Attack On Moe Cp

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Attack On Moe Cp
By Rich Schapiro Published: Nov 11, 2009
St. James Davis after chimp attack.
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The Davises are like any other family, only instead of a son, they raised a chimpanzee. Then something strange and horrifying happened—though not necessarily what you'd think.
Originally published in the April 2009 issue of Esquire
St. James Davis is crying. It's a loud, whooping wail of a cry. He's sitting in the driveway of his childhood home, a sprawling, L-shaped ranch house in West Covina, California, on a sun-drenched day last September. Standing next to him is his wife of nearly forty years, LaDonna. On the brink of tears herself, LaDonna grabs a cloth and gently cradles his cheek with her right hand. With her left, she carefully dabs at his mouth. St. James keeps his head still as she tends to him. He doesn't say a word as he calms down. He doesn't have to — LaDonna knows what he wants now that the sun is beating down on him. She grabs the beige bucket hat hanging around his neck and eases it onto his head.
LaDonna tends to St. James because he can't tend to himself. St. James, sixty-six, a former high school football star and onetime Nascar driver, is severely disabled and disfigured. There's a two-inch hole in the heel of his swollen left foot, and he is confined to a wheelchair. He has no nose, only a red, raw, exposed septum, surrounded by narrow openings. At the top are three tiny magnets designed to hold in place a crude silicone prosthesis, which is constantly falling off. His right eye is gone, replaced with glass. The skin on his face droops like candle wax because so many bones around his cheeks and eyes were broken. His mouth, which has been completely reconstructed, is stuck in a frown. On his left hand, his index, middle, and ring fingers are stumps. His right hand is much worse. He has a misshapen hunk of flesh for a thumb, which appears as if it were lumped onto his wrist with clay. His index and middle fingers are gone; his ring finger and pinkie are immobile.
But St. James's crying has nothing to do with his physical condition. He's crying because of news he and LaDonna recently received about what really can only be called their boy. At first, St. James and LaDonna were reluctant to speak about all that's happened to them. LaDonna prefers not to talk to outsiders about their life because, she says, they are so often misunderstood.
To begin to understand, you have to go back to early 1971, when West Covina's "monkey trial" captivated this small California city about twenty miles east of Los Angeles. St. James and LaDonna Davis were in court, found in violation of a city ordinance against harboring a wild animal — a young chimpanzee they'd kept in their home nearly from birth. The chimp, named Moe, rode to the courthouse shotgun in St. James's jet-black 1932 Ford roadster. Dozens of spectators lined up outside the Citrus municipal courthouse to catch a glimpse of the Davises and their monkey. St. James was a tall, handsome mechanic and race-car driver. His young wife, LaDonna, was a sun-kissed blond with wholesome good looks. Holding St. James's hand, Moe, decked out in a checkered shirt, white trousers, and shoes, entered the courthouse to cheers. Inside, he shook hands and waved to his supporters. He kissed the court reporter and jangled the keys of the bailiff.
St. James and LaDonna both made impassioned pleas to the court. "Moe is like a son to us," LaDonna said. "He wouldn't hurt anyone, and so far as we're concerned, he's a member of the family."
The trial was a sensation. Journalists fawned over Moe in person and in print, and the outcome was never in doubt. Prosecutors dropped the case, and Judge Jack Alex's assessment of the chimp, delivered to a packed courtroom, echoed in newspapers all the way to Texas. "From what I've observed of Moe outside and in the courtroom," the judge said, "he doesn't have the traits of a wild animal and is, in fact, better behaved than some people."
He's a member of the family. That's something plenty of people say about their dog or bird or even a cow in the barn. But with St. James Davis and his wife, LaDonna, that sentiment grew into a singular kind of devotion, into a singular kind of love, into a singular kind of family. And how that came to be, and what that ultimately would mean for them, is a singular kind of story. It's a story at once understandable and incomprehensible, at once comic and tragic, at once familiar and utterly bizarre.
After all, what kind of family takes a wild animal and invests it with humanity?
From the moment St. James returned from a trip to Africa with Moe in 1967, the chimpanzee was the center of the couple's life. Moe was tiny, barely a foot long. His body was covered in brown hair, except for his pink face, ears, hands, and feet. His ears, the size of large clamshells, stuck out a couple of inches from his head. But it was his deep brown eyes and what St. James and LaDonna thought they saw in them — wonderment, innocence, comprehension — that moved them the most.
