Under My Skin

LES DANIELS

I

The six apes sat around the conference table while they waited for their meeting to be called to order. One of them began to scratch and grunt, but he slipped back into silence when the others stared him down. This was no time for clowning: there was money at stake. It was quiet in the boardroom - almost too quiet. Finally the tallest, sleekest and handsomest of the great primates shuffled to his feet and cleared his throat. He handed each of the others a thick sheaf of white paper as he began to speak.

‘This is the first meeting of The Gorilla Gang,’ he said, ‘but if we work together it will not be the last. You have been chosen because each one of you is an expert in his field. You are the best of your breed, gentlemen, and you deserve to be congratulated. I applaud you!’ He pounded his gigantic hands together as he looked around the room. His fur, with its beautiful tints of red and gold, seemed almost afire where it was touched by bars of sunlight streaming through the Venetian blinds. The boss looked like a leader, Jack admitted to himself, but that was probably nothing but the skin.

‘Gentlemen, I suggest we remove our heads.’ The boss reached for his massive, hairy cranium and yanked it upwards; his five followers acted in imitation. ‘Monkey see, monkey do,’ thought Jack with just a trace of rancour.

‘I appreciate the gesture of solidarity you made when you all agreed to arrive in full costume, and it’s good publicity too. The press boys got some swell photos,’ the group’s leader continued. ‘But now we’re on our own and these heads are just too darned hot. I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s passed out from wearing one, especially when I had a dumb director who was trying to be a tough guy.’ There was laughter all around the table. ‘You’ve got to be able to breathe, am I right? Sure, smoke ‘em if you’ve got ‘em.’

With his head off, the boss was just an ordinary guy named Bill Wilson. His hair was blond and his eyes were blue, and he probably thought he was good-looking enough to be an actor, Jack suspected, but not the kind of actor he had turned out to be. Like the rest of them, he was just a monkey man, with only the suit he owned standing between him and the unemployment line. Wilson had been lucky, though. When the war came he’d been rated 4-F, because of an old hip injury that he said helped him with his ape walk, and so while others like Jack were sweating in real jungles, actually fighting for their lives, Bill Wilson waltzed right into the best role any of them was ever likely to see.

The Gorilla Girl was what they call a sleeper, a picture that didn’t cost much but took in a lot at the box office. Some of the critics even liked it, because it wasn’t about the female monster they had expected, but about a beautiful girl who used the brute beast she’d raised from a chimp (people thought it worked that way) to take revenge on the men who’d killed her lover. It had been an easy performance for Wilson, Jack surmised. After all, how tough could it be to show affection for his co-star, an imported beauty with a fake name, fabulous hermans and a sultry style? Yet there had even been talk of an Oscar nomination for Wilson, although Jack suspected that was just a press agent’s dream. Still, when Wilson and What’s-Her-Name had died in each other’s arms, their bodies riddled with vigilante bullets, there wasn’t a dry seat in the house. The Gorilla Girl had made Bill Wilson the King of the Monkey Men, and that was that.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t much of a kingdom left any more, and that’s what this meeting was all about. Jack thumbed through his script while Wilson talked, wondering what sort of part he might get. A monkey, sure, but what kind of a monkey? They were all fucking monkeys, but Jack would probably be the one at the bottom of the cast list. That’s how things generally went. Japan had surrendered, the war was over, and it was supposed to be a new world, but his monkey suit still stank.

The suit stank because it was made of old hair and glue and leather, marinated for years in human sweat, but it stank most of all, Jack thought, because it was out of work. Gorilla Girl, in 1944, had come at the peak of the cycle for horror pictures, and jungle pictures too. Now people wanted ‘realism’, whatever that was, and times were tough on guys who played gorillas. Ray Corrigan, the big, rugged-looking fellow sitting at the far end of the table, had somehow finagled a second career playing cowboys. Talk said that he was planning to sell his suit to the first comer who could meet his price, but Jack didn’t believe it. The suit was a lifeline, a meal ticket, a union card, a faithful friend. Without it, a man would be nobody. A day labourer, like Jack had been too often in the last few years. Jack turned to his left and bummed a Lucky Strike from Charlie Gemora, the tough little Filipino who had been employed as a simian thespian since movies were silent. Then he realised that Wilson was talking again.

‘And now they think they can play us off against each other,’ the blond man said. ‘If there is a job, they pay peanuts. If it wasn’t for Monogram, we’d all be starving. Art Miles here got a feature there a while ago, right, Art?’

‘Right. Spook Busters. But that was almost two years back. With those goddam Bowery Boys. They must be thirty years old, easy, but they still act like juvenile delinquents.’

‘Yeah, but it was a job,’ rasped grey-haired Emil Van Horn as he ground the stub of a Kool into a glass ashtray. ‘I worked with the best. Abbott and Costello. Bela Lugosi. W. C. Fields. And now I can’t get arrested.’

