A Primate's Memoir, page 4
I spent a horrible, sleepless night, suffering from the synergistic effects of being at a moral crossroads coupled with stupefyingly acidic gas from the charred zebra. The next day, it happened—I lied for the first time in the Garden of Eden. I passed through the park headquarters, as I did most days. I had somehow fallen into the habit of having to give a ride way out of my way to a particular ranger. I would deliver him to a village at the far end of the park’s boundary, out of which, after a period of incoherent shouting, he would emerge silently, in order for me to return him to the headquarters. He was rather brusque and aggressive with me, and in the weeks during which this odd chauffeuring had evolved, I repeatedly reminded myself that I had to be more understanding, that this was no doubt a sort of crudeness found in men from the bush, that he was unused to dealing with someone from a foreign culture. Sometime during that sleepless night, it instead occurred to me that he was an asshole who was exploiting me, and that he was doing some sort of shakedown of the villagers to which I blithely squired him. As usual, he waved me down with his rifle, and in response to his demand that we leave immediately for that village, I took a deep breath and lied. In the careful, offhanded way that I had rehearsed half the night, I said that I had to do something first, and that I’d be back in a few minutes. And instead, I high-tailed it through a back track up to my mountain where I sat, glowing with a sense of triumph, picking zebra from my teeth.
There was no turning back. Oh, it wasn’t as if I was out robbing banks under an assumed name by the next day. It wasn’t even so much a behavioral change on my part. Instead, it was the start of my perceiving that things here worked utterly differendy than anything I’d previously known. It was a constant source of confusion to me. People were generally far friendlier than any from my world, people with next to nothing were achingly generous with the little they had. But it was all within this framework of someone constantly being up to something. People with uniforms and weapons victimizing those without. People running shops who tallied the bills constantly bilking the customers who couldn’t read or add numbers. Jobs that were available only for certain tribes, that were available only for those who agreed to kick back parts of their salaries to the boss. Health officials who stole the monies for vaccines, relief officials who pocketed the food monies, endless buildings or roads sitting uncompleted because some contractor or other had run off with the funds. Soon I saw one of the whitey versions of it. My next supply trip into Nairobi, I switched to staying at a rooming house run by Mrs. R, an elderly Polish settler, a place filled with white hitchhikers and overlanders boasting of smuggling and bribings at border posts, with tips on black-marketing illegal cash and where to have fake visa stamps made. I saw my first police shakedown: it was on a city bus that was stopped for inspection of IDs. The cops methodically worked their way down the aisle, relieving people of cash, until they spotted me gawking in the back and abruptly sent us on our way. A few days later, I got to see an event classic to an African or Indian city—a thief caught by a crowd and beaten into a coma in a joyous, frenzied outburst.
There was no shortage of explanations for the endless scams and maneuvers and cheatings and victimizations amid a world of people of intense decency. The desperation of being desperately poor. The raw tribal animosities that made “us’s” and “them’s” in ways I couldn’t begin to detect. The most venal of corruption. A Wild West mentality, small-town boredom, unbridled selfish capitalism without even the pretense of regulations and restraint. Maybe this was how my own world worked, if I had ever bothered to experience anything outside of my ivory tower. Maybe this was also how the ivory tower worked, if I wised up a little there as well. But it was a startling revelation, as the animals continued to graze in the museum diorama I thought I had gone to live in. And it was remarkably preparative for my own minor descent a few months later.
Basically, the professor who sent me out there forgot that I existed. It was four or five months into that first season. I came to Nairobi to call him in the States, at great expense, politely reminding him that money was due. Oh, right, sorry about that, I forgot, money will be cabled to the game park within the week. I’d hitch back and go back to work, only to have a few weeks go by with no money. Back to Nairobi, a slightly more desperate call, Oh damn, sorry, completely slipped my mind, money will be cabled in the next few days. Soon, I was utterly broke and stranded in Nairobi. I couldn’t afford to call this guy anymore, and there were no such things as collect calls from Africa in those days. I would never have contacted my parents for help—my independence was of paramount importance, and I rationed my shrinking funds to include the postage for the cheerful weekly aerograms I sent. The U.S. embassy turned out to be useless for Americans in Nairobi unless they were wealthy businessmen. I knew no one in Kenya who had any money. In fact, I basically knew no one in Kenya. Out of desperation, I took to a life of crime. And it worked.
