jackassworld

Our “interview” with Louie the chimp appeared in Big Brother issue 81, back in 2002. It was, not surprisingly, the second highest selling issue in Big Brother history. The first being an issue with Tony Hawk on the cover. LFP took newsstand sales very seriously and tried desperately to discover patterns and reasons for why some issues sold and some issues didn’t. I suspect it was because porn magazines live and die by their cover photos, that they continually focused on the Big Brother cover.

“Why do you think these two issues sold so well?” Jim Kohls, LFP’s vice president, asked me in a meeting.

“Probably has something to do with the cover,” I admitted.

“Well,” Jim said, “Maybe you should—“ but he stopped mid-sentence realizing how silly what he was about to say was.

“Maybe we should have more covers with monkeys and hawks on them?” I finished for him.

“Yeah,” he said laughing.

Unfortunately, this was the only issue of Big Brother with a monkey on the cover. Below is the entire text and the layouts of “Louie: Simian, None Too Simian.” Look for our new website, bigbrotherskateboarding.com, coming soon.

“Oo! Oo! Oo!” were the first gentle words out of his mouth when he entered the Sacramento park, Board Wild, in a loose fitting yellow World Industry shirt and a pair of blue corduroy shorts. He sat down in a small, very small, lawn chair next to the mini ramp and began rooting through a bag of raisins and other snack foods before ripping into a bottle of Gatorade that had been placed there for him and took a deep tug on the bottle. “He loves Gatorade,” Carol, an attractive, middle-aged woman and one of his trainers, told us. I stood there in utter awe before this silly little creature sitting in a silly little chair making a mess of everything within reach. I was giggling uncontrollably. He held a bag of raisins over his head, stuck out his lower lip like a drawer and poured the fruit into his mouth. Some of the fruit. Most of it ended up on the floor around him. As he chewed, he threw the bag behind him scattering raisins everywhere. Then he non-chalantly lifted the bag of groceries and emptied it onto the floor next to him. If he was completely oblivious to the mess he had made around him, he did take care with his own appearance brushing the stray raisins that had landed in his lap onto the floor. And then suddenly he looked bored.

“Are you ready to skate, Louie?” Greg Lille, Carol’s husband and head trainer, asked the little, fuzzy creature in the chair. Louie leapt out of his chair and scampered onto the flat bottom and grabbed his board.

There are people who have accused us of making fun of skateboarding and not taking it seriously, and in a way, they’re right. I wouldn’t say we’re mean-spirited, though. We just have a sense of humor about what we do and we just don’t take skateboarding as seriously as some others. To us, skateboarding is fun and the magazine is a reflection of the glee we feel when we skate. We’re not jocks, we’re clowns and artists. But in this case, where we’re giving a ten page interview to a chimp, pages usually dedicated to a professional human, it’s pretty easy to make a case that we’re making a mockery of skateboarding. At least that’s what I thought before I saw the chimp skate.

I first learned about the skateboarding chimps, Bernie and Louie, from Alex Chalmers who was working as a “skateboard consultant” for the movie they’re featured in, Most Vertical Primate. First thing I thought was, “No way.” Then, “That’s a cover and a ten page interview.” Before I had met Louie, I had actually intended on “interviewing” him. A gag. Even though it could have been fictionalized, I was planning on actually sitting down with him, asking some silly questions and recording his responses. It would have looked something like this:

Louie, I heard you attacked my bro, Chalmers. What’s up with that?
Oo! Oo!
Uh-huh. So what’s it like being all wild and shit?
[No response. Mouth full of banana, scratching nuts.]
O-kaaaay.

Moments after meeting him, however, I realized how trite such an undertaking would become after only a few lines. It was such an incredible and special experience, albeit surreal, to spend the day with this little guy that I don’t find any need to insert myself into the story. I mean, it’s a fucking skateboarding chimp, what could I possibly do to embellish the story?

