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Issue 3 - Summer 2006 - The Magic Issue
A LIFE IN CHICKENS
Close encounters with poultry
BY GREGOR EHRLICH
1. When I think about the meaning of life — and its stubborn companions, death and fear — I cannot help but think of chickens. I have often reflected how chickens are like us, unsuspecting and oblivious. I have no idea why fright is associated with chickens. I have seen many chickens. Chickens are pretty hard to spook.
2. At the time of my first significant encounter with poultry, I could barely walk. This was the natural result of my age: two. My father, while on summer vacation from his job as a school psychologist at City College of New York, entertained fantasies of a farmer’s life. He bought an old dairy farm upstate and purchased a number of geese from a livestock auction. He brought them to the farm, along with a goat. One morning, holding in my tiny hand a hunk of stale pumpernickel bread, I attempted to bludgeon the geese. “Attempted” is probably not quite the right word. I did bludgeon the geese, just not very effectively (the geese did not seem to notice me). The whole episode might have faded into lost memory if not for my mother, her 8 mm camera and her unusual need to document everything. She was a bit of an auteur. In addition to home movies, her oeuvre also contained a thirty-minute short film about our town, Leonia, N.Y., featuring everything from a montage of garbage trucks, garbagemen, and a huge pile of recycled glass, to a film noir segment about gas stations with our neighbor Larry in a zoot suit and fedora. The point of the film was simply to celebrate our town, and small towns in general, but my mother took a complex route in expressing this conceit, requiring the enlistment of a local pilot for aerial photography sequences, as well as the help of Alan Alda, who was then a neighbor and a rising star of television and film. If I recall correctly, Alan Alda held the camera in the plane and communicated, using a walkie-talkie, with my mother on the ground. For the final sequence, my father, dressed as Abe Lincoln, waved from the Borough Hall steps, while a number of extras, also in period costume, stood, also waving, in the background. 3. By the time I reached the age of five, my father had expanded our menagerie considerably. We had a dozen chickens, twenty chicks, and a nearly-dead draft horse. We also had a pet monkey, Chi-Chi, who enjoyed crapping into his own hand and flinging the feces out of his cage. The chickens roamed free-range — lovely, but problematic in that a predator of some sort was killing them at night. To protect them, my father cobbled together a makeshift coop out of a few boards and honeycombed wire, but the chickens kept dying. In a twist contrary to his Bob Newhart persona, my father knew how to shoot. He had served in the Korean War. Though he had not seen combat (he spent most of his service testing soldiers who had symptoms of VD), he had learned to fire a rifle. To save the chickens, he bought a .22 at Sears. He stayed up late for many consecutive nights, with a row of brass jacket rounds lined up on the windowsill, like a miniature Cold War diorama. The culprit eventually revealed itself to be a raccoon. Incredibly, my father managed to shoot and kill it in the dark. It is difficult to shoot anything under any circumstances, even a paper target in the light of day, so hitting an erratically moving raccoon when all you can see are glimpses of its eyes flashing, is no short order. I should note that guns were not my father’s first line of defense. He had started with traps. These were illegal traps, ancient ones, made of two steel jaws with a spring and a small platform to hold food as bait. They were ineffective at catching raccoons, but a chicken did manage to step on one and got its leg chopped off. The chicken lived on, seemingly fine as an amputee. My mother took to calling him “The Colonel” for his semper fi spirit. It wasn’t long before my father shot a second raccoon, and then, in quick succession, another and another. We had a wheelbarrow, and it became a regular event for us kids to gather the dead in the morning. One night, while in raccoon-sniper position, my father tipped his rifle against the ammo lined up on the windowsill, and a bullet fell out the window. My mother, worried the lawn mower might hit the missing round and send a slug through one of her children’s brains, forbade all further lawn mowing. My father offered the then unimaginably huge amount of five dollars to whoever found the bullet. My brother, sister and I spent many hours combing through the grass. We never found it. 4. As a boy I would go with my father to see the “butter and egg man.” The butter and egg man sat in an ancient shop and was a man, as his name implied, who sold butter and eggs. He also sold live chickens. I would stare at the cages full of tightly packed birds, all doomed. You could pick the one you wanted, which seemed to me an unwelcome burden for any person to bear. Posted on the wall was a rhyme from the Depression. It went like this: Oce umbilli, Se umgo Fortibus es ena row O nobili, de maint trux Demis onligee sean dux Which translates from the phonetic reading as: O see ’em Billy, see ’em go Forty buses in a row O no, Billy, them ain’t trucks Them is only geese and ducks Even as a kid, that poem struck me as so innocent, like a schoolyard rhyme. I couldn’t figure out if people in the olden days were actually more innocent or simply had a cornier sense of humor. 