The first scam I worked out was astonishingly simple. In the land of ex-British colonialism, of whites pouring in with their tours and vacations, the last thing any Kenyan would expect from a white guy would be that he was trying to rip off a meal, or a loaf of bread, or 20 shillings. It’s not that whites were considered above larceny. It’s just that they had proven themselves more concerned with stealing far larger things (e.g., your ancestral land, your nation).
First, getting more money. I had inadvertently entered the country with 50 undeclared dollars in 10-dollar bills. I had it in my knapsack, separate from my stash of travelers’ checks, and I had simply forgotten to declare it at customs. In future years, I would do cartwheels to smuggle in undeclared cash for emergency black-marketing. But that first season, I had simply forgotten to declare the cash. Once I discovered my error, I even went to the government bank to try to declare it and fill out the appropriate legal forms. The clerk was utterly perplexed by me—at first, he made a halfhearted attempt to steal the money from me, to hold it there for presumed safekeeping, but seeing my insistence that he come up with some nonexistent form for me to do after-the-fact declaring of foreign currency, he finally brusquely told me to get lost.
So I had some undeclared cash and decided to try to black-market it, piecemeal. Normally, as I was slowly learning from the overlanders at the rooming house, this was done with careful, paranoid, silent Hindu businessmen with terrible complexions who owned the downtown electronics shops, part of the Indian middle class of East Africa. These are the credible businessmen who would give you, perhaps, 10 shillings to the dollar, instead of the going rate of 7 in the banks. Instead, I’d put on my backpack, walk down the main street of Nairobi, gawking at the people like a newcomer. Street sharps would instantly approach me, offering to change money at outlandish rates—change money? Change money? One dollar, 25 shillings. As I had learned, these were, of course, thieves. They normally get you in an alleyway and, if you are lucky, merely shout in a panic about how the “police” have found us, everyone run, and in the tussle, you lose your money. The less articulate fellows merely bash your head in in the alleyway and take your money.
This time, instead of telling the con artists to screw off, I say, Oh great, just got here to Nairobi, looking for someone to change money with, 25 shillings, what a great rate, glad to meet you. Tell him I only have 10 American dollars with me right now, but at the hotel where I’m staying (mention a fancy one), I have five hundred dollars that I want to change. Can you change the 10 right now and then meet me later for the 500?
Gulp, says the thief. Even thieves are sometimes disciplined, and he does a quick calculation—if he gives me 250 shillings for the 10 dollars now, this dumb-ass kid is going to come back with 500 bucks and then I bash his head in. Money is exchanged, friendship is sworn, a follow-up meeting time is arranged. Avoid that street thereafter, working a different one with the next 10-dollar bill.
This worked fine for making the money stretch. As the crisis worsened, even that money was finished. I sold my camera and film at awful prices. I lived for days on nothing but starch, which made me dizzy and stupid. I left the rooming house, took to sleeping in the city park, stole toilet paper from a downtown hotel. Four years earlier, in my first year of college, I had once traveled a great distance to see someone I barely knew who I felt sure would allow me to kiss her at the end of the day. Now, I hitchhiked two days to offhandedly drop in on a near-stranger of a researcher who I felt sure might feed me.
Eventually, I evolved my next scam. I would go to the city market, where there was a labyrinth of vegetable stalls. Sellers plead with you to buy their cabbages. When you are closer to them, they also try to sell you pot if you look like a plausible customer. I am told that some even do sell it, rather than merely rip you off or inform on you to the police, who then blackmail you.
You line up to buy vegetables with money you do not possess. Slick seller inquires whether you want pot. Yes, you betcha, what price. He names some silly price, you agree, proclaiming what a bargain it is. You arrange to return later with the money, he insists that you, his good friend, leave with free vegetables. Naturally, you avoid that stall thereafter. Critical thing is to start with the stall in the very back, and work your way forward with each day, so that you never encounter one of your disappointed friends again, who presumably now wants to slit your throat.
