We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves Read online

  The lecture that day began with a discussion of violent women. Without openly acknowledging it, this underscored the fact that the rest of the class had all been about men. But that first part is not what I remember. I think maybe Dr. Sosa talked about the WKKK, the Temperance Movement, an odd assortment of religious mobs and girl-on-girl mayhem. I think we ranged from Ireland to Pakistan to Peru. But Dr. Sosa clearly thought of all these less as independent movements and more as adjuncts to whatever the men were doing. His heart was just not in the violent women.

  Soon he’d returned to the topic of religiously motivated violence against women, a standard thread throughout the class. And then, suddenly, with no warning at all, he was talking about chimpanzees. Chimpanzees, he said, shared our propensity for insider/outsider violence. He described what the border-patrolling male chimps do and their murderous raiding parties. He asked us rhetorically if doctrinal differences simply provided cover for our primate and viciously tribal selves, which was so much like something my father would have said I felt an unreasonable impulse to object on those grounds alone. Dr. Sosa glanced at me and I did not nod. He said that among chimpanzees, the lowest-status male was higher than the highest-status female and he was looking right at me the whole time he said this.

  There was a fly in the room. I could hear it. My feet were freezing and I could smell my sneakers, essence of rubber and socks. Dr. Sosa gave up and looked away.

  He repeated a thing he’d said many times before—that most religions were obsessed with policing female sexual behavior, that for many it was their entire raison d’être. He described the sexual herding done by male chimpanzees. “The only difference,” he said, “is that no chimp has ever claimed he was following God’s orders.”

  Dr. Sosa had wandered off from the podium. He returned to it, consulted his notes. He said that rape, like domestic abuse, was a chimp behavior, and he shared a recent observation from Goodall’s team in Gombe of one female in estrus forced to have sex with various males 170 times in one three-day period.

  I had to put my pen down. My hands were shaking so hard my pen was vibrating on the paper, marking it with a frantic Morse code of blots and dashes. I missed a few of the things Dr. Sosa said next, because of the way my blood was rampaging through my brain and, when the students around me turned to look, I realized that I’d been breathing too loudly, wheezing or hissing or panting or something. I closed my mouth and the students turned back.

  • • •

  I HOPE YOU haven’t assumed that just because I had no friends I’d had no sex; the bar for sexual partners is much, much lower. Though it’s surprisingly hard to have sex without friends; I’d often wished for someone who’d give me pointers and reassurance. Instead I’d had to make the whole thing up on my own, wondering why I never experienced the glossy sex of the movies. What is a normal sex life? What is normal sex? What if asking the question already means you aren’t normal? It seemed as if I couldn’t get even the instinctual, mammalian parts of my life right.

  “You’re very quiet,” my first said. We’d met one evening at a frat party shortly after I discovered Jell-O shots. We’d locked ourselves in the bathroom and the sex had been plenty noisy from my perspective, what with the constant banging on the door and people cursing us when they couldn’t get in. I’d had my back against the sink, the rim digging into my spine and then, that angle having proved too difficult for beginners, we ended up on the floor on a filthy bath mat, but I hadn’t complained. I’d thought I was being a good sport.

  Earlier in the evening, he’d called me shy, as if it were a compliment, as if he found my silence strangely compelling or mysterious, or, at the very least, cute. I remembered the noises I’d often heard on my parents’ side of the bedroom wall and I could have made them myself if I’d understood they were desirable. I’d just thought of them as creepy and parental.

  I knew the first time would hurt; I’d been prepped for that by advice columns in various magazines, so I wasn’t alarmed by that part. And it did hurt a hell of a lot. But I’d also been prepped for blood, and there wasn’t any. And then it hurt the second time and the third time, too, even though that was with a different guy and a smaller penis. No magazine had suggested it would still be hurting by then.

