Gorilla suits and latex-The rise and fall of El Mucho

Gorilla suits and latex-the rise and fall of El Mucho.

Monday was hot dog day in the canteen. El Mucho, all seven feet of him
loved Mondays for this. He'd take off the heavy diving bell helmet and
the gorilla suit and sit in his underpants eating six or seven of them
in no time. It was a good thing the studio provided all his food. The
three dollars a week they paid him wouldn't make it past his small
intestine. He also had his own caravan with a fridge full of beer and a
flushing toilet. Yes, El Mucho liked America. Here he found shirts and
y-fronts that fitted. The cars were like boats and the sandwiches were
like submarines. Everything was bigger than ten bears.

He was a little lonely though. His sideshow proportions and broken
English didn't win him many friends. People tended to steer clear of
him, he was just too large for this life. He didn't mind. Without his
freakish size he knew his part in the movie would never have come
about. It got him to the land of the free and the home of the depraved.
Besides, he enjoyed playing the alien in "What The Mutant Did Next" and
the good life it gave him. It looked bright for him. Already El Mucho
was ear marked for another film, "Slugs of Andromeda" It would require
a black latex suit dripping in goose fat. Hot, uncomfortable work but
then so was picking cotton in Baja. B-grade sci-fi was all the rage and
he intended to milk it.

It was around January, 1955 when he met Jimmy. He came by his caravan
one night all swagger and devilled good looks. He was drunk and wanted
to see the giant of Quesadero for himself. "Hell's bells you are a big
bastard", the slick, liquored youngster said when El Mucho answered his
door. Always glad of company he invited Jimmy in for a beer. Always
glad of a beer Jimmy said yes and soon they were playing canasta for
pretzels and slapping each other on the back. They were hitting it off.
Truth be known young Jimmy was missing Indiana and had no close friends
amongst the tinsel and bullshit of Los Angeles. Most people just gave
him the phony brown tongued bravado that all stars were given. El Mucho
didn't. He was incapable of it and Jimmy loved that. After a few more
cold ones the Mexican put on his gorilla suit and diving bell helmet
and played his ukulele. A little number he called "I'm tired of mung
beans and bad Tequila" floated across the movie lot and handsome Jimmy
swayed.

That September in Los Angeles was still hot and hazy. El Mucho was
nearly done filming the Andromeda movie and he sweated like a pony in
the slug suit. He couldn't wait until the yokels chased him back to his
own galaxy with their pitch forks and snail pellets. Jimmy was shooting
his latest film a couple of lots away and El Mucho visited the set most
days. It was some kind of western and he got to meet Elizabeth Taylor
who took quite a shine to his latex and goose fat. Rock Hudson was
Jimmy's co-star and El-Mucho's slug number was not wasted on him
either. "Camp as a row of tents", Jimmy would say looking the Mexican
straight in the eye and giving him a wink. They both finished their
movies the same afternoon and to celebrate the studio bought Jimmy a
Porsche. El Mucho was allowed to keep his latex monstrosity (valuable
memorobilia) and was given forty-eight cans of Moose Head beer from his
Canadian director. He was glad that was over and done with. Most of his
skin had gone permanently pruney and his sperm count was way down. His
next job would be easier with only a Viking helmet and a loincloth
needed. "It Came From Helsinki", would be a breeze and for the first
time people would get to see his face.

Jimmy wanted to get out and about and paint things red for his own end
of shoot celebration. He wanted El Mucho to drive his new car so he
could drink beer and enjoy the scenery. The big man could barely drive
a tractor and even with the seat right back his knees were up around
his ears. He complained and griped and wanted out but Jimmy harped on
until El Mucho came around to his way of thinking. He also insisted El
Mucho dig up his gorilla/diving bell helmet ensemble and put it on.
This was going to be a blinder, a crazy ride.

