The Worst Story I Ever Heard: St. James, LaDonna, and Little Moe

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http://www.esquire.com/features/chimpanzee-attack-0409

Whole thing is probably too long to post; here's the first page:

To be published in the April 2009 issue of Esquire

The Worst Story I Ever Heard

The Davises are like any other family, only
instead of a son, they raised a chimpanzee. As
with Travis, the chimp that attacked a woman in
Connecticut on Monday, for years everything
seemed fine. Then something strange and
horrifying happened ­ though not necessarily what you'd think.

By Rich Schapiro

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. . . .

_______________________________________________
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