Avram Davidson - The Avram Davidson Treasury - a tribute collection

“Where there is no food, there is no religion. Where there is no religion, there is no food. So my first father-in-law used to say. What a gonnif. Eat, my shaggy friend. Eat, eat.”

After quite some time, during which they both ate heartily and, truth to tell, noisily, Alfy gave grateful eructation. Gave a sudden exclamation. “Almost missed the news on the video! Finally I broke down and bought one. Many a movie big shot it will wipe out of business, they say, but me it wouldn’t wipe out. Pardon my back,” he said, as he turned to watch the small screen.

Dorothy gladly did so, for quite apart from her contentment in the immediate situation, she was also pleased to watch what many still called “video,” which was not yet to be found in every room of every house, rather like an ashtray.

Neither black and white screen nor sound adjusted immediately, and Alfy adjusted the rabbit-ear antennas; at length a voice was heard to say: “…meanwhile, search continues for the so-called Monster of the Hollywood Hills.”

“I’ll give them yet a Monster of the Hollywood Hills,” growled Alfy. “What are they trying to do with my property values? Communists! Holdupnikkes! Shut up, Alfy,” he advised himself.

Two men, besides the television news personality, sat before a background of greatly enlarged photographs and plaster casts.

“Well, Dr. William Wumple of the University of Southern Los Angeles Department of Primate Sciences, and Superintendent Oscar Opdegroof of the County Police Bureau of Forensic Zoology, won’t you tell us what your opinion is about all this?”

Professor Wumple said, “These photographs and plaster casts are of the foot-and-knuckle prints of the increasingly rare Sumatran mountain gorilla of Sumatra, and—”

“I grant you, Professor Wumple,” said Superintendent Opdegroof, “that there is certainly a resemblance. But the increasingly rare Sumatran mountain gorilla, a native of Sumatra in Indonesia, is vegetarian in its habitat. There is, as you know, no record of an increasingly rare Sumatran mountain gorilla, which inhabits the East Indies or Sumatra, ever having killed and eaten part of a credit bureau representative and concealed his bones in a plastic bag. The diet of this otherwise harmless creature is mostly the stalk of the wild celery plant which grows profusely on every wild mountain slope of the archipelago of Sumatra.”

“Depraved appetite,” said Professor Wumple, “may be found in any species. I refresh your memory with the fact that pachyderms are also herbivorous, and yet there is the classical case of the elephant named Bubi which fatally trampled and ate a young woman named Anna O. in the Zurich Zoo, who had heedlessly fed him leftover kümmelbrot from the table of her employer, a dealer in low-priced watch cases named Schultz.”

The television news personality opened his mouth, but it and the rest of him dwindled and vanished as Alfy switched off the set. “Look, so now to business. Um, what did you say your name was, unwilling though I am to force you out of your chosen anonymity? Dorothy? A girl in a gorilla suit, this I never encountered before,” he said, surprised; but rallied quickly. “My mother, she should rest in peace, told me that in her own younger days, if a woman so much as smoked a cigarette in the public street, she might as well have gone to Atlantic City with a traveling salesman. But now we live in an enlightened era. Lemme hear you squeal.”

“Squeal?” asked Dorothy, somewhat lethargic from food and rest.

Alfy nodded. “Yeah, squeal. Use your imagination. Say you’re strolling through your native jungle and you see, like, reclining under a tree and fast asleep because she’s lost from her expedition — what then, a bewdyful young woman. You never seen nothing like this in your life before! So naturally, you give a squeal of astonishment. Lemme hear.”

Dorothy, with only the slightest of thoughtful pauses, gave a squeal. Of, she hoped, astonishment.

“Bewdyful,” said Alfy.

Dorothy gave him a doubtful look. “No,” he said. “I mean it, I swear it. By my second mother-in-law’s grave, she should soon be inside of it. Hypocrisy is alien to my nature, even though I never finished high school, but was cast out in the midst of the teeming thoroughfares, what I mean jungles , which are the streets of our large cities. But of this I needn’t bore you, Dotty. — Now use your imagination again. You and this lovely young woman are going along a jungle trail in search of the mysterious Lost Temple of Gold. Her boy friend, the head of the expedition, gets knocked on the head by a falling coconut, and as he sinks to the ground, simultaneously you — and you alone — become aware that an unfriendly tribe of rotten natives are slinking through the underbrush to attack: lemme hear you convey this information to your lovely human newfound lady friend with a series of intelligent squeals.”

Dorothy did her best to oblige, and in the unpremeditated fervor of her performance, began to use gestures. Alfy was immensely pleased. “We’ll dub it, we’ll dub it!” he cried.

She was so excited that she found herself jumping up and down and scratching her pelt.

Alfy, watching her benignly, became concerned. “Even through your gorilla suit you’re sweating,” he said, “let me get you some ice cubes for your cold drink.” Running water over the old-fashioned all-metal tray, he turned and asked, “Why not take off your costume, you’ll be more comfortable, Dotty?”

Even as she opened her mouth to repeat that she wore no costume, Dorothy observed a strange woman come running across the dimly lit dining room adjoining the kitchen; and as she ran, thus she screamed:

“I’ll give you ‘take off your costume,’ I’ll give you Dotty, I’ll give you Shelley, I’ll give you Miffanwy—”

“Sandra, if you hock me a tchainik, I’ll—”

Dorothy reacted to Sandra with as little instinctive affection as she had to Hubbard E. Glutt; raising herself on her toes, extending her arms high and her hands out, her talons clawing and her fangs showing, she began to utter squeals of pure rage.

Sandra never for a moment showed the slightest sign of believing that she was confronted by someone in a gorilla suit; Sandra turned and fled, giving shriek after shriek of terror, horror and fright.

Dorothy pursued her down the street, sometimes erect, sometimes bounding along on all fours; till the lights of an oncoming car caused her to shinny up the nearest deciduous tree, whence she dropped upon a housetop, thence to another tree, and thence to another housetop. Until eventually she realized that she was absolutely lost.

Inadvertently scattering the inhabitants of a hobo jungle, she moodily drank their bitter black coffee and spent the night on a musty mattress in a culvert near their fire. The illustrated magazines of a certain type which those lonely and semihermitical men used to while away the hours of their solitude, she merely fed into the flames in disgust.

Much of the next day Dorothy spent in a eucalyptus grove destined soon to be “developed” into total destruction. She gave a lot of thought to her condition. It was no doubt the celery tonic in which the incompetent quack-doctor Songhabhongbhong Van Leeuwenhoek had administered the so-called glandular extract — containing as the soft drink must have done, certain elements very similar to the wild celery stalks eaten by the increasingly rare mountain gorilla of Sumatra — which had caused this change to come upon her. Of this she was certain.

Since it wasn’t concurrent with her monthly cycle, and seemed not even to be identical with the full moon, she wondered if its occurrence might have something to do with her sign: Aries on the cusp. Vaguely she remembered hearing of a certain economically priced astrologer mentioned by her mother before she left to become an Avon Lady in Anaheim — or so her father said; perhaps (Dorothy now wondered for the first time) he had been shielding some less respectable occupation.