Billy Ray: A Chimp Accused

Ben's note: Rory has been telling me bits and pieces of this damn story for years now intertwined with other vines in his overgrown memoir garden. Time for him to get on with the story. It's a true one. But he takes liberties with the truth whenever he damn well pleases, in my opinion. So, a good bout of dolphin waxing would be more productive than trying to sort out the bits that didn't happen from the bits that did. Bottom line: If Oprah were to call Rory a liar, he wouldn't give a shrew's scrotum. In fact, he'd kinda like it, I think.

Gonna try to get you a bit of Rory's rambles on Billy Ray maybe once a week 'til it's told. I'm sure he'll have trouble staying on point, wanna tell other stories, post on what runs in front of his nose, but we're gonna try. -- Ben

'Fuckin' A." -- Rory

Billy Ray: A Chimp Accused (as told by Rory Shock) -- Part 1

A chimpanzee in Windtown, Kansas, killed her owner. Her name was Billy Ray and she was thought by the public to be a male. She made her living doing commercials for car dealer Cal Stokes (of he’s stokin'-up-a-deal-for-real fame) on television and in person, usually wearing a cowboy hat and a bright yellow windowpane suit with a bolo tie.

I’d seen Billy Ray in her yellow plaid suit, ten gallon hat, and bolo, on late night commercials. Every conceivable inane simian joke was used, every hackneyed human-concocted cliched chimp behavior mindlessly repeated. Like the one where Billy Ray was smoking a cigarette and Cal Stokes kept telling her to put it out before she got in the car, because Cal kept his “veehickels” smoke free. Seeing no evil, Billy Ray held her hands over her eyes when Cal approached a car with a machete to “slash” prices on a window sticker. She smiled an ape smile, with that only-chimps-have-it lip control, when Cal said “Nobody’s service is friendlier than ours.” She held her hands over her ears, hearing no evil, when Cal said he would give away any car on the lot if there was another car dealer with a friendlier Chimp in Windtown. She did a forward roll when prices were “tumbling.” She held her hands over her mouth, speaking no evil, when Cal asked her who was the best dealer in the Midwest. Cal chided her for “monkeying around,” when she was no more a monkey and no less an ape than he. But she wrote her own script and avoided cliche when she snatched him bald one night, tearing his scalp off with the swipe of one mighty hand. She pulled his right index and middle fingers off. They were found on the kitchen floor. She broke his neck by throwing him across the room by the head. Even an average-sized female chimp like Billy Ray is as strong as a 750-pound man made of muscle.

I got to represent Billy Ray because I’d been the lawyer for a local university student, Molly Chandler, who had freed the rats from the laboratory breeding ranch up on campus. Molly was surprised to meet up with a lawyer who had read Animal Liberation by Peter Singer. I told her that since I had seen Roger Fouts on 20/20 with Hugh Downs meeting his old chimp friend Bouie after so many years and Bouie remembered his nickname in American Sign Language, I’d been thinkin about how fucked up it is that chimps, many of whom served honorably in the space program and other scientific enterprises, face torture, both physical and psychological, despite being neither enemy combatants nor criminals. I mentioned some of my favorite books, like Jane Goodall’s In the Shadow of Man, DeWaal’s Peacemaking Among Primates, The Great Ape Project, and Visions of Caliban. I told her that Jane Goodall was one of my heroes, actually the only one I could think of at that moment. She told me that she had met Jane Goodall after a speech and had an autographed copy of Through a Window. Anyway, she trusted me and I’d kept her out of jail on the rat bit. She had a patron that wanted to pay fees and expenses to keep them from executing Billy Ray at all, let alone without due process of law. So she called me. She told me that Billy Ray was being held without bail, so to speak, in an old cage at the Windtown Zoo. The cage had actually been the home of a long-suffering polar bear who expired during a Kansas heat wave, I think is what I was told. The government’s plan was to give Billy Ray a lethal injection. So we had to act quickly. I became her lawyer.

I got a temporary injunction that gave us 10 days to file briefs and have a hearing for an extension. In the meantime, I learned that the case had been assigned to a Judge by the name of Alan Wrench. I shit you not. I’d never had any dealings with him before, so I called a friend who had. Friend of the name Mendicant Friar. Again, I shit you not. I recall that conversation so clearly.

So, I’d told Mendi to whom the case was assigned. He said, “Brother, that Judge is a fucking Pentecostal. He comes from southwestern Missouri.”

“Meth labs in beatup trailers and holy rollers,” I responded. We all have our unfair biases and preconceptions. That’s what makes us human. Actually I pretty much can’t say those things about “that’s what makes us human” too much anymore after the Billy Ray case without thinking it’s bullshit.

“Yep. Seems his father was a minister or pastor or whatever the fuck they call their preachers.”