Scenes from their life together are like scenes from the life of any young family with a small child.
It's a Saturday night in 1970, and St. James is sitting on the couch next to Moe, who is sucking down a vanilla shake. LaDonna is in the kitchen, cleaning up after their dinner of beef stew and vegetables. Moe, four years old, was hungry after a day in the park, and he wolfed down his plate. Now he's clapping his hands because St. James has just turned on his favorite cowboys-and-Indians show.
LaDonna joins her boys on the couch. In two hours, they'll all be on the floor sleeping, their bodies linked at the arms.
Then there was the first trip to the dentist. When Moe was about two, St. James took him to a veterinary specialist to have a crooked front tooth pulled. As the doctor prepared a shot, St. James stroked Moe's tiny arm and concentrated on keeping him distracted. He spoke to him softly: "What are you looking at, Moe? Are you trying to see out the window?" Just before the doctor plunged the needle into Moe's forearm, St. James gripped him tightly.
Moe let out a yelp but fell asleep in seconds. St. James never left the room during the forty-five-minute procedure.
As soon as they got home, St. James carried Moe to the couple's bedroom. He gently placed Moe, still in his T-shirt and plastic diaper pants, on his chest so the sleeping chimp could feel him breathing. They remained in bed together that way for more than six hours until Moe, groggy and glassy-eyed, finally woke up.
LaDonna spent hours with Moe every day, essentially trying to home-school him. She would sit beside him in the living room, coaching him as he played with Erector sets or colored with crayons. She was stunned by how thoughtful Moe appeared to be. He stared at the page, sometimes rubbing it with his hairless palm, before putting crayon to paper. Whenever Moe motioned for a new color — sticking out his hand palm up — LaDonna offered a few and asked Moe to think about which one he wanted: "Do you want this green one? Or would yellow be better? Think about it, Moe. Think."
Moe had his own bedroom, complete with a bed, a large closet where his clothes were kept — the Davises dressed him in plaid button-down shirts, blue jeans, and even dinner jackets and trousers on formal occasions — and a bureau with his toys on top, though of course Moe preferred to sleep with St. James and LaDonna. When he got too big — by age six he weighed about fifty pounds — St. James would carry Moe back to his bedroom after he fell asleep. Hours later, the couple would awaken to Moe at the foot of their bed, climbing back in.
From the beginning, Moe's demeanor surprised St. James and LaDonna. He was gentle and well-behaved. Moe seemed to take pains to avoid scratching anyone with his flat, sharp fingernails. He was affectionate and loved to hug and kiss, throwing his hairy arms around St. James's neck often. And when he wanted St. James to sit down next to him, he'd bound over and softly push on the backs of his knees.
There was one bright day about 1973. For nearly half an hour, St. James and Moe had been frantically running back and forth, trying to catch falling leaves underneath a massive maple tree in the park. St. James, exhausted, lay down on the grass. "I need to rest, Moe. I can't run like you anymore." Moe, with all the energy and insistence of a seven-year-old boy, grabbed his hands, pulling him along. They played for a while more before ending up in a heap on the grass again. St. James looked at Moe and asked him a question: "What are you going to be when you grow up, Moe?"
St. James and LaDonna hadn't planned to keep Moe forever. In truth, there never really was a plan. At first, St. James thought he'd drop Moe off at a zoo, but he says they all turned him away. In time, it became clear that there was no way the couple was going to part with the chimpanzee. So St. James and LaDonna kept Moe and raised him in their home. They taught him how to eat with a fork, use a toilet, even, they say, how to crudely write his name. Over the next thirty years, the Davises' devotion to Moe would push the boundaries of human love. It would also test the limits of that love.
"Okay, then, now you're talking," St. James says after I offer to help him with his car. We'd been sitting outside his mother's old home for a couple of hours, and it had become clear that St. James was far more concerned with getting work done on his car than talking about his life. Zooming ahead in his motorized wheelchair, he leads me to the driveway, where the wooden frame of a 1923 Franklin is resting on a table. It's shaped like a six-foot-long tuning fork and is covered in rusty bolts and nails. St. James is giddy. His condition has kept him from working on the car for three years, so LaDonna has taken over the labor. Having another pair of hands is priceless to him.
