THE APE THAT EXPLODED By Ron Garmon Great big gobs of greasy, grimy gorilla guts Mutilated monkey meat Amputated human feet King Kong eyeballs Rolling down a dirty street I forgot my spoon -Traditional Already considerable by even extraordinary standards of Gotham happenstance like 9/11 and the 1863 Draft Riots, the casualty toll attributed to “King” Kong didn’t end with the great ape’s notoriously messy plummet from the Empire State Building. Death continued to fan out from the disaster scene for many days, confounding compilers of statistics. The popular press, in the weeks leading up to the ill-fated exhibit of “the Eighth Wonder of the World” lovingly detailed the fates of the twoscore adventurers who’d perished on Carl Denham’s first expedition to Skull Island. Scenes of men hurled into ravines, butchered by giant spiders or stomped to paste by the ape were cabled across civilization (and passed mouth-to-ear by awestruck schoolboys across civilization), but would eventually land on RKO’s cutting-room floor well before the
bowdlerized 1933 film premiered. New Yorkers, however, had few illusions during the previous long Depression winter about the hideous consequences on Fifth Avenue of a thirty-eight ton silverback gorilla’s transformation into civilization’s first bio-bomb. President Hoover himself first turned on the lights on this new world’s-tallest structure not two years before, but few of even the most hardened Democrats among Manhattanites were prepared on the night of Nov. 12th, 1932 to take this as harbinger of even worse times to come. Kong’s forty-one second drop from the building’s observation platform was accompanied by a roar heard as far away as Union Hill, NJ, and the monster simian hit Fifth Avenue concrete with the annihilative force of twenty tons of TNT. On impact, the ape detonated like a bomb made of stupendous quantities of hair, hide, bone, muscle, viscera and enough quickcongealing blood to make even veteran cops green decades later in remembrance. That the giant ape thrashing, bullet-pocked and streaming gore, but still livinglanded in a crowd estimated in the 243