  I finally went to see a doctor at student health. She looked inside and told me that the problem was my hymen, which was so small it had frayed but not broken, so the deed was done in her office with special implements of hymen destruction. “That should clear the way,” she said cheerfully, along with a lot of cautionary advice about not letting myself be pressured into things that made me uncomfortable and the importance of protection. Pamphlets were pressed into my hands. I had a terrible ache below, as if a cramp had tied itself in a knot and then tightened. But mostly it was humiliating.

  My point being: I’m no stranger to bad sex.

  But I am one of the lucky ones. I’ve never in my life been forced into any sex I haven’t wanted at the time.

  • • •

  WHEN I COULD hear again, Dr. Sosa had moved on from common chimps to their (and our) close relations, the bonobos. “Bonobo society,” he said, “is peaceful and egalitarian. These laudable qualities are achieved through continual and casual sexual congress, much of it same-sex. Sex among the bonobos is just a form of grooming. Mere social glue,” said Dr. Sosa. And then, “Lysistrata had it backwards. The road to peace is through more sex, not less.”

  This went down well with the male students. They were surprisingly okay with being told, by inference, that they were simple creatures entirely controlled by their dicks. Ithyphallic, one might be tempted to say.

  They were okay with being told, by inference, that reluctance, mostly female, was the root of all evil. This reaction was less surprising.

  A young woman a few rows to my right raised her hand and then didn’t wait to be called on. She stood. Her blond hair was braided and beaded in complicated ways. The one ear I could see was rimmed with silver cuffs. “How do you know which came first?” she asked Dr. Sosa. “Maybe female bonobos find their males more attractive than women find men. Maybe it’s sexy to be peaceful and egalitarian and not so concerned with policing female sexuality. Maybe you guys should give that a try.” Someone in the back made a sound much like the chimpanzee food hoot.

  “Bonobos are matriarchal,” the young woman said. “How do you know it’s the sex and not the matriarchy that makes a society peaceful? Female solidarity. Females protecting other females. Bonobos have it. Chimps and humans don’t.”

  “Okay,” Dr. Sosa said. “Fair point. You’ve given me something to think about.” He glanced my way.

  • • •

  DR. SOSA ENDED the last lecture of the quarter by telling us that our preference for our own kind begins at birth. We find it in three-month-old babies who prefer faces from the racial category they see most often to all others. We find it among young children who, when divided into groups along the most arbitrary of criteria—shoelace color, for example—vehemently prefer the people inside their group to the people outside. “‘Do unto others as you would have others do unto you’ is our highest, most developed morality,” Dr. Sosa said. “And really the only one necessary; all the others flow from that; you don’t need Ten Commandments. But if you do believe, as I do, that morality starts with God, then you have to wonder why He simultaneously hardwired us against it.

  “‘Do unto others’ is an unnatural, inhuman behavior. You can understand why so many churches and churchgoers say it but so few achieve it. It goes against something fundamental in our natures. And this, then, is the human tragedy—that the common humanity we share is fundamentally based on the denial of a common shared humanity.”

  End of class. Everyone clapped, either because they’d liked the lecture or else because it was over. Dr. Sosa said a few more words about the final. It wouldn’t be a simple regurgitation of dates and facts. He wanted to see the quality of our thinking. He looked at me again. I could have gi
ven him one last reassuring nod, but I was still upset. Extremely upset. Profoundly, heart-racingly upset.

  I’d never even heard of bonobos. Suddenly everyone seemed to know a lot more about chimpanzees than I did. This came as a surprise and a surprisingly unpleasant one. But that was the least of what I’d been given to think about.

  Part Four

  I’ll say it again: imitating human beings was not something which pleased me. I imitated them because I was looking for a way out, for no other reason.

  —FRANZ KAFKA, “A Report for an Academy”

  One

  TODAY, IN 2012, with the whole of the Internet laid out before me like a Candy Land board (or maybe Chutes and Ladders is the better metaphor—or maybe Sorry!—anyway, one of those games that never ends because you never win), I’ve been trying to find out what happened to other famous cross-fostered chimps. Information about the experiments is easy to come by, not so easy to learn the fates of the subjects. When there is information, it’s often disputed.