[Ben's note: Rory is about to say words that show a lack of respect for something venerated by others: a particular religion. I told him that we were gonna lose our Pentecostal readership. He laughed and slapped his thigh at that one. And I said to him, “probably, if and when Billy Ray ever comes out in print, there’ll be a burnin’ party.” He responded like he often says but doesn’t entirely mean, “Fuckit. I don’t care.” Actually, he seemed quite pleased at the burning book vision.]

“Mendi, I looked into this Pentecostal thing back when John Asscrapt became Attorney General, more or less just out of curiosity, because he was one. I learned that those are the fuckers that have Lord seizures, jabber nonsense, speak in tongues, whatever.
What the fuck is the theory there? The words of god are gibberish? God loves morons? Man, they don’t dance. They don’t drink. They think gay people are evil. Generally, they love the death penalty and would happily give it to you if you’re a doctor who removed a thimbleful of nonsentient flesh from a 13 year-old fucked by Uncle Biff.”

“Yeah, Rory, and it doesn’t matter what you do all life long. You can rape, cornhole babies, steal widow’s life savings, cut throats, beat your wife black and blue, torch your friend’s double-wide, waste a cop, and publicly unrinate on a daily basis and still be forgiven and walk into heaven happy, pampered, eternally blissful. Even if you spend a life trying to alleviate pain instead of spreading it, if you don’t accept Jesus into your life by the time you take your last breath you go to some fucking cliched version of hell where there is brimstone and fire and all sorts of shit like that.”

“Well, Mendi, let me guess what they think about animals.”

“Book of fuckin’ Genesis.”

“That’d be the God-put-em-here-for-us-to-do-whatever-the-fuck-we-want-with-the-story. Hunt, eat, skin, wear, and I suppose in modern times, experiment upon. But where the fuck do they stand on bestiality?”

“That’s pretty much ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell.”

“So, you can fuck chickens all your life long as long as you accept Jesus before you die. ... that certainly stands to reason if you can fuck children and still go to heaven, then you ought to be able to fuck, pluck, roast and eat fowl and enter the white cloud Hollywood biblical land of milk and honey. So, anyway, you’re not gonna believe this Mendi, I’ve got case in front of him involving whether a chimpanzee is legally a person.”

“Fuck, you’ve got that case? I saw something about it on the news.”

“I’m a little concerned about his views on evolution and genetics.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Mendi, I assume he’s a fucking creationist. So, what’s he gonna make outta the fact that we’ve got almost 99 percent of the same DNA as chimps?”

“Maybe that 99% just won’t do. God put the chimp here as a lesson to man. As an advertising mascot for the depilation industry, which is still growing. As an amusement because they do seem similar. Or maybe god put ‘em here for experimentation and 99% the same DNA makes them excellent research subjects for human diseases? Somethin’ like that.”

“Yeah.”

After we hung up, I thought to myself, Pentecostal, hmm. Guess I better learn up real good on them uns. Know thine enemy. Understand your adversary. Knowledge is power. Face the source of you anxiety. Like that. so I do what you do nowadays. I get on the web.

Before too long, I am growing disturbed. Among other things I find this explanation of the significance of the holy jabber known as speaking in tongues -- glossolia -- in the official doctrine of the United Pentecostal Church:

“The tongue provides the greatest expressions of the human spirit. We humans are spiritual and emotional beings, and as such we must give expression to our emotions. The ability and power to coordinate thought and tongue into intelligent speech is one of our highest prerogatives, elevating us above the beasts of the field. This ability makes us superior to the rest of God's creation on earth, and it is the most distinguishing feature of our being.

The tongue becomes the vehicle of expression for the spirit.
All of the emotions--such as love, hate, anger, sorrow, joy, happiness, relief, serenity--are communicated through the tongue. The tongue is the gate way to the heart, feelings, attitudes, and spirit.”

Holy shit! I think to myself, here’s one argument I’m gonna hear from the other side, I’ll bet. Chimps don’t “coordinate thought and tongue into intelligent speech.” What about humans who don’t do this, of which there are plenty, I wonder. Are sign-language users unholy, nonpersons under this frickin' Pentecostalism? Can you speak in tongues with your fingers? Can a chimp speak in tongues? What if I can convince the Judge that Chimp chatter is really just God taking control of the Chimp tongue? Maybe I can find an expert who will testify that Chimp chatter can be glossolia. And here it is again this pervasive human fucking arrogance that we are “superior to the rest of God’s creation on earth.” Well superior in the sense that we can dominate any creature and kill any creature, anyway. My head is already spinning. But then I’m a little bit happy, because I realize that I have another overgrown trail of learning to hack through: I must study Chimp language experiments. Shit, I must go even further. I must try to communicate with my client. I must get to know her. Who is she? And, needless to say, I must find out why she killed Cal.