On his instructions, I pick up a hammer and start prying out some of the decaying bolts. A half hour later, holding a yellow angle grinder, I'm smoothing out a section of the gray fender as St. James provides an excruciatingly detailed real-time tutorial: "Okay, turn your thumb toward your nose. Now drop your elbow two inches and press the machine against the metal. You don't have to be gentle."
Watching from a few feet away, LaDonna is laughing. She's thin and pretty at age sixty-five. Guided by her husband, she has taken apart the Franklin over the past three months. Now she's rubbing epoxy on the fender with a piece of cardboard. St. James is less patient with her.
"LaDonna, what are you doing?" he says as she applies the epoxy. "It's dripping all over the place."
LaDonna doesn't get flustered. She knows he's just frustrated. After St. James commands her to pull out an extension cord, she laughs. "I can do that," she says, "because I love you so much."
Later, over some In-N-Out burgers that we eat sitting around the Franklin, the couple begins to tell the story of their lives. And, as it often does with St. James, it comes back to cars.
St. James and LaDonna were high school sweethearts in West Covina. They dated for a few years before St. James reluctantly agreed to get married. He was obsessed with cars and worried that marriage would put a wedge between him and his hot rods. By 1966, everything was in place for their wedding at a small brick church in West Covina, but St. James never showed up. Instead, he spent the afternoon under the hood of one of his cars while LaDonna was left alone in the church before all their friends and relatives.
The following week was the worst of St. James's life. The story of the jilted bride became the talk of the neighborhood. The entire town, it seemed, had turned against him. When he saw the ad in the paper, he knew he had found his way out: A merchant ship was looking for deckhands for an around-the-world voyage, all expenses paid. St. James had never been on a boat, but he didn't care.
What happened over the next several months altered the course of St. James's life. It is impossible to know for sure how he ended up with a baby chimpanzee. The tale he tells strains credulity in places, but he recounts it passionately, in vivid detail. By now, its facts are beyond any proof or evidence besides St. James's earnest telling. In any case, it seems to be what St. James has come to believe. It goes like this:
The ship suffered damage off the coast of Africa, forcing it to come ashore in Tanzania. Days later, while following a group of Tanzanians he befriended on a hunt, St. James witnessed a band of poachers slaughter a female chimpanzee just after she gave birth. He returned the next day, found the helpless newborn chimp alive, and began caring for him. St. James jumped ship, and for a period of several weeks and perhaps months, he provided for the animal, foraging for food, nurturing him with fruits, bird eggs, and rainwater as he searched for a way home. St. James lost weight. The chimp's fingernails left him riddled with sores. His ordeal finally ended when a tall villager, who called the chimp Mogambo, took St. James to German missionaries, who eventually secured him a flight bound for Los Angeles. Moe sat on his lap on the plane. He behaved like a prince.
By the time St. James stepped off the plane into the warm air outside Los Angeles International Airport, he was a changed man. His imposing frame had wasted away. His cheeks were hollow. Gaping sores covered his face and neck. And in his arms there was no luggage, only a baby chimpanzee.
Waiting for St. James inside the terminal was his mother, Estelle. LaDonna was there, too, and she was seething. She hadn't seen him since the day before he left her at the altar.
St. James hugged his mother. He and LaDonna locked eyes but didn't exchange words. She was waiting for him to start explaining, and she had no idea what to make of the tiny monkey at his side. St. James and LaDonna left the airport that day not knowing if they were ever going to speak again.
St. James brought the infant chimp to his mother's home in West Covina. He was tiny, about a foot long, and more playful than the most rambunctious child. Then there were those big, brown eyes. Estelle fell for him immediately. LaDonna's mother, who happened to be Estelle's close friend, began coming over. She, too, was captivated by Moe.
In time, LaDonna's mom started dragging her daughter over to play with the chimp. Like everyone else, LaDonna soon fell in love with Moe. It wasn't long before she also fell back in love with St. James.
