Chicken (2 page)

Slowing slightly in the cool latenight earlymorning air, I slip into my red hightops. I do not stop to tie them.

As I speedwalk onto Hollywood Boulevard, Saturday morning's moving in on Friday night, vampyres scurrying in before the first ray of dawn turns them to dust. It smells like an ashtray. Streetlights aren't off yet, and the dark chill clings still as night tries desperately not to give up the ghost.

Clodding along over and under the fading stars, the adrenaline anesthetic begins to wear off and the pain creeps in, starting at the tip of the bottom, and pulsating an ache that shoots all the way up through me.

A thick cloud of tears appears. Everything hurts. I deserve it. But I won't cry. I don't understand how tears work yet.

I grimace as I limp gingerly, trying not to breathe too much, head
down shuffling, stargazing to keep from dropping right off the face of the earth, past the hungry hookers and the horny johns who don't have enough money, the smackdaddies and the boozebabies, the clodhoppers and the pillpoppers.

Oh God, I'm so tired. I can barely keep putting one foot in front of the other. But the fear that the man with the
SEXY
shirt might be following spreads like a brushfire through my ass and keeps me moving at a brisk clip.

I feel wet between my legs. I reach inside my pants. Warm thick liquid pools. I pull out my hand. It's red with my blood. Looks like I killed something.

I reach into my pocket. My twenty-seven dollars is gone.

 

H
UNGRY
.

Saturday morning is waking up, shops opening their mouths and yawning, seers of sights emerging from cheap hotels on their way to big American breakfasts.

Hungry.

Bloody and nasty, I wander like a moving violation down Hollywood Boulevard, the sun slowly exposing herself, as the smells of eggs, bacon, and pancakes start a hollow rumble in my stomach that distracts me from the pain in my ass.

A little pink peeks out from under the horizon as I pass Hollywood Fried Chicken. I can't take another step, so I lean like a broken soldier against a Dumpster in the shadow of the restaurant.

Soon as I stop, the tears are there again, close enough to drink.

I smell a greasy chicken perfume crooning from inside the Dumpster, and it lifts me right up onto my feet. I peer in and spot an almost full container of almost uneaten chicken. I reach into the Dumpster, but even on tiptoes I can't quite grab the bucket. Then the hunger hoists me up, and before I know it I'm in the Dumpster, trash swallowing my shoes, air thick with rotted coleslaw and rancid meat. As orange joins pink around the rim of Hollywood, I can't tell where the garbage ends and I begin. But there's no turning back. I can see clearly now that my future depends on reaching this holy poultry grail.

I wade through skanky refuse until finally I get there. I reach down, grab that bucket of chicken, and hold it over my head like I just won a gold medal in the Olympic Dumpster hunting event.

It's full of legs and thighs. No wings. Just legs and thighs. I take this as a good sign.

Then I can feel someone watching me. I look up. The sun blinds me with its first fullfaced appearance of the day, and the silhouette of the tall black man with the
SEXY
shirt appears. Oh God, he's here to rip me up again. I clench unconsciously and a mad stab of pain sears me. I sink to my knees in stinking filth, clinging to my chicken. Slowly he moves toward me, and my blood roars, drowning out all the Hollywood morning noise.

I'm going to die in this Dumpster. I know it now. A dead calm envelops me. It can't possibly be any worse than this.

My father later told me he first suspected something was hinky with my mom when he found a book in a bag she packed for a trip with her new friend she'd moved into my vacated room.

The book was called
A Woman's Orgasm,
or
Woman and Their
Orgasms,
or
Orgasms and Women
. Something like that.

I don't think my father was aware at the time that a woman could actually have an orgasm, but even he knew this was not a good sign for the marriage.

S
EXY
steps forward and leans on the Dumpster. I see him clearly for the first time now. It's not
SEXY
. It's someone else. A new black man. And he's small, not tall. He's smiling. At me. With deep, teasing coffee eyes—

‘Whatchew doin', boy?'

This is my problem in a nutshell. I have no idea what I'm doing. But his voice is smooth, loose, and soothing, like a lily pad floating in a warm Savannah pond. It makes everything unclench.

‘You lookin' to git you some chickin?'

I swear to God he's flirting with me. I squeam. Fool me once I'm an idiot. Fool me twice I'm twice as big an idiot. I want to
say something. I need to say something. But my father's jaw locks around my mouth, and it will not open.

‘Git out the Dumpstah, boy, Ah'll give you some chickin.' He's all mint-julep Old South Charm School charm.

I'm paralyzed, raw and sore, a wounded freak in a trash cage. God seems to be reaching His hand out to me. But what would God be doing in Hollywood? And what if it's not God at all? What if it's the Devil? Having just met the Devil, I'm terrified of the prospect of a return engagement.