First, it should be made clear that Louie is a chimpanzee (not a monkey), and thus a wild animal. And a possibly dangerous animal at that. When I first started talking to Robert Vince, the director of the movie, and Anna McRoberts, his assistant, they tried to make it very clear that Louie and Bernie are wild animals. “They’re five times stronger than we are,” Robert kept saying to me in our phone calls. Over and over again, “They’re five times stronger than us.”

“Yeah, whatever,” I remember thinking, “I just want to see the little fucker ride a skateboard.”

Rick, however, feared the chimp before he even met him and we did everything we could to keep him unsettled. “Is it going to, like, attack me?” he asked me.

“Probably. They’re five times stronger than us and they attack all the time,” I said.

“Shit. What about flashes? Can I shoot with flash?” he asked.

I had asked Robert about flash and he had said it was no problem. “No, Rick, they hate flash. He’ll totally attack you if you use flash.”

“Well, what am I going to do?”

“I say you just flash and run,” I said, “I got your back.”

Then Steve the intern started fucking with Rick. His father works in the movie/TV industry and has done a lot of work with chimps, so Steve presented himself to Rick as kind of an expert on the subject. Steve’s a really good bullshitter. Steve would tell Rick some genuine chimp behaviorial facts, but then he’d sprinkle all kinds of bullshit on his story.

“Oh, they always attack,” he told Rick, “they’re gnarly. Whatever you do, don’t look them in the eyes. It’s all about dominance and if you look them in the eyes that means you’re challenging them—oh! And are you wearing deodorant? Don’t wear deodorant. They hate it and they’ll kill you if they smell it on you.” Rick was genuinely freaked out. You could hear the pencil in his brain making mental notes, “No deodorant, avoid eye contact.”

The morning of the shoot Rick donned a green shirt. “Good morning, Rick,” I said, “Are you—oh, dude, didn’t I tell you not to wear green?”

“Shutup, Dave,” he said. We had been lying to him for a couple weeks and he was onto us.

“No, I’m serious. I thought I told you. They hate green. The trainer told me not to wear green.”

“You are so full of shit.”

“Alright, whatever. Suit yourself. Wear green, get attacked, see if I care. I’ll film it.” He didn’t fall for that one, though. He left his green shirt on.

After Louie finished his Gatorade and his raisins, he got on his skateboard, a small World Industry board, and Greg proffered his hand, Louie took it, and he pulled him across the flat bottom and flung him at the transition.

And the fucking monkey did a backside kickturn.

I couldn’t believe it. And then he pumped the transition and did another b/s kickturn at coping. I was dying. He pumped again and did another b/s kickturn, this time grabbing mute. Sure, he was a little awkward, but the damn thing was skating. He had a really silly look on his face and his arms were all over the place like Billy Ruff. Then, mid-run, he jumped off his board and went galloping all knuckles and feet across the flat bottom and in one bound leapt up onto the deck, clambered up onto the railing and scurried over to the corner where he sat looking silly as all hell.

“Come here Louie!” Greg yelled at him. And then the three trainers spent a few minutes chasing Louie around the park. Rick looked over at me all wide-eyed and agog and all we could do was laugh. But we were both thinking, “We just saw a chimp skateboard.”

Greg and Carol Lille run a chimp sanctuary near Sacramento called, P.A.C.T (People And Chimps Together). That’s where Louie lives along with 16 other chimps. I asked them how they got started. “We both started working in animal parks when we were really young,” Carol said. “We started at Marine World, and we worked at several zoos across the US. Someone came into the zoo that we were working at who had a chimp and they had no place for it to go so we took it in. Basically it started the foundation of us realizing that a lot of chimps had ended up at places where they shouldn’t be and had no place to go. So we started getting a few more chimps and then in order to provide we started to do film and television work to help take care of them. They live 50 years, so it’s a long time.”

