Some years ago I visited Hester Mundis and her then-husband who were living in a large apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. When I rang the doorbell, the most fearful snarling erupted on the other side of the door. A man’s voice issued sharp commands in German that did not seem to have much of a pacifying effect on whatever was in that apartment. When the door opened a furious German shepherd lunged at me and would cheerfully have disemboweled me had his master not restrained him with an iron grip under his collar and a series of gutteral commands that sounded like a Nazi officer rounding up civilians. Every terrifying childhood memory of the bloodthirsty hunting dogs in Bambi gripped me as Jerry Mundis struggled to hold the growling beast back.

“Come in,” Mundis said with the warm smile of the benign host of dinner party. “And don’t mind Ahab. Just be sure not to let him smell your fear.”

That was far easier said than done. I’m sure you could smell my fear in Delaware as I edged along the opposite wall past the snapping jaws of Ahab.

The Mundises were thoughtful enough to put their dog under lock and key, but then they revealed the second denizen of their menagerie, Boris the baby chimp. Boris, clad in a diaper, was chained to a mahogany dining table easily weighing several hundred pounds but he was dragging it behind him like a pull-toy on wheels. The racket from Ahab in the other room was enough to wake the dead; it was clear that he was murderously jealous of his simian sibling.

This was my introduction to the world that Hester Mundis eventually wrote about in No He’s Not a Monkey, He’s an Ape and He’s My Son. It answers the question that’s on everybody’s mind: “What’s it like to raise a chimpanzee in Manhattan?” Hester’s hilarious memoir is the complete guide to raising a chimp in the heart of urban America. Join Hester, her husband, attack dog Ahab, and the funniest monkey — excuse me, APE — ever to occupy an apartment in New York or anywhere else in this true adventure of woman versus beast.

I asked Hester to give us an update on Boris, and here’s what she had to say, along with an award-winning charcoal rendering of the noble mature creature:

Dear Reader,

If you’ve already read No, He’s Not a Monkey, He’s an Ape and He’s My Son, you know it has a happy ending. (Happy endings don’t qualify as “spoilers” in my books.) So, as an update, I’m thrilled to report more good news. Boris continues to thrive in his colony at the Chester Zoo (

www.chesterzoo.org), and now has the distinction of being the oldest—and most popular—chimpanzee there.

Recently, British artist Rob Symington won a National Exhibition of Wildlife Award for this charcoal portrait of Boris.

The portrait is on sale for an impressive 560 pounds (that’s more than a thousand dollars), but then Boris always was—and still is—one very impressive chimpanzee.

- Hester Mundis

- Richard Curtis