‘Come on, boy, git out the Dumpstah …'

The small sexy man clucks like a hen den mother.

Dazed and confused, I put down the chicken, hop out of the Dumpster, and brush off some scum.

‘Whatchew doin' in there, boy?' Big brown doe boy eyes size me up. ‘You need a job?'

A job. Yes. A job. That's what I need. That's exactly what I need. Or is this small black sexy man just jacking with me so he can crack me open like a ripe melon?

‘What kind of job?' I say, full of need and please.

‘Fryin' chickin,' he says, like, ‘What the hell do you expect, stupid?' Then he walks toward the back door of Hollywood Fried Chicken.

I follow three or four feet behind, wary, wounded, and feral. He takes out an oversized key ring, opens one lock, then another, then the big black back door. Then he enters.

I hover like my own ghost just outside the doorway, smelling that deep comforting chicken fry smell. He punches some numbers into a small box on the wall. If the guy has the keys and knows how to turn off the alarm, he's gotta be the manager. Right?

‘Boy, don't jest stand there, come awn in.'

He holds out an apron. I have to enter to take it. I enter. I take it. I put it on. Feels good to belong to something.

I have no idea what a wonderful joke the gods are playing on me. Torn apart and lost in a Dumpster, at the lowest moment in
my young life, I'm brought face-to-face with the man who'll teach me all about chicken.

How to fry one. How to be one.

My dad's response to finding his goodwife cuckolding him is to buy her and her new lover a brand-new Pinto, a car offered to the public at the time by the Ford Motor Company.

However, unbeknownst to anyone, that would be the year Pintos were recalled by the Ford Motor Company, their gas tanks having a nasty habit of exploding. In addition, the doors were too heavy, so after a while the weight of them, combined with the force of gravity, made them fall quite off.

So when my mom eased out of the driveway in Dallas with her kids (minus me) and her young lover, headed for the rest of her new life, she was doing so in a time bomb with the doors falling off.

Four minutes.

That's how long it takes me to learn everything there is to know about the industrial frying of chicken.

1. Soak chicken bits in foul yellowish liquid.
   
2. Dump into batter.
   
3. Shake until fully glommed.
   
4. Dump batter-glommed chicken bits into industrial-strength boiling oil-filled inferno fryer.
   
5. Set dials.
   
6. Lock and load fryer.
   
7. When buzzer buzzes, dump deeply fried chicken bits onto tray and slide under megamagma heat lamps.
   

Sunny explains all this to me very slowly, like I'm a glue sniffer who just smoked angel dust. He begins going over the whole thing again, but stops and stares when he sees I'm already doing it.

In Hueytown, Alabama, when something's slightly off, people say: ‘Nigger in the woodshed.'

Several times that day I catch Sunny slipping me some eye. He starts to say something, then backs off, chuckling. This is what it looks like he's thinking: ‘Nigger in the woodshed.'

Frying chicken for a living is not the worst thing a person can do. Having a task is a great distraction from the searing sensation in my shredded ass, the
Where am I gonna live? Where is my next
meal coming from? Why does everyone hate me?
questions.

I fry thousands of chickens and eat several hundred. The night-shift guy doesn't show, so I work a double, and by ten o'clock closing time I feel like a mutant poultry experiment gone wrong, ready to run away with the carnival and become a geek: ‘Step right up and see Chicken Boy! He's half human, half extra-crispy fried chicken. Ladies and gentleman, he's gonna bite his own head off!'

Even though my hair is turning into feathers, my feet into claws, my nose a beak, and I have no lips, I feel good. For the first time in a long time, I've been given a challenge to rise to. And I have risen.

After I've polished the deep fryers to within an inch of their lives, Sunny comes over, puts his arm around me like the black brother I never had, and smiles.

‘You done good t'day, boy.'

I have no home, no money, and I smell really bad, but when Sunny says I done good, my heart soars like the eagle.

‘Where you stayin' tonight?' drawls Sunny.

Oh, shit. Sleep. Bed. Roof over head. Right. In all the excitement I've forgotten: Yet another crucial top-level executive decision faces me.

As he looks at me I quickly review my options:

1. Wander the Hollywood streets all night and hope I don't get mutilated again.
   
2. Find someone on the streets to take me in for the night, then bash my head and trash my ass.
   
3. I have absolutely no idea.
   

I'm forced to admit that both short-and long-term prospects do not look good.

‘You ain't gotchoo no place to stay tonight, do ya, boy?' Sunny's like the lawyer who knows the answer before he asks the question.

‘No, no, no … I'm not, you know … see, uh, I gotta little situation, and … it's not really … uh …' The sentence gets off to a very bad start and never really recovers.

