Chimpanzee at the Zoo
“They’ll never suspect it.”
“But I don’t believe you’ll suspect it either.”
“There’s nothing to suspect. Look at us, trapped in here like … like … well. Not like animals, that’s for certain. They are out there, free like animals. I suspect only that I will fly and they will fear me.”
The two chimpanzees looked at each other, one with vengeance and the other with compassion for vengeance. Although there was only a one percent difference between chimpanzees and their evolved friends, the humans, their worlds were diametrically opposed.
“I will not be kept in this cage any longer.”
His innate abilities already prepared him for the jump across the river, though he had assessed the terrain wisely. Though he had never seen a real river, he understood danger. Though he had never touched real earth wet from river water or hung from the branches that were rooted in its nourishment, his ancestors had still told him the story of how to cross. He had reached into the depths of his heritage for the answers of his escape. The same DNA his captors had jumped forth out of, and the same DNA that called to him for his freedom and fired his rage.
He had decided upon not the tallest tree, but the tree closest to the wall that held the gaps in the cement enclosure. The crumbling edges around the silicone joint would make for excellent finger grabs. His long paws gripped the bark of the trunk, and he climbed to his perch. He made a show of it, banging his chest and screaming, “I’m coming for you! I’m coming for all of you!” Of course the humans couldn’t understand him, and his rage was incensed at the reminder of their disregard for their forgetting of their history.
“You will not fail, but you will not succeed my friend.” The chimpanzee of stoic nature called from the grass, picking his teeth with straw.
Ignoring the nay sayer, he swung, branch to branch, momentum increasing with each loop around the trunk. In his final swing he did a flip and flung his body across the empty void above the moat. The freedom of being detached from the snares of the humans filled him with satisfied purpose, even if it was only a moment untethered to their filthy manufactured jungle as he flew through the air to his death.
And yet he did not fail in his efforts. He caught the spout that stuck out from the wall that had sprayed the water when the fire had started last spring, whipped upward to catch the crumbling edges of the security walls, and barely grasped the thin edge of the window from which he had been observed by their children for all of these years, pointed at and laughed at while he threw his feces to them in his defiance. From there it was only a few grabs and pulls onto the ledge where the humans leaned over to observe his captivity.
And then he was free. He slapped the flat painted surface as he stood on the edge of his barriers, no longer holding him at bay from his truest self. The humans ran screaming. He did not care.
“That is correct! Go and hide! Fear me!”
“Brother. My brother,” he heard from the bottom of the pit, as the wise friend nodded his head. “You won’t attack. That is good.”
“I will if I must!” Some humans had not run, and they were taking pictures. He lunged at them. “You still deny my dignity in my moment of triumph!”
They ran. And from in the pit he heard, “You should run too, friend. Though there is nowhere to go.”
And run he did. Never having been out of his pathetic cage, he felt an unexpected but tremendous terror. Panic filled him in the chaos of the moment, and he found the nearest path.
“I don’t believe you’ll suspect it either.” He heard the echo of his old friend's words in his mind.
He ran and ran. The whirl of other animals he had not known before. A tall spotted creature, a neck stretched as tall as his enclosure walls. A fluffy yellow beast with four legs, sounds of power roaring from its mouth. A group of strange black and white striped souls running together across grass, much more grass than was in his pen. He swung himself over the bars and found a tree to climb into to rest and make a plan.
Tell me what to do, he called into the universe for an answer. Keep me safe.
At that very moment, he heard a whizz and felt the sting of something sharp in his leg. Another whizz and another sting in his arm. He jumped from the tree and rushed forward, moving to anywhere else but there. His eyes scanned as he ran, no trees, nowhere to hide. Ahead was a wall of very strange trees, tall and flat standing right next to each other without leaves. He jumped and was just able to grab the top of the and raise himself up. It was difficult, his hands felt buzzy and tingly.
He stood on top of the strange trees and looked out. It was cold and gray and full of screaming people. They were opening strange contraptions and shoving their young into them. They would then make a roaring sound and move away from him. There were tall structures made of the same material as his enclosure walls. It was all foreign. There was no forest, no trees, no water, no roots. Only fear, and strangeness.
And then he blinked heavily, and his weight somehow felt greater than typical. He gripped the wooden trunks but his fingers slipped, and he fell backwards. He landed on the dirt painfully, and rolled over, attempting to force himself to run again. But his legs would not budge. Then his body softened into the ground, only his eyes following his directions. He held them open as long as he could, staring at the strange black and white stripes on the four legged strangers across the field. Then everything was black.
“As I suspected.”
He had woken up in a cold cell, not made of crumbling concrete, but of metal bars. Remaining there for several days, he received shots and prodding of all sorts. Eventually, the humans had tagged him with several devices and then returned him to his enclosure. He walked sullenly out to the open outdoor area, only to see the stoic old chimpanzee.
“Was I right?”
“No. I’m glad I did it.”
“I never said it wouldn’t be worth it.”
For about a year, Tom Hanks was my boyfriend.
Here’s what happened….
I was at a bridal shower.
