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CHICKEN MAN

Afternoon light etches a brittle hardness into the corrugated San Gabriel Mountains. They were always there to the north and east, green shoulders hunched protectively over the city, ignored mostly, like we ignored the elders who watched over us because we thought we were in some kind of rush, thought we’d already known everything about them for a long, long time. The San Gabriels are still there, of course, but the city as we knew it is gone. And with it, ourselves. We have become others to ourselves, or ghosts, those selves we thought of as our permanent, private property turned out to be transient as secondhand clothes. Late afternoon orange light cutting across the folds of the mountains, shadows seeping out of the canyons into the lavender dusk like snowmelt stored deep in the heart of cracked granite. Once in a lifetime, the yucca throws up its tall crisp stalk and blooms, creamy white blossoms. Later, the whole plant dies, the stalk drying golden in wind and sun. Later, the seedpods rattling black in the wind.

Ben recommends the Dino’s Chicken and Burgers in Pico Union, but I was closer to the Lincoln Heights location. An order of their famous chicken dripping radioactive orange marinade, french fries drenching a paper basket, trying to eat in the car—you get impatient to eat while driving (can be a disaster), hard to cuss yourself out now because why bother, did you really think you could steer with one hand, stuffing a fistful of greasy bird breast into your face with the skin sliding off your fingers with a fire engine and paramedics coming at you? Sirens, and glare so you can’t hardly see to get over to let the emergency vehicles pass, plus you could once in awhile clean your windshield so it won’t look like a cross between an Oklahoma dust storm and a starry night in the Sierras projected onto the brilliance of mid-afternoon? It’s hard to see anything, while the roofline of a mini-mall in the middle distance polarizes into its own silhouette every time you look directly at it, leaving you seeing spots, groaning because some secret reservoir of orange grease inside the chicken breast is splattering your T-shirt, your pants, and the passenger seat as you thrust it aside.

Traffic moves somehow, people in vehicles crammed together stare at other drivers grimacing, cars bottlenecked behind an 18-wheeler changing gears in the intersection. Too late for this T-shirt now, toss the chicken back into the basket, wipe your hand on your shirt so as not to slime the steering wheel even worse, accelerate past vehicles crowded at the on-ramp, veer into the right lane ahead of the truck, dashing into the shadows of the Golden State Freeway overpass, heading toward the L.A. River.

I punch the radio button, and Warren Olney is reporting on a mass murder in some outlying California town, somebody killed a whole crew of Mexican workers on a chicken ranch. Six, all told, maybe one survivor, Warren Olney said, men who had ventured far from their homes in Michoacán and Jalisco, only to meet terrible deaths—shot, stabbed, and in one case run over repeatedly by a pickup truck—at the hands of an apparently crazed individual. “Is it racism or a sign of deepening economic stress when individuals commit these terrible crimes? As in last week’s murderous attack on a Mexican family in southern Arizona, these crimes seem to be on the rise in the United States. Does it mark a fearful new chapter in the xenophobic history of the American West, as in the days of anti-Chinese pogroms, lynch law and vigilante ‘justice’?” Warren Olney said he was going to devote his program to these issues.

I hadn’t tuned in in time to get the full details. Where was it? Who did it? Was this somehow connected to Mexican cartels and gang wars? Was the chicken ranch actually a secret meth lab? Were the killings a cover-up? What was the poultrymeth connection? I sucked chicken out from behind my incisor and probed the area with my tongue, straining to hear the facts as I drove. I gathered that the violence had taken place in some rural area. I pictured in my mind a chicken ranch I’d seen once as a child outside of Lancaster.

It had impressed me a lot at the time—sterile industrial lines, a facility of sheet-metal hangars sitting under desert heat in utter silence. I had spent the day riding out in a van to see “the ranch,” a piece of real estate the father of one of my friends had purchased as an investment. My friend Raúl said his mom was angry that his dad had spent their savings on this piece of rocky desert. Raúl’s dad told his family it was going to be their getaway from Los Angeles, their “ranchito.” Raúl, his little brother Beto, and I were all curious to see the ranchito. We drove out on branching dirt roads across sun-stricken desolation. The landscape reflected an almost malevolent heat. When the van stopped in a barren patch of bulldozed ground ringed by piles of old construction debris, odd bits of trash and discarded car parts, we saw that the ranch consisted of chalky, alkaline soil, tumbleweeds and creosote brush, and dark volcanic rocks.