  One of the earliest chimps, clever, docile little Gua, appears to have died in 1933 from a respiratory infection shortly after the Kellogg family returned her to the Yerkes research lab, where she’d been born. She’d lived in the Kellogg home for about nine months alongside their toddler son, Donald, effortlessly outshining him at using a fork and drinking from a cup. She was two years old at the time of her death.

  • • •

  VIKI HAYES WAS born in 1947 and died in her home of viral meningitis when she was either six and a half or seven, depending on what website you choose. After her death, her parents divorced; at least one friend said that Viki had been the only thing keeping that marriage together. She was an only child.

  • • •

  MAYBELLE (BORN IN 1965) and Salome (1971) both died of a severe diarrhea that developed within days of their respective families’ going on vacation and leaving them behind. No underlying physical condition for the diarrhea was found in either case.

  • • •

  AFTER HIS RETURN to a research facility, Ally (born 1969) also developed a life-threatening diarrhea. He pulled out his own hair and lost the use of one arm, but none of these things killed him. There are rumors, unsubstantiated, that he died in the 1980s in the medical labs, victim of an experimental but fatal dose of insecticide.

  • • •

  AT TWELVE YEARS OF AGE, Lucy Temerlin (born in 1964) was sent from her home to live with the chimps in Gambia. She’d been raised in Oklahoma by the Temerlin family. Lucy liked Playgirl magazine, tea that she brewed herself, and straight gin. She was a tool-using chimp who took sexual pleasure from the household vacuum. She was a wild girl.

  But she knew nothing of life in the wild. She’d been born at the Noell’s Ark Chimp Farm and taken from her mother into a human home two days later. In Gambia, Janis Carter, a psych grad student, took great care over many years trying to gently habituate her. During this time, Lucy suffered a deep depression, lost weight, and pulled out her hair. She was last seen alive, in the company of other chimps and apparently resigned to being so, in 1987.

  Some weeks later, her scattered bones were found and collected. The suspicion that she was killed by poachers, into whose arms she eagerly ran, has been widely transmitted. It has also been strongly contradicted.

  • • •

  NIM CHIMPSKY (1973–2000), star of book and screen, died at the far-too-young age of twenty-six. At the time of his death he was living at the Black Beauty Ranch for horses in Texas, but he’d had many homes and many surrogate families. He learned twenty-five or a hundred twenty-five signs—reports differ—but his linguistic capabilities were a disappointment to Dr. Herb Terrace, the psychologist who’d picked him for study. When Nim was four years old, Terrace announced that the experiment was over. Nim was then sent off to live at the Institute for Primate Studies (IPS) in Oklahoma.

  Nim’s perceived failures had consequences for many of the signing chimps. Money for these experiments dried up as a direct result.

  He was eventually sold to the medical labs, where he lived in a small cage until one of his former grad students threatened a lawsuit and launched a public fund that finally got him out.

  • • •

  WASHOE (1965–2007), the most famous of the cross-fostered chimps, also spent time at the IPS in Oklahoma. The first nonhuman ever to learn American Sign Language, she had a vocabulary of 350 ASL words and died of natural causes in 2007, when she was forty-two. Roger Fouts, who’d started working with her as a grad student, eventually devoted his life to her protection and well-being. She died at the sanctuary he created for her on the Central Washington University campus in Ellensburg, surrounded by humans and chimps who knew and loved her.

  About Washoe, Roger Fouts has said, she taught him that in the phrase human being, the word being is much more important than the word human.

  • • •

  THE IMPULSE TO WRITE a book appears to run like a fever through those of us who’ve lived with apes. We all have our reasons. The Ape and the Child is about the Kelloggs. Next of Kin is about Washoe. Viki is The Ape in Our House. The Chimp Who Would Be Human is Nim.