Finally, a number of days into not eating, I made the decision to just plain steal. The strategy seemed to be to simply walk into a middling-class hotel, sit down at the dining room table, and act colonial and confident, giving the number of your supposed room for billing when asked. No Kenyan waiter would dream of challenging you, I assumed. I had targeted the YMCA, planning to pass myself off as a young Christian man who had paid for a room. And on the very day that I intended to execute my plan, the cabled money appeared, the professor finally remembering my existence. Somehow, in my dizzied, food-deprived state, the YMCA seemed to me to have played some role in my salvation. And I would not forget this. A year later, as Uganda was in the middle of a war to overthrow Idi Amin, I would sleep in a bombed-out, roofless YMCA in a small Ugandan town and would give the proprietor what he considered to be an immense sum of money toward rebuilding the roof, thus atoning for my life of crime.
3
The Revenge of the Liberals
I am the angel of death. I am the reign of terror, the ten plagues, I am a case of the clap, I am the thing that goes bump in the night, De Shadow, death warmed over. I am the bogeyman with cat eyes waiting until midnight in every kid’s clothes closet, I am leering slinky silent quicksilver baboon terror, I am Beelzebub’s bill collector. Another baboon successfully darted. Euphoria. Today I darted Gums, the last baboon on earth I would have ever thought of getting. Wily old bugger, knew my every trick, had eluded me for months. I was near despair at ever getting a blood sample from him, and today, he screwed up. Surrounded himself in presumed safety in a crowd of females, figured he was safe, figured they would take the fall if there was a rubout, figured I’d never dare shoot into a crowd, but he was wrong! They all had their heads turned, he miscalculated the space between two closely spaced trees, and, fffft, I sent an anesthetic dart sailing from the blowgun into his ass. Unconscious in four minutes. Musk triumph power loins dawn-of-man science. It was all I could do to keep from savaging his soft underbelly with my canines while he was down.
Darting. As I said, the main thing I wanted to learn when I first joined the troop was what a baboon’s social behavior, his social rank, his emotional life, has to do with what diseases he gets, especially stress-related diseases. Why are some bodies, and some psyches, more susceptible to such diseases than others? So you watch the animals like crazy, carefully document the whole soap opera. Then dart them with an anesthetic blowgun and find out how their bodies are working. Theoretically simple. Approach a baboon you typically walk up to twelve times a day while you’re doing behavioral observation, except this time, your walking stick turns out to be a blowgun and you zip a dart into him. The only problem is that you have to dart everyone at the same time of day, to control for daily fluctuation in blood hormones. And you can’t dart someone if he’s sick that day, has had a fight, an injury, mated—because those will throw off the normal values of the hormones. Finally, and here’s the real pisser, you can’t dart someone if he knows it’s coming. If I’m trying to see what stress hormone levels in the bloodstream are like under normal unstressed resting conditions, I have to get the baboons when they are quiet, unsuspecting. I must sneak up on them. No witnesses. To wit, I dart baboons in the back for a living. And then get a first blood sample as fast as possible before normal values are thrown off by the stress of being darted.
What I actually wind up doing for a living is trying to act nonchalant around baboons, get them to turn around, forget about me. Which is a lot trickier than you’d think, even with a college education.
You wake up at five in the morning, tense as hell, get things ready in the dark. Anesthetic, darts, blowgun, syringes, vacutainers, centrifuge, liquid nitrogen tanks, needles, vials, burlap to cover the animal, instant ice bags, cages, scales, emergency medicines if there’s an accident, powerverters to run everything off of the Jeep batteries, pipettes, slides, test tubes, endless crap. Find the baboons by six-thirty, as they come down off their rocks or trees that they slept in. Pick someone, start stalking, start calculating—which way will he run when hit, up a tree? Up the rocks? How do you get him down if he does that so that he doesn’t pass out and fall? What if he attacks someone else, what if he gets attacked—who’s pissed off at him these days and would love to slash his throat while he’s staggering around half-conscious? What if he attacks you? Which direction is the wind going, how much do you have to compensate in the shot, shit, can’t shoot, some weasly kid is looking right at you, go stalk from a different position, he’s not looking, no one else looking, ready for a shot, fabulous, fabulous, this is going to be perfect, get ready, feel absolutely sick to your stomach with tension, realize you’re hyperventilating so much that you can’t blow the blowgun properly—you’ll either accidentally inhale the dart or shoot it two feet because of shallow breath. Shit, shit, he’s moved again, reposition, control your breath, he’s looking straight at you now, act nonchalant, how the hell do you act nonchalant in front of a baboon anyway? He’s in a perfect position now, but turned sideways, too much peripheral vision. Crouch and wait, tense, not moving a muscle, near to cramping, there’s some goddamn bug biting your calf, but you don’t want to move, keep still still still until you realize you just want to scream and run amok and bowl him over, then perfect, a fight breaks out elsewhere, irresistible to baboon voyeurs, he turns around, cranes his neck to look at the action elsewhere, full clear beautiful meaty rear end, zip!, dart in his ass, and he’s off.
