Benjamin Hale - The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

“If sack and sugar be a fault,”—and here he braces himself against a pole, removes a flask from somewhere in his regal fur coat, unplugs it, takes a pull, and emits a gruesome belch—“God help the wicked!” As he fishtails down the aisle, he booms out the words — which of course I recognize from act 2, scene 4 of Henry IV, Part One —in a gravelly and robust foghorn of a voice: an actor’s voice. Here is a man who has trained himself to speak in a Boston Brahmin continental accent. This man is obviously drunk, but nevertheless his voice is melodious, articulate, authoritative.

“If to be old and merry be a sin, then many an old host that I know is damned. If to be fat be to be hated, then Pharaoh’s lean kine are to be loved!” As he shouts, the Beggar King pivots to his left and right, swinging his belly before him like a sack of cement, addressing his involuntary audience personally, directly. Aggressively, even, confrontationally. He holds out his coffee can, rattling its contents to communicate that it is a receptacle into which bits of currency ought to be placed in exchange for his services, or at least to make him go away. The Beggar King goes generally ignored. The passengers regard him as an irksome presence, pretending that he is invisible and inaudible, even as they scrunch themselves into the sides of the train car to allow unobstructed passage for his elephantine girth.

As he works his way down the aisle, a passenger or two clinks a coin into his coffee can, gestures he acknowledges with a subtle nod of appreciation. Because I am trying to remain incognito, I am furiously looking away from him; even now I know — perhaps by intuition — there’s nothing that sets off a freak quite like another freak. Don’t look —I tell myself, as if to look would destroy me, as if to look at him were to gaze into the eyes of Medusa— don’t look, Bruno, don’t look, don’t look, don’t look.

The Beggar King continues: “No, my good lord: banish Peto, banish Bardolph, banish Poins…” The Beggar King approaches. I try to appear inextricably fascinated by something happening outside the window, out there in the void of the subway tunnel, the empty rushing blackness. But he sees me — I can feel it. I can feel his curious gaze lock onto me. I begin to sweat in panic. I look down, letting the brim of the hat shade his countenance. The Beggar King not only sees me — but he is intrigued by me. He is staring at me. The Beggar King seems to have temporarily forgotten his lines, his eyes are so fixed in curiosity upon the little creature sitting quietly on the subway in a black coat and a hat, like a pariah, like a tiny miserable deformed midget pervert. The Beggar King’s stare has now herded the eyes of the other passengers onto me. He is now standing directly in front of me. I stare down, dogged in my resolve to ignore him.

Then the Beggar King leans down toward me, decanting his mountainous self closer and closer to the only fully dressed hairless chimpanzee on this particular subway car, who is sitting — quietly, civilly, harmlessly — alone. He is so close I can smell the sweat beneath his Henry VIII costume, and smell the whiskey on his halitosic breath, breath which I can smell as well as also hear: it is loud and belabored fat-man’s breath, whistling in and out of his nostrils. With his free hand the Beggar King seizes a nearby pole to steady himself. He addresses my averted face as he says — softer, now, no longer shouting (though still probably loud enough for everyone on the train to hear):

“But for sweet Jack Falstaff… kind Jack Falstaff, true Jack Falstaff, valiant Jack Falstaff, and therefore more valiant being as he is old Jack Falstaff…” Finally, I dare to look at him. I turn my face upward to his. His face is so close to mine that the brim of my hat brushes against his beard as I raise my head.

The Beggar King is probably in his fifties, though maybe he looks older than he is. A bramblebush of beard bursts forth from his face in matted gray fistfuls. His cheeks and his golf-ball nose are deeply dimpled with overlarge pores and tinged pink with rosacea, and under his floppy hat his hair is long and gray. He looks a little greasy, though not quite to the extent of your typical public-transit tatterdemalion; you can tell this man at least has a roof of some sort under which to sleep, otherwise he would be in worse shape. His eyes, though, are sane and alert.

“Banish not him thy Harry’s company,” he says, “banish not him thy Harry’s company — banish plump Jack, and banish all the world.”

And I, Bruno, counter him with what I know is the answer: “I do. I will.”

