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Bobo the Self Hating Chimp
By Shalom Auslander
At 9:37 in the otherwise ordinary morning of May 25th, Bobo, a small male chimpanzee in thr Monkey House of the Bronx Zoo, achieved total conscious self-awareness.
God.
Death.
Shame.
Guilt.
Each one dropped like a boulder into his tiny primitive skull. He grabbed his head in his hands and ran shrieking around the Monkey House., overturning the water bowls and tearing branches off the trees. He threw himself to the ground, kicking and screaming. He grabbed a fallen branch and began chasing smaller chimps around the old oak tree.
Suddenly he froze. Bobo closed his eyes and leaned against the trees for support. It was as if he had been somehow transported to the top of the tallest tree in the forest and was looking down upon himself below. Bobo saw a brute, a beast, a dim, half-finished creature using his newly acquired skills not to build or better, but to brandish a weapon. He also noticed he was sporting a bright red erection. Shame filled his soul.
Shame?
That was new.
The children who were gathered around Bobo’s cage began to scream and cry, tears streaming down their faces. Horrified elfin jurors, they pointed their little fingers at Bobo’s hideous primate penis.
The mortified teachers skipped right over Explanation and went straight to Denial.
“He’s just happy, children!” tried one teacher
“Happy, yay!” clapped the other.
They quickly led the little innocents outside. Management had no choice. The Monkey House was closed for the day, and Bobo was sedated.
The Monkey House is located a short walk away from the Skyfari stop, just across the way from the World of Reptiles. For the past year and a half there had been the constant hammering, sawing and diesel-engine-starting of facility improvements. RV parking had been added near Wild Asia, and they had spruced up the water fountain outside Giraffe World with real Mexican tiles. Administration East got new computers.
The Monkey House restoration was the most recent, and the most elaborate, of them all. Those monkeys made their numbers. “They pull in the crowds,” said management.
Renovations began in early March in order to be finished in time for the Memorial Day rush. The chain link fences were gone, replaced by clear, high-tensile-strength glass. The first week many of the chimps smashed into the glass midswing, but soon learned. Gone, too, was the drab décor, replaced with exotic white birch trees, maple trees an even grander, older oak and the crown jewel of the empire, Chimpanzee Bay, a freshwater pool that was built to look like an ocean, complte with a Deluxe WaveMaker 3000. Judging by the crowds pressing their faces to the glass on opening day, it didn’t seem to bother anyone that chimpanzees can’t actually swim.
The humans outside the glass all seemed quite pleased with themselves, but for the lesser primates inside, the renovations caused nothing but anxiety. Beebee, Shirley, Topo and Sweetface were all on antidepressants, Ladybird had mysteriously stopped menstruating and Koko had to be sent to a small animal farm in Northern New Jersey for recuperation. The doctors expected this.
“We expected this.” They said.
And so, when Bobo made the same astonishing evolutionary leap as our primate ancestors made so very long ago, the doctors quickly misdiagnosed it as posttraumatic stress disorder, discontinued his Viagra, and scripted him for a month of Paxil, five milligrams a day.
Bobo awoke some time later to find himself in a small steel box. His head felt heavy. The front wall of the box was a metal grid, through which Bobo could see many similar boxes along the way.
He wanted out.
A lab technician at the far end of the room was enjoying her morning feeding and a cup of coffee as she read the New York Post. He would appeal to her humanity. “You and I indeed are different,” he would say. “But surely the awareness of our own mortality and the unique self perception we share more than compensate for the fraction of a fraction of a difference in our physical genetic makeup.”
Bobo’s mind may have evolved, but his larynx had not. And so, in place of an impassioned plea for understanding, he grabbed the cage with both hands and legs and shrieked as loudly as he could.
Bobo was sedated.
The next morning, the zookeepers decided to see if Bobo could be safely reintroduced to the Monkey House. Bobo was no fool; he knew what they wanted. They wanted Curious George. They wanted Megillah Gorilla. The wanted Monchichi.
They wanted Monkey.
Bobo held the vet’s hand as she walked him back inside the house. They loved it when he did that. Elbows high, hands scratching his armpits, Bobo did an exaggerated chimp walk over to the food bin and peeled a bright yellow banana.
“Ooo ooo ooo! Ah ah ah!”
The zookeepers smiled, nodded and wrote on their clipboards.
Bobo walked back and forth, scratched his ass and rubbed his crotch. He swung from a low birch branch. “Ooo ooo ooo! Ah ahah!”
The zookeepers smiled, nodded and wrote on their clipboards.
He sat down next to a female chimp named Esmerelda. Esmerelda stood up and bent over. Bobo mounted her.
The zookeepers smiled, nodded and wrote on their clipboards.
“I’m sorry,” Bobo said to Esmerelda when the zookeepers had gone. “That was wrong of me.” He sat down and sighed heavily. Smerelda moved behind him and began picking bugs from his hair.
“I know you probably don’t understand the concept of right and wrong,” said Bobo, “at least not in the Judeo-Christian sense of the words. I didn’t myself until just recently. Still, I used you. Selfishly. I objectified you. And for what? To save my own hide? Or perhaps still worse, out of some violent animus, some stubborn genetic trait of survivalism that even nature can’t filter out? Damn all my high philosophies! I deserve to be locked in this cage with you monkeys.”
Esmerelda pulled a yellow-winged bug from Bobo’s shoulder, examined it closely for a moment and stuck it in her mouth. She stood up, brushed herself off and walked away.