Panic, heavy breathing, heart racing: you, not him. He ambles off, thinking he’s only been stung by a bee. After him, trying not to chase him, trying not to lose him in the bush. Minutes, minutes, endless time, three minutes and he gets wobbly, staggers a bit, decides to sit down and take it easy a bit because the drugs are beginning to work and the acacia trees probably have a purple aura and are beginning to spin around, the zebras are all doing some dance number from The Lion King. He’s getting woozier, everything is under control, perfect darting, when some rival bastard comes up to hassle him while he’s hallucinating. Shoo the rival guy away, just in time, because, splot, your guy’s out cold. Run over, throw a burlap bag over him, take a fast, surreptitious blood sample, and adrenaline city, androgenic triumph, you’ve successfully darted a wild baboon—stalked him in the bush and took him out—perfect to shore up your precarious sense of manhood and, best of all, you’re not even doing something appalling like hunting, you’re doing it all in the name of science and conservation. You can wipe out innocent beatific baboons and still be a liberal. Oh, joy.
The rush is over with, and you have to get him out of there. The Jeep is half a kilometer away over a ridge, you have to spirit him away without anyone else in the troop seeing you or else they’ll freak and rip you to shreds. Seventy-pound baboon wrapped in burlap, and you’re tiptoeing through the middle of the troop, arms aching, trying not to run or giggle or collapse from exhaustion. The guy’s snoring and you try to shush him. Get up over the ridge, nearing the Jeep, feel like you’re going to die, but you’re almost there. You begin to plan the rest of the day—what time do you have to take the subsequent blood samples, what other tests will you do on him, what time will he be awake enough to release him back to the troop, which seven baboons are you going to dart flawlessly tomorrow. He’s bouncing along on your shoulder like a sack of potatoes, and suddenly he burps. You are unspeakably charmed by that and thus let your guard down, and ten seconds later he throws up down your back, a thick lava flow.
So goes a darting; there’s nothing I enjoy more in the world. I learned how to dart baboons in a dormitory room in Manhattan. It was on my first break back in the States after I had joined the troop. I was boiling with schemes about the research. The biggest problem was how to dart on foot, to work on foot in general, and not get smeared by some buffalo. There was a guy from Berkeley named Laurence who lived over on the next mountain who studied hyenas. Laurence of the Hyenas had just gotten a donation of an old pair of infrared light-enhancing night-viewing goggles from the military, which allowed him to drive around in pitch darkness and follow his hyenas, all the while with the twenty-pound contraption strapped to his head. I decided I needed a similar high-tech solution; I would get a Flash Gordon jet pack from the army. I knew they existed, and figured if I could lumber around the Serengeti with one, I’d be safe. Buffalo comes at me, and I’d be gone, into the air, a god to the local Masai tribesmen. I called the Pentagon, got shuffled through a dozen of their R & D groups, finally found a colonel who thought the problem was fascinating. He confirmed that the jet packs existed, would check into it for me, generously offered to call back. A week later he had the bad news—he was afraid that I’d have to go to something bigger than the U.S. military for my jet pack—the Disney people had the only working model on earth. I called them, was told by someone far less courteous than the colonel that the jet packs weighed ninety pounds, took a minute to warm up, required asbestos pants, and were not available for loan to some zoologist. End of that idea; instead, I merely had to look out for buffalo and use some common sense in where I wandered in the bush.
