You take the gorilla…I suppose there are probably only about forty of them left on the planet, if that many. Point of fact: the reason the gorilla has such a large brain is not because he has to figure out where to find food or how to make a little nest in the grass. In Gorilla Country food is plentiful; enemies, apart from man, are nonexistent. To find food, make the nest, and then migrate along to the next spot, the gorilla needs a brain the size of a Rice Krispie.

The reason the gorilla has such a large brain and the reason it takes so long for the young to mature and develop is because in a gorilla society, in addition to understanding the various nuances of their vocal utterances, they are masters of reading body language. They are skilled psychologists and, in their roughshod way, they are far more diplomatic than a human can ever think of becoming.

In a gorilla troop there is no violence. Everyone gets along. There’s a pecking order, true, but everyone has his place and accepts it. Gorillas are happy. They don’t need New Balance tennis shoes, or VCRs or Jaguar V-12 convertibles. They don’t need DKNY. They don’t need crack cocaine. They don’t need to write clever stories about some guy driving around Cape Cod with angst. You give a gorilla a banana and a piece of nookie and you’ve got a happy gorilla; you’ve got a gorilla that has no desire to commit rape or Murder One, or to paint the Sistine Chapel, or run for president, win a Nobel Prize—any of that. Gorillas don’t war upon one another or torture one another. It never happens.

A friend of mine in the ER told me that the animal consciousness is one of the here-and-now and that the human being can approximate it by drinking five martinis while soaking in a hot tub. A Saturday evening condition, if then. The rest of the time…well, just read the newspapers and you’ll know what I mean. Human behavior, ninety-eight percent of it, is an abomination.

The morning after I screwed Victoria, everyone at the breakfast table knew. Humans can read body language, skin color, flushed cheeks, eye pupil size, heads hung in shame, etc., just as well as any gorilla can.

I finished my platter of buttermilk pancakes topped with pure maple syrup and then packed up my valise, gunned the V-12 Jaguar, and roared out of Clendon’s life forever. I couldn’t wait to get back to the Emergency Room at Valley General in Los Angeles, California, where I practice as a trauma surgeon and save human lives by the score, although I had to drive the Jaguar very carefully. The wheel alignment had been thrown out when I blew the tire and the frame shuddered behind all of that V-12 power.