‘Lugosi’s not doing much better himself,’ drawled Ray Corrigan, ‘and Fields is juggling for God now. People don’t want entertainment any more anyway, just social justice pictures and all that stuff.’

‘Which brings us to you, Jack,’ said Bill Wilson, transfixing his colleague with a bright blue gaze. ‘You’re the only one here who’s worked the suit at a major studio in the last year. Columbia, wasn’t it?’

‘Yeah, right,’ said Jack, suddenly in the spotlight. ‘Two days, playing stooge for the Three Stooges.’ He got a little chuckle, and hated himself for liking it.

‘So it’s not going great for any of us,’ continued Wilson. ‘And now I hear Willis O’Brien has cut himself a deal over at RKO.’ Everybody groaned. O’Brien had worked on the greatest monkey movie ever made, and nobody would ever dare deny it. King Kong. It had come out fourteen years ago, in 1933, but it was a show nobody had ever forgotten. The only problem was that it used some kind of trick photography instead of a man in a suit. If O’Brien scored again, every other monkey in Hollywood would be a dead duck. ‘That’s why I decided to write this script,’ said Wilson, tapping with one fuzzy finger at the pile of pages in front of him. ‘The Gorilla Gang. This is our way out, gentleman. Instead of waiting for jobs and then fighting each other for ‘em, we should be working as a team. You know, we should all hang together, or swing on the same vine, or something.’

‘We’re all bananas on the same bunch,’ muttered Jack. ‘No difference between us.’

‘That’s right, Jack!’ grinned Wilson, his white teeth flashing. ‘And that’s what this script is about. A bunch of apes get hit by some of this atomic stuff, you know, and suddenly they’re smart! They evolve! So they form a gang and they fight for money and power, and there’s some laughs and some tears and some scary parts, and we all end up as lovable as King Kong or Frankenstein. I tell ya, it’s a winner.’

‘I don’t know about this evolving stuff,’ rumbled Corrigan.

‘Jesus, Ray, it’s only a movie! Don’t make a federal case out of it!’

‘Who’s gonna put up the money?’ demanded little Charlie Gemora, vocal for the first time. ‘Us?’

‘Don’t worry,’ Wilson reassured him. ‘I know there’s not enough cash in this room to pay for the credits, much less the movie. But if we can get all the top ape actors in town to come in on this project, then we’ve got a little clout. Maybe even a money magnet. Come on, you know what we’ve got that they haven’t got. We’ve got the suits.’

‘They could make their own,’ suggested Van Horn as he squinted at the cover of Baker’s screenplay.

‘They couldn’t afford to make six suits. Not for a low-budget picture. Not like our skins. They’re special. Each one of these suits has a story. You all know that, even if you don’t want anyone else to know what it is.’

‘So you sell the show to Poverty Row, and we all get through the year,’ sighed Arthur Miles. ‘That’s not bad, but what happens in 1948?’

‘We’re not going to sell it to the studios,’ Wilson insisted. ‘At least not the way you mean. Hollywood’s changing, and the government’s going to take the studios apart. Gentlemen, we’re going independent. You’ve heard of United Artists, and Liberty Pictures. People are producing their own movies. Alfred Hitchcock. Frank Capra. And there are people ready to distribute them. We get financing, and then we each own part of the action. Maybe we’ll get to make some sequels. What if we hit it big, like the Mummy, or even the Bowery Boys? How would you like a piece of that?’

‘Who did you say was gonna pay for all this?’ asked Emil Van Horn.

‘Don’t worry! The script will bring in the financing,’ said Wilson. ‘And anyway, we’re not accountants, we’re actors. And right now, we’re having a party!’ He pulled a battered briefcase from under the table and extracted from its interior a cellophane package of paper Dixie Cups, and a bottle of Old Crow to fill them. Jack looked around the table, populated by six simians sitting in the afternoon sun, their hirsute bodies surmounted by the heads of six worried, middle-aged men. Some of them looked hopeful, the others only thirsty. Jack reached for his shot of whiskey and downed it in one gulp.

II

Jack let the script fall into his lap, leaned back in his ragged easy chair, pulled the chain on the lamp beside him and sat thinking in the dark. With his eyes shut, he hardly noticed the intermittent blue flashes of the neon drugstore sign two floors below his rented room. On the inside of his eyelids, he was replaying scenes from the pages he’d just finished reading, and he had to admit a lot of it looked pretty good. The script was bullshit, really, and he knew there were things wrong with it. He was even pretty sure some of the words weren’t spelled right. Yet a few of those scenes were just about foolproof. The gorilla lurking in the shadows near the uranium dig, who suddenly understands the words that men are saying and answers back. The gang forming in the jungle, shouting slogans and waving torches as they anticipate their attack on civilisation. Their savage conquest of a small South African town. The Gorilla Gang on the rampage as bank robbers, wearing zoot suits and fedoras, driving cars and brandishing machine-guns. Their daring foray on a diamond mine, which takes a shocking twist when they discover a cave that serves as the hideout for a group of fugitive Nazi officers. Among them is Hitler himself. After a wild, triumphant battle against a greater evil, the beasts are hailed as heroes, pardoned, and appointed international agents to fight tyranny around the world. The end.