5. On Friday nights, we had Shabbos dinner. This involved lighting the candles and making a prayer over the wine — although we drank Champale instead — and bread. My mother would roast a bought chicken on a wire rack in the oven. At the end of the meal, we would remove a wishbone and set it out to dry on the dish rack over the sink, exchanging it for the previous week’s wishbone, which had been waiting for us on the rack for seven days. Two of us would loop our pinkies around each end of the bone, and it would break with a satisfying crack. The same summer, while eating a Friday roast chicken, I asked my mother if what I was eating was the same as the animal we called The Colonel out in the yard. She said, “Yes,” and then grew pensive. From that time forward, she never ate a mouthful of meat, though she dutifully continued to make the Shabbos chicken every week. 6. In high school, we were made to play field hockey in the morning. We would go out on the grass, even while there was still a heavy frost, and do our best to avoid getting hit in the head with the wooden ball, which felt like hard punishment when it smashed your nose or slammed into one of your eyes. There was also the risk of slipping on bird guano. The playing field was adjacent to a marsh, and migratory flocks of Canada geese would alight there, leaving an improbable quantity of droppings. If a thousand Canada geese landed, it seemed there would be two pounds for each bird, deposited in green tubes the size of Tootsie Rolls. When I ran back and forth on the field, the stuff would soak through my sneakers and leave dark stains on my socks. In my senior year, I went, under darkness and moonlight, with a girl to a nearby pond. We sat and kissed, and then rolled around by the water. After we returned to her car, the dome light revealed that both of us had green goose shit all over our backs. It was like a horror movie, except with feces instead of blood. 7. I have a highly charismatic, slightly mad, old friend named Saul. Here are three Saul-related chicken capers: 1) In college at Vassar, Saul hatched a scheme to dance with a chicken. Actually, to dance with a sheep, a cow and a chicken. This is a true story. His dream was to make a splash during the annual battle-of-the-bands contest. He wanted to lip-synch and dance with animals to the song “Doin’ Da Butt.” Our friend Noel, a saturnine fellow with prematurely gray hair, was supposed to do it with him, but dropped out at the last minute to go see Jules et Jim instead. I was recruited as Noel’s replacement. Saul got the bird a few days in advance and hid it in his dorm room. The sheep and cow were delivered the day of the show. The sheep and cow didn’t seem to mind the crowd, or the dancing, though the chicken was all frightened claws and beak, and scratched big red lines all over my chest, ripping my shirt as I tried to lead her in a waltz. The people in the audience were not pleased and turned, as one, against our skit, booing and stamping their feet. There was a flurry of emotional letters to the editor published in the school paper. Under pressure, the school attempted to mete out punishment, but no rules had been broken that anyone could actually name until it was discovered that Saul had kept the chicken in his room prior to the show. There were rules about pets in dorms, and so a student government proceeding was brought against him. After a round of heated testimony, Saul agreed to a fine of $140 for his infraction, which he never paid. 2) Two years later, Saul went to medical school. He chose to do a semester in Colombia to learn jungle medicine, as part of a program with Doctors Without Borders. While there, he unraveled. He began injecting the morphine intended for patients into himself, and he shaved his head, after the style of Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now. He also took to butchering his own chickens, which he did by cutting their throats with a Leatherman tool. Out of a demented sense of respect for his victims, he ritually painted his face with the slain animals’ blood before eating their flesh. 