The sole structure on the property was a battered mobile home, hot and airless when Raúl’s father opened it up and we pressed in behind him, rank with some bitter plastic stench, reeking like a wet dog. Raúl’s mother stood outside with her arms crossed over her chest in the leaning shade of the trailer, with such a sorrowful expression on her round face that we couldn’t look at her. We thought she was about to burst into tears, and perhaps there’d be a typical big nasty fight and we’d have to ride back to the city in a choking atmosphere, full of recriminations and the chance that we might get slapped across the face if we said anything. So Raúl said, “What’s that over there?” and we three ran off into the bushes to get away as fast as we could.

Instinctively, we made for the highest point on the property, a very low rise—not even a hill—some distance away. We didn’t want to be anywhere near if the adults were going to start screaming at each other. The low rise didn’t look very far, but Raúl and I had to cajole little Alberto to keep up with us, because it must’ve taken us at least half an hour or so of struggling through brush, down into and back out of gullies, struggling up sandy embankments that collapsed and covered us in chalky dust, ducking under dusty branches that coated us in sticky resin. Beto was whining about going back, rubbing his eyes red with some cactus fuzz or something in his hair and eyes, and about to cry, so Raúl and I kept telling him that the low rise was “ruins!”, but he didn’t know what ruins were so we said that there was a treasure there. Alberto really had no idea what treasure was either and kept insisting that we’d better go back, so we told him that people had buried big piles of money and toys and stuff in a secret cave on the hill. We actually found two crushed, decaying beer cans on top of the low rise when we finally got there, and Raúl and I both told Alberto that pirates drank beer here before they buried their treasure. Beto was such a baby, we didn’t have to bother to explain how pirates bury their treasure in the desert. In fact, there were shallow depressions and holes where it looked like someone once dug into the rocky ground. Raúl jumped into one and started kicking at the ground with his foot, telling Alberto that he bet he’d be the first one to find something. I was a little leery of what he might find and didn’t move to help, because it reminded me of old backyard graves of family dogs. I noticed there were white buildings maybe a mile or so in the distance, pale against the volcanic ground. Dozens of windowless, featureless sheet metal buildings arrayed in long broken parallel lines. Who lived in the metal buildings, like barracks, without windows, out here in the broiling desert? There was no sign of movement, no vehicles, nor people, nor anything. There seemed to be no fence around the buildings, so I figured that they were not a prison, like the county jail compounds—Sybil Brand for women and Peter Pitchess for men—located behind high fences near my house, in the neighborhood where Raúl and I lived.

Who builds these long buildings out here in the desert, who works here? It reminded me of the movies, where scientists are working on top-secret projects. Blankly metallic in the afternoon sunshine, I knew they were too far away to ever get Beto there and back. I wondered if there was a way Raúl and I could tie little Beto to a bush, or just tell him not to move while we ran as fast as we could to go investigate those strange buildings. We might find some real treasure! But Raúl said Beto would cry, and his mom was already pissed off and didn’t need a reason to whip the crap out of him. When we got back to the van and asked Raúl’s father about the windowless buildings as long as city blocks, he told us that it was a chicken farm. I said, “I thought scientists were working on something there.” He shook his head, “Chickens come from there.”

The United States was at war when we were growing up, as we came of age, during our young adulthood, throughout our lifetimes, and after we died. The wars could never stop, it was too late for that now. People didn’t mention it. It wasn’t worth thinking about. United States equals WAR. So? They got Mexicans to fight in the wars and deported them afterward. Some wars, if you blinked you missed them. Grenada, Panama. Of course, the industrial-military complex conducted fullblown wars in Iraq and Syria and Afghanistan—and those soldiers, privatized mercenaries and civilian contractors, didn’t want to work in KFC and Popeye’s frying chickens like Mexicanos, though they did eat mountains of chicken.