They took off with the top down so the big man's head had somewhere to
go. His peripheral vision was gone with the helmet on and he was hotter
than an armpit in July until they hit the freeway and some moving air.
Jimmy just wanted to cruise and knock back a few with the wind in his
hair before they found some place for the hard core session he had in
mind. He was full of himself and peaking nicely. At peace and easy, the
world was an oyster and he was the pearl. The beer was going down a
treat and mixed with his halcyon. He was fit to burst with some thing
bordering on glee, wooooeeee!

They stopped after an hour or so up the road. A shopkeeper remembered
the huge hairy Hispanic beast stumbling into his store for beer. Jimmy
had stuffed a fistful of dollars in El Mucho's paw and told him to go
scare the shit out of some people. This he did easily and it was fun
until the owner of the store produced a shotgun and told him to get
out. In his panic to leave he knocked over a stack of tinned beans in
tomato sauce. The guy with the gun, already jittery, sprayed buckshot
everywhere, some of it pinging off El Mucho's helmet. Quite a lot of it
made it through the outer gorilla layer and into his thigh and bum
region. Tins of kidney beans exploded and plastered the big man in a
red and pink paste. He got up with what felt like a bunch of angry
hornets having a sting-a-thon on his leg and ran outside. Jimmy had the
car running, he was wide-eyed and wondering what the hell was going on.
El Mucho hurled himself into the back seat and they were off.

By this time Jimmy had twelve or so bottles of beer under his belt and
was fairly well cut. As a result his driving was all over the place. He
kept looking over his shoulder and asking El Mucho why he was basted in
beans. Hard laughter, facing the wrong way and being rottenly drunk
made control of the Porsche difficult. Back on the freeway they had
four lanes worth of swerve leeway and Jimmy was road hogging the lot
every time he turned to speak. With other variables like more cars and
bends the two friends weren't really on a freeway any more, they were
on shit-street. It was always going to happen and then it did. The
Porsche sideswiped an articulated truck, which sent a jack knife right
through the heart of the oncoming traffic. Jimmy and El Mucho spun out
of the already snarled bunch up of cars and rolled, bouncing over the
guard rails at the edge of the road. It was an almighty pile up, a
heavy metal mess. The Porsche had ended up on its wheels in a
ravine.

El Mucho's helmet and gorilla suit had protected him from untold damage
to his head and body. He and Jimmy's big brush with inertia threw them
a good twenty feet through the air and crumpled them up next to each
other. Two broken men. El Mucho came to but Jimmy never did. He was in
the next world before the ambulance and reporters arrived. His big
friend swatted the pressmen away and smashed cameras before he was
bundled off in a meat wagon headed for the county hospital. He had six
weeks in traction, pulleys and weights everywhere with nurses tweaking
them daily. He was pestered often by the newspapers for the exclusive
that would read, "Death of a heart throb-B grade friend tells all".
They never did get it. El Mucho signed himself out of hospital and
quietly slipped away back to Mexico and Quesadero with just his
costumes and a his ukulele. He came out of the crash pretty healthy but
for a heart that always hurt, the part of him that missed Jimmy in a
horrible way. He didn't manage a smile for three years and his air was
of sadness and loss for just as long.

Then all at once some thing shifted off his chest. He threw on the
mutant suit and sat drinking beer banging out the odd ditty on his
ukulele. He raised a bottle to his friend and buried him there and
then. He was coming good and decided to go for a wander. The locals
hadn't seen him in his Hollywood get up until then and reacted like all
good ignorant rural folk do. They decided to kill him. As El Mucho
walked out of town over the Rio Queso Bridge all helmet and hair he
hummed the score from "Slugs of Andromeda". Behind him Raoul
Fricadelle, deputy Mayor and treasurer of the resident lynch mob let
rip with a salvo of hell and lead, some slugs of his own. They caught
El Mucho square in the back. The big man was sent reeling off the
bridge into the Rio Queso where he floated downstream a while before
getting snagged on an old tree and bobbing about like a big hairy
apple.