The Silverback Society
by Jeffrey Greene
part 1
While taking his daily walk through his neighborhood, the first leg of which traversed a small, wooded park, Dan Derossett came upon the carved wooden bust of a gorilla sunken almost to the brow ridges in the center of what was unmistakably an impact crater several inches deep in the clayey soil. By the fresh look of the dirt, the bust clearly hadn’t been there long and, from the depth of the crater, he had to assume it had been dropped from a very high place, possibly a small plane or helicopter, though why or even how anyone would do such a thing he couldn’t imagine.
The bust was larger than life-size, about two feet long from neck to crown and a foot wide from ear to ear, and it was carved from what appeared to be a single piece of dense, black, tropical wood. There was no pedestal that he could find, and the base of the neck was as smoothly finished as the rest of the head.
He looked up, seeing a wedge of open sky between the branches of the big tulip poplars surrounding the spot where he was standing and tried to picture the head falling through the sky, generating the kind of velocity that could make a hole this deep in the ground. He shuddered slightly to think what it would have done to anyone unlucky enough to be standing there.
Except for a hairline crack in the cranium, the bust hadn’t sustained any serious damage. Dan didn’t know much about wood carving, but the workmanship seemed first-rate. From the finely delineated hair on its massive skull to the taut black tendons in its neck, the unknown woodcarver had brought his subject fully and almost alarmingly to life.
The ape’s large, close-set eyes, deeply shadowed by heavy brow ridges, were widened in a kind of amazed fury at anyone foolish enough to meet its gaze directly. The flared nostril pits and the huge, jutting mouth curled in the beginnings of a snarl, revealing one formidable incisor, completed the portrait of a dominant male gorilla giving its final warning before charging.
This preposterously unlikely gift from the sky was growing on him by the minute, although he knew that his decision to keep it would be challenged by his wife, Ellen, whose word tended to be law when it came to decorative art. Lifting it, he guessed its weight at about twenty pounds, but the sheer density of the wood made it seem heavier, and he wasn’t surprised it had survived the fall intact.
Though not more than a block from his house, he still had a hard time carrying it back. Setting it on the tile floor of his back porch, he fetched a rag and a pan of water and began wiping off the rust-colored clay lodged in the finely cut grooves that the woodcarver had chosen to represent the skull hair.
As he was working, Ellen opened the sliding glass door and stepped out, holding a glass of tea. “What in the world...?” she said, staring at the bust in grave surprise.
“I found it in the woods up there,” he replied, pointing vaguely up the street. He was about to say, “It fell out of the sky” but thought better of it.
“Found it in the woods,” she said, in that uninflected way of hers that made it sound childish and ridiculous, even to him.
He nodded with his excited kid’s grin that had so charmed her in her twenties, but these days seemed symptomatic of a late mid-life crisis. “Can you believe this thing? I love it.”
“You’re saying you just now found this in the woods?”
“Yeah, I was taking a walk and there it was.”
“All right, Dan, I’ll buy that,” she said. “A really hideous piece of wood sculpture got dumped in the park, and you couldn’t bear to let it lie. Wonderful.”
His smile faded. “So you hate it. What a surprise.”
“Hate it? No, it’s just that I have a queasy feeling you intend to keep it.”
“And why not? What have you got against it?”
“Besides the fact that it was dumped in the woods and is as ugly as sin, nothing.”
“Well, I think it’s a damn fine piece of wood carving.”
“Yes, Dan, it’s a competently rendered bust of a gorilla. Hardly something I’d want glaring at me in the den day after day.”
“But even if it doesn’t appeal to you as art, surely you agree it’s worth keeping as a conversation piece?”
“I wouldn’t want that thing if it was a gift from the Queen of Sheba.”
“You might as well quit trying to talk me out of it, Ellen. I’m keeping it, and that’s that.”
She shrugged. “Have it your way. But I don’t care whether you really found it in the woods or bought it at a yard sale, there’s no way in hell King Kong here is going on display in my house.”
