Jennie (37 page)

Down in the basement, the darkness of the place and all the posters and the black light made Jennie even more nervous. I should have done something, put her in the car. I could see she was getting really upset.

Sammie bent down to open a drawer, and I put my hand on her back, or I guess it might have been her ass, you know, affectionately, and then
Jesus
. It happened so suddenly. I heard Jennie make that barking sound and felt this sudden rush and I turned and then there was a shooting pain in my hand. I don't even remember Jennie even touching me. It was so dark I couldn't see much, but I could
see this sudden sticky blackness all over my hand. Inky black under the black light. Sammie started screaming and I went upstairs and ran some water in the sink and put my hand in to wash it off. The water instantly turned
red
. I pulled my hand out and that's when I saw—I mean I had this horrible sickening feeling and I saw that, well, this had happened. My pinky was gone. Well, I said to myself, there goes my career as first krummhorn with the Boston Pops. [Laughs.]

So you see, it was my fault. It was stupid to bring Jennie along with us, it was stupid to let her in the house, and it was stupid to bring her down to the basement. I knew Jennie was getting nervous. I knew she didn't like Sammie. I knew she got worried and even aggressive when people touched each other around her. It was just plain stupid.

What? Why didn't she attack Sammie? I don't know. You know, there was something about Sammie that kind of scared her. I don't know. In the dark like that, maybe she just miscalculated. I'm sure she didn't intend to hurt me or anybody. She didn't know her own strength.

At that point I threw up. Sammie was pretty good about it. Her mother was upstairs hollering her head off and yelling about not ruining the carpet. At least that's what I remember her saying. “What happened? Is he bleeding? Don't drip on the carpet! Get that boy out of here!” She didn't even know there was an ape in the house. Sammie told her to fuck off again and got me in the car and to the hospital.

The funny thing was, we forgot all about Jennie, just left her there shut up in the house with the hypochondriac mom. I was feeling very weird and didn't really know what was going on. Shock, I suppose. Sammie was so scared it was all she could do to drive the car.

So we got to Newton-Wellesley and they got me inside. The doctor wanted to know what had happened. He was really concerned that we go get the finger. He wanted to send someone back
to get it. We tried to explain that it was probably in this chimpanzee's belly, but I think he thought we were delirious. And that's when I suddenly said, “Where the hell is Jennie?”

Sammie turned white and said she was still in the house with her mom, and she jumped up and left. The doctor was saying “Go look for the finger!” But she went and called the police. I have to tell you, it was pretty funny.

See, all the commotion had finally gotten the old drunken bitch out of bed. She came staggering down the stairs, saw blood on the carpet no doubt, heard some noises, and went down to the basement. Apparently Jennie was hiding under the covers of Sammie's bed, whimpering. Her mom, thinking it was somebody, started yelling and when there was no response whipped the covers back. Oh my God. The poor old sot screamed and fainted.

The police found Jennie curled up on the bed, crying. They revived the mom. She was hysterical. She refused to leave the house so the cops searched around for the finger, couldn't find it, and left with Jennie and brought her to my parents' house. By the time the police got there my parents were on their way to the hospital, so they sat there and waited. Jennie felt terrible about the whole thing. She was so ashamed and sad. When my parents came home, Jennie went to the bathroom all by herself and shut herself in. To punish herself. She stayed in there for the whole day. Not even eating.

I really don't remember much of anything. They'd given me some shots that made me feel like I was floating about two feet off the bed.

They fixed me up pretty well. After about six months I stopped missing it, except that once in a while it itches right on the tip and I can't scratch it. Damn, that's annoying!

So that's what happened. My parents blamed Jennie and decided to send her away. End of story.

I got over losing a finger pretty fast. I wasn't mad at Jennie at all. It was my fault. But my mom kind of freaked out. She kept Jennie
locked up in her room most of the time and she had bars and screens put on the windows and door. It was like a prison. And Jennie treated it as such, banging and yelling and raising holy hell when she was put in there. My mother and I had pretty bad fights about that, arguing almost nonstop. Sarah was her usual uptight self, walking around with her nose wrinkled up. Sarah was basically a good kid but she really had a thing about Jennie. My father did his usual disappearing act. Did you try to talk to Sarah? I knew it. I knew she wouldn't talk to you. You might as well forget her; she's as stubborn as an ox. When she says no that's it.