Myself, I like to take two chickens, fryers five or six pounds each, slice them from the neck through the breast cartilage down to the bottom, spread the ribcage apart and place them backside up on a cutting board and press down till the ribs crack and the chickens flatten about as flat as they can be. Rub both chickens with achiote paste that you can cut with lemon juice and mashed garlic in liquified butter, maybe with chipotle powder and/or red pepper flakes if you want to increase the necessary heat. On the barbecue over semi-low coals, it takes about an hour and you have two red juicy fiery chickens to serve to your guests with the side dishes. My friend Rick has a killer curry chicken recipe he cooks in a wok and serves over rice, so hot it burns your mouth, but these days I prefer my barbecue chickens, which when flattened cook all the way through without having to be turned, over a bed of Mexican mesquite charcoal. They brown nice and crisp on top like that.

After listening to a Recent Rupture Radio Hour (Ehekatl KXPO 99.9 FM), which features guests like Chicano Moratorium organizer Chalio Muñoz, I was especially intrigued by urban agriculturalist and chicken farmer, Liki Renteria. What he said about raising poultry for personal needs in an urban setting was eye-opening and enlightening. On his rough estate on a slope in Happy Valley, adjacent to Eugene Debs County Park (where it would seem his chickens have the run of many acres of urban green space, however fraught with raccoons and coyotes), Liki Renteria farms hundreds of heirloom variety pullets and cocks: Cuckoo Marans, Salmon Faverolles, Speckled Sussex Triplets, and Dark Cornish Plymouth Barred Rocks. Renteria, a favorite guest on the radio show for several reasons, answered many questions from the audience about raising your own organic food in an urban setting. I’ve been lucky to catch him on the radio lately on a couple of episodes, where he answered questions from the audience with alacrity and generosity. Audience members (seemingly a wide spectrum of Eastside residents of all ages and genders) could not get enough, asking him about food pyramids, urban ethics, sustainable agriculture, legal issues, and even questions about the effect of select foods on personal relationships. I was deeply impressed with all the information and began to believe that it might be good to purchase some big fat Rhode Islands for myself.

Recently Tina and I were at some “industry” (show biz) lawyer’s house in Laurel Canyon, a benefit for arts programs for children with AIDS. Tina told me I should go when somebody asked me to read some poems there, and, even if I didn’t want to, she was curious and it was for a good cause, etc., even if it was going to take us an hour or more to get across town in traffic, if there were no accidents. The usual bottleneck on the 110 through downtown to the 101, bottleneck there too, breaking up a bit by Alvarado to Highland, south to Hollywood and due west on whatever it is, people driving so rude, night falling, lights of the city coming on in the glittering chill, winking and twinkling as we drove up into the hills. Tina reread Google-map directions as I drove rushed and gloomy.

