Trials of the Monkey: An Accidental Memoir

CHAPTER ONE

The End

It’s a Sunday in June and I’m at the Greyhound Bus Station in New York, waiting to get on a bus. You buy the ticket but it does not guarantee a seat. For that you have to take an escalator down into the vast, clinical basement and stand in line at the appropriate gate. Two African-American women are ahead of me. One of them says, ‘I wouldn’t do that wit’ my own flesh and blood’ The other replies, ‘She did that, she did that, she did that wit’ me.’

The gate opens and we all shuffle forward, deposit our bags in a cavity beneath the bus, and climb in. The seats are tall and narrow, the windows don’t open, but the air is cool. The engine gurgles in a dull, self-satisfied way and the vehicle jolts forward and climbs a ramp into daylight. As the bus heads toward the Holland Tunnel, I look out the window and see a middle-aged man in a well-pressed beige suit, white shirt and tie, piss copiously through a chain-link fence, shake himself, and walk back toward a clean Honda with a brisk stride and a smile of accomplishment.

There are twenty-two passengers on the bus. Fifteen are African-American, four are white, two are Sudanese, and one is Hispanic. In front of me sits one of the African-Americans. It’s eighty-five degrees and humid. He wears a wool hat with the hood of a sweatsuit top pulled over it. His eyes are hidden behind menacing shades and a thick beard conceals what’s left. A wire goes in under the hood and I can hear the music from his headphones three seats back. This is not someone who wants to intersect with reality too much, perhaps even less with his own thoughts.

We enter the Holland Tunnel and a couple of minutes later are spat out of Manhattan into New Jersey. For the next five hours we grind down the Eastern Seaboard toward Washington, D.C., through a suburban and industrial landscape so featureless it’s forgotten as it enters the eye.

I’m heading south to Dayton, Tennessee, the small town where in 1925 a schoolteacher, John Scopes, was prosecuted for teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution. The first trial ever to be broadcast live—by radio—not only to America but also to Europe and Australia, it was given the title ‘The Trial of the Century,’ and for my money it remains so. A philosophical skirmish between religion and reason, between the most famous fundamentalist of his day, William Jennings Bryan, and the most famous humanist, Clarence Darrow, it was played out in an atmosphere of hucksterism and commerce uniquely and hilariously American.

Inherit the Wind, a play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, was a fictionalised account of the trial which then became a movie starring Spencer Tracy, Fredric March, and Gene Kelly. Not a bad piece of work, it cannot compare with reality, which is far funnier and more poignant.

Seventy-five years after the trial I’m going to see what has changed in the town, if anything. I want to find out if they still believe the world was made in six days and is only 6,000 years old. It seems incredible that they might, but word has it they do. Every year the town stages what they call a ‘re-enactment’ of the trial. As the trial lasted for several days, and as the outcome was not favourable to the fundamentalists who still dominate the region, I’m intrigued to see what gets lost in the editing. I’m going down now, a month in advance of the show, to do some research, and will then return for the play in July. My idea, although it’s not fully formed yet, is to spin the whole book out from the play. Revisionist religious history as theatre.

In my bag, I have two books, one a guidebook called The Old South, the other a biography of Darwin. I pull out the guidebook and find an essay by Tim Jacobson about the origins of the region. He says that while the North was colonised for ideological reasons, the South was always about business. Sir Walter Raleigh first tried to settle Virginia in 1584, but the settlers couldn’t take the loneliness and hardship and came home to England without having turned a profit. In 1587, Raleigh sent out another 150 who made camp on Roanoke Island, now in North Carolina. Three years later he sent a crew out to check on them. All they found was a tree with the word ‘Croatan’ carved on it, that being the name of the local Indian tribe.

In 1606, 120 men were dispatched by the London Company, also for commercial reasons. Sixteen died on the voyage. The rest sailed up the James River and settled. Within six months, all but thirty-eight of them were dead from malaria. In 1609, some women were sent out to breed with the survivors. Talk about Natural Selection.

