Free Me Cheeta by Cheeta

somehow passed to the other side of the room.
    “Half trained, Tony?” Trefflich said. My teeth were still jangling horribly, and I thought there was a cut in my soft palate. I jigged up and down in an attempt to shake the pain. “Exactly which is the half you got trained, huh? Chrissakes, look at that! Look at the toothmarks he’s left in the metal.”
    Around his wrist was a band of dense, shiny material in the middle of which a white, glassed-over circle displayed—oh, this is gonna take forever: his watchband. I’d bitten his steel, chain-link watchband. And I wonder sometimes just how much the gentleness of my character was formed by that little lesson in the pointlessness of violence. It’s a rare chimp who has bitten so few humans as I have over the years. Or so many famous actresses, come to think of it.
    “Stop jigging, kid, I can scarcely write,” Trefflich was saying. “Oh four oh nine three three, uh… little…
Jiggs
, brand-new U.S. citizen.”
    Mr. Gentry approached me as I squirmed in Trefflich’s grasp. That exquisitely straight white line of scalp down the center of hisglossy brown head somehow imbued him with an aura of rectitude that made you trust him. He stroked the side of my head and made shushing noises. “We’ll be right back, Cheats, OK? You’re in good hands here. Wait a minute, uh, DiMarco, you got any smokes?” DiMarco held out the pack of Luckys he liked to wedge between bicep and rolled shirtsleeve, and flourishing the pack, Mr. Gentry disappeared down the passageway that led out of the room. “OK, Henry, you can let him go now,” he said, when he returned. “Watch this. Smokes, Cheats, go get me my smokes!”
    Well, for pity’s sake, you had them just a minute ago, I thought. But I desperately wanted to please him, to do something for him that would bind him to me, so I scampered off down the passageway between the caged galleries of monkeys, looking for the Luckys. There they were, in plain sight on top of a bucket of sand. I grasped them and loped back between the dumb gray monkeys, not in any expectation of a banana or an orange, but only of pleasing him.
    When I got back to the room there was nobody in it but Trefflich, and it was another sixteen years before I saw Tony Gentry again.
    So it was that the kaleidoscope of America dwindled to a shelter in another rehab center. Of course I was grateful, and impressed by the sheer number of animals who had been rescued, but I wasn’t altogether convinced that I was in any need of
further
rehabilitation.
    I was sharing my shelter with Bonzo and a couple of other males the same age as us, but there wasn’t much cause for interaction. Trefflich’s was like
Forest Lawn
in that most of us slumbered through our days, roused only by the internal alarm of our hunger going off and the light traversing the room. It grew more and moredifficult to hold anything in mind other than breakfast and dinner. Our muscles whispered at us about things they recalled doing, but only very faintly. Our dreams became incoherent and naggingly repetitious. Every once in a while we’d stir our stumps for a gallivant around the shelter, or while away an hour or so with a good long groom….
    Please, dear reader, please don’t for a second think that I’m not grateful. Each second of my life is a record-breaking triumph that I owe to you, to human protection and intervention. In me, the shelter system has magnificent proof of its efficacy and I salute the ambition of the whole project. By the time Trefflich’s heart killed him in 1978 he had been involved in the rehabilitation of around 1,450,000 monkeys, mainly rhesus macaques. Nearly one and a half million macaques had either passed through Fulton Street or been helped in their resettlement by a single man! I suppose the only tragedy was that he didn’t live to complete his work. So much more remains to be done, and one trusts that many millions more macaques will benefit from his work. But I was a