The Ape Man's Brother Read Online Free PDF Page B

truly understood its locale, and to be honest, most people thought it was a big publicity hoax, that The Big Guy was some Hollywood muscle man, and that I was a fellow with a disease that caused me to grow hair all over my body. We never did shake that whole hoax business. It still follows us around.
    Anyway, there were all these interviews, and then we were given lines to learn and deliver. We made two pictures.
    We got a few calls from the desk about the howling, but that didn’t stop him, and being the celebrity he was, no one wanted to really corner him on it. Besides, he had a look in his eye when approached about such behavior that made you feel as if he were just looking for a reason to reach down your throat, grab your asshole, and pull it up through the big middle of you.
    As for the pictures we made while we were out there, they were terrible. We were the real deal, but we couldn’t act our way out of a paper bag with a pair of scissors. We didn’t really understand what acting actually was. They had these scenes where “natives” would attack, and me and The Big Guy would just actually beat the hell out of them. We had to really work to play at it; play of that sort wasn’t in our nature. You showed up with a weapon, even if it turned out to be made of balsa wood, and waved it around, it triggered our defense mechanisms. We broke up a lot of stuntmen.
    Also, on the second picture there was an unpleasant incident with a lion. There were lions on the lost world where we lived, but they were lions without manes, and they were much bigger. Our greatest fear in the form of jungle cats on our world wasn’t actually the lion. It’s what are called by those who study bones, saber-toothed tigers, thought to be extinct. Maybe everywhere else, but not where we are from. And the dinosaurs in those two pictures we made—stop motion and men in suits—were just plain silly, and didn’t look anything like the real deal. But damn it, there I go again. Distracted. I was talking about the movie we were in and how a supposedly tame lion on the set went wonky and jumped on the girl who was playing The Woman (we portrayed ourselves, The Woman did not), and The Big Guy strangled it as easily as a kitten. He was a hero up to that point, because there had been considerable panic on set, but when the cat was dead, The Big Guy jerked off the loin cloth they had given him to wear (we, of course, never wore any), yanked it up by the tail, and diddled it in its dead ass right there, then threw it on the ground, put his foot on its neck, lifted his head and howled. This was his way of showing dominance, acceptable behavior where we came from when there had been a life and death struggle. It wasn’t necessary for an antelope, and some of the creatures were a bit too large for this act of dominance, but, still, it was considered just part of our way of life when it came to big dangerous predators. It was a way of showing who was boss. This, in civilization, however, was looked down upon even more than whacking off in public.
    Observers on the set took this out of context and thought it to be deviant. The set was abandoned for the day and no one would talk to The Big Guy for awhile, and certainly wouldn’t turn their backs on him. Me, I was proud of him. That said, the rest of the shoot was a nervous event.
    Anyway, Hollywood is Hollywood, and there was money in the picture and money in us, and the public was waiting, even though the first picture had gotten the worst reviews of any film ever made. What counted was it had been a big financial hit. The director, who was devastated, and not anxious to do another film with us, or anyone else, retired from the movies and went into advertising, but when asked about his work in later, nostalgic interviews, said he had worked at shooting pornographic slides.
    That was the end of our movie career as actors, even though that lion screwing incident didn’t end up in the last picture we made. It