Tarzan’s Roars

 

 

Johnny Weissmuller roared and the entire Jungle (with its suggestive vines and dense foliage) seemed to tremble. The whisky tumbler slid off the small glass table and fell onto the lion-skin rug, leaving a dark, circular, rain-swollen lake. Johnny roared: a long, enduring roar with its outer crust and littoral, its mountains of sound, its lichen-rimmed caves, its hidden depths where bats fly and nimble clouds waft off like smoke. Protracted, deep; long, profound - a roar that soared through the air from branch to branch, summoning the blue birds and gray elephants, a roar that pierced the chiaroscuro of the leaves and the scarred trunks, that whipped through the rocks like a blizzard. It scaled the peaks of the solemn, still mountains, rushed amid the primary stones darkened by the foliage and hastened the slow, crystalline summer rivers. Not only did the tumbler fall, so too did the ashtray, a porcelain ashtray shaped like a banana leaf, a gift from one of his old fans. A lot of crumpled cigarette ends were scattered about like tiny scorched trunks.

Summoned by the call were birds that took long migratory flights, little fish that licked the sides of rocks, regally horned deer, and vigilant crows; crocodiles extended their long heads, and the trees seemed to sway. It was a triumphal roar, a key heeded by large pachyderms, haughty flamingos, elusive mollusks. Then, Jane - tan and glistening - raised her head, moved by the roar as if by a long-awaited provocation. And Jane ran, ran along the jungle trails, fighting her way through the big, fleshy-leaved branches; guided by the roar, protected by the roar, encouraged by the roar, Jane traveled the moist corridors of the jungle. The birds flew after her, the lions hid, the vipers concealed their heads, the great hippopotami gave way.

Not only did the ashtray shatter on the floor: a picture in the bedroom shook; it seemed to bang against the wall and after quivering for a moment in the air (dense with smoke and alcohol), it came to a rest, crooked, yearning, out-of-kilter. It was the full-color copy of an old still of the jungle, of the prefabricated jungle of Lake Toluca, with its cardboard mountains, baobab wallpaper, and swimming pools turned into lakes brimming with piranhas. Outside the apartment, the automobiles making their way down the avenue were alarmed by the roar and came to a halt, but then hastily continued on their way. The elephants shook their huge ears like slow fans; high above, the monkeys traversed the jungle, leaping from one branch to the next; the birds snapped their wings like whips against the fronds of the tall banana trees. In the picture there was also a girl in tiger skins, lying on the ground, chained, her swollen breasts rising from between the dark spots of the tiger, her pale thighs (thighs of someone who takes little sun) visible between the orderly tears in her skirt, her thick, ruddy lips half-opened in what could be a provocative gesture of pain or a sensual entreaty. Johnny was a few steps behind - his broad, muscular torso naked, his chiseled nose, his graceful bones, the small suggestive shadows around his nipples and waist; just above the navel, the beginning of a line, a shapely crease concealed by the triangular loincloth (long between the legs but narrow on the sides, perhaps to highlight the contours of his formidable muscles), but the course of which - like a flowing river - could be imagined.

The picture, based on a scene from Tarzan and the Amazons starring him and Brenda Joyce, had been painted by one of his fans, many years ago. From what he could remember of the movie, there was an extraordinary number of girls, arrow bearers, all decked out in sandals fashioned from vines and in tiger skins (discovering that the black spots on the fabric were really the result of an excellent studio dye-job had enraged him; but lions were scarce, at least in Hollywood, and in any case an unbelievable number of advocacy societies for what-have-you - dogs, tigers, even whales - had cropped up, making cinematography a difficult art form). In the movie, he projected his long, sharp, penetrating roar, a roar of the jungle and the mountains, of the water, wood, and wind; a roar that ululated like the foghorn of a Mississippi paddlewheeler, that made the bluebirds of Nork-Fold flap their wings, that attracted salamanders from the swamps of West Palm (West of the Colorado River there’s a place I love. . .), and encouraged the ducks of Wisconsin to fly. Johnny roared; he roared on the slopes of the bison-skin couch, and the deer head on the wall didn’t move; he roared again, thinking of Maureen O’Sullivan, and the roar thundered across the room like a heavy rock falling on the reefs of Leyte: the madreporic island reproduced the roar in the whisky tumbler that bore the marks of lips and cigarettes and in the Caribbean conch shells, keepsakes in whose cavities the raucous notes of the phosphorescent sea united with the shrill notes of his roar. Johnny roared across the velvety animals of the African blankets that covered the empty double bed of his California apartment, he roared across the ivory curios and the tobacco leaves - a long, desperate, dislocated roar, the roar of a humble receptionist at Caesar’s Palace in Vegas, where he’d held his last job, and for a moment he thought that Jane would come, that Jane would cross the snarled central streets, that she would make her way through the shining traffic lights and the glistening metal of the automobiles, that Jane, wearing a leopard-skin overcoat, would cross the neon-sparkling avenue, hurdle the river of peanuts and little bags of popcorn, run through the billboards announcing porno flicks and American Noble Savage cigarettes, and reach the humble apartment where Edgar Rice Burroughs was drinking whisky before he dialed the Retired Actors’ Retreat in Woodland Hills, because the roars of an old man named Johnny Weissmuller wouldn’t let the neighbors sleep.