The story was corny, Jack knew that, but it could work. Obviously Wilson had written the star part for himself, but they all had good scenes. The Gorilla Gang could save everybody’s ass. There was just one problem.

During the fight in the cave, one of the monkeys was going to die. The funny guy, the one who kept slipping back into his jungle ways, the one everybody liked. His death scene was a real tearjerker, guaranteed to make everyone remember Pearl Harbor and all that, but at the end the character would be dead. If there were more movies, he wouldn’t be in them, and the man playing him wouldn’t be making any more money. As soon as he saw the words on the page, Jack felt his guts turn into a bag full of ice cubes. He knew, as surely as if God had whispered it into his ear, that he would be asked to play the monkey who didn’t make it.

He picked up his towel and his bar of Lifebuoy, walked down the hallway to the communal bathroom, made sure it was unoccupied, then did what he had to. Afterwards he washed his hands and face, then looked at himself in the mirror for a long, long time. Water trickled down his face; he looked like a crying child. Was this the look of a loser? Why did everybody think as soon as they saw him that they could walk right over him? The mirror might have known the answer, but it didn’t say, and after a while he got tired of waiting.

Back in his room, Jack fished in his pants pocket for the shred of paper with Bill Wilson’s number on it. He put on his last clean shirt, checked in the closet to make sure his monkey suit hadn’t walked away, and headed downstairs to the drugstore to make his call.

Jack hurried past the blue and orange Rexall sign, pushed through the revolving door and into the pale glow of fluorescent light that bathed the store. Funny how it made everything look like it did on the big screen. Light was a big part of the magic, whether you were selling apes or aspirin. The store looked just about as big and fancy as a movie house too, and the phone booths were way at the back. As he approached them, passing row after row of toothpaste, tampons and razor blades, Jack began to feel like he was walking the last mile. Maybe he should wait for a minute, do something to build up his strength. He took a left turn towards the lunch counter and planted the seat of his pleated tan pants on the red leather seat of a shiny chrome stool. A punk with pimples and a paper hat asked him what he’d have, but didn’t really seem to care. Jack ordered a burger and a Dr Pepper, and was soon left alone with his thoughts. Not enjoying the company too much, he spun around on his stool and spied a little coloured kid hunkered down in front of the magazine stand. The kid was surrounded by row upon row of comic books, their covers fanned out like some deck of cards that held the secrets to mankind’s dreams and delusions. Action Comics. Marvel Mystery. Smash. Crack. Whiz. The kid had the latest Jumbo Comics in his clutches, and he was poring over it like he was studying for a test, his black and white sneakers rubbing together as he turned each page.

Jack understood the feeling. Way too old for comics himself, he nevertheless picked up a copy of Jumbo once in a while anyway, always shamefacedly telling the newsie it was for a son he didn’t have. The reason for the sale was right on the cover, of course: Sheena, the Queen of the Jungle. Even the way it sounded was like poetry: Shee Nada, Quee Nada. Jungle. Still, it was the pictures that counted, drawings of the impossibly gorgeous blonde in her leopard-skin swimsuit, striding through the jungle and meting out bloody justice to humans and animals alike. Sometimes she wrestled apes, sometimes she stabbed the wicked priestesses of forgotten tribes, but she never let anybody get away with anything. She knew the good apes from the bad apes, just like she knew the good tribes from the bad tribes. She was never wrong. She had a sort of a boyfriend named Bob, and sometimes he carried her spear, but mostly she was there for every guy who had a dime to share with her. A lot of them were soldiers not too long ago, just like Jack was, but he had an even better reason to remember her.

Maybe the sweetest job he ever had, just after he got out of the service, came about when he hooked up with a blonde who ran a hoochie-coochie show called ‘Rita Wilson’s Jungle Rhythms’. Unless they caught a good gig with a house band, the rhythm was just an old Gene Krupa record with an extended drum solo, but Rita looked pretty fine in that leopard-skin outfit she’d sewn herself, and she didn’t seem to mind where the monkey touched her when they danced, even if he couldn’t feel much through the paws. Jack could never quite figure out if she really liked it or just thought it was good for the act. Maybe she didn’t know either, but it didn’t matter much after the cops in Burbank raided a performance of ‘The Angel and the Ape’. Rita and Jack were charged with ‘lewd and lascivious behaviour’, and somehow he never forgot how splendid that sounded, no matter what it meant. Rita was a tough cookie; she just paid her fine and moved on, but Jack got a month of room and board from the county, which turned out to be more than he could get when he got out. He never saw Rita again.