‘Yeah, Ah got the picha …' Sunny nods. ‘You know what yo' problem is?'

‘No …' I really want to know what my problem is.

‘You too smart for ya own damn good.' Sunny laughs. ‘You wanna crash to mah pad, that's cool …' slides out of him real easy.

I know that as far as offers go, that's as good as it's gonna get on this chicken-filled night. Waiting in the parking lot with my funked-up ass for Sunny to take me Godknowswhere and do Godknowswhat to me, I almost bolt into the starry Hollywood night. But where will I go? What will I do? My mom? Fat chance. She doesn't want me around. Bitch. Life's a bitch. I'm a bitch.

Change the record. Now.

I tail Sunny to his car, walking on cat's paws. He unearths his keys. They have a rabbit's foot on them. I breathe. Can someone with a rabbit's foot be truly evil?

Moby Dick is the name I give Sunny's car. It's a cross between a tank, a dictator's limo, and a prehistoric albino rhino. It's brand-new, and big enough to house a family of refugees. Gold spokes gold bumpers gold grille. The gearshift knob looks like a giant golden Cyclops testicle. It is a conquistador's wet dream.

Inside Sunny's combination automobile/lifestyle/movable feast, it's like I'm on a crazy movie set where everything's way too big, so the actors look teeny tiny. Barry White throbs on the wraparound
stereo with his huge deep growly sexmusic. I swear it's like Barry's sweating and moaning in the car with us.

Then it hits me: How the hell can a guy who's manager of Hollywood Fried Goddam Chicken afford wheels like this?

Someone's in the woodshed.

But as soon as I focus on this paradox, a picture of my violator man flashes in my ass, and I bite my cuticle, ripping into the flesh with my teeth, pulling off a chunk of skin, my finger bleeding.

Sunny's apartment complex sits like a gray sore on the scruffy neck of Hollywood. All it needs is a searchlight and some German shepherds to make the
Stalag 17
effect complete. Sunny and I disembark from the belly of his great whale into the bowels of the building. He walks me through the concrete courtyard past the grungy fungi-filled pool, complete with its own water troll lurking in the boggy depths.

The door that Sunny throws open reads 3-D.

Perfect. Where else would Sunny live?

Suddenly I'm all clammy and slabby and crappy, and the ache of my pain screams: ‘Don't walk in 3-D!'

Then I have a moment of clarity. I've got no money, no place to sleep, and I don't think I can stay awake all night.

I walk in 3-D.

A fluorescent-orange couch crouches in the middle of the room, creaking like a rusty whore when Sunny plops down on it. I lower myself into a giant once-green once-overstuffed chair. It's like sitting atop an anorexic greyhound. I wonder why Sunny doesn't put plumbing and a bed in Moby Dick and live in there.

Sunny asks me if I want anything, says he's got some chicken wings in the icebox.

‘If you make me look at one more piece of chicken today, I will have no choice but to kill you.' I'm tired enough to actually be my real self for a second, and Sunny laughs. I breathe again.

Then he gets up and walks out of the room, leaving me alone with my worst enemy: myself.

Suddenly the savages creep in from the closets, crawl out from
under the rug, and sneak in from the bathroom whispering how Sunny's gonna tie me up and make me squeal like a pig. I see me naked, my dead head resting on a pillow of my own blood.

A few weeks before I'm due to fly to Hollywood to attend Immaculate Heart College and live with my brother, my sisters, my mother, and her new lover, I call my mother to make arrangements for pickup.

She sounds off balance. Tells me she's decided to stay up in Oregon because it's so nice there. And since I'm already enrolled in college, and tuition is paid, I should just go to college in Hollywood.

The beige phone is cold and hard in my hand as my heart sinks through the rug that's being pulled out from under me.

Good luck and Godspeed.

Sunny emerges in a long shiny teal satin boxing robe, and when he sinks into the loudly complaining orange couch, he looks like a twisted little Howard Johnson's.

He carries a two-foot hollow cylindrical plastic tube, three-quarters full of water, with tubes sticking out of it, and a small bowl from a pipe attached to the side. He pulls a Baggie from his imitation wood end table, removes some green leafy substance, stuffs it snugly into the pipe bowl, and lights it, while holding one finger over a hole in the back of the cylinder. He tokes it and stokes it, and when the cylinder fills thick with smoke, Sunny removes his finger from the hole, and sucks hard, the smoke shooting Old Faithful style into his mouth, disappears into him. Then he leans back and smacks his lips, like he's savoring a fine wine, and holds his breath for a very very very very very very long time, then slowly lets the smoke roll out like tumbling dice, smiling contentedly as he passes me the smoking bazooka.