So then Prentiss came around with some kind of offer to take Jennie to Florida. Prentiss and that pompous old egomaniac Epstein. Epstein thought he had the answer to everything. My parents jumped on that. I was surprised, because my mother didn't like Prentiss. My parents pretended to have a talk with us, to let us feel that we were part of the decision, but their minds were already made up. I was against it right from the beginning. I knew exactly what was going to happen. I tried my best to stop it, but being a sixteen-year-old kid I didn't have much say.

They had a going-away party for Jennie. I thought that was the cruelest thing of all. Like giving a condemned man a last meal of steak and lobster. Jennie had no idea that in three days she was going off to prison. It was so phony, this party. I wasn't going to go to the party, but then I changed my mind and showed up near the end. I guess I'd had a bit too much to drink. They were all lined up for a picture and I just ripped into the whole lot of them. I said some pretty terrible things. I asked them how they could stand there laughing and smiling and having a good time, when they were sending Jennie to prison camp. I called them hypocrites, motherfuckers—I mean, you name it, I said it. And you know what? Nobody said a word. Nobody defended themselves. The knew. They knew in their heart of hearts that I was right. They stood there looking guilty and then they slunk away and went home.

Here was the deal. This'll make you sick. Prentiss insisted that
we transfer ownership of Jennie to the Tahachee center. Like a fucking slave. Like chattel. Oh but no, it was just a legal formality, see? Something about insurance or liability, oh yes of
course
, thank you, just a formality. Right. And my parents went along; they signed the fucking slave papers, giving these bastards
ownership
of Jennie. A clean break, a new life, they called it. How oh-so-
wonderful
.

My parents flew down to Florida with Jennie and came back a few days later. I wasn't around. I was so pissed off at that point that I'd gone to live with Sammie. I stayed there for a week and then I came home.

I have to say, I found my parents pretty broken up about losing Jennie. The only one who was happy was Sarah, who went humming and skipping around the house with her fucking dolls, having make-believe tea parties and things like that. Oh well, I can't blame her really. My mother cried just about every day. That surprised me, how upset she was. We talked a lot about it and I think that was the first time I'd really connected with my mother in years. We talked a lot about the early days when Jennie was young, about Jennie and her tricycle, about Jennie's first words. My mother really needed to talk about it. She tried to explain to me why they'd sent Jennie away. It was hard for her to defend the decision when I could see she was having second thoughts herself. I think she realized she'd made a terrible mistake. My father, he just withdrew. He was always pretty remote, but he looked . . .
ashen
after that. He was at the museum all the time. I really resented that.

The reports coming back from Florida were all bullshit. Everything was “normal.” Normal what? Jennie was still in a fucking cage. It may be normal for them to sit in a cage but it wasn't normal for Jennie. What a crock.

After a few weeks my mom started getting suspicious. They had said Jennie would be released on the island in two weeks, but a month later she was still in the cage. They were evasive. They didn't
want anyone to come down. Dr. Prentiss came back to Boston, but three weeks later she was back down there. No one would say why.

My father was a fool. In his mind, these people were scientists and scientists never make mistakes. He had this faith in those people, Epstein, Prentiss, Gabriel.

So here we were, everyone was sitting around the house talking about it but nobody was doing anything. Not a thing.

So I finally said to myself, the hell with this, this is a crock of shit, I'm going down there myself to see what's going on. I'm her brother. Nobody, I mean nobody, is going to keep me out.

So about a month after Jennie left, I wrapped my stuff in a blanket and I went out there to Route 128 South and stuck out my thumb.