A white plate clattered on the black marble counter. ‘Here’s your burger, bud,’ said the punk in the paper hat. Jack looked down at a dry disk of meat between two halves of a stale bun, and at a pale section of pickle about the size of a quarter. He wondered why he kept coming here, but deep down inside he knew. It was easier.

‘Hey, boy! This ain’t a liberry!’ bawled the soda jerk. ‘You gonna buy something?’ The kid at the magazine stand jumped like he’d been caught stealing, but actually he was guilty of a much worse crime: caught dreaming. He dropped the comic book and backed towards the door.

‘Wait a second,’ said Jack. The kid froze, trying to figure his odds. ‘Come back here, man, and take your book,’ said Jack. ‘I’m gonna buy it for you.’

‘What do I have to do for it?’ asked the kid, suddenly all angry and street smart.

‘You just have to read the whole thing,’ said Jack. ‘Now pick it up and take a hike.’

Summoning up all the dignity he could muster, the kid retrieved the comic book and walked away; he didn’t start to run until he was out the door. ‘It’s only a goddam dime,’ Jack said to nobody in particular. He tossed a small silver circle on the gleaming black counter. He felt better than he had all day, but the burger soon changed that.

Jack killed his soda, dug up another dime and headed for the phone booths. He had to set up a private meeting with Bill Wilson while there was still time, before everything went wrong again.

III

Jack’s pre-war Plymouth would have been grey if he’d had the money to get it painted. As things stood, however, the old rattletrap not only looked like a leper, it was one of the walking wounded. Jack hated to take it out, even when he had gas money, because he never knew when it might break down. And then there was the muffler, or rather the lack of one. The heap sounded like a strafing Stuka, complete with high-pitched whine, and the black smoke pouring out of the exhaust pipe combined with the ungodly noise to make the car a certified cop magnet. The missing headlight didn’t help either. So it wasn’t really a surprise when Jack got a ticket on his way to Bill Wilson’s, but it didn’t do much to cheer him up. If he couldn’t afford to pay a mechanic, then how was he supposed to pay the fucking fine? And why was he living in this shithole city, anyway? New York, nobody had a car. Nobody needed one. But no, they had to make movies out in goddam Los Angeles, where every stinking thing was twenty miles away. He jacked up the blare of brass on the radio and screamed along with it. Phil Harris and the boys built to a wild crescendo and gave out one last big blast of big-band jazz. Then the speaker popped, and the music died too.

Jack was grinding his teeth and punching the steering wheel, lost in the canyons for almost an hour, before he finally found what he was looking for. Wilson’s house was small, dark logs and warm windows. Not much more than a cabin, really, but the man owned his own place, and the car parked beside it was a white Pontiac that looked almost new. There was nothing else around but the inky shadows of rocks and trees, and the big black sky spattered with small white stars. That’s something else wrong with the City of Angels, thought Jack: it’s a jungle out there.

He climbed out of the car and shut the door slowly, almost afraid to make a sound. It just seemed rude, somehow, out here in the middle of nowhere. A spinning cloud of bugs surrounded his head as he approached the cabin, and as he swatted at them he heard a screen door screech open. In front of him stood a man silhouetted against a rectangle of yellow light. It was Bill Wilson, dressed in a loud Hawaiian shirt and dungarees. ‘That you, Jack?’ he asked. ‘You find the place okay?’

‘Okay,’ muttered Jack, not even knowing why he lied. He followed Wilson inside. The whole ground floor was one big room, its walls as homey and rough-hewn as the cabin’s exterior. A stove and a refrigerator and a kitchen sink stood at the back, but the space was dominated by heavy, unfinished furniture which Jack took to be redwood. A big table, some sturdy chairs, too many bookcases. Straw matting on the floors in place of carpeting. An open staircase led up to a bedroom and, as Jack learned after a few drinks, the bathroom too. ‘Nice,’ said Jack as he looked around. There were several framed glossy photographs, and Jack recognised faces almost at once: Dorothy Lamour, Hedy Lamarr, Maria Montez, Hollywood jungle queens all over the place. Wilson was a fan too, thought Jack, then realised that all the pictures were personally inscribed. How well had Wilson known these women? ‘Really nice,’ said Jack. Just how big had The Gorilla Girl actually been? He stepped back from the shiny, black and white visions of lipstick and mascara, and then he turned around. On the opposite wall was something equally striking but not so pretty: a huge, crudely carved mask, a simple, snarling visage painted in shades of black, white, and brown.

‘That one I didn’t know personally,’ admitted Wilson, ‘but I went a long way to get it.’

‘Africa, huh? You really been there?’

‘I’ve been everywhere, Jack. Worked on filthy stinking ships in all the seven seas. Always wanted to see the world, so I just went out and did. Ended up seeing a lot of things I wished I hadn’t.’ He walked towards the kitchen, and Jack noticed his peculiar limp again. ‘Drink, Jack? Bourbon all right with you? The boys finished off that bottle this afternoon, but I’ve got another one here. Gotta watch out for yourself, you know. Have a seat, Jack. Ice?’

