Note: I first presented this piece at Fireside Storytelling in San Francisco on Jan. 9, 2013. The theme was “Epic” and this story is about what felt like the longest car ride of my life. It has gone through a significant revision since the first telling.

---

When I was in junior high, my mother and father split and my mother started seeing her graduate adviser  a man named Mike. By senior high, I was living on Mike’s farm. About a year before I arrived, Mike went down to Florida and came back with a tiger. Next trip, he came back with a jaguar, and after that he just kept going until he had a private zoo populated mostly by big cats.

Maintaining his menagerie required frequent trips to buy, sell, trade, and loan animals, and I often went along. One of his regular stops was Cooke’s Buffalo Ranch in Concord, North Carolina. Cooke’s was a Western store. Old Man Cooke had a herd of bison in his pasture, and for a few bucks you could ride past them on a restored stagecoach. He also has a small roadside zoo.

On one visit we discovered the zoo had a new attraction—a chimpanzee named Lolita. (I don’t really want to think too hard about why someone would name a chimp Lolita.)

I thought I knew what chimps looked like, but what I had seen were a few movies and television shows. I didn’t realize that the trained chimpanzees were cuddly little juveniles.

Lolita, on the other hand was a young adult. She had black face and a mouth full of very large teeth that she displayed by curling back her lips. When she stood fully erect, she was taller than me. What struck me most was the power of her forearms, which seemed twice the length of mine, with thick, ropy cords of muscle. I knew that if I got too close, she could grab me, dismember me, and pull my body parts through the bars of her cage.

Lolita’s cage was a former drunk tank. The county had recently built a new jail, and Cooke had purchased the old drunk tank. It was a freestanding iron cell—an almost cube six feet wide on the sides but slightly taller, perhaps eight feet, in height. A tow chain wrapped around her neck and held in place with a padlock had chaffed away some of the hair.

It seemed a horrible way to live one’s life, but part of me was thankful for the bars, and maybe even for the chain. But then Old Man Cooke did something strange. He walked closer to the cage and stuck out his foot. Lolita reached through and gently, delicately untied his shoelaces. Then she tied them back again. Untie, tie, untie, tie, untie, tie. Cooke told us she would do this over and over again as long as you kept your foot next to her cage. I looked at the cage, I looked at the chain, I looked into her dark brown eyes. Seeing no hostility and a great deal of sadness, what else could I do? I offered her my sneaker.

A few weeks later, Mike informed us he had purchased Lolita. Tim, one of the regular weekend volunteers, had agreed to help move Lolita. Mike also made it clear that he was counting on my assistance, though I doubted there was much I could offer.

Tim arrived that day on his Harley Hog. When we climbed into the cab of the F350, Tim brought his motorcycle helmet with him. “Protection,” he said, pounding on it smugly.

At Cooke’s, we tied the end of Lolita’s chain to a post while Mike and Tim and some of Cooke’s workers loaded the tank into the bed of the truck. Mike decided it was too cool to transport Lolita inside her cage and his solution was to put her in the cab with us. It was a four door cab with two bench seats. He passed the free end of the chain through the split rear window and anchored it to the side of the bed. The chain kept Lolita from climbing into the front seat. It did nothing, however, to keep her from reaching across the seat and, if she chose, snapping me in half.

For the first part of the drive, Lolita occupied herself with dismantling the truck. She pulled out the dome light, unscrewed the door locks, and managed to yank loose one of the window cranks. Because her fidgeting made him nervous, Tim put on his helmet—and as soon as he did, Wham, Wham, Wham. Lolita repeatedly and forcefully whacked the back of Tim’s head. He sat there for the better part of an hour, absorbing blow after blow. The whole time, I tried to make myself invisible. Tim was a body builder. He was over six feet tall and probably weighed about 250 pounds—and he had a helmet. At that time, I probably weighed about 115 pounds and I had not yet reached my full stature of five foot six. I was a little guy with a skinny neck and no helmet. And I have hemophilia, a bleeding disorder. I quickly recalled all the stories I had ever heard about hemophiliacs dying from cranial hemorrhaging. If Lolita starts flailing on my head, I thought, surely I am a dead man.

Somehow, though, we survived. Mike and Tim unloaded the drunk tank in the middle of the yard and led Lolita into it. “Man,” said Tim as he was leaving, “I’m sure glad I brought my helmet.”

Later, we learned more about Lolita’s history. It seemed a man had trained a young chimpanzee to ride on the back of his motorcycle. He wrecked the bike and killed the chimp, so he bought Lolita as a replacement. Lolita was a too old to train and she hated riding on the motorcycle. Absolutely hated it. The man gave up and sold her to Cooke. Lolita wasn’t hitting Tim as much as she was hitting his helmet. If he hadn’t put it on, she would have left him alone. And I was never at risk.

Mike had no other place to keep Lolita, so he left her in the drunk tank. From time to time, he would take her out so she could exercise and he could clean her cage. He would lead her from the tank by the chain and tie her to one of the trees in the yard. One day, when he decided to put her back in her cage, she wasn’t ready to go. Imagine!

Mike insisted by yanking the chain, and she responded by biting him on the hand, practically severing his thumb. Mike didn’t miss a beat. With his intact hand, he picked up a beef bone the dogs had left in the yard and slammed it down on her head. I half expected to see her topple over, but instead she staggered momentarily and then raced contritely back into the tank. Mike shut the door, ran inside to grab a towel to wrap his hand in, and got my mom to drive him to the hospital.

When I think back on Lolita’s time with us, I am most struck by how much I feared her. It is what most people would expect, I think. But fear wasn’t really in my vocabulary. As a child with hemophilia, someone who could easily die by falling off a bicycle or mistiming a leap from the diving board. I never would have gone anywhere or done anything if I had grown up in fear. At the farm, it wasn’t good to show fear, especially when I was going into a tiger’s cage on crutches or waking to find a jaguar at the foot of my bed. It wasn’t that I wasn’t afraid, but I refused to acknowledge my fear, even to myself.

I think I feared Lolita because if I had been her, I would have attacked, and that’s why it always felt an attack was imminent. After all, her previous owner terrorized her. Cooke put her in chains and jailed her. To his credit, Mike eventually sold Lolita to a zoo, and I wondered if that was his plan all along, to get her away from Cooke and into a bigger place where she had her own kind for company. But I don’t know that for sure, and she couldn’t have known it either.

Tim triggered her PTSD when he put on his helmet. Mike led her around by a chain, and slammed a bone down on her skull when she fought back. And me? Could I claim innocence because I was just along for the ride?

Fear is a complex emotion. Sometimes it is simply about preservation, but I think it can also be a secondary emotion. Like anger, it can mask something deeper. Perhaps in my case, that something was guilt.

I don’t think I feared Lolita more because she was any deadlier than the other animals I worked with, or because she was at heart a wild and uncontrollable beast. I think I feared her because she was so damn human..