“I don’t care if I’m late,” I sulked, but I drove fast (anyway I tend to drive fast). Tina soothed me, nonchalantly, “We’ll get there.” I had to park a couple blocks away on a narrow winding street hemmed in between tall walls, tall hedges, tall structures obscured by trees. I gave my name to a couple at the door who checked it against a list. The hostess, a TV actress, met us as we were walking in—she looked at me with wide eyes as if tentatively recognizing me based on somebody else’s verbal description and thanked me for coming, telling me I was to follow the musician (“That’s your cue, just let us know if you need anything. The program this evening is bursting, so please keep it under three minutes. Will that be satisfactory?” “Sure,” I said, “I won’t go longer than even one minute.”). I’d been staring at the actress, her face round and shining like the moon, thinking that I had seen that face before on TV and in movies where it appeared normal-sized. She turned to other arrivals. We moved forward through a crowd. What’s her name? I asked Tina. Tina said she thought her name was Something Something, but then corrected herself, saying, “but I’m probably wrong.” I forgot the name a minute later. The party was all white people except for a few black people who apparently also worked in television or film. I recognized another actress who used to be Jackson Brown’s girlfriend and who we used to see, sometimes with him, in downtown protest marches and demonstrations. She was in some terrific famous science fiction movie that academics loved to reference when discussing the future of Los Angeles. People were dressed in clothes they might wear on TV and also regular clothes, jeans, T-shirts or whatever. Nobody was talking to us just yet so we ambled through the living room where people milled with plates of food, drinks in hand. “Man,” I whined, “when is the musician going to play? They haven’t even started the program yet. Maybe the musician will be on first and then me and we can get out of here. What does this guy do, anyway? To earn enough to buy this big house overlooking Hollywood.” Tina told me that he was a former communist in the 1960s, lawyer for the Black Panthers and other radical groups, lately he mostly did “entertainment law,” made lots of money and tried to give some of it back. I scanned the spines of books on the nearest bookshelves. Social issue or political titles, nonfiction trade hardcover books (Uneasy Rivals: Men and Women in Today’s Workplace, Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela). Easy reading, not very interesting. Outside there was a deck where caterers grilled imitation Thai chicken satay on skewers, which we stood in a short line for and set on a bed of rice with Chinese chicken salad (made from the same frozen cuts of white meat, it seemed). I handed Tina a plastic cup of sparkling cider as we pushed through knots of people glancing at us so coldly their looks were almost openly hostile, out onto the hillside, laid out in a grassy open garden under oak trees. “This is very nice, very nice indeed,” Tina said. “I can’t wait till I get the fuck out of here,” I said. “You gotta do your one good deed today,” Tina said. I tried to tear the satay off the bamboo skewer with my teeth without stabbing myself with the skewer’s charred point. The meat sort of crumbled like charcoal in my mouth. “This chicken is dry,” I said. “My favorite,” Tina said. “Yeah, right,” I said.

Tina said the gardens alone were worth the trip. I couldn’t see it, but I said the gardens were nice, to show that I could appreciate horticulture where she was involved. It was a nice warm evening above the city. When she was finished with her food I took her plate and we sauntered the path that wound down the hillside.

One time I went to Liki Renteria’s farms in the hills of Happy Valley, following Jose’s detailed directions, without which I probably would have ended up lost somewhere, driving into some unfortunate alternate reality of sci-fi Los Angeles, never having the opportunity to join the UFO Club of Greater East Los Angeles, to miss out on ever finding my destiny. I went to the farm to kill chickens. Or roosters, rather, because the hens serve the purpose of laying eggs and therefore don’t need to be killed, but the roosters just fuss and fight all the time, and harass and rape the hens, and need to be killed. Because I am a chicken eater, and I eat chicken every week, I felt it was my duty to help Jose and Liki cull their chickens. By the time I got there, up on the hillside by the shed, they had the big pot heated to exactly 140 degrees, or whatever the exact scientific temperature is for immersing the dead chickens in extremely hot water so that their feathers slough off as easily as feathers fall out of a torn pillow, and Jose and Liki were already at work, cutting the roosters’ heads off, letting them bleed out in buckets, throwing the bodies into a big pot, which was (it was immediately apparent upon entering the area) releasing a stench of chicken death, of scorched dusty feathers, of bird blood, bird fear, punctuated now and then by the snapping off of yellow chicken feet, also tossed into a bucket, to be later thrown away, because no one—except Olga—wanted to cook or eat chicken feet. Liki handed me an apron and a knife. “There’s gloves if you want them,” he said.