  Maurice Temerlin’s Lucy: Growing Up Human ends in 1975, when Lucy was eleven years old. The Temerlins adopted her believing, as did many of the cross-fostering families, as did my parents, that they were making a lifelong commitment. But at the end of his book, Temerlin expresses a longing for a normal life. He and his wife haven’t shared a bed for years, because Lucy won’t have it. They can’t take a vacation or ask friends to dinner. There is no part of their lives that Lucy doesn’t affect.

  Lucy had an older brother, human, whose name was Steve. Post-1975, I can find no mention of him. I do find a site that says that Donald Kellogg, the child raised for a year and a half with little Gua—a period of time he would, of course, have had no memory of, though it is well documented in papers, books, and home movies—killed himself around the age of forty-three. Another site claims that Donald had had a distinctly simian gait, but it’s a white supremacist site—there is no reason to give that any credence at all.

  Two

  A FEW HOURS after Dr. Sosa’s lecture, I met up with Harlow at a beer-and-hamburger place in central Davis called The Graduate. The streets were dark, cold, and wet though the rain had stopped. On another occasion, I might have been more appreciative of the black magic around me, each streetlamp wrapped in its own bubble of mist, my bike-light briefly igniting the puddles on the black streets as I passed. But I was still teetering on the ragged cliff-edge of Dr. Sosa’s lecture. My plan for the evening was to drink. In Davis, biking while drunk results in the exact same ticket as driving while drunk, but this was so patently ridiculous I refused to acknowledge it.

  By the time I locked my bike, I was shivering mightily. I remembered the scene in It’s a Wonderful Life when Clarence Odbody orders a flaming rum punch. A flaming rum punch would have really hit the spot. I would have bathed in it.

  I opened the heavy door to The Graduate and slid into the din. I’d been considering telling Harlow what I’d just learned about chimp sex. Much would depend on how drunk I got. But I was all about female solidarity that evening, and I thought it might make me feel better to talk frankly to another woman about the horribleness of male chimps. So I was not happy to see that Reg was joining us. Reg did not seem like someone with whom you could profitably discuss chimp sex.

  I was even less happy to see Madame Defarge. She was sitting on Harlow’s lap, weaving her head from side to side and unhinging her jaw like a cobra. Harlow was wearing a pair of worn jeans just barely held together with embroidered patches of mountains, rainbows, and hemp leaves, so her lap was an interesting place. “I’m being careful with her,” Harlow told me, apparently irritated by something I hadn’t even had the time to say yet. She was making assumptions about my no-fun-at-all-ness. They were good assumptions. Our relationship had started so promisingly, what with both of us breaking things in best monkey-girl fashion a
nd swinging off to jail together. But I could see she was reassessing me now. I was not as gamesome as she’d thought. I was beginning to disappoint.

  She graciously put all that aside for the moment. Harlow had just learned that the drama department would be putting on a gender-reversal version of Macbeth in the spring. Of course, she didn’t say Macbeth; she said “the Scottish play” in that annoying way drama majors do. The male roles would all be taken by women, the women’s by men. Harlow had been chosen to help with the sets and costumes and I’d rarely seen her so excited. Everyone was assuming, she told me, that they would be cross-dressing the actors, but she hoped to talk the director out of that.

  Reg leaned in to say that there was nothing an audience liked better than a man in a dress. Harlow brushed him away as the minor annoyance he was.

  “Wouldn’t it be more challenging,” she said, “more of a mind-fuck, if the costuming didn’t change?” That would suggest a place in which the dominant paradigm was female; all those things that coded here in our world as female would represent power and politics. Female would be the norm.

  Harlow said that she was already doing sketches of the castle in Inverness, trying to imagine a fantastical, female space. This could have segued into a conversation about chimp rape, but not without harshing the mellow. Harlow was incandescent with hopes and plans.

  Men were buying drinks for Madame Defarge.

  Reg offered me one of them, a dark ale with a strong hoppy smell. The chilled glass mug was warmer than my hands and I’d lost all feeling in my thumbs. Reg raised his own beer in a toast. “To superpowers,” he said, lest I get the impression we were letting bygones be bygones. Let the wild ruckus commence.