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[Kiki Yablon <kyablon AT chicagoreader.com>]

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. . . .