn’t start to run until he was out the door. ‘It’s only a goddam dime,’ Jack said to nobody in particular. He tossed a small silver circle on the gleaming black counter. He felt better than he had all day, but the burger soon changed that.
Jack killed his soda, dug up another dime and headed for the phone booths. He had to set up a private meeting with Bill Wilson while there was still time, before everything went wrong again.
III
Jack’s pre-war Plymouth would have been grey if he’d had the money to get it painted. As things stood, however, the old rattletrap not only looked like a leper, it was one of the walking wounded. Jack hated to take it out, even when he had gas money, because he never knew when it might break down. And then there was the muffler, or rather the lack of one. The heap sounded like a strafing Stuka, complete with high-pitched whine, and the black smoke pouring out of the exhaust pipe combined with the ungodly noise to make the car a certified cop magnet. The missing headlight didn’t help either. So it wasn’t really a surprise when Jack got a ticket on his way to Bill Wilson’s, but it didn’t do much to cheer him up. If he couldn’t afford to pay a mechanic, then how was he supposed to pay the fucking fine? And why was he living in this shithole city, anyway? New York, nobody had a car. Nobody needed one. But no, they had to make movies out in goddam Los Angeles, where every stinking thing was twenty miles away. He jacked up the blare of brass on the radio and screamed along with it. Phil Harris and the boys built to a wild crescendo and gave out one last big blast of big-band jazz. Then the speaker popped, and the music died too.
Jack was grinding his teeth and punching the steering wheel, lost in the canyons for almost an hour, before he finally found what he was looking for. Wilson’s house was small, dark logs and warm windows. Not much more than a cabin, really, but the man owned his own place, and the car parked beside it was a white Pontiac that looked almost new. There was nothing else around but the inky shadows of rocks and trees, and the big black sky spattered with small white stars. That’s something else wrong with the City of Angels, thought Jack: it’s a jungle out there.
He climbed out of the car and shut the door slowly, almost afraid to make a sound. It just seemed rude, somehow, out here in the middle of nowhere. A spinning cloud of bugs surrounded his head as he approached the cabin, and as he swatted at them he heard a screen door screech open. In front of him stood a man silhouetted against a rectangle of yellow light. It was Bill Wilson, dressed in a loud Hawaiian shirt and dungarees. ‘That you, Jack?’ he asked. ‘You find the place okay?’
‘Okay,’ muttered Jack, not even knowing w
hy he lied. He followed Wilson inside. The whole ground floor was one big room, its walls as homey and rough-hewn as the cabin’s exterior. A stove and a refrigerator and a kitchen sink stood at the back, but the space was dominated by heavy, unfinished furniture which Jack took to be redwood. A big table, some sturdy chairs, too many bookcases. Straw matting on the floors in place of carpeting. An open staircase led up to a bedroom and, as Jack learned after a few drinks, the bathroom too. ‘Nice,’ said Jack as he looked around. There were several framed glossy photographs, and Jack recognised faces almost at once: Dorothy Lamour, Hedy Lamarr, Maria Montez, Hollywood jungle queens all over the place. Wilson was a fan too, thought Jack, then realised that all the pictures were personally inscribed. How well had Wilson known these women? ‘Really nice,’ said Jack. Just how big had The Gorilla Girl actually been? He stepped back from the shiny, black and white visions of lipstick and mascara, and then he turned around. On the opposite wall was something equally striking but not so pretty: a huge, crudely carved mask, a simple, snarling visage painted in shades of black, white, and brown.
‘That one I didn’t know personally,’ admitted Wilson, ‘but I went a long way to get it.’
‘Africa, huh? You really been there?’
‘I’ve been everywhere, Jack. Worked on filthy stinking ships in all the seven seas. Always wanted to see the world, so I just went out and did. Ended up seeing a lot of things I wished I hadn’t.’ He walked towards the kitchen, and Jack noticed his peculiar limp again. ‘Drink, Jack? Bourbon all right with you? The boys finished off that bottle this afternoon, but I’ve got another one here. Gotta watch out for yourself, you know. Have a seat, Jack. Ice?’
Sitting across the redwood table from Bill Wilson, three fingers of Old Crow in his hand, Jack felt like he was back in that meeting with the other monkey men, but this time he had the undivided attention of the only one who mattered. The time was right for him to stake his claim, but instead he asked something that made no sense at all. He gulped down half his drink. ‘You get that skin in Africa?’ he asked.
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