That trip was a nightmare. It took me five days to get to Florida, and it rained almost every day. The first man that picked me up was an old guy driving a gold Cadillac, and he was so drunk, weaving all over the road, that I had to get him to stop and get out in the pouring rain. Then this busful of hippies picked me up; you know, peace and love and all that, and all they did was bitch about who was hogging the drugs, who had ripped off the pot. I spent a night with them at this KOA campground outside of Baltimore, and they split in the morning without paying and I had to pick up the tab.

It rained that morning, and an old black guy in a pickup stopped. He was only going a hundred miles, but he invited me to spend the night at his place near Richmond. His name was Dad Patterson. Dad and Muriel Patterson. I'll never forget them. Their kids had grown up and moved away, and I think they were lonely. They lived on one floor of this old crooked three-story house, looked like the porches were about to fall off. His wife cooked me a fantastic meal and I told them about Jennie. They were fascinated. They asked me all kinds of questions about Jennie and what it was like growing up with a chimpanzee, and I showed them
my finger and they ooohed and aaaahed about it. We drank bottles of Colt 45.

It rained the next day and the next, and when I finally got to Florida it was still raining. It took me a day and a half just to get halfway down the length of Florida. Tahachee was on the Gulf Coast near Sarasota.

The last afternoon it cleared and I slept in a nature preserve along the coast. Snuck in and curled up in this deep sandy grove of palmettos. The night was full of stars. When I got up in the morning the sun was just hitting the tops of the trees and the birds were making an incredible racket. They were flapping and squawking through the branches. The sky was an incredible blue color, and as I lay on my back I saw a snake silently gliding along a branch above my head, so smooth and graceful and alive. It seemed like such a perfect thing. Just going about its business and living its life in a pure way. There was no bullshit or phoniness in this snake's life. No complexity, no moral agony. Just this beautiful simplicity. I wanted to be the snake, at that moment. I wanted to shed this life and just be up there, gliding over a branch in the warm sun. And then I thought, Why not? What's preventing it? I
can
be like that.

I wish I could describe to you how I felt at that moment. I suddenly felt alive, for the first time in months. It was a great moment, an epiphany. I felt free.

I was only a few miles from Tahachee. I felt that, whatever happened, everything would be okay. I don't know why I felt that, but I did. It helped me get through the next few days.

I got to Tahachee about noon. I walked into George Gabriel's office. I wasn't looking very presentable, and he looked at me and demanded to know what I wanted.

I told him who I was, and I said I wanted to see Jennie.

He just looked at me steadily. He was dressed like a great white hunter, all khaki with pockets everywhere. He had a big beard and
a sunburned face, but his eyes were that Nazi pale-blue color. He was a phony through and through.

Then he stood up and shook my hand. He said, “Sit down, sit down. Let's rap.”

Can you believe it?
Let's rap
. He thought he was so cool, so with-it, he wanted to rap. Not talk. Rap. What an asshole.

Then he went through this thing of crossing his legs and sighing and saying that he didn't know how to say this to me, but it wouldn't be in Jennie's interests for her to see me, and so forth. Looking all thoughtful and fatherly and paternal, and pretending to take me seriously when all he wanted was for me to get the hell out. Talking to me like I was some kind of idiot.

So I said, “Why not?”

So he started this longwinded explanation. They wanted to release Jennie on this island with other chimpanzees, but in order to do that they had to accustom her to being with her own kind. And that was a hard process for her. On and on. Jennie was very upset, she was having trouble adjusting. But she was making progress. My visiting her would undo all the progress they'd made. It would upset Jennie terribly. It was a very bad idea. It would set her back.

I listened patiently. I thought, Let the asshole talk himself out. I mean, nothing was going to keep me out of that cage.

So I asked him, very nicely, why she was in a cage in the first place.

He had another long bullshit explanation for that. She was too powerful to control on a lead. She was extremely hostile to other chimpanzees and had attacked one. Why, Jennie had even attacked him. When he said that I couldn't keep myself from grinning. Too bad Jennie didn't kill the bastard. The only way, he said, to safely allow her to be in proximity with other chimps was by keeping her in a cage. On and on. It was only temporary and then she would have a long and happy life on the island.