The only time chimps are available for “work” is towards the beginning of their lives. Once they reach sexual maturity, apparently they’re impossible to deal on that level. “I mean it’s like anything, like a bull or a horse or a stud,” Greg explained. “When they’re young, when they’re colts, they’re very easy to handle, but once you turn into a stud or when a cow goes into a bull it’s all sexual drive. It keeps the procreation out there going, you know?”

Bernie, the chimp who did most of the skating in the movie, is just reaching sexual maturity and is becoming very difficult to work with. They didn’t even bring him out. Since they had completed the movie, Louie had become as good at skating as Bernie. I just got to see Bernie sitting quietly in his cage. He had changed a lot since the filming of the movie. He was huge and had gained a more sinister look. He’s around nine years old, and since their clock runs almost exactly twice as fast as ours, that would make him about a sixteen year old boy, except with hormones of a hundred 16-year-old boys. Fighting and fucking hormones, I understand.

“How do you keep all 16 of your chimps from just jumpin’ each other’s bones?” I asked.

“There’s a number of way you can do it,” Greg said, “you can do it by socializing different groups and just putting certain females with males, but when they’re in season you don’t put them together.”

“You can use birth control,” Carol added. “The same type of birth control that humans use.”

“There are chimps on the pill?” I asked dumbfounded.

“Yes there are. Or implants. They put the implants in.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, because the girl chimps have the same cycle as a human woman,” Carol said.

“Do they, like humans, sometimes forget to take the pill?” I asked.

“Just when they want to get married,” Greg said.

Louie had grown bored of the mini-ramp, or he was just distracted by all the new people around, he was very excited, so they decided to take him over to the street course. Carol took him up to the top of a wedge ramp at one end of the street course while Greg stood at the other end. Louie held Carol’s hands and she gave him a little push down the ramp while Greg directed Louie where to go. It was one of the funniest fucking things I have ever seen. He went zooming down the bank, all tucked up for speed, roared past us, smiling, because he knew we were watching him, he was seriously excited, like he was beating his chest as he rolled past, and then up and over the pyramid, pumped up the quarter pipe at the other end where Greg was, did a kickturn and headed back over the pyramid and finally back up the wedge ramp to Carol. He kind of lost his speed by the time he got back so he jumped off his board, kicked it into his hand and ran up the ramp.

“See how he’s beating his chest as he skates by?” Greg said, “That means he’s excited. That’s like, ‘I’m the man.’ People think that when they go, ‘Eek! Eek!’ that means they’re happy, but that’s not true. When they go, ‘Oo! Oo!’ and beat their chest, that means they’re happy.”

On Louie’s next run, he was a little too excited because as he rolled down the bank ramp and skated past us he wasn’t even paying attention to where he was going. He was just looking at us, pounding his chest going, “Oo! Oo! Oo!” and he ran into the hand railing that ran down the middle of the pyramid.

It was pretty obvious from the beginning not only how much stronger than us they are, but also how much more agile and durable they are than humans. Every movement he made was borne of a superior physical intelligence. I’ve often asserted that jocks are stupid in the traditional measurement of intelligence, but they possess a different kind of physical intelligence which is just as valid. People like Jordan and Gretzky will never make any great strides in the sciences, but they’re geniuses when it comes to the movement of their bodies. And if they’re geniuses, then chimps are gods. Louie never really fell.

“How did you get them skating in the first place?” I asked.