“Well, I’m not hiding it in the basement just to please you,” he said, lifting the head and posing it on its neck facing Ellen, as if hoping its intimidating presence would somehow bolster his argument. “I’ll find a place for it somewhere.”
Ready to make a conciliatory gesture now that she’d gotten her way, Ellen walked over to the corner of the porch where the Christmas cactus sat on a brass pedestal. “How about right here?” she said. “We can relocate the cactus, and then you’ll be able to commune with your ape all through the warm months. I suppose I can live with it as a kitschy piece of porch sculpture. At least until you get bored with it. Deal?”
“Fine. I’ll have to make some kind of stand for it, though. It’s a little top-heavy.”
“That should keep you busy for a while,” she said distractedly, already thinking of where to put the cactus.
In fact, it kept him two days’ worth of busy, searching all over town for a suitably heavy piece of wood that more or less matched, then sizing the hole and cutting it in his garage shop but, at last, he had “Pongo” — as he’d privately begun calling him — handsomely mounted on his own pedestal, flanked by a potted palm and a bamboo plant, the undisputed king of his own little corner of African bush country. Now, as Dan read his paper on the porch, he could pause between sections and make eye contact with his sky-fallen companion, whose fiercely surprised stare never failed to impress him.
Dan Derossett was a military retiree working part-time as a tax preparer for a nationwide firm, and had intended to tell the story to his co-workers at lunch on Wednesday, but when his opportunity came he decided against it. After all, if his wife of thirty-three years hadn’t believed him, why should he expect his part-time colleagues, a pretty staid bunch, to buy a tale that he himself would have had trouble accepting?
He did check the newspapers for several days, but found no reports of animal heads being dropped from helicopters. He thought of running a notice in the Lost and Found section of the Post, wondering what kind of response it would scare up, and even wrote out a notice and dialed the number, but hung up as soon as the phone was answered. As curious as he was about the mystery of Pongo, he couldn’t shake an obscure feeling that the bust would remain his only so long as he kept quiet about it. It didn’t trouble him as much as he thought it should that the beginnings of a real bond was developing between himself and a bust of a gorilla, although he wasn’t fool enough to share these feelings with Ellen. He saw things in Pongo’s eyes that vividly reminded him of his few encounters with gorillas in zoos.
There was one incident in particular with a huge lowland silverback in the Miami Zoo when he was a young man. He’d been a bachelor then, and had been standing in the safety zone that separated onlookers from the bars of the cage, staring — as of course one shouldn’t do — straight into its deep black eyes as it squatted placidly on the floor near the low concrete entrance to its den. It had suddenly stood up and with surprising swiftness crossed the cage and gripped the bars close to where he’d been standing.
He was in no actual danger but had backed away instinctively, even though the gorilla seemed more curious than angry. Feeling suitably chastened by his inferior status in the presence of the huge primate, Dan had continued to observe it with furtive, sidelong glances, watching in fascination as its intensely alert eyes shifted rapidly back and forth in their deep sockets. It was his most memorable encounter with a non-human intelligence, and nothing in the animal kingdom had impressed him half as much since. He hadn’t thought of that gorilla in years, but the strange arrival of Pongo brought it all back.
He began to feel that the wooden idol’s fierce yet somehow sympathetic gaze reflected his own inner self back to him more clearly than the bathroom mirror, which showed him only a bald, aging man whose weary jowls had to be scraped clean of their white bristles each morning to maintain the fading illusion of youthfulness. Now he saw himself through Pongo’s eyes: one of that vast legion of older men who dwell in a marital solitude as total as any hermit’s, having lost as many male friends over the years to the demands of family as he had through death and distance.