Sitting across the redwood table from Bill Wilson, three fingers of Old Crow in his hand, Jack felt like he was back in that meeting with the other monkey men, but this time he had the undivided attention of the only one who mattered. The time was right for him to stake his claim, but instead he asked something that made no sense at all. He gulped down half his drink. ‘You get that skin in Africa?’ he asked.

‘Why, Jack! You know better than to ask that! Nobody ever asks where a skin comes from!’ Wilson’s protests were a parody of indignation; his blue eyes were bright with mockery. ‘These things aren’t easy to come by. I dare say some of them are illegal. And all of them have secrets.’

‘No secret about mine,’ said Jack. ‘I got it from my uncle. He was in vaudeville. I used to love watching him when I was a kid, and he left it to me when he died.’ Jack killed his drink. ‘The only thing anybody ever gave me. So I took it and made a living from it. But it’s like going around the world, I guess. You see some stuff you don’t like.’

‘And you might not like knowing about your skin, if that’s all you’ve bothered to find out. Have another drink. What do you think it’s made of?’

‘Leather and hair, mostly.’

‘But where did the leather and hair come from, Jack? What died so you could be in show business? Is it pig skin and yak hair, like Van Horn’s? I think he made it himself, but there’s something strange about that, too, if you stop and think about it. Don’t you know who made yours? Don’t you care? I think you’ve got a real skin there, Jack, know what I mean?’

Wilson’s grin was maniacal, but Jack just sat and stared. He’d never really thought about stuff like this for long, even though he couldn’t always stop the dreams.

‘The audience never worries about it, do they, Jack? They probably think all the skins are real. Like that Boris Karloff picture, The Ape. You know, you just take a dead monkey and spoon out the stuffing, and then you climb inside. They don’t know it’s more like a mummy, do they? A dried-out old corpse you wrap around yourself till nothing shows of you except your eyes. And the worst thing is you wanted to do it. You wanted to be it. Like something called out to you from a hundred thousand years ago. It’s bred in the bone, Jack, and that scares even a big cowboy like Ray Corrigan. Doesn’t it scare you?’

Wilson paced across the room, his whiskey glass waving in the air, his hip lurching weirdly. He tapped the wall beside a neatly framed eight by ten. ‘And the women love it, too. It’s in the blood. It’s some kind of magic. Without the skin, I’m just an old merchant seaman who walks funny. With it, somehow, I’m somebody. Do you think I’d ever have met any of these pin-ups if I didn’t have the skin? It’s all any of us have, Jack. Take away the suit and there’s not a Barrymore in the bunch.’

Jack was getting nervous, but he was still too interested and too angry to get up and leave. Maybe he was earning himself some leverage here. ‘You’ve got the best monkey suit I’ve ever seen,’ he said.

Wilson stopped moving and stared at a wall as if he could see something on the other side. ‘It was just about the same as murder,’ he said. ‘And they made me do it, too. Wouldn’t just sell it to me. They made me earn it, Jack. Something sacred, they said. A sacrifice. Like it was their god, but still they wanted to get rid of it. And maybe they were right. I feel like I’ve been working for the damned thing ever since, trying to please it, but it’s never been enough. I should have left it alone. I wish to God I had.’

‘What kind of an animal did you say it was?’ asked Jack.

Wilson sat down again. He poured another drink and downed it in one continuous motion. ‘Funny about that, you know? People don’t care. Gorilla, ape, orang-utan, they don’t give damn, as long as it’s big and strong and hairy. Some of these suits don’t look like anything that ever walked the earth. Ever see Charlie Gemora with Lugosi in Murders in the Rue Morgue? No? Well, it was years ago. Charlie had his suit on, whatever it’s supposed to be, and the goddam director kept cutting back and forth between Charlie and some close-ups of a live monkey half his size. And nobody even noticed!’

‘But what about…?’

‘You know, Charlie’s not the only one who worked with Bela Lugosi. And did you hear Van Horn carrying on this afternoon? Well, I worked with Lugosi too, you know. Say what you like, he can really control the camera, the poor old bastard. He really fills the screen. Let me tell you a story. No, really. You’ll like this. I was with old Bela on a picture for PRC. The worst. They made Monogram look like MGM. Bela used to hide in his dressing room when we weren’t shooting, so nobody got to talk with him much. But we had one day on location - Bronson Caverns, natch - and there was nowhere for him to go, so I got next to him when we broke for chow. It was just a lousy box-lunch, an orange that cost a nickel and a dried-up old sandwich. So he picked that up and looked at it, gave it the eye, you know how he was. And then he said to me, “Vot’s dis?” So I took a big bite out of mine, looked straight back at him, and said “Baloney”. And Bela looked at me, and he looked at the sandwich, and he pulled back the bread and looked inside, and then he said what he said. You know what he said? He said: “Baloney? Perhaps not.”‘

Wilson threw back his head and laughed like a hyena. His face swelled up and fumed red, his eyes were wet, and he pounded on the redwood table till the bourbon bottle jumped and rattled against the silver Ronson table lighter, but Jack just sat and stared.