3) Shortly before my wedding, when I was 35, I went back to the farm of my childhood with Saul and Noel. My parents barely went there anymore. Saul, a physician by then for more than ten years, suggested that we get some live birds and kill them and eat them, for old time’s sake, and to consecrate the end of our youth. He went to a local farmer’s and bought a pheasant and two roosters. I don’t think Saul mentioned he intended to kill and eat them, because every farmer knows roosters are not for eating. Behind the house, I fashioned a box with chicken wire on top. Noel then removed the top of the box to get a better look at the birds. The pheasant was the first to run off, with the roosters following into the brambles. Not easily discouraged, Saul went out and purchased another trio of birds. He then tied a string to one of each of the birds’ ankles, and attached the strings to a stake in the ground. Then, using my dad’s still serviceable .22, he shot the birds in their heads, and we plucked and cooked them. We tried to eat them. But the meat was very tough, like a bundle of rubber bands. 8. Shluggen kapores is a ritual performed around the time of Yom Kippur. It has been interpreted in various ways: an expiation of sin; a visceral confrontation with mortality during the Days of Awe; a sacrament for the poor; a superstition for prosperity. No longer as popular as it once was, shluggen kapores involves slitting a chicken’s throat and swinging the bleeding bird overhead. My grandfather was a shochet in the old country and a rabbi with his own synagogue on 107th Street in the new world of Manhattan. He looked down on shluggen kapores. Real shochets, he said, didn’t like shluggen kapores because to them it was like amateur night. There were not always enough shochets to go around, and with laypeople doing their own killing, he believed chickens suffered. Perhaps a knife with an imperfection was used on a bird, causing more pain than necessary, or the animal was held by its feet for the slitting, which my grandfather said meant a chicken dying in panic and fear. But no matter how sliced, the net result of shluggen kapores, at least for my grandfather in the old country, was a pile of dead birds left outside his house on Yom Kippur. 9. A few years ago, my mother developed an interest in photo pairings — images that looked like other images. She developed an eye for odd similarities. Sometimes she would photograph a farm boy because his nose looked like former president Bill Clinton’s, or a checkout girl who looked like Vermeer’s girl with the pearl earring. Once she had me float on my back in bay water, to resemble a photo of her father, the rabbi, taken in the Dnieper River, in Poland, right before the Nazi invasion in 1939. When she found a photo of my great-aunt Ida in the old country, feeding chickens in the yard of a farm, she was very excited. Aunt Ida was of the era when cameras were still new and suspicious, and family lore has it that Ida always refused to have her picture taken. My mother decided to restage this rare photo, with herself in the starring role. She spent about three months getting the outfit together — sewing a dress and getting the right shoes. Rather than procuring live chickens (our days of owning livestock had ended with a move to the suburbs), she used a papier mâché ornamental chicken that my father had bought at a garage sale, probably someone’s souvenir from a holiday in Mexico. She got the right kind of basket, and then even put seeds in it. I took the photo, and then reworked it in Photoshop to better resemble the older photo. When I handed her the print, she found it hilarious that I had labeled it “My Mother Is Crazy.” 10. In the old country, this time Romania, my paternal grandmother made a dish called helzel. Helzel is chicken skin, stuffed with flour, then sewed shut with a needle and thread, then fried so the fat from the skin soaks into the flour. Truly traditional helzel isn’t even made from a chicken’s body skin, it is made from neck skin. Presumably the head of a chicken came cheaply — no one can eat a chicken’s head. Helzel is not the kind of food that is delicious. It is food eaten by people who cannot afford anything else. It is the kind of food that keeps you alive, combining fat and starch for maximum calories and belly-filling. Helzel is the food of desperation, a stage or two before one thinks of boiling one’s shoes for the leather nutrients, or filling an old sock with flour and eating that. Helzel is an end-of-the-road food; a food containing awful shadows of taxidermy and autopsy in all that skin sewing. Helzel belies the grace of how the bird that gave its skin to the dish died. In a kosher kill, the blade should be sharp, without imperfections, and cause unconsciousness within seconds. The knife is supposed to pass — like lightning — between two heartbeats. & |