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One of the first things I did was to go slowly through an old American Heritage Dictionary from beginning to end. Twice. What a magic invention are words. There is at least one for every imaginable thing under the sun. And if one doesn’t exist, you make it up!

I have not and perhaps won’t learn to write. I do not have the hand, eye, and mind coordination necessary. Ridley gave me his old computer and taught me how to use it. It seemed as new as the one with which he replaced it. Ridley has been very generous, giving me clothes, books, CDs, and good whiskey, even if he does get loopy sometimes.

I knew there were occupants of the house that were not comfortable around me. The stiff smile of toleration is one of mankind’s worst and most necessary achievements. I had to resist the urge to revert — to go apeshit, as Ridley puts it — and bite off their balls and faces.

So I learned to be modest and keep my privates covered. I learned you couldn’t fart anytime you wanted to, which never made much sense to me. I learned to knock on doors, or work the ringer light, because people liked their privacy, which I still find odd. We all know what people do in the bathroom or in the bedroom when they take off their clothes. The privacy thing took me a long time to learn. Perhaps because people will do things in front of animals that they wouldn’t do in front of other people.

Some of them didn’t take my presence very seriously at all. I had been ensconced there six months when a young man named Tim came to live in the house. He was a big handsome fellow with curly yellow hair and a normal laugh. He could even say a few words, but he couldn’t hear too well.

Well, right off, he noticed Megan, who was Fred’s girl. And she noticed him. For a while they kept their attraction secret, except from me. I would be in the library deep in a book when they would come in, sit on the couch, and go to all the fuss and bother people do. There was a lot of licking and mouthing, worse than bonobos if you ask me. I noticed, peering just over the rim of my book, that Tim had a sizable member that Megan, with considerable vigor, treated like a lollipop. I pretended not to notice. Just another ape reading Gibbon.

They were discovered of course. Fred burst in on them one night when he was supposed to be giving a signing class to some high school students. He didn’t find them in flagrante, but mussed up and reddened enough to be suspected with plausibility.

Afterward Fred cornered me in the television room and bought me a beer at the house bar, which is just a refrigerator full of stuff that the residents pay for on the honor system.

“Okay,” he signed, “tell me what Meg and Tim were doing on the couch just before I came in.”

I took a slow sip of my beer, a bottle of Bass Ale. “I didn’t notice,” I lied, showing him the thick tome I had been reading.

He made a face. He’s one of the skeptics where I’m concerned. That is, he doesn’t believe I can read a comic book, much less Herodotus. Which in this case was to his disadvantage as I could play dumb with conviction. When he made the sign for kissing and then something more suggestive, I pretended not to know what he was asking.

“Were they sitting close?” he asked with some exasperation.

“What do you mean by close?” I asked back, taking a long swallow of the Bass.

“Touching,” he signed.

I again pretended to be mystified. “The couch is small,” I said, “and Tim is big.” Megan was kind of big, too, at least her backside, but I thought it best not to mention that.

He gave up finally, muttering with his hands something like “f*cking lying ape,” before stomping off.

Not long afterward, Tim and Megan left the house together and went to live in San Francisco. Fred has never forgiven me, as though it was my fault that his woman ran off with another man. Frankly, I don’t see why they couldn’t have shared her. There was certainly enough to go around.

What I’m trying to say is that in reality I was little more than a pet to some of the people there. Not to Millicent or Ridley and one