I feel I’ve had no choice in the matter. Consequently, I’ve kept most of my work with Roscoe a secret from Pina. I got the feeling early that a little bit of the parrot would go a long way for her. She found the bird tedious and once asked whether my obsession with teaching Roscoe every word in the God damn Webster’s Dictionary, was going to drive me mad.
It could, I allowed, it certainly could.
But I don’t really care about the size of Roscoe’s vocabulary. He’s mastered thousands of words and scores of sentences. I do my best to keep his achievements under wraps. I’m actually focused on how to teach the parrot to think. Like everyone else, I doubted the possibility until I discovered how deftly Roscoe followed scripts and constructed unique parallels. I keep reminding myself that a bird is not a computer. Even now I’m not sure that it’s actually thinking that Roscoe does. The circuits of his small brain respond to complex sequencing as if he were wired for it. Maybe it’s nothing more than rote learning taken to a new level of sophistication.
Read any manual about training a parrot to talk and it will tell you not to overdo it. Give the bird a command or two and then offer a treat. Never exceed a few minutes a day. You don’t want your parrot to lose interest, nor do you want to turn him into a rebel. It so happens that Roscoe has a very long attention span; at times it seems to exceed mine. This is a creature that relishes the training. When I asked him recently, after an hours-long session, whether he’d had enough, he turned the question back on me and it grew a second query: “Have you had enough, Charlie? Do you need a treat, Charlie?”
Once when I said that I was going off to make a martini,” he intoned in his low crackling voice, “In that case, shiver my timbers, I’ll have a thimble of Barbados rum, Charlie.”
After repeating that sentence a half dozen times: In that case, shiver my timbers, I’ll have a thimble of Barbados rum, I discovered that I’d become the parrot.
Roscoe had constructed a charming line of poetry, rich in assonance. I realized the line possessed what writers fresh from MFA programs call voice. How was this possible?
After my sixth repetition, Roscoe praised me: “That’s very good, Charlie. You’re making genuine progress.”
I have no memory of teaching Roscoe the rum sentence. Sad to say, I’m not creative enough to coin a line like that. No, it was the product of Roscoe’s extensive vocabulary, intuitive language-sequencing skills, the countless hours of tapes I play for him, and, yes, I’ll say it, his uncanny grasp of logic. But how to account for a parrot who speaks naturally in the language of poetry?
Early on, as a lark, I gave Roscoe a taste of several kinds of alcohol. Scotch, I told him, was sipped by gentlemen and ladies, very slowly. He followed my cue, nibbling daintily at the drink. Before offering him his first thimble of rum, I explained that pirates served their parrots rum, at least in storybooks. His response unnerved me— “Are you a pirate, Charlie?” “Charlie,” the parrot said: “Is this a storybook?”
“Are you a pirate, Charlie?”
I pondered that.
“Charlie,” the parrot asked:
“Is this a storybook?”
Some days during quiet time, when I’m sitting at my desk, I hear Roscoe mumbling in his cage. He can’t always keep silent. His brain is in overdrive; he’s busy wrestling with phrases, experimenting with emphasis and tone: The nerve of him. Will you get a load of that? It’s first come, first served around here, Bub.
The other day I put some music on for Roscoe, the long movement of John Adams’ Saxophone Concerto, which ranges from Animato, Moderato, Tranquillo to Suave. I watched Roscoe intently listening. He started to mouth the music, chewing along with the sixteenth notes, ghost-calling angular intervals, and, during a brief tuneful French horn solo in the Tranquillo section, reciting musical terms that he picked up during weekly foreign language drills. I was impressed with the clarity of his pronunciation, but also by the fitting character he gave to the terms. Andante spilled slowly, even delicately, out of his mouth, while vivace soared into lively leaps through the syllables. When I introduced the term scherzo, I pointed out that it meant joke in Italian. He pronounced it during the Adams concerto in a lilting nasal burst, tagging on a brief chuckle for a coda.
