Down a Desolate Hallway, Eddie’s Ghost Lingers Still

He knew a thing or two about zoos . . . 

The Copenhagen Zoo shotgunned to death a young giraffe named Marius a couple of months ago, cut it up and allowed children to watch as the zoo’s big cats eat the creature.

It was a real teaching moment. Just ask one of those kids.

A few days ago, the same zoo killed four of those hungry lions to make way for a new cat.

It was all done cleanly and scientifically, in the name of genetic purity. This time, they didn’t invite the kids.

I got a job working as a night watchman in my hometown of Buffalo in the mid-’70s. After everyone left the grounds, the place — an ornate old WPA pile — belonged to me.

This was where I met Eddie, while pushing a chemical broom down the building’s shiny terrazzo floors.

Eddie knew a thing or two about zoos, though he never talked about what he knew. Not in so many words.

I felt like a turnkey in a 19th Century madhouse. Tiny rooms — cages, really — housed scared-looking lonely creatures who peered out at me while I made my rounds. Sometimes, there’d be screams. The place stank of shit and urine and the weird lemony compound I used to spray on the broom.

Eddie had a small, bare-bones space just around the corner from the grim little room I was stationed at, with a battered steel desk and a noisy radiator.

Eddie was old when I met him. Spiky white beard, long, skinny arms. Large, brown, sunken eyes. Patches of scraggly hair. He had a long, protruding jaw that sometimes hung open and fat, rubbery-looking lips.

An ugly cuss.

Eddie didn’t have any time for me, or anyone else. I’d been warned he was crazy, crazier than all the rest, and that I should keep my distance.

My first night on the job, he was sitting on a wooden bench in the corner of his space, staring at his arm as if he’d never noticed it before. He was picking at a string of scabs along his arm. And they were bleeding.

He caught me staring at him. Looked up from what he was doing and grinned at me. He had a tremendous set of chompers.

I went back to the broom.

The guys I worked with knew Eddie when he’d been a star, a real show-stopping vaudevillian who’d do anything for attention — hang from the rafters, dress up like a woman. Scream his head off.

No longer. Attention was the last thing Eddie wanted, from me or anybody else.

I liked working nights. Liked being alone. I could do make my rounds in half the time I was given. The rest of the night I sat in the room with the desk, writing my novel. When I got frustrated, I’d light up a Parliament and wander around the corner, in case my muse was out there waiting to meet me.

She was never there. But Eddie was. He’d be there, picking at his sores.

I used to wonder what was going on in his head.

Was he remembering palmier, applause-filled days? Or nursing old grudges, dreaming of ways to wreak revenge on his keepers, the men who made sure he never saw the light of day?

No way of telling. When he started smearing his own shit on the walls, I pretty much knew he’d gone over the hill.

Years later, long after I’d said goodbye to that hellhole and to my career as a novelist, after I read about the demise of Marius then giraffe, I thought of Eddie. I Googled up his name and found this small notice from 1985:

“BUFFALO, NY (AP) — Eddie the chimpanzee, a one-time protege of Marlon Perkins and the oldest resident of the Buffalo Zoo at age 47, was given a lethal drug injection Friday after suffering a stroke, zookeepers said.”

The story said Perkins, who later became famous as the host of TV’s “Wild Kingdom,” taught his one-time protege to dance something called the “Zoological Conga,” and to shave his keeper.

I wanted to cheer when I read this:

“A glass shield was placed over his cage’s bars in 1958 after he hurled objects at touring members of the Buffalo school board.”

Three guesses what those “objects” were.

I think Eddie would have welcomed a shotgun blast back when I knew him, just as Marius the giraffe would have preferred a long, anonymous life in Copenhagen’s genetically pure ersatz savannah, neither of them burdened by the need to entertain or educate their supposed superiors, their highly self-regarding keepers.

This essay originally appeared in The Huffington Post.