‘I don’t get it,’ said Jack.

‘What? You never saw that show? The Black Cat?’

‘The one you made with Lugosi?’

‘No, Jack. The one Lugosi made with Karloff. He had that line in there, you know. Great, great line. “Supernatural, perhaps. Baloney, perhaps not.”‘

‘I never saw it,’ said Jack, suddenly realising that Wilson was dead drunk, then noticing that he wasn’t much better off himself. Wilson had stopped laughing, as if someone had turned off a phonograph. ‘I gotta go to the can,’ said Jack.

‘Upstairs,’ Wilson advised him. ‘You’ll see it. And when you come back, we’ll talk about The Gorilla Gang. After all, that’s why you’re here, isn’t it? Top of the stairs. And you never saw that movie? You’re a funny guy, Jack.’

His stomach sinking as he pulled himself upright, Jack took in the words that sealed his fate. ‘Funny,’ he mumbled. He staggered towards the stairs. ‘What kind of skin did you say that was again?’

‘You know,’ said Wilson, opening up a silver cigarette box to reach for a cork-tipped Herbert Tareyton. ‘The best kind. No kind. Not a monkey, not a man. The kind of skin that scares a guy like Corrigan. The kind that says there might not be a God, Jack. You know. The missing one. Just call him Mr In-Between.’

Swaying at the top of the steps, Jack looked down at Wilson, who was bent over the table so that his blond hair fell across his face. His shoulders were shaking, but Jack wasn’t sure why. Smoke shot out of Wilson’s mouth and formed clouds around his head.

Jack turned away and into Wilson’s bedroom. It was big and almost empty, containing next to nothing but a bed and the bamboo chest at its foot. There were more African masks and Hollywood photos on the dimly lit walls, but Jack didn’t care about those now. He knew as if he had X-ray eyes what was hidden at the foot of the bed, and he tiptoed towards it across straw mats, desperate to go unheard by the man below. He held his breath as if he thought that might help, and was emboldened by a fusillade of coughing from below. He reached for the chest with trembling fingers, convinced that the hinges would betray him with some ungodly squeal, but the lid opened as smoothly as a banana skin.

Still not breathing, Jack reached inside and pulled out Bill Wilson’s skin. It was as smooth as smoke, as heavy as the night. Jack took a breath as he embraced it, and when his lungs were full to bursting he exhaled, then drew in the scent of the skin almost against his will. For a second he missed the stench he had expected, but then he was overwhelmed by the aromas of sunshine and tall grass, of cool pools and shadows, of ripe fruit and flowers hanging in the trees. It was a primitive perfume, and Jack was dizzy inhaling it for a moment, but then he remembered where he was. He stuffed the skin back where it belonged, barely remembering to hurry into the bathroom and flush the toilet before he headed back downstairs.

‘Find everything okay?’ asked Wilson. ‘Have a smoke.’

‘Okay,’ said Jack. He sat down opposite his host.

‘So you read the script. Great. You know, you’re the first guy to get back to me. You’d think they’d be more interested.’

‘Maybe they don’t read so fast,’ muttered Jack.

‘You think you’re joking? Half the people in this town don’t read. Even the big producers. Their wives or secretaries read the scripts, then tell these self-styled masterminds what they’re all about.’

Jack grunted.

‘Well?’ asked Wilson. ‘You wanted to talk. What did you think?’

‘Never mind what I thought.’ Jack reached for a cigarette and tapped it on the silver box. ‘Just tell me about the casting.’

Wilson actually gave him a light, hefting the big silver Ronson while he looked Jack square in the eye. ‘You must have liked it,’ Wilson said, ‘or you wouldn’t be worried about your part.’ He poured two more drinks out of the half-empty bottle. ‘Don’t worry, Jack. You’ve got the plum. Stuck in your thumb and pulled out a plum, Jack. You’ve got laughs, tears, everything. It’s a star-maker.’

‘I knew it,’ said Jack. ‘You want me to play Koko.’

‘That’s right, Jack, Koko. You’re Koko.’ Wilson rubbed his hands together in a simulacrum of glee.

‘You son of a bitch,’ snarled Jack. ‘You go to hell.’ He took an angry drag on his Herbert Tareyton, then snuffed it out on the silver ashtray.

‘But Jack! What’s wrong? You’ve got the best part!’

‘Except for yours. Aw, I expected that. But you’re making me the guy that gets killed. You get all the monkey men in Hollywood together, then you shoot me, and you cut me out of the sequels. Out of the money. Me. Why me?’

‘Jesus, Jack, you didn’t believe all that crap about the sequels, did you? That was just to get the boys worked up. We’ve got one chance in a hundred of getting a sequel. I don’t even have financing for the first one yet, probably won’t unless everyone gets on board. But it could be a payday, Jack, and if it happens you’ve got the scene-stealer. Believe me.’

