“Here we come,” Tony mumbled, “Sweet Buddy Holly.” Then he threw up.
Tony looked up into a sky full of green and hair. He could hear his grandmother crying in the distance. He could hear the preacher man speaking to a milling crowd he could damn well hear but could not see.
“He hath lived fast. He hath died young. He hath delivered unto us a good-lookin’ corpse.”
Tony opened his eyes wide. The preacher was looking down from heaven right at him, and he looked like an ape. He was an ape. Then there were other ape heads right up there beside the first one: a row of smiling, goof ball coconuts.
“Ah, jeez…”
One of the apes covered Tony’s face with a leathery palm and pushed him back against the ground. Then they were dragging him faster and faster through the jungle, his head bouncing off fallen trees, rocks, and hardened lion crap. Tony had visions of being nurtured and raised by these apes, learning their ape language, becoming skilled in their jungle ways, being part of a jungle gang that roamed and hunted and killed, that did pretty much whatever they pleased. Then they came to a sudden stop before a hillside, and headed back to the trees, leaving Tony there with his head spinning. An animal looking something like a cross between a dog and a very sick housecat stuck his head out of a hole in the embankment. Then there was his twin brother, and another, another still, until the hole was filled with about a dozen of those identical ugly animal heads. One of them squirmed out of the hole, came over to Tony, sniffed him, then raised his leg and pissed on him. Then he yipped to his brothers—they all came out and pissed on him, and then they snared his clothes with their teeth and commenced dragging him through the jungle at breakneck speed again.
That entire day Tony was passed in similar ways to the tiger clan, the elephant clan, even the goddamned wildebeest clan, but he wasn’t kept anywhere longer than a few sniffs and a lot of good peeing. By sunset he was bone-sore and stank to high heaven, and he’d pretty much given up on the idea of becoming intimate with any clever jungle ways.
That’s when his last potential adoptive jungle family—a ten-yard-wide black mass of no-nonsense army ants—deposited him face first in front of a small jungle dwelling—a jigsaw puzzle of branches, fronds, and mud. Tony shook the jungle debris off him and climbed unsteadily to his feet. A few broken sticks had been stuck to a door crudely fashioned from some salvaged crates. A small bald head appeared in a hole in the hut wall. “Vot iss this?” the head asked him.
Tony looked at the door again with sudden understanding. The handful of broken sticks formed a swastika.
Over the next several weeks Tony was schooled in the clever jungle ways of the expatriated Nazis. They weren’t such bad guys, really, although maybe just a bit intense. They liked injecting him with strange things or feeding him indescribable crap and seeing how he reacted. Mostly he reacted by throwing up.
After a while they let him inject the blacks they kept in a large pen in a nearby jungle clearing. That wasn’t too bad, kind of interesting really. The stuff he injected the blacks with must have been a lot stronger than the stuff the Nazis used on him because the blacks would scream for a long time after he injected them, roll their eyes and stick their swollen tongues out sometimes until they bit their tongues in two or choked, sometimes both. It was actually kind of funny, sometimes, if they jumped around rubbing their balls or crapping all over themselves, say, or they screamed over and over until it was like this loud, crazy song. Now and then he’d feel a little nervous about being alone in that pen with all those crazy, naked blacks, what with just the hypo to protect him, and what with them knowing what he’d been doing to their buddies. But the Nazis had armed guards just outside the fence carrying these huge tommy guns, and guard dogs with heads the size of watermelons. When the dogs crouched by the fence and growled, showing their long, sword-like teeth, even the bravest of the blacks moved to the center of the compound. Tony figured these dogs were some kind of special Nazi jungle breed—he’d never seen anything like them in any of the pet stores in New Jersey.
He never could figure why the Nazis were injecting the blacks with all that crap, but then he figured it wasn’t any of his business either. His grandma always told him, “People have their reasons.” That was her other bigtime saying. “Long as nobody got hurt.” Yeah. But blacks don’t count. Even grandma would’ve agreed with that. It was too bad really—Tony loved their music. It wasn’t fair, but it was the way it was. It was nature, and half of them living in the jungle like they did, the other half in some filth-hole of a city somewhere, they had to know that.
After a few months the Nazis must have given up on the blacks though—figurin’ they’d never change—and they started injecting stuff into Tony again. Or maybe it had more to do with the fact that most of the blacks they had penned up were dead by then, except for a couple of near-giants, Jo Jo and Kang, who had always been a pain to mess with.
Or maybe they were done with their animal tests, and now they were ready for the real thing. Ungawa.
Actually, Tony didn’t mind particularly. Life in the jungle had proved to be a lot less interesting than in the Tarzan movies. It was hot, it was steamy, and, other than poisoning the blacks or playing poker with the Nazis, there wasn’t much to do. He’d tried to swim the local river once, but what with the alligators, hippos, and eels it was a lot more crowded than your average Jersey pool, and almost as nasty.
He tried making friends with some of the local animals. “We’re of one blood,” he’d say as a sure-fire junglecratic opener. “I am a cub of the… the Nazi clan. And you?”
But they either ignored him, shit on him, or tried to eat him.
So he let the Nazis shoot him up with practically everything in their mad scientist pharmacy, as well with whatever they could find crawling around on the jungle floor that could be jammed into their giant Germanic steel Mixmaster.
And some of it wasn’t all that bad. After one particularly good jolt, Tony decided that the lead Nazi, a guy named Fritz, looked pretty good in leather. Tony’s leather jacket, in fact.
And, as they say only in the movies, that brought him to his senses.
“Joy! What have you done with my Joy?”
“Ya, ya. Der jungle be a sad place sometime. Iss not Fritz’s fault, however.”
Tony was staring right at Fritz when the Nazi’s head disappeared into a cloud of blood. The rest of the Nazi’s body stood upright a moment, long enough for the mist to form its first blood drops on Tony’s leather jacket, before it toppled forward, revealing the two giant blacks, Jo Jo and Kang, massive blood-stained stones clutched in each of their massive hands.
Tony’s bowels suddenly filled with wet, jungle heat. But he couldn’t move.