The Woefield Poultry Collective (29 page)

With the bandstand nearly complete, and the posters and flyers that Seth designed already printed and the website up, I was really quite excited about our progress. I was sure there was no better place to advertise a bluegrass concert than an agricultural fair.

As I’d mentioned to Travis when he first arrived, I’d written to Earl’s brother, Merle, or at least his management company, right away, but hadn’t heard back yet. I was convinced he’d come. That’s why it was fine that I advertised him as our special guest on the flyers and posters. It’s important to be confident and optimistic when putting together any sort of party or gathering.

Although a person might not be able to tell from my personal history, I have a competitive streak. I just kept it hidden until the chicken show. I didn’t do that well at school and my blogs weren’t the most popular or whatever, but sometimes I think that’s because I didn’t want my hard-driving aspect to get out of hand. Enough shit in my life was out of control, which was something I learned from hanging out with Eustace. I also learned that I have a superabundance of character defects. That’s the technical term for the unpleasant parts of yourself that cause your life to suck.

I don’t want to go into a lot of detail, but I found out that I’m basically crippled by character defects. Seriously. When people talk about their defects in meetings, even the hardcore ex-cons and people like that, I turn into a bobblehead. That’s how much I relate. No one has mentioned a defect that I do not have. You’d think there’d be at least one. But not so far.

What I’m trying to say is that extreme competitiveness is something I have to watch. I probably used to try and drink it away, like I did everything else, but I’m not going that way anymore. I’m like the Nuge now. Mr. Clean.

That said, I had to remind myself not to bug out when I got to the fairgrounds and saw all those birds Sara and Alec would be competing against.

Fuck me, I thought. We’ve got some serious competition here.

I was already kind of disappointed that Eustace bailed on me. He
had an emergency to attend to. Some cow went through a fence and cut herself open from shoulder to hip and Eustace had to go and sew her up. I don’t want to be a selfish prick (another character defect), but he did fucking promise.

He told me I’d be fine on my own for a couple of hours, which kind of pissed me off because it was so condescending, but then I thought about it. It turns out that in addition to being ambitious and selfish, I’m also thin-skinned. In some ways, it can be liberating to be sober. It can also be a downer of the highest order to find out all the shit that is wrong with you.

So I put the brave face on it, another completely new experience, and I fucked off to the fair by myself. I do know how to drive. Got my license when I was sixteen, before everything went down with the drama teacher and the play and whatnot and I decided to go into seclusion. I just hadn’t driven for a few years.

I took the old Buick that had been sitting off to the side of the house. Prudence had put insurance on it the week before, just in case we had an emergency and the truck was gone. No one had been brave enough to try and drive the car. No wonder. When Prudence’s uncle crashed it last time, he screwed up the U-joint so the car drove like a suicidal steer. When I pulled out of the driveway and turned right, I saw my mom and Bobby sitting on the porch. I tried to wave, all cool-like, but the car headed straight for the ditch. I had to wrestle it to make the corner. It surprised them so much that Bobby nearly got up. I’m pretty sure my mom looked proud when I got the car back in my lane, but I couldn’t slow down long enough to check. The whole drive was an epic battle to keep the car from plowing into a ditch or the median or the oncoming traffic. Good thing the fair was only about ten minutes away.

Once I got there, it was hard as hell to find a place to park and I couldn’t make the parking attendants or assistants understand that I wasn’t a regular fairgoer, that I was closer to a competitor.

“Support person,” I told the big, pink-faced guy in the reflective vest.

“Huh?” he said.

“Almost like a competitor. But not quite. I need to park near the facility.”

I didn’t want to get sent on some long goddamn walk. My chicken grooming assistant’s bag was heavy and another one of my defects is that I’m extremely lazy.

“Can I see your badge?”

I tried to keep my temper under control, even though a short fuse is another problem of mine.

“I don’t have one,” I said.

Then I made him wait for a few seconds while I repeated the serenity prayer to myself several times. I guess it worked because I calmed down before I called him a useless piece of shit.

