Tags
This is my attempt at rehabilitation: lie on my belly as I watch TV.
When Adam and I decided that we were going to raise chickens, I did not know that one could affix a surf rack to a Mercedes Benz convertible coupe. I learned that this was possible while driving south on CA-1 through Malibu.
It was Saturday, and Sufjan Stevens’ Djohariah was competing with the WOMP-WOMP-WOMP of the salt air rushing past my open window. I smiled a familiar “I-love-this-freaking-state” smile, forced onto my face by the ecstatic discomfort of a million darts of polarized light slamming into my retina after having zipped through space, squeezed through the atmosphere, and ricocheted off of a tiny wind-ripple on the surface of the largest ocean in the solar system. The Pacific Palisades is not where I imagined my chicken adventure would begin, but poultry turns out to be full of surprises.
Thelma and Louise: 1-month-old ameraucana chicks in ruddy tan and black and white. I was concerned the names were inauspicious. I haven’t even seen the movie, but even l know that the eponymous characters die spectacularly, and young. Since chickens are incapable of driving a T-bird off a cliff, I couldn’t help but imagine by what mad methods our girls would destroy themselves.
Adam was sure though. The names had come to him, and inspiration is not to be argued with.
As we turned East onto the I-10W away from the tanned, sculpted, and manicured coast, toward our newly adopted skyline, we rolled up the windows and our girls’ commingled chirping began to bubble up whenever Sufjan brought down the soaring horns and harmonies.
Almost instantly after their homecoming, our chicks had attracted two beautiful specimens of the human variety. Lauren and Orly’s enthusiasm revealed to us that eggs and nitrogen-rich compost may not be the only benefits conferred by our micro-flock. Our ameraucan girls were undeniably adorable; but where Thelma’s personality accorded with her appearance, Louise’s miniature fluffiness was a lie, a clever ruse designed to lull those responsible for the well-being of our chicken nano-society into complacency.
At some point between when Lauren and Orly left, and when Adam next checked on the girls, Louise attacked Thelma with sufficient ferocity to break her right leg. When Adam discovered this, Louise was standing on top of Thelma’s back, pecking her on the top of the head.
I didn’t think chickens possessed the capacity for psychological trauma, but the defeated Thelma had clearly lost the will to live. Adam lovingly held her for hours, trying to hand-feed her and coax her out of the bottomless pit of self-pity that Louise, like a downy Leonidas, had mercilessly booted her into.
It is hard to overstate just how evil Louise is. After coming to terms with the fact that we had a murderer on our hands, we separated the chicks and went about our day, hoping that Thelma would buck up once she didn’t have Louise playing “how many pecks does it take to get to the center of Thelma’s cerebellum?” However, the very next time we checked in on her, we caught Louise doggedly pursuing data relevant to her research thesis: “Beak vs. Skull, Which is Harder?: a Review of the Evidence in Favor of the ‘Let’s-F**ck-up-Thelma’s-face’ hypothesis.”
At this point I think it is necessary to highlight the fact that in order to initiate this new round of utter physical domination, Louise had to escape from the box we had her in, then break into the box we had Thelma in. Up until Louise’s berserk search and destroy mission, we had no idea that the tiny chicks were capable of leaping over two times their own height. But I guess we didn’t know that chickens were capable of obsessive, murderous psychopathy either, so there you go.
Upon noticing that we had discovered her covert attempt to finish what she started, Louise went totally ninja, jumping out of Thelma’s box and darting across the living room and under the bar. This, for me, was the most disturbing part of the whole ordeal.
Up until now, I could try and explain away all of this behavior as an aberrant reaction to the stress of being moved, or a natural attempt to establish a pecking order that got out of hand. But once I saw that little black and white terror fleeing the scene of the crime, I knew that we had brought home a demon-chicken. It is one thing to be a bug-eating, egg-laying, occasionally-murderous biological automaton. It is quite another to demonstrate an understanding of the difference between right and wrong, then choose to kill your own sister and go on the lamb.
Thelma couldn’t stand, and despite Adam’s attempts at hand feeding her, she wouldn’t eat or drink anything. We went to bed hoping that she would go to sleep and wake up having forgotten how much her new life sucks, which might make it possible to nourish her. This was not totally unreasonable, as chickens, with the exception of Louise Lecter, are very stupid.