“Well they play around,” Robert, the director, said, “because it’s fun for them. One thing they love is action. They’re very active animals, they’re durable, they’re five to seven times the strength of a man in coordination and so you have to have a very agile little chimp to start with. They love activity and mental stimulation, so we started off with him just rolling off [on the board] like a kid would, just getting used to being on the board. He sits down and rides it, he lays on his stomach and rides it so he can get the feeling of it, get the concept that it’ll roll them and move ‘em and they like that kind of thing. I’ve talked to a lot of guys that train kids for this and they get them on the half pipe and the first they do is teach a kid to fall. Pretty soon the kid’s learning how to roll and tumble because in this you have to know how to fall because there are no brakes obviously, right? But with the chimp he just does that naturally. They roll and tumble and roll. They know that instinctively. And then from there you do it on like the half pipe, you take their hand and you get them coordinated so you stand them on the board and you run them back and forth, up and down this half pipe. You get higher and higher, you just take steps like with a kid and just build it up over the days, and like I said their coordination is a lot quicker. We taught them what they do for this movie in about two months at about two hours a day, five days a week. From what I’ve seen, it takes a lot longer for a person to get that—they need a lot more hours than a chimp does to get that agility.”

“They don’t have the fear factor that kids would have,” Greg added.

Indeed, Louie didn’t seem to be afraid of anything. After watching him skate around the street course for awhile, I said, “Do you think we could get him up on that rail?” There was a flat bar going over one of the pyramids.

“I don’t see why not,” they all said.

So we put his board up on the flat section of the rail, Louie scrambled up on top, they gave him a little push, he grinded across the flat section and then down the rail and rode away. He made it first try. It was bananas. Absolutely bananas. After a few more attempts we decided to take a break. It wasn’t because Louie was tired, it was because the trainers were tired.

I got a chance to sit atop the pyramid with Louie who was splayed out luxuriously in the arms of a trainer eating grapes like a Roman emperor. They were all lovey and stuff feeding on grapes. Like the trainer would put a grape in his mouth and Louie would kiss him with his big monkey lips and suck the grape out of his mouth.

“Can I try?” I asked.

So I put a grape in my mouth. Louie was a little confused. His expression said, “Wait, those are my grapes.” But I showed him the love in my eyes and he understood. I bent over him and we kissed. And he took the grape from my mouth with his soft velvety lips. Someone said, “That wasn’t full lip.” So I did it again and this time we kissed, I mean fully kissed. His big lips swallowed my nose and stretched almost from ear to ear. I was in love.

“He likes you,” they all said.

Louie went, “Oo! Oo!”

And the trainer said, “Oh, yeah? See he’s happy right now. Oo! Oo!”

So I went, “Oo! Oo!”

And he responded, “Oo! Oo!”

So I did it a little louder, “Oo! Oo!”

And he responded, “Oo! Oo!”

So I did it a li—

And he just cut me the fuck off and bellowed, “OOOOhoashdoooooOOO hehehOOOOO hehhbA OO!”

I tried my best to answer his call and he went even louder, and then he grabbed my beard and picked a zit off my face. I felt like we were really doing the interview. I wanted to turn to Rick, acting like I was translating what Louie was saying and go, “He really likes your DVS’s and wants to know how he can come up on a pair.” (He had attacked Rick on the street course—well, he kind of hid behind him—and was fascinated by his DVS shoes. Dimitry, incidentally, also has a really crazy shoe fetish. And he’s hairy, too.)

We even went, “EEK! EEEEK! EEEEK! EEK!” at each other. That worried me. Remember, that means they’re not happy. I was worried he was going to throw his poo. Which, incidentally, I asked them about.

“Do they ever throw their poo?” I asked.

“You know what?” Carol said, “people don’t realize it’s a territorial thing. They do it to tell you this is my area and you don’t need to be here.”

“So they do throw their poo?” I asked.

“Yes they do.”

“Okay,” I said, very satisfied with my scientific/investigative reporting. “Have you ever been hit by any of the chimp poo?” I pointed my finger at them letting them know that I didn’t want any monkeying around, just the truth. “Have you, or have you not been hit by chimp poo?”

“Not much,” Carol responded, “I usually duck behind other people.”

I decided then that I needed to keep an eye on this Carol lady for the rest of the afternoon. I wasn’t going to be no monkey-shit shield.