Jack thought it over for as long as it took to swallow another ounce of bourbon. ‘I won’t be the one who dies,’ he said.

‘Don’t be like that, Jack. Look, if we get lucky we can always finagle it. You know, we’ll bring Koko back as a vampire or something. No, I’ve got it. Gorilla Zombie! That’s it! Can’t you just see it? Gorilla Zombie! Wilson swept his hand in an arc in front of his face, envisioning a title fourteen feet high. Jack grabbed that hand and smashed it down on the table so that the bourbon bottle and the silver box and the silver lighter and the silver ashtray all jumped and rattled and dropped down on the redwood table once again. The bottle fell on its side and Old Crow leaked onto the floor. ‘Are you shitting me?’ demanded Jack.

Jack clutched the collar of Wilson’s Hawaiian shirt and pulled their faces close together. ‘Why don’t you give that part to Corrigan? He’s trying to sell his suit anyway, get out of the monkey business…’

‘The cowboy?’ said Wilson, not even bothering to pull his head away. ‘You heard him today. No sense of humour.’

‘Get Gemora to do it.’

‘He’s no comedian, Jack. I don’t even know if he can read lines.’

‘Look, just because I worked with the Stooges doesn’t mean I can’t be scary too. You should have seen me at Corregidor. I killed three men, you know, two of them with my hands. And I didn’t fight my way back here to be treated like some kind of clown!’

Wilson finally pushed Jack away, then pulled himself upright and swayed over the table. He spoke slowly and deliberately. ‘If you don’t want the part, you don’t have to take it. I can get somebody else if I have to. I thought you’d be grateful.’

‘Grateful for a hand out, you mean?’ screamed Jack. ‘Grateful to be standing at the end of the line again?’ He picked up the bourbon bottle, looked at it for a moment, then brought it down on Wilson’s head in an explosion of glittering glass and purple blood.

Wilson sat down clumsily. ‘Jack,’ he said. He’d been saying it all night long. Jack hit him with the jagged stub of the broken bottle and it did something bad to his right ear. ‘You stupid, ugly, fucking…’ muttered Wilson, but before he got the last word out, Jack cut him off with a wild swing that opened Wilson’s throat like a ripe watermelon. Wilson didn’t even seem to care about it; he just slumped down and died. Right away, there was lots of his blood on the table.

Jack had gone ape. What had possessed him? He stood in the middle of the room with dripping hands and wondered what he’d done. He wanted Wilson to sit up again and pretend everything was still all right, but knew without even looking that that would never happen. Then he realised with a shiver that he really didn’t want anything of the kind. He wanted all the dead things in the world to stay dead, especially the one sprawled on the table in front of him. Instead, it slithered down to the floor with a sound like a load of wet laundry. Jack jumped; he couldn’t help it. Then he swore.

Every primitive instinct in the back of his brain told Jack to run and run like hell. There wasn’t going to be any movie, and there wasn’t going to be any sequel, but there could still be some sort of life for him if he didn’t get caught. It wasn’t his fault. A man could take only so much, and Jack had taken enough. Now he had to save himself, and that meant he couldn’t hit the road before he covered his trail. He had to think fast: the longer his car stayed parked outside, the bigger the chance that someone would spot it. But what had he left inside that might lead back to him? He was trying to figure out how to get rid of his whiskey glass (wash it? break it? take it home?) when he realised what was on it. Fingerprints.

Jack was dead. How many things had he touched in this damned house? Come to think of it, was there anything he hadn’t touched? The doors, the walls, the pictures, the bookcases, the stairs, the chest, the toilet, the bottle, the cigarette case, the ashtray, the lighter. The skin. Bill Wilson. There was no way he could ever wipe it all clean in time to make his getaway. Shit! He kicked the table and that fancy silver lighter clattered to the floor. Jack just looked at it for a moment, and then he grinned. The lighter. If he couldn’t get his fingerprints off everything in the house, he would just have to get rid of the house instead.

He fumbled with the big silver lighter, got it open, and spilled a few ounces of fluid on the lump of wet wash that been Bill Wilson. It didn’t seem like quite enough fuel. He went into the kitchen to rinse his hands, noted the gas stove with some satisfaction, and actually whooped with glee when an angel led him to a drawer which contained a flat blue and yellow can of lighter fuel. Like an animal marking its territory, he squirted the stuff all over the straw matting, the walls, the furniture, the bookcases, the pictures of the women he would never meet.

Jack backed towards the exit, pulled a book of drugstore matches out of his pocket and set them aflame in a deft, one-handed motion. He turned the doorknob and pulled, making sure there was open air behind him before he tossed the burning square of cardboard into the room. No sense in being a damned fool. When the flame hit the fluid, the house belched like a Titan eating tacos, and a blast of hot air pushed Jack out the door, just where he wanted to be. He stood suspended in time for an instant, ready to keep moving towards his car, then turned and walked back into Bill Wilson’s burning house.

