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Back in 1974, when I was living in Montrose, a Houston neighborhood that was a vaguely bohemian mixture of gay bars and strip joints and that was also home to the SWP headquarters, a comrade named Gene Lantz invited me to go see the famous gorilla named Hugo who lived in a Montrose house. Gene was one of the few local Texans we had recruited that sided with the pro-Barnes majority I was sent down to reinforce. Most of the rest were aligned with the minority that backed the Ernest Mandel faction based in Europe and Latin America.
Since I was fascinated by the great apes at the time (and still am), I decided to take him up on his invitation. We arrived in the living room of a man named Charles B. Greer Jr. who was one of Montrose’s “characters”. He had built a cage for Hugo abutting his living room, in which the animal was sitting quietly near the rear. With a mischievous smile on his face, Greer invited me to go up to the bars and take a look in at Hugo. As soon as he saw me, he stood upright and charged directly toward me like a football defensive lineman coming after a quarterback. When he rammed into the reinforced bars of his cage, it sounded like a bomb going off. This made Greer laugh out loud. It was obviously why he enjoyed keeping a caged gorilla next to his living room—it was a good practical joke to play on visitors. Hugo’s needs hardly entered the picture.
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