After we ate our grapes and cleaned up our mess, it was time to go out back into the alley behind the park where we set up a little launch ramp over a garbage can (the cover photo). Oh, but first he had to change his clothes. While he was in his yellow shirt, he kept trying to take it off mid-run. Seeing an animal change into and out of his clothes just like you and I do is very strange. Plus he was wearing diapers.

If he didn’t look strange enough skating in the park, a chimp skating around in an alley is really weird. We of course attracted the attention of a small number of people who were passing by, including perhaps the stupidest person I’ve ever encountered. He came out of a bar at the end of the alley, so he had likely been drinking. He was young and wearing a Habitat shirt and brand new DCs. I didn’t recognize him immediately, but he’s one of those guys who likes to dress like a skater, but doesn’t skate.

“You guys are idiots,” I think was the first thing he said to us. “Do you understand you’ve got a monkey skating around in an alley?” Not exactly the wisest thing to say to someone, especially four men who were all capable of taking him on one on one. Except me, I was on crutches.

Greg got right in his face. “Why are we stupid? Tell me why we’re stupid? I don’t understand.”

He was unable to properly express himself, words did not come easy to him, but essentially he said we were idiots because Louie sucked at skating. Even he could “bust” better tricks. Perhaps he was concerned about the film we were wasting? He also didn’t like the idea of a man Greg’s age playing with chimps. I stood to the side quietly filming everything.

“This is something stupid like my little brother would do, I mean—what are you doing?” he asked me.

“I’m filming you,” I said.

“Oh, okay, peg leg!” Nice one. He really got me there. And then he continued babbling oblivious to the camera.

I interrupted him, “Why don’t you get your board and I’ll film you.” That stumped him for a second. I continued, “If you’re better than the chimp, why don’t you get out here and ‘bust some shit?’ I think the chimp is probably better than you.”

“No,” was all he could muster. And then he resumed babbling. “You guys are idiots,” etc.

“Have you ever been to a zoo, or an animal park?” I asked. I don’t know why I asked that. I couldn’t believe I was having the conversation in the first place.

“No, I’m not into that shit. You’re into growing beards and shit, and I’m into other shit,” he said. “Why don’t you skate, peg leg? I’ll film you.”

Nuh-uh! Yeah-huh!

I was so frightened by how stupid that young man was, that I needed to get away from him. So I, along with everyone else, having gotten our photo of Louie (and some great video footage of a complete knucklehead), retreated back into the skatepark.

It was funny because when ole rocks-for-brains started cussing us out, I thought he was concerned about the animal’s well being. I mean, we were hurling a chimp up and down an alleyway and sending him soaring over a jump ramp, after all. Upon first glance, it must have looked like torture. After meeting Louie, I’ve realized he’s a happy animal, enjoys the skating, his trainers are capable and caring people, and, above all, he’s physically superior to us, so there’s really nothing you can do to hurt him. But the question of whether what we were doing was animal cruelty or not had occurred to me. I knew that the chimps had come to them from less than pleasant situations, like from people who thought they could handle a wild chimp as a pet, but didn’t realize what they were getting into. Greg and Carol had dedicated their lives to providing for these creatures, and that they were saviors in that sense, but before I had met Louie I wondered, as I’m sure you’re wondering, “Are these ‘slave monkeys?’” So I asked Greg and Carol how they respond to animal activists and critics of what they do.

“In everything that we do as humans we use animals to some degree,” Carol said, “whether we study them in the wild, there is going to be an encroachment in the wild, when we have them in the captive environment then we have to provide for them, so whether you believe they should be in captivity or not, they are. There are second and third generations born here, they’re never going to be in the wild. So the best thing that you can do is make the best life for them that you can here and create environments that are good for them as they mature. So when they’re young they like to be around people and they like to work. It’s really a thing that they like to do. You use that for the time that they like it but as they come into sexual maturity that changes the whole picture and you have to retire them to something better that they will enjoy. For me it’s just a means to provide and when you have animals that live 50 and 60 years you have to find some way to provide because people just don’t give you money. And this movie has committed to making a donation [to P.A.C.T.] to provide for all those years. So to me it’s a good balance.”