Here on the bus I’m pondering a different but related matter: Survival of the Fattest. A black woman weighing at least 250 pounds sits across the aisle from me. She is dressed in a large, colourful dress and, were it not for her obesity, she’d be beautiful. Her face is so large it almost engulfs her humorous eyes, and her chest and stomach have merged to become a monumental, rippling hillside. She feeds constantly on potato chips and Teddy Grahams. The hand she’s not eating with holds a book. It’s held high so she can read it over her cheeks. The door to the Greyhound shitter is very narrow. Even I have to turn sideways to pass through. So far she has made no attempt to enter. If she does, I’m convinced it will end in failure or worse and I’m getting curious. Next to her is an amiable, uncomplaining child. Everyone is amiable. You leave New York—or maybe any big city—and suddenly the neurosis level drops.

Much to my disappointment, the woman doesn’t hit the WC until D.C., when she scrambles off the bus, child dangling from her arm, and plunges into the crowd, the eyes above her cheeks seeking the symbol of the skirted woman.

I have to change buses and I’ve got some time to kill, so I get my bag out from under the bus and walk outside to the parking lot behind the bus station.

A white Southern woman in tight white jeans and a tank top is trying to compact ten boxes and suitcases into six or less. It’s a comedy about futility, and it has drawn a good crowd. She and her African-American boyfriend are relocating to Virginia, where she was born. They were going to get a train from New Jersey, where they met, but he—she casts an admonishing look at the man, who, in stark contrast to her, is extremely handsome and muscular—woke up late and so they had to change their plans. On the train you can take as much luggage as you want. On the bus, there’s a limit and they’re well over it. She must be around thirty, he a few years younger, and it’s one of those pairings which is endearing if only because it seems so improbable.

She keeps saying, ‘My Lord!’ and ‘I swear!’ as she wrenches and pushes and tugs. Now she straightens up and brings her hands to the sides of her head. ‘Oh, my Lord,’ she exclaims before leaning in again with all the heft of her upper body.

He stands back, shaking his head pessimistically. ‘It’s going to be an odyssey,’ he declares, as if commenting on someone else’s life.

‘It’s going to be shitty, that’s what it’s gonna be,’ she responds.

I could take one of their bags—I only have one of my own—and I should offer to do so, but I don’t. I’m not quite sure why. Maybe it’s because I’ve been locked in a room writing for ten years. Or maybe it’s because I’ve always felt myself to be exactly what the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service describes me as: a Resident Alien. I am here but I am not here and I like it that way.

By paying an extra few dollars, they manage to get what has now become eight dense, misshapen bags onto the bus and we’re all headed for Roanoke, Virginia. It’s a new gang on a new bus with a new driver. Every time you get a new driver he gives you the rules. Each driver has his own style. This one welcomes us aboard and then lists every single stop along the way to Roanoke. Finally, he concludes with:

‘These are the rules: no smoking, no drinking, no sex in your seats, no sex in the bathroom, and no boomboxes. If you have a Walkman don’t have it so loud it disturbs anyone. With that in mind, just lean back, close your eyes and dream about tomorrow. Or yesterday …’

I’m finding it hard to concentrate on anything for any length of time. I pick up the other book, Charles Darwin: A New Biography, by John Bowlby, and start to read it. The big question in the early pages is whether Darwin, an invalid for most of his life, was the victim of some tropical disease or was in fact a hypochondriac. His list of maladies is awe inspiring. One of them is eczema. As a child, I too had eczema. The eczema and the eczematous forefather have made me who I am.

