5
Lois shook her head. “With you I never know what’s real. I mean, I like the feathers left on the floor and the weird and twisted underground in Boston circa 1960. But the dangerous bird motif and your long-lost cousin locked in a cage? I have trouble with those items.”
“I know I can be a chore.”
“I met you a couple of years after that in college,” she said. “And at one point in our extended adolescences, I got to see you interact with a bird and it wasn’t nearly as scary and a lot more hilarious than the story you told me.”
At first, I didn’t know what she was talking about. Then she asked, “Remember the Educated Chicken?” For a moment I didn’t. “Down in Chinatown fifty years ago, on Mott Street and Pell, there was this sleazy arcade. We used to come into the city from school on weekends. And you’d always insist on going there.”
It all came back to me. I even saw it through a drunken teenage haze just like the first time. A gray hen strutted across a tic-tac-toe board and hit the center square with its beak. The Educated Chicken always went first. I’d put an X on another square but already I’d be at a disadvantage. Before I knew it the bird had filled in a row of X’s and I’d lost.
My college friends, kids at least as drunk as I was, were hooting, yelling, “You going to take that from a chicken?”
My answer was that no bird would ever make a fool of me. Everything I hadn’t spent on beer and grass, I lost playing tic-tac-toe.
It became a weekend ritual. I can remember shoving one quarter after another in the slot. I’d beg or borrow it from Lois if I was broke. And the chicken would come strutting out and hit the center square, leaving me as badly off as ever.
“We’d have to drag you back to the car when the arcade closed for the night,” Lois said. “One time you stood on the sidewalk of Mott Street and Pell, shaking your fist at the arcade and saying you were coming back as a eagle to kill every chicken in the place.
“Even the people hanging around that corner at three A.M., who you have to figure had seen a lot, were impressed.”
We both laughed, and this memory of the chicken ran through my head like a cartoon. But the idea of me long ago threatening to come back as a great bird caught me.
6
Lois had departed and the Village was all autumn leaves and early dusk as I walked through Washington Square a week or two later. A crowd had gathered and was looking up—not at a hawk but at something even more remarkable.
The guy, who I remembered for his questions at the information desk about fresh rat meat, stood naked on a tree limb. He was making a weird kind of cawing sound and crying, “Feed me! Bring me my food!”
Some people in the crowd laughed. I felt that I kind of understood what he was going through and wanted to get close, maybe talk him down. But as I headed that way, park workers with ladders appeared and first a cop car, then an ambulance arrived with sirens blaring.
They wrapped him in blankets and he was bundled into the ambulance. The guy was more than a little disturbing.
7
I was walking home in the early-morning hours from a party on the night before Halloween. All Hallows the next evening is beyond a doubt the biggest date of the year in the Village. But on this night the neighborhood was quiet.
The street where I live abounds in all manner of bars and restaurants and a few remnants of the glory days of Greenwich Village. But there’s one store that really only stands out very late at night. CIGARS, HOOKAHS, TOBACCO reads the sign that blazes over the door, an oasis for certain wanderers. The silver light in the front window reaches onto the dark sidewalk.
On the almost empty street, I passed that shop and something inside hooked my eyes. I’d caught a glimpse of a young guy bent down and looking away from me. I thought he was somehow familiar even before I saw the wings on him.
This was the kid in the birdcage but now in another city and another century. And no, I don’t drink much or get stoned much these days. I walked back, looked in the door and saw him again but only in profile. He was wearing tights, a pair of wings and shoes that looked like bird feet. Another guy was adjusting the wings for him. I understood this was practice for the Halloween parade.
He did look like Neil, or looked the way my cousin might have looked if he’d become a dancer and stayed eighteen forever. In reality, Neil died of a heart attack some years ago. Maybe he never got much of anywhere. But right now he seemed a lot more alive than I was.
By afternoon the next day my street was full of drunken vampires, male witches, female princes, and scandal-plagued celebrities in multiple sizes and shapes. In tribute to last summer’s fad, a couple of human-size hawks came out of a bar on Bleecker Street. They were tacky—not even close to what I was looking for.
That night I went to a party at the house of a friend of a friend whose front windows overlooked Sixth Avenue and the passing parade. We nibbled hash brownies and I dutifully applauded the float loads of musicians and the many-legged dragons, monstrous cartoons, and singing mermaids who shimmied, strutted, and marched up the avenue.
I waited impatiently. But when the Raptors appeared they were entirely worth the wait. They swooped from one side of Sixth Avenue to the other with bloody beaks, glistening wings, mad, staring eyes that flickered, then stared again. The Neil I’d seen the night before was all shimmering feathers and savage glances as he swept forward.
People yelled and applauded. This was Raptor worship and I was impressed. The kid, whoever he was, showed artistry. It seemed that his wings, not his legs, carried him.
Even knowing it was all performance, I still expected him to rise off the street and fly. When he remained earthbound and the Raptor cult passed on up the Avenue, I was disappointed.
But like a retort aimed at my doubt, a form flew out of the dark sky and hovered motionless above the marchers. Everyone at the party told one another this was a trick and tried to explain it. When the hawk rose into the sky and disappeared they lost interest. But I was hooked all over again.
I wanted to fly out the window and follow the man who’d been followed by a hawk. Instead I ran down the stairs, kind of wobbly from age and the brownies. The building was only a couple of blocks from the parade’s end.
By the time I got there, the Raptor contingent was lost somewhere in the chaos at the finish line. I caught glimpses of them through the crowd but couldn’t get close.
8
An eagle stood at a podium and spoke in savage cries to a roomful of birds of prey and to human devotees of birds of prey with feathers pasted on their bare skins. All of them screeched at each thing he said.
I stood in a dark hall in that old building and looked into the lighted room. The bird at the podium swiveled his head my way and looked me over.
“Another featherless one, frightened and fascinated by our ways,” he said quite clearly, and I found myself moving toward him while birds and humans stared and cried out. All of this seemed familiar, like I’d done it before but couldn’t remember when.
Suddenly there was no one in the room beside me. Despite that, the crowd noise continued. Then another bird stood at the podium: the Educated Chicken. “Come here often, sucker?” she asked. I realized I was naked and thought of the man in the tree.
I awoke in my bed and still heard the cries. I looked around my bedroom for the birds and realized my dream had ended, but the Halloween party that was this neighborhood continued out on the street.
I dozed but didn’t get a lot of sleep. Early the next morning, in the full glory of All Saints’ Day, I staggered into my front room. The hawk sat outside my window. He glanced my way, as he tore into a small bloody carcass.
Wanting to make him feel at home, I put on my feathered mask and sat close to the window. We exchanged stares. I was being summoned to worship. I wouldn’t have Neil’s immortality. And I might end up as a lunatic in a tree. I was fascinated but terrified.
The hawk flicked a small bloody clump from the carcass it held. It fell on my windowsill. He waited to see what I’d do.