The Ape Man's Brother Read Online Free PDF

the clergy.
    I went to fine restaurants and learned to order wine. I will tell you truthfully, I took to the life. It beat climbing trees to flee wild animals. It beat looking for fruit and eating bugs and worms, or chasing down some swift animal with a stick or a rock. I liked the nice rooms in the great hotel where we were kept. I liked the bed with its clean, cool sheets better than I liked a leafy nest on the ground or the crook of a tree. I liked room service. I liked the women who slept with me; or rather I liked what we did. No particular woman ever stayed with me more than a day and a night. I wouldn’t let them, even though there were many who wanted to. There were just too many opportunities, too many offers, and I took advantage of it.
    I was drinking until late, smoking cigars and sometimes a pipe. I was learning to tell jokes and talk in a sophisticated manner. I knew how to get my arm around women’s shoulders without being awkward, and I had gained quite a reputation in the tabloids as a ladies’ man.
    And I was becoming famous and admired. Maybe not as much as The Big Guy, but it was a new experience for me. Back home I was, to sum it up in crass and modern terms, just another monkey, because even though he was different from the rest of us—perhaps because he was—he was always held in higher esteem than me. At home, I was just like everyone else there, but in New York, I was special.
    In time this fame led to The Big Guy and myself becoming movie stars.
    At least for awhile.

[10]
     

Y ou went to the movies, you saw all manner of things in the newsreels about us. Saw us climbing trees and doing this or that, Big Guy bending those iron bars and so on, and it was only natural that Japanese-America and Hollywood came calling.
    This was sometime after we had been in New York, and we had learned the language reasonably quick and reasonably well; well enough to do simple interviews.
    We flew out there in a smaller zeppelin than the one that had brought us to New York. We landed in a field near the ocean. There were reporters and cameras everywhere. We did interview after interview.
    “What do you think about our world?” a reporter asked The Big Guy.
    “Busy,” he said.
    “What do you think about our women?”
    “I think about The Woman all the time.” He called her that, same as me, but they thought he just didn’t know how to say women, and so it was reported that he thought about women all the time. This led to women throwing themselves at him in even greater abundance than before. He ignored them even when a fine doll would toss a pair of underpants in his face, or a room key. It wasn’t a moral code that kept him from humping them; it was a sincere love for The Woman, who was back in New York teaching anthropology at a university. Me, I was damn near screwing anything except a hole in the ground. But The Big Guy was truly lonely. While we were out there in moving picture land, sometimes he would go out on the hotel veranda and look up at the moon and howl. Sometimes he whacked off. This was a behavior he had been taught to modify in public; out there he just put his hand in his pocket, but he knew I didn’t care. That was just SOP for us back home. While he was at it I read a magazine and drank a cup of coffee. This was the kind of activity that our handlers were always afraid of. Fearing we might go primitive during an interview, and frankly, it was a legitimate concern. It was hard to figure things out.
    “Where is your home?” reporters asked.
    The Big Guy shook his head. They thought he was being coy, but it was an honest answer. We had no way of knowing where our home was, not after that long flight. And in fact, old Dr. Rice wasn’t telling either. The crew had been sworn to secrecy due to scientific research and Rice wanting to keep the place unknown due to fear that it would soon be swamped by explorers and curiosity seekers. There was also this: No one except him and the navigator