Me Cheeta by Cheeta Read Free Book Online Page B

of flesh in the crooks of his nostrils was Captain Mannicher, and so on and so forth. It wasn’t hard to pick things up. “Whiskey!” meant if you went to the other side of
Forest Lawn
, opened a number of doors, retrieved a bottle and brought it back to Mr. Gentry, you got a banana. “Get my hat” or “Smokes, please” meant… well, you follow—there were a lot of banana-based interactions between Mr. Gentry and me.
    By now I was consuming so many bananas that I had taken to imitating the humans and using the stalk to unfurl the skin petal bypetal. You missed the chewiness but discarding the skin enabled you to get through them quicker. “Come on, kid, you’re going to Hollywood,” Mr. Gentry would say, as he worked on another task with me. “You ain’t gonna meet Dietrich if you can’t fetch her a smoke. You want the banana, do it again.”
    “Elephants” meant taking a bucket of water from Mr. Gentry and climbing up the shelters onto the backs of the bristly giants and sluicing them down. “Giraffes” meant carrying armful after armful of hay up to a kind of bier on a pole and avoiding being licked on the way by the creature’s hideous two-foot-long blue-black mouth-tentacle, or “tongue.” “A key” was an intricate glittering thing. “Somersault,” “Do it again” and “Again” all meant performing the backflip I was so adept at. “Hold Number Four” was where I’d come from; “the Atlantic” was the river without banks we were crossing to get to “America,” which was where all the humans lived. “Cheats” or “Cheatster” or “The Cheater” was me.
    “Bluffing or packing” was simple enough. The humans sat around displaying fans, like male turacos in courtship, made up of prettily colored cards. The longest display, again like turacos, was rewarded with “chips.” When Mr. Gentry said something like “It’s my notion that you ain’t packing nothing, Earl,” or “He’s bluffing, Cheats,” it was my job to circle the table while the others showed me their fans. Mr. Gentry would ask me, “Bluffing or packing?” with a raised forefinger. Whichever word he lowered the forefinger on, I had learned through a long afternoon of withheld bananas, I was at that moment to display wildly, and he would make his call based on the Cheatster’s “advice.” As far as I could tell, bananas seemed to be allocated on a completely unreadable basis for this task.
    Of course, I didn’t have any idea of what was going on most of the time. I was a very young chimpanzee and had only just started to read human beings. But frankly, I hadn’t had any idea of whatwas going on in the forest either. It wasn’t any
more
confusing being on
Forest Lawn
, and at least I was hanging out with a higher consciousness, and who doesn’t want to do that? Death seemed very distant among the humans. Also, I was struck by how deeply they seemed to love animals. And a further plus was that I was eating more bananas than possibly any other chimpanzee on earth. Whatever
Forest Lawn
was, I liked it!
    The only problem was that with my fetching and carrying Mr. Gentry’s cigarettes and whiskey all the time, and my smoking and drinking “imitations” at the card displays (they weren’t imitations, I
was
smoking and drinking) proving so popular, everybody else decided that they wanted a chimp familiar too. Earl, my banana-denier, was the first to follow where Mr. Gentry had led, and one day I was surprised to see Frederick scuttling across the “deck” with one of Earl’s dirty brown cigarillos between his lips.
    Frederick was a nervous little chimp and spent most of his time huddled inside Earl’s shirt, puffing on a cigarillo so that it seemed Earl’s chest hair was constantly on fire during the card displays. He couldn’t do backflips or feed the giraffes but he could smoke, that kid, and drink, and of course the
Forest Lawn
rehab program, with its fierce commitment to relaxing us, encouraged him to