Me Cheeta: My Story by Cheeta

Author:Cheeta
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2011-03-15T04:00:00+00:00

When I’m swinging upside down in my tire behind the Sanctuary, the contrails of the airplanes segmenting the little rectangle of blue visible above the climbproof wall appear to me like the wakes of yachts racing around Catalina Island; and the planes themselves look just like the flying fish who skipped beside us. If Lupe wasn’t coming to the shore for the weekend, Johnny would take me and Otto down in his new Continental, lingering at every stoplight for a little triumph of handshakes and a quick Tarzan yell, with Otto in his lap and me around his shoulders, my hands on the wheel, bamboozling the bums and lushes. Good morning, sir, I’m looking for the source of the Zambezi but I seem to have taken a wrong turn at Wilshire Boulevard! NDSN, as the stage direction used to go—Nobody Don’t Say Nuthin’. Umgawa! I loved him and he loved Otto and me and we loved each other and I felt, at those moments, almost entirely unendangered.

Occasionally, on a Lupe weekend, Peter Lorre—a very special human being and a wonderful actor whose beautiful manners were largely unaffected by his addiction to morphine—might pick me up and I would spend most of my time on the yacht club lawn with him and his wife, of whom I was very fond, trying to apologize for upsetting the black and white ornaments they would arrange with great thoughtfulness in a kind of courtship dance on their checkered board, outrunning the unpredictable geysers throwing rainbows over the grass, and accustoming myself to my lowered status, my starvation rations of affection, my ten-minute poolside audiences.

It was on one of those weekends that Flynn arranged for a steer to be slaughtered and sunk beside his Sirocco with lead weights and a buoy to attract some “motherfucking fish” and maybe “a few hungry merbroads.” Kate Hepburn was staying with Bogie and Mayo on Santana and she rowed me out there herself in the tender, I remember, to where Allure was moored beside the Bogarts, and there they were, the World’s Most Perfect Male and the Latino Tornado. Lupe was wearing a British naval officer’s cap at an angle, which somehow managed to articulate a tolerant contempt for everything aquatic. Tarzan and His Mate.

Otto snuffled around in the swell, like a great dumb happy seal, getting ready to shake himself dry over Lupe’s chic little brass-buttoned jacket, bless him. I wanted to throw him a fish. Johnny spent the afternoon lined up on the stern of Allure with Flynn and Bogie, rods out, alpha males at peace. There was a strong atmosphere of closeted male defensiveness coming off them, exacerbated as the day wore on by their failure to catch any fish for their females, who talked and drank with a smattering of beta males in the bows. The very special human beings glimmered in the ocean glare, as did the slightly less special ones who ferried them their drinks.

At some point in the evening, after Otto had

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