Me Cheeta by Cheeta Read Free Book Online Page A

comedian, not an intellectual, never claimed to be one—but once more, holding my gaze, he picked up the glittering thing and opened the shelter and I thought, No, don’t know, but since it’s open … and I whipped through the opening in the shelter between his legs and bounded toward the bananas. The ashen snake showed its startled pale underside as I veered past it, pouching the loot. I could hear the human coming fast behind me, shouting violently over the screeches of Stroheim and Spence, so I scooted with my bananas up a sort of vertical sequence of branches and kept going toward where the light was coming from. My disused legs seemed about as sturdy as a pair of termite-fishing sticks and one of my hands was full of bananas so I nearly fell, hauling with one arm only on the glossy branches, but I kept hoisting myself up, and eventually knuckled out, limping, into a somewhat bewildering landscape.
    For a moment I thought I’d come out of the wrong opening—the one marked “Not Your Life”— and almost backed quietly out, as if I’d inadvertently walked in on Jack Warner banging a secretary (which I have done). For a start,
where was everything?
Why was I standing in the middle of a windy gray plain? How come the rehabilitation center didn’t open onto a gentle prospect of fruiting figtrees and termite mounds, as I’d half suspected it did? It took me a moment to grasp that we were in the middle of a huge, swiftly flowing river, that the world was circular like the moon, that what I needed above all was to get back to my shelter. But, much as Gary Cooper always appeared to be profoundly in touch with the nuances of existence while what was actually passing through his head was “food, sex, sleep,” what I thought then was “bananas, safety, up!”
    I clambered up a handily narrow treelike thing and found a place to cling with my legs so that I had both hands free, for the eating of bananas. Down below me I could see scores of huge shelters containing leopards and various other unnameable and mind-boggling megafauna—the first elephants, rhinos, hippos, lions, zebras and giraffes I’d ever seen. Now, the Discovery Channel becomes reliably breathy and awestruck whenever it approaches the subject of “the visitor’s first glimpse of the animals who make their home here, on these teeming, majestic plains.” Imagine how overwhelming that “first glimpse” might be with all of them seen at once in a single panoramic view. On top of that, all around, the gray water was rushing by us uninterrupted as far as I could see. There were no banks! I wondered if Kigoma and the forest had simply been
flooded
, and that what we had here was a small number of humans who had collected as many other life-forms as possible on a kind of floating platform with a view to starting afresh when the waters receded. Was everyone else dead? Were we the Saved? Was this the reason that, as I had noticed, all of us chimpanzees were
children?
It seemed too insane an idea to be plausible, so I dismissed it and concentrated instead on eating half a dozen bananas, while various humans called up at me, “Hey, cheat! Come on down, you damn cheat!” Eventually I allowed myself to be coaxed down and recaptured. They were offering more bananas as bait, you see.

4
America Ahoy!
    Janos, or Johann, Weissmuller was seven months old when he made the same trip, on the SS
Rotterdam
out of Holland to New York in February 1905 (in steerage, though, not in MGM luxury). So he was too young to experience crossing the Atlantic in the way I did. I got to know that ocean in March 1932, with Tony Gentry and Captain Mannicher and Gabe DiMarco and Earl and Julius and the rest of the guys. It was a great time. Humans, it turned out, were on the whole a delight.
    Tony, or “Mr. Gentry,” was the kind one with the sprightly alpha air and the spiffy line of white skin down the center of his sleek head. The lopsided one with long, mournful ears and the bubbles