Liki’s Chicken-Killing Machine consisted of a piece of plywood onto which he had screwed a plastic orange traffic cone, upside down. At this point, there was a wash of blood streaming down the plywood into the bucket where the heads ended up. The cone made cutting the rooster’s head off easy. You stuffed the rooster head first into the cone, so the head protruded out of the bottom. The roosters blinked, mouth open, wondering what the hell. They were so trusting. They’d lived their lives on this hillside, fighting with each other and raping the hens, endless free food, safe in the wire pens (once in awhile menaced by raccoons or coyotes who dug underneath or climbed overhead), and now they were hung upside down, with their head sticking out of a traffic cone? What was that awful smell? Why is there blood on this board? They don’t try to peck at you. This is uncomfortable, you pulling my head like this. You pull their neck out, stretch it for the knife and cut off the head. The body flaps and kicks. Blood spurts out and drips toward the bucket. Toss the head. After the body stops moving, pass it to Jose and Liki who are scorching the feathers and removing them. That’s the dirty job. After the dark feathers are yanked out, the outer feathers and long wing feathers and underfeathers, with that stench of filth and death, pale goose-pimpled naked chicken skin revealed itself, and I had never seen it before, but after the feathers came out—out of the same pores the feathers came out—long filaments of pale mucous extruded in spaghetti-like secretions.

No wonder we like our chicken fried crispy.

Many years later, decades later, after Swirling Alhambra disappeared and the others were killed, after Sergio died, I was walking across the parking lot of a mini-mall. I had gone jogging in the hills in El Sereno, and my knees were killing me, and I was thinking that I was going to have to give up jogging, that I was getting older and closer to death—all those gloomy thoughts that I was always torturing myself with in a self-centered way, especially when I was working out. Except, of course, I felt pretty damned good afterward, cooling down, walking through the last light of the afternoon, twilight falling, car headlights streaming by on Huntington Drive. I passed giant piles of used tires towering over the fence of the bright yellow tire shop that I admired for its large plastic sign, which had been painted over and re-lettered so many times that when it was lit up, it was a perfect gibberish. The mini-mall parking lot was half-empty in the dusk. The jiujitsu students were taking a break in the parking lot. The tall dark woman in her late twenties who was apparently the lead black belt of the group glanced at me. I’d spoken to her once or twice somewhere, probably at a meeting at the Eastside Cafe. She was giving her group a break out in the hot summer dusk, and they were chatting while she stood looking stern. They were mostly young people—nobody as old as me. One storefront was empty, between a pharmacy and a “health food store” (window filled with supplements) and some curandera’s office. I ducked in the doorway of the empty storefront for a look; the door was flung open as if the store had been looted or abandoned. The fluorescent lights were on, and debris was scattered in corners of the place. Was the economy in such disarray that landlords could no longer even police their properties? It wouldn’t be surprising as a sign of the further downturn in the ever downward spiraling of dust-empire America. “You want a future? Go to China and see if you can make it there!” said some former storefront psychic-turned-politician on the front page of the L.A. Times. I walked through the empty storefront and out the rear door, which I’d expected to lead to a parking lot behind the buildings, but I found myself in a hallway full of medical equipment: gurneys, examination tables and computers, boxes and boxes of stuff, paperwork, stools, cabinets large and small, all stacked the length of one wall. I found a suite of rooms in the rear of the building, an abandoned medical clinic that was occupied by the group I’d only heard rumors about, Bugs Not Bombs (at least that’s who I’m pretty sure it was, that’s who I supposed it was based on what they were doing). With their little logo of an electrified cockroach. Anyway, somebody must have recognized me from somewhere, from those community meetings or whatever, somebody nodded at me (they didn’t kick me out, as I walked through they ignored me—it was like I was some ghost, vestige of old days, neither a threat nor of any relevance), I walked through, heading purposely toward the rear exit, as if looking for the rear exit, which indeed I was. This group, Bugs Not Bombs, was a bunch of hacktivists targeting war machine NSA spy computers and police state war computers and Rand laboratory defense contractors, etc. They were going about it casually, as if marinating carne asada for a barbecue. They conferred quietly, talking in low tones, glancing at me now and then as if waiting for me to make my exit—which, just as casually, I did. I had the feeling they were doing their usual thing, using computers abandoned by a failed medical clinic, sending off a viral malware or spyware and waiting for signs it was working its way through systems, firewalls, servers and clouds. “I think it’s working,” someone said. They were quiet, waiting. I opened the door to exit, and paused. They seemed tense, awaiting a signal. (Maybe the signal was going to be cop cars roaring into the parking lot just outside this door, or an alteration of numbered patterns on the screens?) I exited, closing the door behind me.