“Wait!” called Bobo.
There was something about this Esmerelda, something in her eyes. Maybe she was different. Bobo wondered if they could someday leave this zoo together, get a place nearby in Rye, maybe Larchmont, something with a fence and a swing set for the kids.
Bobo scrambled after her but he was too late. Esmerelda swung from tree to tree, straight across to the far end of the Monkey house where Mongo, one of the house’s larger males, was closely examining his scrotum. Esmerelda nudged Mongo, turned her back to him and bent over with all the ceremony of someone who just dropped a quarter. Mongo mounted her.
Bobo instantly loathed her. Then he immediately regretted loathing her.
Regret?
That was new.
Bobo watched the contempt as Mongo humped away at Esmerelda, his ridiculous testicles bouncing this way and that like terrified children on the back of a runaway camel in the African Safari Park.
“Help!” they seemed to shout. “Get us out of here!”
Bobo knew how they felt. Look at us, Bobo thought, shaking his head sadly. A bunch of fucking monkeys. Where is our dignity? Where is our pride? Where are our pants?
Mongo finished with Esmerelda, walked over to where Bobo was sitting and shat.
A typical leader. Bobo could not believe the amount of shit in this tiny chimpanzee world. There was shit on the floor, shit in the cave, shit by the sunflowers. There was shit in the water bowls, and shit on the jungle gym.
As Mongo lumbered back to his bed on the far side of the cage, Bobo grabbed a handful of Mongo’s shit and threw it at him as best he could. Bobo didn’t have much of a pitching arm, or opposable thumbs, and the turd sailed sloppily past Mongo and landed with a wet thud on the wall jus beyond him. It held there for a moment, and Bobo scratched his head.
“Huh,” Bobo thought. “Kinda looks like a chimp.”
And with that, Bobo scooped up another handful of shit, walked over to the glass and began to paint. By the end of his first week of consciousness, Bobo had painted large Expressionistic shit murals on every wall of the Monkey house. He began with simple studies: an apple, a monorail, cotton candy. By the end of the first week, he was creating sweeping tableaus which he saw as scathingly satirical attacks on chimpanzee culture and primate mores. His Self-Portrait was a devastating attack on racism, his Unhuman Stain a poignant plea for self-respect and dignity, his Life in the Monkey House a searing assault on political power and corporate gain.
Bobo’s paintings not only exhibited true artistic promise, they were –at $35,000 a pop –a much-needed additional revenue stream for the zoo. Management gently steered him toward Werthmeyer oil paints and hand-stretched canvases (they had, after all, spent almost $3 million on those glass walls). They even splurged for a mahogany easel with height adjustment and bonus stow-away paint tray.
This wasn’t nearly as therapeutic for Bobo as it may have appeared. He was tortured. His mind was expanding at a phenomenal rate. All he could see was the shit around him, and all the paint in the world could never cover it up.
His paintings grew darker with every passing day. Reds became blues, greens became blacks. While the humans took snapshots, Bobo wrestled with existence, meaning and death.
And Esmerelda.
Of course she would prefer Mongo over him!
Why not? It was a mutually selfish relationship; he only wanted to fuck, she only wanted to breed. They were perfect for each other!
Let them, he thought.
Let them sniff and poke and prod, let them debase themselves and all chimpkind.
Bobo was spending much of his time alone, curled up in the darkest corner he could find. “Aww,” said the tourists tapping loudly on the glass, “you’re an angry little monkey, aren’t you? Yes you are!”
He stopped painting. Management optimistically distributed Bobo’s art supplies to the rest of the chimps, albeit with little success: Mongo tore apart the canvases to make himself a bed, and Esmerelda had to be hospitalized after eating half a dozen tubes of Cadmium Yellow. Her skin tone was never the same again.
On June 12, just two weeks after he first gained consciousness, Bobo stood up and walked calmly over to Chimpanzee Bay.
B He put one foot in, then the other. The humans waved and smiled. Bobo walked further into the water, one step after another.
He didn’t struggle or flail. He made no attempt to swim.
Bobo stayed below the waves for some time . The rest of the chimps stood by and watched with anxious curiosity.
Esmerelda bent over.
Mongo mounted her.
After some time, Bobo’s body bobbed gently up to the surface. The Wavemaker 3000 nudged it slowly back to shore.
A small chimp named Kato stood on a large, flat quarry stone that extended out, into the Bay.
God
Death
Shame
Guilt
Each one dropped like a boulder onto his tiny primitive skull. He grabbed his head in his hands and shrieked. All of a sudden, it was as if Kato had been somehow transported to the top of the tallest tree in the forest, and was looking down upon himself below. Kato saw a group of God’s first drafts sitting complacently by as one of their own took his own life, not only unable to offer any assistance but unable even to relate, to understand, to get beyond bananas, and shit and Esmerelda’s vagina.
“Look at us,” Kato thought. “A bunch of fucking monkeys.”
He grabbed a klong, bare branch from the Monkey House floor and used it to gently pull Bobo’s body back to shore.
Nobody else seemed to mourn. No one else seemed to feel. Shame filled Kato’s soul.
Shame?
That was new.
Shalom Auslander will be in discussion with Naomi Alderman, Shalom Auslander and Elena Lappin at Jewish Book Week on Tuesday 28th February at 6.15pm
Click here to view this session
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