Monkey Business

I took a short respite from bloggery and told all of you to take a moment and throw up some short fiction based on this pic. Details here.

We have several links to stories in the comments of that post, but good pal Jim Henshaw of The Legion of Decency sent this over via email so I had to post this up to share:



Cheetah had never been to Amsterdam. He had never eaten a Royale with Cheese. Hell, he'd never even been in a MacDonald's. On either side of the ocean. Why would he? His body was his temple. No meat. No dairy. Maybe one beer with Crabbe or Weissmuller after wrap. But just one. Those guys took care of themselves too. That's how you stayed on top in those days. You stayed fit. You stayed focused. You worked at your craft. Not like the kids in the business these days.

He had almost cold-cocked the whiny, fast-jabbering kid who'd accosted him in the Video store, claiming he was a director. What kind of director went out in public without a crisp Brooks Brothers shirt and a tie? It would never have been tolerated at MGM. But amid all the slack-jawed yammering the kid had swore he'd seen all of his movies, even "Tarzan and the Mermaids". God, how he wished they'd let him do his own swimming in that one. He'd almost flipped him a signed glossy and walked away. But then the kid told him he'd been ignored too long. His star deserved to shine once more.

While you're shooting 85 features and 300 TV episodes, you think it's never going to end. And when it does, and then the weeks turn to years of low-fat banana shakes, afternoons at the gym and improv classes in Glendale, having somebody say he can put you back on top again can't help but push your buttons. So here he was. His first screen test since 1931. It was between him and some bloated nobody who'd been half a dancer and shot his wad in less than a decade.

Piece of cake.