The wedding, on June 6, 1970, was a modest affair, held at LaDonna's parents' home in West Covina. Moe was St. James's best man. The four-year-old chimp, dressed in a tight-fitting black tuxedo, walked down the aisle holding hands with the flower girl as she tossed rose petals on the floor. At the reception, Moe scampered from table to table, stealing sips of champagne. When one of the guests, a friend of LaDonna's mother's, began sharing her glass with him, the chimp clung to her for the rest of the night. Moe got drunk and pissed all over her pale yellow dress, which everyone in the room thought was about the funniest thing they'd ever seen.
As St. James told his friends, Moe was the "bond between us two." That bond would only deepen with news they received less than a year into their marriage. The couple had talked about having a large family, maybe as many as five children, and LaDonna had gone for a routine OB-GYN visit. St. James was sitting in the waiting room with LaDonna's mother when a doctor approached with a solemn expression. The doctor told them that LaDonna had cancer and needed a hysterectomy. She was in the exam room, crying.
LaDonna left the hospital with her mother and didn't come home. She refused to see St. James. She was overcome with guilt and began talking about a divorce, but St. James would have none of it. "We already got a kid," he reassured her. They spent hours and hours on the phone, talking it through. After five weeks, he convinced LaDonna that not having children should not drive them apart. Moe would remain the couple's only child.
So it was that an unconventional household began to transform into something truly different, even for southern California. Over the next three decades, the Davises lived what they considered a near-perfect life. They brought Moe along with them everywhere — to shopping malls, restaurants, weekend trips to the beach. The couple bought a three-seat bike and rode around town with Moe in the middle. And the chimpanzee, who developed a fondness for cheese burritos and coffee, took his meals with the couple at the kitchen table.
In time, as Moe grew, so did his notoriety. Already an honorary citizen of West Covina — he'd earned that distinction at the time of the trial — Moe attended ribbon-cutting ceremonies and fundraisers, once manning a kissing booth at an Actors and Others for Animals event in Burbank with Doris Day and Lucille Ball. The Davises fielded dozens of TV and movie requests for Moe. He appeared in episodes of Sesame Street, Reading Rainbow, BJ and the Bear, and Bowling for Dollars and had bit parts in movies, including the 1975 comedy Linda Lovelace for President. St. James, meanwhile, gained notoriety of his own. Though he still earned most of his living through the auto-body shop he and LaDonna owned, St. James competed on the Nascar circuit, with Moe often appearing at his side for racing events.
The Davises' feelings for Moe deepened as his behavior became more complex. According to biologists, chimpanzees are humankind's closest genetic relatives on earth. The subtlety of Moe's expressions and emotions could be uncanny. There was the time with the peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. Moe was obsessed with peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. Standing on a chair at the kitchen table, he'd always make one for himself and then one for St. James. One day, when he was about nine, there wasn't enough peanut butter for a second sandwich. Moe tried to cover up by overloading St. James's bread with jelly. But St. James reached for Moe's sandwich, throwing him into a tantrum. Moe stomped his feet and made gagging noises. He stormed out of the kitchen, found LaDonna in her bedroom, and dragged her into the kitchen. Indignant, he pointed at the sandwich, pointed at St. James. Finally, St. James capitulated and offered Moe the good sandwich. The chimp shook his head and refused to eat it.
As he matured, Moe began to understand no and yes. He knew that shaking one's head up and down meant okay and side to side meant disapproval. Eventually, he developed his own form of sign language. He'd cross his arms over his chest and tap his shoulders to signal he wanted a hug. He'd motion as if he were turning a steering wheel back and forth when he wanted to go for a ride.
Moe's playfulness continued through his teens and twenties. One night in 1984, the eighteen-year-old chimp methodically prepared his bed of multicolored blankets inside his cage in the backyard before bounding into the kitchen to give LaDonna a goodnight kiss. She handed him a flashlight and a cup of hot chocolate. Holding one in each hand, Moe carefully walked back into his cage and sat down. He grabbed one of the blankets, draped it over his head, and began flicking the light on and off, on and off. LaDonna could hear her boy making laughing noises as she headed for her bedroom.
By this point, of course, Moe looked nothing like the baby monkey who held hands with the flower girl at their wedding, a rascal straight out of Curious George. He stood four feet tall, weighed roughly 130 pounds
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