My childhood in the jungle

When I was in the first grade, my best friend was Jonathan. We spent our recesses tromping through jungles and emitting spine-tingling calls of challenge as we swung through the trees on vines. Hey, they don't call it a jungle gym for nothing! Of course, we had a regular diet of Tarzan cartoons and live action Tarzan reruns starring Ron Ely on the Sunday afternoon TV matinee to fuel our imaginations.

There was one notable difference in our particular fantasy, however: Jonathan finally confided in me that he was actually Boy, Tarzan's young helper (Ward? Son? Who was Boy, anyway?). The details of why he was attending first grade at a small mid-western church school were never fully explained. Perhaps Tarzan and Jane had wanted him to have an American religious education before returning to Africa to help safeguard peace and justice in the jungle.

I never actually caught sight of N'Kima when Jonathan would try to point him out to me in the trees across the street from the school playground. N'Kima, in case you are wondering, is the capuchin monkey (although I believe I always thought he was a gibbon) that was Tarzan's right-hand primate in the filmation cartoons of the 70's. He filled much the same role as Cheeta the chimpanzee did in the live action movies. Presumably, N'Kima was there to watch over Boy (aka Jonathan) so that no mysterious jungle warriors or shamans found their way to Kansas City as part of a nefarious plot to enact vengeance upon the Lord of the Jungle through Boy. I'm not sure what N'Kima would have done had any evil villains actually appeared; perhaps he had Tarzan's pager number.

I can't say whether I truly believed Jonathan's stories. He was a fun playmate, I was a shy and awkward boy, and truth is a much more flexible thing for children than for adults. Why cause a fight and lose my best friend over something as minor as a few grandiose delusions? Looking back, I suspect his reasons for making the claims might have been rather similar to mine for going along with them.

I think I also went along with Jonathan's claims because because I identified with his feeling of displacement. Part of the mobile, lower middle class who thought they were buying into the American Dream, we found ourselves isolated from distant relatives--rootless strangers hiding in the lonely uniformity of suburban neighborhoods. Humans crave identity. If we don't find one in family and community, we'll use whatever comes to hand. Jungle boys dropped into America--yeah that felt about as authentic as anything else. At least we had a monkey looking out for us, albeit an invisible one as far as I was concerned. How many first-graders can say that?