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had been filmed, but that part of the movie was removed, though there was gossip about it from some of those on the set who had seen it. That gossip grew into a larger crowd that claimed to have witnessed the incident. If all of those who claimed to have seen it had, then the movie set that day would have been packed with a thousand people for a scene that only contained The Big Guy, the actress, me, and the lion, a skeleton crew, and a mess of false tree and brush props.
    We went back to New York.
    The rumors didn’t kill our popularity. Not at first, (we’ll come back to that) because there wasn’t any actual revealed evidence it ever happened; it seemed so bizarre to Americans on either coast, and in the middle of the country, it was mostly thought of as an anecdotal story.
    As for future pictures, they hired an actor to play The Big Guy, and got that damn chimpanzee to play me. When the actor pretended to kill a lion, or some beast in the movies, he put his foot on it and howled. No diddling allowed. The chest beating and the howling were correct, but the other thing missing just sort of dulled the situation. But, from an acting standpoint, our replacements were better and the movies still made money and made us even more famous. They made eight movies back to back about us with that actor pair, all of them major hits. There were lunch boxes and thermoses and tee-shirts and bread and milk products with our pictures on it. I still have a lunch box with a thermos, and for the right price, I’m willing to let it go.
    By the time the first four pictures came out, the two with us, and the first two with the other guy and that chimp, we were rich as fresh-whipped butter. Something I learned about my adopted land was that if you had money, and if you were making other people money, you could diddle a lion at high noon in Times Square and most everyone would get over it, even the kids, as long as you didn’t have the actual film to prove it, of course.

[11]
     

N ow 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