I couldn’t help but compare the chimp’s life to our own. I mean, if you’re going to criticize anything, criticize how we as humans are handled by our “masters.” Think of the countless people who have to get up every morning, trudge to work, sit in a little pen (cubicle) for eight hours a day, for years and years, “chained” to a computer with no other reward than an insultingly small handful of money every couple of weeks to buy cocaine so that they can work harder in order to get more money so they can buy more cocaine and work even harder. Birth, school, work, death. At least the chimp is having a good time.

And he’s good at skating. I don’t know why I feel the need to say this, but all these photos are real. The chimp is really skating. It’s absolutely insane to watch. I guess when Bob Burnquist first saw Bernie skate, he literally fell down laughing. I would have fallen down also had I not a crutch to hold me up. The whole day I was just completely amazed.

“You know what’s fascinating to me about it,” Greg said, “is the reaction of skaters. We can go to a park or to a demonstration with non-skater kids and they go, ‘This is really kind of cool, this is neat.’ But with somebody like you and skaters they watch and they have a much bigger reaction. And that’s the big difference, is that those who know are more amazed than those who have never been on a skateboard in their life.”

“Like I started skateboarding again just because the chimp does,” Robert said, “I mean I figured I’m the higher primate.”

“When Bob Burnquist was doing it in the film,” Greg said, “I was new to it and I didn’t appreciate it as much as I do now. Now I’m in awe. Once you try it, even standing on a board and trying to go up on these little banks a little bit, you learn real quick this is tough.”

It’s probably because of the trainer’s lack of skateboard knowledge that Louie isn’t better than he already is. As they said, it’s not really a matter of what he can do, he can do just about anything, it’s just a matter of training him to do it. Like he doesn’t turn frontside, but he has such mastery of the board that he looks like he could be doing f/s grinds no problem. Also, when he does kickturns, and because his arms are so long, he actually grabs the board. I saw him grab mute and backside a few times while doing edgers on the mini-ramp. I think he could be taught to do b/s airs. We got him up on the rail and he made that first try. Jesus Christ, imagine him spinning a 540. But they don’t skate, so they don’t really know what to show him.

“Do they ever sit down and watch skate videos?” I asked.

“They’ll watch themselves do it, we’ll show them,” Carol said.

“They do see color and 3D like we do,” Greg said, “like we brought them into a theater and we sat in the first row with a popcorn and when they watch that image, they hoot when they see each other. They can recognize that like we do. It’s neat to see. They almost have a dialog with each other when they’re watching the movie.”

“Oh my God,” I said. I wonder what they’d think of Planet of the Apes.

By the end of the day I was reeling from the experience of hanging out with Louie. We thanked everyone, high-fived Louie and said goodbye. It was a very humbling, yet exciting day. I was filled with mirth thinking of how this interview would look and seeing Louie on the cover. I giggled all the way back from Sacramento. I don’t think we’re mocking skateboarding by dedicating this much space to a chimp riding a skateboard. I don’t see how anyone could be offended by this. It’s astounding to know that a “lower life form” has the skills to do what we do. It makes you think of our place in the world. I’m often upset by the grandiloquent hubristic nature our culture has developed over the last century. Industrialization, the sciences, etc. sling so much shit about that you’d think we’re above Nature. We don’t mean shit. We’re animals, too, and our lives are but a blink in the eye of time. And we’re obviously not that much higher a life form since one of the lower ones has just stepped up. Do you understand what has happened? You can no longer draw a line between us and them. I don’t think we’re going to be seeing Louie and Bernie at the next Tampa Am contest or anything, but you never know. I mean, if a hawk can do it, why not a chimp?

(I’d like to thank Robert Vince, Anna McRoberts, Greg and Carol Lille for all their help and most of all Louie and Bernie. No humans were harmed in the filming of this interview.)