The Ape Man's Brother by Joe R. Lansdale

Author:Joe R. Lansdale [Lansdale, Joe R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Adventure, cookie429, Lost World, zeppelins, alternate history
Publisher: Subterranean Press
Published: 2012-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

[11]

Now the odd thing was, in a short time, the actors who played us became better known than us, and many people forgot that we were the real ape-men of the jungle—me being a little closer anthropologically in that department. We were old news, and that damn chimpanzee, even after he quit playing the part, as I said earlier, got special attention each year on his birthday. Cake and candles. We didn’t get that. But, we did get royalty checks, so there was a trade off. In that way I prefer what we got to what that damn ape got, though I still bristle at his popularity, and that now, so many years later, me and The Big Guy are mostly forgotten and the memory of the actor and that chimpanzee have taken our place.

The whole thing began to get to Big Guy. The whole thing being the world we were living in. He just couldn’t understand it. He discovered alcohol, and he could drink a lot of it. That stuff was to him like nectar to a bee. He became bourbon’s bitch. He was so drunk most of the time The Woman began knocking on my door late at night to ask if she could sleep on my couch while he raved and cursed in our ape-man tongue. Sometimes when he drank up all the hotel room booze, he climbed out the window, down the side of the building and into the street, and away he would go, dressed in clothes but not wearing any shoes.

He drank his way from one end of town to the other. One night he climbed over the walls of the zoo, bent bars, and let all manner of wild animals out. It was kept out of the papers, but a couple of tigers ate a bum and two orphans who were sleeping under a bridge. They weren’t tax payers, so it was easy to sweep under the rug. Way Big Guy saw it animals were supposed to be free. They could kill or be killed in a wild world situation, but cages, that bugged him, bugged him big time. In a way, I think he came to see the hotel, and even the whole of New York, as nothing more than a kind of cage that held him back from where he wanted to be, from the life he wanted to live.

Me, I was digging it. I got so I kept my body hair trimmed close, dressed nice, wore a monocle and a top hat and very nice suits. I took to going to jazz clubs, learned to play the bongos, smoked big cigars. I liked having an evening martini, wearing my bathrobe and slippers. I even did a little record album with a couple of those cool jazz cats; one of them on bass, one on sax, and me beating the skins. I got so I could lay down quite a few French phrases and a smidgeon of Italian. And there was another thing.

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