If you’ve ever been to a bridal shower you know, they play the games. The terrible games. Bridal bingo, couples trivia, what’s in your purse. If the bride likes to get real crazy (or drinks a little), the toilet paper wedding dress game.
At this party, we were playing a scratch off card game. Each card had a man’s body in a suit and then the head was covered in the scratch off stuff. When you scratched the card, you could see the face underneath. One card had the groom’s face, and if you scratched that card you were the winner. The rest of the cards showed faces of celebrities.
People were throwing the cards away, but I took a bunch home.
I'm a teacher. And if you have any teacher friends, then you know we are all a little crazy. Smart, creative, generous, yes. But genuinely insane. So it was not at all weird when I cut out the silhouettes of the celebrities, and I hid them in my colleagues’ classrooms at school.
Mrs. Painter, teacher across the hall, got Prince Harry and loved it. Mrs. Parker, my teacher bestie, told me I me was an idiot and threw Brad Pitt away.
And I kept Tom Hanks.
I love Tom Hanks. Always have loved Tom Hanks. Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve got Mail. A League of Their Own. These are amazing films that, as a 90’s kid, helped shape my understanding of the world around me.
They also gave me debilitating codependency, but that’s a story for another day.
So I put Tom in the corner of the window of my classroom door, and wondered if anyone would notice. I have lots of stuff like that around the classroom. Overlooked easter eggs, that bring me joy. I have a sticker posted on a bookshelf for the Call and Oates hotline, it’s a phone number that plays Hall and Oates songs when you call. No one has ever commented on that, and no one mentioned Tom either.
A few weeks later, I was coming back from lunch with my seventh grade students, and the key wouldn’t work to get into the room. While I was struggling to get it open, my ADHD brain had me point at Tom Hanks in the window and say to the student at the front of the line these three words:
That’s my boyfriend.
As a teacher I say random, stupid things all day and every day. Witty puns, movie quotes, stuff about books and grammar and, like, the curriculum or whatever. Nothing important. It usually goes unnoticed and completely ignored. I’m basically a ghost. But when I said the word boyfriend, they all heard me. The commotion spread quickly down the single file line of children.
I figured they would see the picture, immediately know I was kidding, roll their eyes, and move on. Because he’s famous and because it printed on cardstock and cut out by hand. But they took me seriously. Or they were at least curious.
Either way, they were not impressed. Seventh graders are mean and horrible creatures. Instead of the groans I expected in response to my bad joke, I heard, “Seriously Ms. Pearl, that guy?” Others told me he was old and gross. One girl just looked at me and said, “No.” And my favorite was a kid who said he looked like a bulldog, but I think that says a little more about the kid than Tom’s looks or age.
While they were bullying me, and Tom, I realized something. They didn’t know him. Not one kid recognized him. I mean he has won Academy Awards, Golden Globes, Oscars, Emmys, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. But they didn’t know him, and this, to me, was pure gold.
Immediately, it became my new passion project. I needed to see how long I could keep this going. I talked about my boyfriend, Tom, every day in class. I spread the word to the other teachers, so they could help. They would talk about him with me in the halls, just loud enough for the students to overhear. Soon kids started to ask, “Is Ms Pearl really dating that guy?” And the answer was always a resounding, yes. Of course I was.
It was official. I was in a relationship. With the guy from the door. Some guy named Tom.
After a few weeks, a movement had begun. The goofy kids would wave at his picture as they walked past. I would hear “Hey, Tom,” followed by giggles as they came in the room. He even started showing up in the short stories the students were writing and in their projects. They loved it. And so did I.
On Veterans Day, the social studies classes were given a required video to show to their classes. Mrs. Parker, the social studies teacher and my teacher bestie, came frantically running up to me to tell me there was a problem. The real Tom Hanks was in the video. It was going to ruin the game. But she had an idea. She told the students very seriously, “Before I show this video, we need to talk. I don’t want you to be confused when you see him, but Ms. Pearl’s boyfriend is in the video. Ms. Pearl didn’t want you to know, but he is famous. He is Tom Hanks.”
Sadly, some kids stopped believing in Tom and I that day. Others became suspicious of our love. Of course, I maintained this was all very legitimate. I had been dating a movie star, and now they all knew it.
The not so secret secret is, they really never believed at all. But children want magic more than we know. More than they know.
We all want magic.
So we all kept playing along.
At that point, the stories became more fantastical. When the kids asked what I was doing after school, I would say Tom was going to pick me up in a helicopter on the roof of the school later that night. If they told me I looked tired, I would say Tom and I got back late from eating pizza in Italy the night before. They would say it couldn’t be true. It was a fun game to try and prove I was lying. Some of the smarter kids started googling him to try and stump me, and I would have to think quickly on my feet to find plausible answers. But there was just enough of a sparkle in their eyes that I knew they wanted it to be real and loved the pretending.
Imaginations and dreamers are very important.
It had been several months of this game, and somewhere around Christmas time, students decided to decorate Tom for the holidays. They dressed him up as Santa Claus.
I told them I had texted a picture of their decorations to him and that he thought it was great. New Year’s came, same thing. In February, he had flowers. St. Patty’s day, a pot of gold. Easter, bunny ears.
There was a lot of laughter, creativity, and connection.