People generally believe they are part of an evolutionary process, either physical, spiritual or both. At an absolute minimum they note with smug satisfaction how much taller and smarter and richer they are than their forefathers. This suggests that life is, if not meaningful, at least progressive. Your average Joe goes beyond this, of course, and convinces himself that not only does life have meaning, but so too does death: God awaits him on the other side to reward him with eternal life for pushing the species along. But how could any of these assumptions work for me? In early childhood I was told how Darwin’s theory of evolution had demolished the biblical story of creation, God slapping it together in six days, Adam’s rib, and all that. And if the very first chapter of the good book was nonsensical and untrue, why would the rest be any more credible or useful? My parents made an attempt to raise me Christian but ultimately lacked the conviction to boost me over the numerous improbabilities. I went through one highly religious phase, but, wonderful as it was, it didn’t last. As for simple, earthly evolution, here too I got the short end of the stick. What was the likelihood of my evolving beyond Grandpa? Even physically, I turned out to be a lesser man. Born in 1809, he grew to be six feet tall. Born in 1950, I barely made five-ten. I not only got the short end of the stick, I was the short end.

When Darwin called his second book The Descent of Man instead of The Ascent of Man he was thinking of his progeny. One only has to study the chronology to see the truth of this.

First there was Charles Darwin, two yards long and nobody’s fool. Then there was his son, my great-grandfather, Sir Francis Darwin, an eminent botanist. Then came my grandmother Frances, a modest poet who spent a considerable amount of time in rest-homes for depression. From her issued my beloved mother, Clare, who was extremely short, failed to complete medical school, and eventually became an alcoholic.

Then we get down to me. I’m in the movie business.

At prep school in Cambridge, where I was brought up, I could not figure out what rung I was supposed to occupy on the social ladder. It was hard to believe I was beneath the brutish offspring of titled pig farmers and Tory MPs, but they clearly thought so. When I asked my father for help in the matter, he informed me I was ‘a member of the intellectual aristocracy.’ He said it with a laugh but he was right, and like most aristocracies it is in decline. I went to a Darwin reunion a few years back and it seemed to me that the whole family tree was hopping with regression, every smile verging on the imbecilic, every suit stuffed with the same sorry cargo of morphological deterioration.

By some genetic fluke, I retained enough of Darwin’s powers of observation to be able to see clearly which way I was heading. My boyhood hero was Zozo the monkey, and when I was taken to the zoo at the age of six and saw live monkeys picking and scratching exactly as I did, and trying to have sex in public, I was convinced: evolution was a yo-yo and in my case the yo-yo had just about reached the end of the string. All I had to do was push it down another inch or two and it would rise again. If Charles was the top, I would be the bottom. If he was the beginning, I would be the end.

Simple academic mediocrity would not suffice. I had to do worse than that. I had to fight education with everything I had. As stubborn and diligent as Charles was in collecting facts, so I would be in holding them at bay. If this was my defence against the crushing weight of family history, and if the strategy ultimately failed, you certainly couldn’t fault me for its execution on the ground: I emerged from school with an outstanding lack of knowledge.

I only took two significant exams and failed both. The first was the eleven-plus, which should have been called the eleven-plus/ minus because if you passed it—at the age of eleven—you entered grammar school and had a shot at university, while if you failed you were subtracted from opportunity and condemned (unless you had money) to the purgatory of secondary modern, and life on the production line. The second exam was an O level. Most kids passed five to ten of these. I failed my solitary one and my parents and the system conceded defeat.

Thirty years later, here I am on a Greyhound bus, a screenwriter. I used to direct but now I get paid so much to write I can no longer afford to. I write for the studios in Los Angeles. They pay, I deliver, they own. Nothing I create belongs to me. The scripts I write rarely become films and a screenplay, however well written, is only a blueprint. I’m an architect whose only buildings lie in the past, each made by uncomprehending builders. Worse still, the scripts which have been made are not my best, and the rest, the unmade ones, the ones I love, have now accrued so much interest that I cannot afford to buy them back. This year I sold an idea for a million and a half dollars. It won’t get made and before you know it I’ll need two million to get it back.

And of course I won’t get it back and it will be consigned to the great necropolis of dead scripts, a massive tomb under a mountain in Utah where the air is dry and cool. A friend of mine was sent down into this awful legacy of failure to root around and see if anything was worth bringing back to light. He found a script by F. Scott Fitzgerald and for a while, the studio was looking for someone to rewrite the great man; but I’ve heard no more about it and presume it’s gone back into the darkness.