Even so, the guy parked me as far as possible from the chicken exhibit hall. As a result my arms were about to fall off when I finally got to the gates and I didn’t even get a break on my ticket price.

I’d never really seen a large-scale poultry operation before. Obviously, I’d read about those battery farms or whatever you call them where chickens have to live about ten to a cage and get their beaks cut off and are massively depressed before they get shipped off to KFC to be turned into family packs and strips. But even that foreshadowing didn’t prepare me for the epic filth and stench of a chicken show barn. I can’t comprehend how bad an actual factory farm would be. I mean, where none of the birds have been bathed recently, like all the ones here. These were the finest specimens the chicken world had to offer and still they reeked like a rancid pile of dead dogs on a hot day.

I found Sara standing near her frizzles. Her best hen was in one cage and the frizzle cockerel was down the row a bit in his own cage. I’d created these extremely cool signs for the cages based on the logo of that TV show,
So You Think You Can Dance
, only our signs read,
So You Think You’re the Best Frizzle?
Over in the Polish non-bearded area, Alec Baldwin’s sign looked like the one for
Inside the Actor’s Studio
, which I thought was hilarious but no one got. I find that as I get healthier, I’m starting to leave a lot of people behind, intellectually or at least comedically.

You might wonder how I felt about the event in the first place because of my history and all. You seriously have no idea. Going into a crowd of people for me was like walking into a burning building wearing plastic pants. But since I’d been at Woefield, I’d been doing so much of it that I was getting used to the melting-pants feeling. After all, for the past little while Prudence had the place swarming with people from morning to night. Farmers coming by to give her advice, people who heard she had herbs and leafy greens for sale, her writing students, people helping get ready for the concert, and total random wanderers. Eustace told me that people don’t care about me as much as I think they do and that going out in spite of my fear was the “rock and roll thing to do.” He was trying to relate to me on my own level, which I appreciated even though his encouragement was somewhat lame. Truthfully, the fair was the place I was most likely to see people who’d been at the school the night of my big performance. But I was sick of hiding. So what if I’m the local pants-down drunk? If there was anything I’d learned since I’d been hanging with Eustace and going to those meetings, it was that I’m not the only one.

Anyway, when I was in the poultry barn, I resisted the urge to hold my nose and I made a big point of smiling at Sara when I saw her. One of the key principles of staying sober is helping others. Eustace told me that’s how I could “get out of myself.” Sounded like so much bullshit to me. I told him that I think about other people all day, every day, on my website and in my head and he said that talking trash about celebrities and musicians doesn’t count and neither do paranoid revenge fantasies. Then he told me to look up all these quotes about gossip and character assassination in the Big Book and the Twelve by Twelve, which are like the bible and psalms of AA, even though it’s not supposed to be a religious program or whatever. I hadn’t quite gotten around to reading either of them because their nicknames freak me out a bit. The Big Book made me think of a very, very simple religion for reluctant readers or something.

Still, I tried the serenity prayer, as well as being helpful and thinking about other people, and Eustace was right. It worked. It was a relief to
think about someone else for a while. For instance, when I saw Sara in the show barn she had this worried look on her face.

“I’m here,” I told her, thinking that would calm her down from the pressure of the competition.

She looked from side to side, like she was about to steal something.

“It’s rubbing off,” she said, speaking through the side of her mouth.

“What’s rubbing off?”

“The Magic Marker. On Alec. Even Bethany noticed.”

“Don’t these people have anything better to do than stare at your chicken’s ass?” I asked.

“We cheated. I could go to hell.”

“Come on Sara, don’t you mean
we
could go to hell?” I said, trying to lighten things up.

She gave me a look and I realized that in her mind, my going to hell was a foregone conclusion.

The thing is, she wasn’t kidding. She was always talking about hell and how she was going to end up there for one thing and another when the Rapture came. I don’t know who filled her head with that bullshit, but if I find whoever it is I might take a break from controlling my anger defect of character and practicing “restraint of tongue and pen.”