Except for his wife, whom he certainly loved, a grown son now living on the west coast, his acquaintances at work and a handful of married couples with whom they occasionally socialized, he was so isolated these days that he had actually begun to find congenial company in the carved bust of an ape. Had Ellen called him on it, he could hardly have denied that it was rather pathetic, or that he needed to join an organization of some kind, maybe a wine-tasting group or a chess club, or even start playing golf again, anything to bring him back into contact with men his own age. In a city this size, surely there must be a gorilla appreciation society somewhere, he thought with a smile. And if there wasn’t, well, he could always found one of his own.
He sat up straight in his lawn chair and glanced sharply at Pongo, as if half-suspecting that the thought had come from him. As bizarre as it surely was, the idea intrigued him, even if he knew that sharing it with Ellen was out of the question. But just for argument’s sake, he thought, how would one go about starting a club — and, just for fun, let’s say it’s one restricted to male membership — the purpose of which was simply to consolidate under one roof the instinctive but until now publicly unexpressed admiration among human males for the noblest primate of them all?
For he knew somehow with complete certainty that the feeling was out there, an untapped resource, spread diffusely among thousands of homes and apartments for miles around. He’d never been a clubby sort himself; in fact, he hadn’t even been inside a church for twenty-five years. But if his explorations of the Internet had taught him anything, it was that for every imaginable topic there was a group of enthusiasts with the will to gather in its honor. Like a new magazine, a new organization needed a vision statement, combined with enough capital, if not to rent a hall, at least to build a website and find creative, inexpensive avenues to get the word out.
Really inspired now, Dan found a pen and a legal pad and began to work out what in the next few hours would become a rough manifesto of... well, what exactly was he going to call his gorilla-appreciation club? What could be more important than a memorable name? But finding one proved harder than he thought.
It was hours later, when he was lying in bed, still too fired up to sleep, that it came to him. “The Silverback Society,” he whispered to himself. There was weight and dignity to the name, like the dense black presence of Pongo himself, that made Dan feel as if his infant brainchild, upon hearing its name spoken, had miraculously opened its eyes and begun to breathe on its own. Already he felt a father’s love for his creation.
Twelve Years Later
Ira Shalwitz slid the thin, paperback copy of The Teachings of Pongo across the bar of one of Washington D.C.’s most venerable steakhouses to his companion, a richly dressed older man, then reached for his scotch and soda.
“Well?” asked the handsome, silver-haired man.
“So this is the official version, huh?” Shalwitz asked. “Approved by the Grand Wahoo himself?”
“Unless you happen to be in a roomful of Mormons, you might call it the Silver Tablets of Dan Derossett,” the older man replied, sipping his single malt. “The Society issues a copy of this tripe to every prospective member. Firmly in the visionary tradition of American management theory. I don’t know about you, but it had me picturing Og Mandino dropping acid with Dian Fossey. The moving story of the taxman-turned-prophet’s life-changing vision after the Miraculous Advent of Pongo. Whirlwind of calendar leaves as we follow Dan’s lonely odyssey: his first visits to the Primate House at the National Zoo, where he gradually meets fellow admirers of the silverback gorilla’s leadership style and begins handing out his newly-printed Silverback Society cards.
“Then the surprisingly strong response to his website, the early meetings on his back porch as he discovers his own eloquence and hones his philosophy through a series of glorified pamphlets, with such titles as, ’Ten Times Stronger, Ten Times Gentler,’ ‘The 450-lb. Bluff,’ ‘Size, Strength, and the Wisdom Not to Use It,’ ‘The Silverback Inside,’ ‘Banishing the Chimp, Embracing the Ape,’ ‘Gorillas in the Boardroom,’ and of course my favorite, ‘If He Looks You in the Eye, Fire Him!’”
“I did read it, you know,” Ira said with a pained smile. “Skimmed it, anyway. The gorilla ex machina thing is certainly the most bizarre touch in an otherwise punishing read. I’ll bet he kept that little anecdote under his hat for a while, at least until he’d cemented his position as ‘Der Silverbackenführer.’ Wouldn’t want to scare off your dues-paying membership with tales of signs and wonders.”
Copyright © 2025 by Jeffrey Greene