In my struggle for survival I have dragged my simian arse as far from its origins as I could—from the lawns of Cambridge to the Mercedes-littered lots of Hollywood, then to New York’s Upper East Side—and all I’ve achieved, ‘spiritually,’ is that: survival. I have a life which requires me to earn at least half a million dollars a year. I am always either in debt or on the verge of it. I have no money saved. I could be wiped out by a few months of studio indifference. I feel drained. What is the purpose of all this?

If I believed in God, I could comfort myself with the thought that once in heaven the bills would at least stop coming. Instead the only relief in sight is complete extinction. Circumstances change and in response, I simply become more anxious. It’s as if my whole character has become vestigial to this constant fear. Somewhere in my mind there still swaggers the fine young, atheistic monkey waving his insolent hard-on at the world, but suddenly it’s no longer amusing or effective and soon it will become embarrassing. I am not afraid of death, I’m afraid of a moment when, immobilised by something fatal, and unable to distract myself with work or sex or illusions of progress, I reflect on my life and see a rich and fascinating landscape, and me off to one side of it, a rat inside a wheel of darkness.

It’s time to become wise and happy. But how? I am an adolescent lobbed into middle age without the necessary equipment. Sitting in the bus, cut loose from obligation and decency, I start to wander inward. When I look out the bus window now, what I see are scenes from my childhood, and I find myself compelled to write them down. Another book, an unasked for book, takes shape in my mind, The Monkey and His Education.

There’s a sudden random swath of wildflowers on the meridian. It passes by like a brush stroke and jolts me back to the external journey. The country has become more hilly with tree-covered mountains in the distance. The highway is less crowded.

To my left a Hispanic woman sniffs constantly, every fourth or fifth breath. It’s really incredible. If the seats reclined, she could lie back and the fluid would drain down her throat, but they don’t. You get a two-inch tilt that’s barely noticeable and she doesn’t have a tissue.

A sign on a mountainside says ‘Endless Caves’ but nothing can compete with the endless sniffing. Many hours have passed and many more are yet to come. Since the book I was reading on Darwin brought on a crisis of memory and self-loathing, I decide to go back to my book on the South.

Tobacco, it tells me, introduced to the whites by the Indians (some small revenge, I suppose, for the theft of their land), soon became the major crop in the South. Tobacco was labour intensive. The first people to work in the fields were indentured servants from England who worked off their passage and were then set free, at which point they became expensive to hire.

Enter the slave. You could lease an Englishman for a year or two, but a black man you could buy for a lifetime. The outlay was higher but once purchased you could literally work him to death. I remember when a movie of mine was being shot in Atlanta, arriving late to my hotel and being ushered to my room by a young, gay African-American man. When I asked him where I could buy cigarettes, he told me it was too late and offered me one of his. I thanked him effusively. ‘No, no,’ he said, waving my gratitude aside with a complicit smile, ‘I too am a slave to nicotine.’ How ironic, I now think, seeing a larger meaning, that African-Americans who continue to smoke in America are in fact continuing a 400-year tradition of slavery to the deceptively beautiful plant.

The bus stops and about half the occupants leap out to smoke. It’s quite comic this. Sometimes the bus stops for only thirty seconds. The true addict gets out none the less, lights up, sucks feverishly on his cigarette, then re-enters the bus, coughing. This, however, is a longer stop. I haven’t smoked in a long while, but suddenly, I have the urge to have just one. I go to the mixed-race couple and bum a cigarette. We sit in the sun, our backs to a dilapidated convenience store. She is a Certified Nursing Assistant and he’s in the building trade, bricklaying, concrete. I ask him how he feels about moving to the South.

‘Well,’ he says, ‘as a man of colour …’

He takes a drag on his cigarette, looks off into the distance, exhales, and lets the smoke drift off with the rest of his sentence.

TRIALS OF THE MONKEY. Copyright © 2000, 2001 by Matthew Chapman. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Picador USA, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.