He had to have that skin. He wasn’t sure why - he could hardly use it on the job, and it was evidence against him - but suddenly that beautiful red-gold monkey suit cried out to him to be rescued. He felt like he would be saving a baby and robbing a safe in the same gesture, but he knew the way he knew his own name that he had to get that skin if he ever hoped to live with the memory of what he’d done. It could make everything worthwhile. He was moving faster than he was thinking, but there was no doubt in his mind that he had time to get in and out before the fire caught him. He needed only a few seconds, and the stairs weren’t even burning yet. And that skin was some sort of miracle. He could almost hear it calling to him. Yet at the same time he saw the red and yellow flowers of flame blossoming from-floor to ceiling, and acknowledged that he was living out the conflagration cliche of every cheap monster movie ever made. Scrambling up the steps on all fours, he ran towards the chest at the foot of Bill Wilson’s bed. He heaved open the lid.

The wonderful skin leaped out and wrapped itself around Jack’s head. In a heartbeat he was blind and deaf, his mouth full of hair and the scent of dead animals in his nostrils. He was hot and he couldn’t breathe. Jack fell to the floor as he scrambled and clawed at the thing that tormented him, his brain a molten ball of panic, and then suddenly he pulled himself free. Had he gone crazy? No matter. Screw the skin, it was time to leave. He rushed for the stairs, now full of billowing smoke and flickering light.

Something stood at the top step. Dead black against the orange glow behind it, the empty skin tottered between Jack and freedom, waving its arms like an angry ape. He saw to his horror how hollow it was, then it was upon him once again. He knew why it had called him back into the house when it wrestled him around and sent him tumbling down the stairway head over heels, each step striking him like a baseball bat in the hands of some simian slugger.

Jack landed on his back, looking up at the bedroom. He could see the skin capering above him, then watched as it danced away and threw itself through an upstairs window to the safety of the lawn below. Jack had broken something, maybe a lot of things. He couldn’t raise his head. He couldn’t move. He was beginning to realise now why so many horror films ended in fire: it hurt like hell. But why was he being punished? Was it really all his fault? Why were his eyeballs boiling in their sockets? Why was his skin sizzling in his fat and falling from his face? Why, when he was finally found, would he look like nobody at all?

IV

From Variety, October 27, 1947.

ACTOR FOUND DEAD

Bill Wilson, the actor who gained critical acclaim for his role in the indie hit Gorilla Girl, was discovered dead yesterday in the smoking wreckage of his home outside of Hollywood. Widely acknowledged as the leader of that strange breed whose profession is portraying primitive primates, at the time of his death Wilson was preparing production of an all-star ape production to be called The Gorilla Gang. His previous films include The Jungle Juggernaut, Human Sacrifice, The Sinister Scientist, and The Saint at the Circus. Apparently his final act was to throw his monkey suit, considered the best in the business, to safety just outside his burning house. The cause of his death is under investigation.

Also dead at the scene was John ‘Jack’ Jackson, a small-timer whose only notable screen appearance came in Universal’s musical Campus Cuties of 1938. He was seen cavorting behind bandleader Paul Whiteman in the novelty number ‘Monkey Man’. Jackson is said to have been the only Negro in Hollywood who made his living acting in an ape-skin.

Les Daniels has been a freelance writer, composer, film buff and musician. He has performed with such groups as Soop, Snake and The Snatch, The Swamp Steppers and The Local Yokels. A CD of his 1960s group with actor Martin Mull, The Double Standard String Band, was recently released. His first book was Comix: A History of Comic Books in America, since when he has written the non-fiction studies Living in Fear: A History of Horror, Marvel: Five Fabulous Decades of the World’s Greatest Comics and DC Comics: Sixty Years of the World’s Favorite Comic Book Heroes. More recently, he is the author of The Complete History volumes of Superman: The Life and Times of The Man of Steel, Batman: The Life and Times of the Dark Knight and Wonder Woman: The Life and Times of the Amazon Princess. His 1978 novel The Black Castle introduced his enigmatic vampire-hero Don Sebastian de Villanueva, whose exploits he continued in The Silver Skull, Citizen Vampire, Yellow Fog, No Blood Spilled and White Detnon. His occasional short fiction has appeared in a number of anthologies and he has edited Thirteen Tales of Terror (with Diane Thompson) and Dying of Fright: Masterpieces of the Macabre. About the preceding story, Daniels explains: ‘Several of the minor characters are real people, actors who eked out a living decades ago by impersonating apes. I read an anecdote about one of them whose costume was stolen, reducing him to penury, homelessness and eventual death, and thought it might make a good background for a story of supernatural revenge. However the tale took an entirely different turn from what I had first intended, and in fact no theft occurs. Such departures from the original plot don’t happen often in my work, but I was pleasantly surprised by the result.’

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