Then I see in his eyes that he has realized I am a chimp. The Beggar King places a huge paw of a hand on my head and takes off my hat. Everyone on the train is looking at us now. They may have been murmuring, or making interjections of wonder or gasps or shouts of fear — I don’t recall. The Beggar King has unmasked a monster in their midst.

“Great snakes!” says the Beggar King. “You, sir, seem to be an ape!”

At this moment the train slows down to make a stop: bing! — “Twenty-third Street,” the electronic female voice announces. The doors scroll open, and everyone on board who is neither Bruno nor the Beggar King hastily departs the train car at the same time. Let them go. Bruno is alone with the Beggar King. This is how I met Leon Smoler, the best human friend — besides Lydia — that I have ever had.

Why did Leon Smoler become my friend? Because he was one of the very few humans I had ever met who spoke to me without any underlying prejudice evident in his voice. Nor, on the other hand, did I find that he overvalued or exoticized me. Leon truly could not have cared less whether I was a chimpanzee or a biological human. Because Leon was just barely sane enough to live in the world, yet mad enough not to find it at all odd that Bruno, later his best friend, roommate, and business partner, was an articulate chimp. In Leon Smoler there was not the faintest shred of that incredulity, that horror, that queasiness, that shock and discomfort that betrays the face of pretty much everyone who has ever met me. If anything, when he found out I was a talking ape, he was amused and maybe mildly interested. For some reason, Leon is immune to the uncanny valley. This thing I can sense in people — maybe people with horrific deformities, severe physical defects, serious mental illnesses, maybe those sorts of people can understand that look in other people’s faces I am talking about. But I don’t think so. The discomfort I see in people’s faces when they look at me does not necessarily have any pity in it, or even any relief, any sure-am-glad-that’s-not-me in it. The look of unease that I am met with is a symptom of the same great unease that met and continues to meet Darwin even a century and a half after The Descent of Man . It is the sense of absolute nakedness, of humiliation that humans feel when confronted with the realization that they are not so fucking special. They look at me and see an assault on their notion of “human dignity.” Dignity? No, vanity ! Who else — who else could be so vain?

But not Leon — in Leon Smoler there was — is — none of that. He is no anthropo-chauvinist. Because Leon’s as in touch with his animality as any human I have ever met. Have you ever heard of Diogenes the Cynic, Gwen? Once, in the course of my self-directed studies in the reading room of the main library at the University of Chicago, I sat at one of the long desks with a volume of Laërtius’s Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers splayed before me under the lamp, and I read in it an account of the life of Diogenes the Cynic. Back in Plato’s selfsame ancient Athens, Diogenes went naked and lived in a bathtub, urinated, defecated, and masturbated in public, and denounced all laws, religions, governments, and good manners. People called him “the Cynic” because the word means “doglike” in Greek, because Diogenes lived like a dog. He wasn’t offended, though; he liked it. You’re damn right I live like a dog, he said to them. Alexander the Great returned to Athens fresh from conquering the known world and found Diogenes, naked as was his fashion, sunning himself on the steps of the Acropolis. Alexander stood before him and said, Ask any favor you choose of me. Name anything, because I’m Alexander the Great and that basically means whatever it is, I can get it for you. Diogenes looked up at him, squinted, maybe gave his scrotum a lackadaisical scratch, shrugged, and said, Get out of my sun. Can one help but admire that? We are animals who like to constantly congratulate ourselves on all our sweetness and light and triumph of spirit, and nobody is supposed to choose to live like a dog. I’ve always admired this man, his presence at the same place and time as the birth of philosophy, like a voice crying, not in the wilderness, but from the wilderness in the human heart, in the midst of civilization. The solemn golden machineries of politics, learning, thought, goodness and grace and virtue and art —especially art — all we call our society, needs Diogenes in the middle of it, a human proud and content to live like an animal, to remind us not to mistake the frippery of human civilization for anything too distant or distinct from what’s already there in pigs and monkeys and dogs, to remind us that for all the sweetness and light of our great cities and great machines and great art, we are nothing terribly more magnificent than apes with clothes on our bodies, words in our mouths, and heads inflated with willful delusions.