Sunday morning I woke up late and relaxed. It was one of those mornings that can only happen if you went to bed knowing that there wasn’t going to be an alarm ringing. I came out of my room to find Adam on the couch rolling a spliff, which we enjoyed in the noontime sun that fills our backyard like lemonade poured into a cup made of cinderblocks. After the spliff had gone, we chilled in the shade of our fig tree and talked lazily about what garden projects we would get into that day. Then Adam remembered with a start that we had a terminally injured chick to deal with.
We went inside and looked in Thelma’s box. She was still laying lamely on her side, and looked even more pathetic than she had the night before. That’s when, for the first time, it occurred to me that we were going to have to kill this adorable little animal.
I looked at Adam and said, “so we have to kill her right? I mean we have to.” Adam just looked at me for a second, then burst out laughing and started walking around in circles with his fist over his mouth, trying to reign in his reaction.
Once he could breathe, he said, “Sorry. This is just too ridiculous.”
At that point I caught a hold of the absurdity of two city boys in their twenties standing over a cardboard box, wrestling with the fact that they are going to have to euthanize a chicken, and I lost it too. Looking back, we probably would have done well to remember that we had to deal with Thelma before we got high.
After I got a hold of myself, Adam said, “how should we do it?”
“We could put her head in a sock, then hit it with a hammer.”
I could tell by his reaction that Adam was shocked by the brutality this idea, and I’m sure he would have mounted an articulate protest had he not again dissolved into a giggle-fit. After he regained his composure, he said simply, “No.”
Then the conversation began in earnest.
Me: “well I don’t want to cut her head off, because she’ll spray blood all over our kitchen.”
Adam: “We could do it outside.”
Me: “Yea but I don’t want Tasha and Laura to see. Also, I don’t want to be looking at it’s face, and I’ll have to or I’ll chop my hand off.”
Adam: “Can’t we just let her starve?”
Me: “No. Definitely not.”
Adam: “Well what do you think then?”
Me: “I guess we just break her neck. That’s how they do it on farms right?”
Adam: “I guess.”
At this point we just kind of stood there looking at each other uncomfortably. With the discussion over, there was nothing but squeamishness keeping us from doing the deed. My hands were getting a little shaky, and I felt my chest tighten. It was just like back in high school before I got up to give my first speech during an M.U.N. conference, or last weekend before I approached that brunette. The moment grew long enough that we both started laughing again, but this time instead of laughing at the absurdity of the situation, I was as laughing at myself. Here I was, genuinely nervous about this. I had realized it was important to me not to fuck this up. I felt like I had taken responsibility for this little life, and if I tried and failed to break its neck correctly, then the suffering it experienced before it died would be on me. I stopped myself laughing and said, a little out of breath, “OK… OK,” then steeled myself against the thing and looked at the box.
Adam saw the determination come into my face and said “Oh shit! I can’t believe you are going to kill her!” At which point, shaking my head and smiling at just how unhelpful that reaction was, I bent down, gently picked up her tiny little body in my left hand, wrapped my right hand around her head, and then twisted and pulled.
As I said, I was very concerned with the possibility of doing her serious injury without actually killing her. What follows is a reproduction of my real-time internal monologue during the deed.
*pop*
“OK I think that was the neck.”
“You sure?”
“True. Better just pull and twist a little harder to be positive. Don’t want to under-do it—”
—*rip*
And that’s when I ripped Thelma’s head off.
After both Adam and I had panic-yelped the obligatory, synchronous “OH SHIT,” I threw both her headless body and her disembodied head back into her box and, for some reason, jumped backwards exactly as if I had just dropped a knife. Annoyingly, her corpse began running around spraying the sides of the box with blood. Apparently in death, the injury that had broken Thelma’s spirit did not even warrant a limp.
I closed the lid to the box, and looked at Adam. He was trying to look somber, but all those tiny muscles in his face were getting conflicting instructions. Part of his brain was roaring with laughter and saying,
“HOLY FUCK! He just ripped Thelma’s head off!!!” But a much smaller, sadder part of his brain was saying,
“Holy fuck… He just ripped Thelma’s head off.”
As soon as the upturned corners of his mouth, the tight lips, and the crows feet registered, I lost it. I started laughing as hard as I can ever remember laughing, and we both fell over. Sitting on the tile with our elbows on our knees and our heads in our hands, we giggled ourselves tired and wiped away our tears as the thumps of Thelma’s thrashing body running up against the sides of the box became more infrequent, and eventually stopped.
tolivealovelylie 