Free Me Cheeta by Cheeta Page B

anyway. You go, macaques! And, you know, wasn’t it a pretty clever tactic to go for the other doors in the first place, so that Trefflich’s boy would be outnumbered?
    Now that the macaque shelters were springing open, a little delegation
had
in fact scampered over to the main door. Second by second Trefflich’s boy’s day was getting worse. He stopped trying to chase the macaques and instead took out a set of keys with which, I suppose, he meant to double-lock the remaining shelters. And at that moment my feelings about rehabilitation came clear to me. I
hated
it. I suddenly needed to get the hell out of there very badly—not to go anywhere in particular, only to, Christ, only to be
free
And then a little ginger ball sprang onto the door of our shelter and flipped the bolts.
    Panicking parakeets fluttered through the air as we evaded Trefflich’s boy and knuckled into the maelstrom of macaques. Big-eared rats were hopping among them, looking flummoxed, and some busy little critters twitched their high-held tails. I shouldered my way through the monkeys to the door, which was a breeze. I’d worked out harder doors on
Forest Lawn.
A swivel knob and an outward push and the stairwell lay open to us. But beyond this door, I knew, there would be others. There’d be a whole succession of doors, and Trefflich, and other impossibilities. Instinct told me all this in a moment, as macaques eddied around me and down the stairs. Instinct told me too: always escape upward.
    For a second I vacillated, looked around to see Bonzo and our shelter-mates, and Tyrone (my heart brimmed at his face) and various others behind me, and then I pelted upward into the dark of the stairwell, not in fear so much as pure joy. The door at the top yielded to a push and we opened out onto an escarpment. All around were the termitaries of the humans and beautiful, beautiful, climbable America.
    I do love Palm Springs. You’ve got the cool, dry air from the desert coming down from the mountains, a low crime rate, half a dozen championship-quality golf courses that Don can drive me around while he hacks away. Impeccably liberal, pro-animal, pro-environment views are standard among the humans you meet. But you wouldn’t want to be young here. There’s nothing to climb. It’s a flat, bungaloid city. Whereas New York is the greatest climbing city in the world. I’d advise any young ape looking to break into the entertainment business to find a human backer living privately in New York. You may not make it—and you certainly won’t if Don and the No Reel Apes campaigners get their way—but you’ll have a better time clambering around the place, especially if you live on ablock with an old-style iron fire escape like the one that invitingly ushered us down the back of Trefflich’s building.
    Down we all swung like a waterfall, six or seven chimps and twenty or so macaques. We hit the streets with a certain simian swagger, I like to think, if a little scrambled by the question of what to do with our freedom. It wasn’t as if we had a plan to return to Africa, raise children and retire. What to do? What does any organism
ever
do, except survive?
    The rolling shelters in the street slowed themselves so their occupants could gawk at us, and the braver macaques vaulted up onto them. I saw Tyrone hesitate, then rush into the crash of the rolling shelters but I couldn’t make myself follow: with their glossy depths of glazed black, their frictionlessness, their somehow angry speed, they reminded me of the mamba.
    I took off down the sidewalk. Possibly I had some mad idea that I would run into Mr. Gentry, and we could parade regally together through Manhattan again, I don’t know. But I saw immediately how much things were changed simply by the absence of his hand from mine. No human called my name or sauntered up to slap palms now. Instead they stooped to grab at me or tried to corral me with the long cloth-covered sticks many of them carried. By baring