Weeks before Pina moved in, even before she told me, to my delight, that she would, I had the second bedroom of the condo, soundproofed. That‘s where Roscoe trains and listens to the recordings and scripts I play for him. I suppose I’m afraid that if Pina discovered how deeply I’m involved with Roscoe’s training, and the degree of his prowess with language and cognitive skills, she’d flee in horror. Nobody wants to live in a house with Dr. Frankenstein. Some day Pina will discover the extent of Roscoe’s skills and what I am grooming him for, but until then my relationship with the African grey remains just another odd hobby pursued by a middle-aged man during the pandemic.
Because I am a masochist, I tuned in yesterday afternoon to Trump’s news conference, and then a delightful moment surfaced. A White House reporter, named S. V. Dáte from the Huffington Post, who looked like a seasoned diplomat, asked, in a measured matter-of-fact manner: “Mr. President, after three and a half years, do you regret at all, all the lying you’ve done to the American people?”
Trump looked like a deer in the headlights. He couldn’t concoct a fresh lie quickly enough and, after an awkward pause, he turned from S. V. Dáte and called on another reporter.
Unfortunately, I am alone in the house with all the political news. Pina has declared a moratorium on all things tied to the coming election as well as everything Trump, so I either take my news in the soundproof room or listen out front with headphones. I’ve yet to introduce the political world to Roscoe, although that will clearly play a big part in his future.
Pina and I haven’t even spoken about Biden’s selection of Kamala Harris, but I have the sense that she got the word, most likely from her ex, Vince, with whom she speaks frequently. She makes a point of letting me know after she’s conversed with Vince, an effort to show me that she’s not being duplicitous. I’m surprised she thinks that’s necessary. If I’m within earshot, I can tell when Vince calls because Pina’s assigned him a specific ringtone: a barking dog. I don’t know what to make of her devotion to the recovering addict. Perhaps it’s simple jealousy on my part, and yet it’s occurred to me that her concern for Vince may represent a form of penance for moving in with me. My jealousy and Pina’s feelings of guilt, if that’s what they are, are not mutually exclusive.
In one of her recent conversations with Vince I noticed a broad smile crest on Pina’s face. Then I heard her say, “She was the one I was hoping for.” I find it curious that Pina hasn’t invoked her moratorium about Trump and the election with Vince.
This afternoon it reached 105 degrees in Sonoma. I was a little disappointed because the forecast called for 106 and I’m fond of extremes. I refuse to turn on the air conditioner—I don’t like the artificial air or the waste of energy—and Pina seems to thrive in the heat. I spent the whole day in shorts without a shirt and Pina did the same. I made every excuse I could to go into the bedroom, where she keeps her office, just to gaze at her beautiful breasts, until finally she rose from her desk chair and pressed up against me.
“You know what the heat does to me?” she said.
Dumb as I am, I didn’t have a clue.
“It makes me horny. How about you, Charlie?”
“Same with me, especially when I’m around you.”
“I don’t know what it is; it just gets all my juices going. Hmm, you smell so good, Charlie.”
Soon enough we stripped off each other’s shorts and rolled around on the sheets, making hot sweaty love.
Afterwards, we both lay on our backs, panting in a damp heap, Pina asked: “Have you always been such a magnificent lover, Charlie?”
That’s not the kind of question my ex asked.
“Have you always been
such a magnificent lover, Charlie?”
That’s not the kind of question my ex asked.
“This is where we’re supposed to smoke cigarettes,” I said, “like we’re in a French flick.”
“I have a joint rolled,” Pina said, and rose from the bed in a burst. I watched her slender body slice through the space with the assurance of somebody fully at home in her skin.
When Pina returned, she not only brought the joint but also a small basket of plump figs, the first of the season. “Let’s save these until after we smoke.”
She lit the joint with my brushed brass Zippo and we passed the doobie back and forth until we’d both smoked too much of it.
“So what’s this movie called?” Pina asked, busting into a devilish laugh.
I pondered that a moment. “Figs Without Leaves?” I said, finally, rather pleased with the title. I took hold of a fig but instead of biting into it, I suckled one of Pina’s breasts. Coming up for air, I affected a posh British accent: “I know that we are in Eden, however, I’m not sure which is the forbidden fruit.”
“Silly boy,” she said, “nothing is forbidden.”