funnel thing about ten yards ahead of us. It noticed us, though. Opening its terrible, terrible black mouth again it slid toward us, veered away toward Mannicher (“It’s the—the—the fucking
thing!”
he managed to get out) and held its position, switching its head from side to side as if uncertain whether to go for the captain or DiMarco and me, scenting the air with its tongue. It didn’t look disoriented by its surroundings at all.It looked like it was spoiling for a fight and simply couldn’t decide which opponent was nearest.
So there was America and there was me. And between us, Death.
We were the nearest. DiMarco was slow to see it, and by the time he did, it was gathering speed across the gap. They’re
fast, black
mambas, you’ll remember from Discovery, and they like to strike high. Two or three feet of its body was raised above the ground as it rippled over the planking. “Oh, Jesus,” breathed DiMarco, because he could see that any chance of outrunning the thing had already gone in the previous second. He must also have seen the awful black of the inside of its mouth. And it flowed up into the air, four, five feet off the ground and still rising as it struck, and we were suddenly tumbling down on the deck with the heavy body of the snake whipping over us.
It was one of my fucking discarded banana skins that DiMarco had stepped on, we later worked out. It had taken his legs from under him just at the moment of the mamba’s strike.
Captain Mannicher and the crew ran over to the snake as it sprawled, somewhat surprised, or as surprised as a snake can ever look, and momentarily vulnerable. A couple of them managed to jam its head down against the deck with their wooden sticks and, with a long knife, Mannicher decapitated it.
And still the snake’s head and half a foot of its body continued to slither on toward him, and we watched it, pleading with it to die so that we could go to America.
It did. But to this day, I retain a loathing for two things in particular. (Three, if you count Mickey Rooney.) I fear snakes. And I cannot stand the taste of bananas.
That was April 9, 1933: my official date of birth, if you look at the website. The day of my arrival on American soil. As is almost traditional in these cases, my name was misspelled at Immigration.
5
Big Apple!
I’ll always have a soft spot in my already well-tenderized heart for New York, and not only because it’s generally agreed that some of my very best work, including the now classic “hotel-room sequence,” can be found in
Tarzan’s New York Adventure
(1942). The last of the truly great Tarzan pictures,
New York Adventure
was built around the simple but brilliant conceit of getting the Boy out of the goddamn way (he’d been kidnapped, or something). Without Johnny Sheffield there to muddy everything up, the central Tarzan-Cheeta-Jane relationship was free to return to its original clarity. I like to think I managed to make a reasonable job of the opportunity.
I don’t know whether I’d go so far as the
New York Times
reviewer—“Cheta (sic) the chimpanzee who well-nigh steals the picture runs amok in a swank hotel boudoir, shakes hands with astonished clerks, causes havoc with hatcheck girls, babbles over telephones and even makes wisecracks nearly as intelligible as Tarzan’s…. More than anyone, the monkey turns the Tarzans’ excursion into a rambunctious simian romp”—but the truth behind that “picture-stealing” performance, and the real reason I quote from that review, was that I was simply playing from life. Thefamous nightclub sequence with the hatcheck girls? That was for real. All I had to do was dredge up my memories of a little spree I’d had in Lower Manhattan, the summer of 1933. By then I’d already spent several months in New York. Rehab. But right from the get-go America seemed to me to be some sort of paradise.
The morning we docked was spent overseeing the unloading of the stock into smaller mobile
thing!”
he managed to get out) and held its position, switching its head from side to side as if uncertain whether to go for the captain or DiMarco and me, scenting the air with its tongue. It didn’t look disoriented by its surroundings at all.It looked like it was spoiling for a fight and simply couldn’t decide which opponent was nearest.
So there was America and there was me. And between us, Death.
We were the nearest. DiMarco was slow to see it, and by the time he did, it was gathering speed across the gap. They’re
fast, black
mambas, you’ll remember from Discovery, and they like to strike high. Two or three feet of its body was raised above the ground as it rippled over the planking. “Oh, Jesus,” breathed DiMarco, because he could see that any chance of outrunning the thing had already gone in the previous second. He must also have seen the awful black of the inside of its mouth. And it flowed up into the air, four, five feet off the ground and still rising as it struck, and we were suddenly tumbling down on the deck with the heavy body of the snake whipping over us.
It was one of my fucking discarded banana skins that DiMarco had stepped on, we later worked out. It had taken his legs from under him just at the moment of the mamba’s strike.
Captain Mannicher and the crew ran over to the snake as it sprawled, somewhat surprised, or as surprised as a snake can ever look, and momentarily vulnerable. A couple of them managed to jam its head down against the deck with their wooden sticks and, with a long knife, Mannicher decapitated it.
And still the snake’s head and half a foot of its body continued to slither on toward him, and we watched it, pleading with it to die so that we could go to America.
It did. But to this day, I retain a loathing for two things in particular. (Three, if you count Mickey Rooney.) I fear snakes. And I cannot stand the taste of bananas.
That was April 9, 1933: my official date of birth, if you look at the website. The day of my arrival on American soil. As is almost traditional in these cases, my name was misspelled at Immigration.
5
Big Apple!
I’ll always have a soft spot in my already well-tenderized heart for New York, and not only because it’s generally agreed that some of my very best work, including the now classic “hotel-room sequence,” can be found in
Tarzan’s New York Adventure
(1942). The last of the truly great Tarzan pictures,
New York Adventure
was built around the simple but brilliant conceit of getting the Boy out of the goddamn way (he’d been kidnapped, or something). Without Johnny Sheffield there to muddy everything up, the central Tarzan-Cheeta-Jane relationship was free to return to its original clarity. I like to think I managed to make a reasonable job of the opportunity.
I don’t know whether I’d go so far as the
New York Times
reviewer—“Cheta (sic) the chimpanzee who well-nigh steals the picture runs amok in a swank hotel boudoir, shakes hands with astonished clerks, causes havoc with hatcheck girls, babbles over telephones and even makes wisecracks nearly as intelligible as Tarzan’s…. More than anyone, the monkey turns the Tarzans’ excursion into a rambunctious simian romp”—but the truth behind that “picture-stealing” performance, and the real reason I quote from that review, was that I was simply playing from life. Thefamous nightclub sequence with the hatcheck girls? That was for real. All I had to do was dredge up my memories of a little spree I’d had in Lower Manhattan, the summer of 1933. By then I’d already spent several months in New York. Rehab. But right from the get-go America seemed to me to be some sort of paradise.
The morning we docked was spent overseeing the unloading of the stock into smaller mobile
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