“You didn’t cheat. You think women who wear lipstick are cheating? Elvis Presley put a sock in his underpants. What about women who get breast implants? What about them?”

A man next to us who was helping his kid write a sign to put on their little black bantam chicken’s cage gave me a look. Judgmental prick.

“I’m talking about
reconstructive
breast surgery,” I said, a little louder.

Sara took a step away from the kid and his father so they wouldn’t overhear.

“Those people are cheating,” she whispered. She looked stricken. “Just like us.”

“We didn’t cheat. We
enhanced
. Huge difference.”

“We could get disqualified,” she said.

“Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it. Where’s Alec Baldwin?”

Her little face still white and pinched with worry, she led me down the row of cages, which ran the length of the long, narrow building, and over a couple of rows to where the larger birds were housed.

The back and sides of Alec Baldwin’s cage were still draped with a sheet so that only the front was open. Earl stood in front of the cage beside a girl about Sara’s age. The kid’s stare was a little bit fixed and her mouth hung open slightly.

“Hi, Sara!” she said, breaking into this big smile when she saw us.

“Hi, Bethany,” said Sara.

“Mr. Lymer came by. He wanted to know why there’s still a sheet on your cage.”

Sara looked at me. I looked at Earl. Earl looked up into the rafters.

“Tell Mr. Lymer the bird’s kind of high strung,” I said. “We’re acclimatizing him slowly or whatever.”

“Ha, ha! Acclimatizing,” said Bethany. “I never knew that word before.”

“Yeah. It’s a big one. I bet it’s new to Earl, too. Look, Bethany, we’ve got to do some personal grooming with Alec. So you should probably find your parents. Or check on your own birds. Okay?”

“I thought I saw some white on his feathers,” said Bethany, who seems like she might be one of those savants you hear about who are able to memorize the New York City subway system, only her uncanny ability was detecting pigment changes in chicken feathers.

“God, no. Sara would never bring a bird with illegal white feathers to a show.”

Bethany stared at me, mouth slightly ajar. “Did you just take the Lord’s name?”

“Yes, but then I gave it back to him,” I said.

I turned to Earl. “Can you help Bethany find her … people?”

“Jesus,” he muttered. Which caused Bethany to look at him, equally shocked.

“You just took the Lord’s name too!” she said, breathlessly.

In answer, he sighed and stumped off down the row of cages toward the front door and she followed.

“Keep a watch on things,” I told Sara. “I’m going in.”

I looked from side to side and then reached in and pulled out Alec. He went to jab his beak into my wrist, but I gave him a little squeeze to remind him who was boss. I handed him to Sara, who arranged him so that his head was tucked under her armpit. I could see the white ends on his feathers where the black marker had worn off.

“Shit,” I said.

“We should have pulled them,” said Sara. “That’s the only cure for white feathers.”

“I was worried it would make his ass feathering look less full,” I said. “So let’s pull them now.”

“He’ll get a bald spot.”

“Let me talk to him,” I said.

She turned the rooster to face me. His eyes were round and shiny and totally unconcerned under his big head of white feathers.

“Buddy,” I said, “this is your fault.”

Alec Baldwin blinked in that crazy, upside-down eyelid way chickens do.

“We need to take him outside,” I told her.

She nodded and we walked fast back the way we’d come, out the front door and around the narrow alley between the poultry shed and the next building. People were everywhere, man. It was super stressful. Like being in
The Bourne Identity
or something.

Once we were out of sight in the passageway between the two buildings, I told Sara to turn him around again and hold him tight.

I got the tweezers ready.

I pulled out the first white feather and Alec gave a muffled squawk and tried to flap his wings, but Sara held him so he couldn’t.

“It’s okay, buddy,” I said, and went in to pluck another of the offending white feathers.

I saw somebody walking past the gap between the buildings pause and I realized that from a distance what we were doing probably looked suspicious.

“Is your bird all right, little girl?” I asked loudly. Then I whispered, “Hold him so people don’t think I’m doing something weird to you.”