A Tragedy of Poultry. In Three Parts.
Part 1: February, 2008. I plop a slippery, naked, happy-go-lucky whole chicken onto my chicken grilling contraption and rub its chilly body down with sea salt and freshly ground pepper. The chicken giggles. "That tickles!" laughs the chicken. Very gently, I separate the skin from the chicken's body and softly massage garlic-infused butter over its back and legs. The chicken understandably dozes off during this massage and so I'm quiet when I carry it outside to the waiting preheated barbecue. As I open the lid the chicken wakes up, straightens its neck nub, and yawns.
"See ya later, Chicken!" I sing.
"After while, Not A Chicken!" the chicken sings back, waving a bumpy wing. "Thanks for the rub down! See you in about an hour when I'm golden brown and my juices run clear!"
Five minutes later: The barbecue is awash in flame. I grab a potholder and throw open the lid but it's too late, it's a massacre.
I hurry the chicken inside to better assess the damage.
"What
happened out there?" I ask.
The chicken coughs. "I don't know," it moans, "things were good, you know, warm... and then... and then I think I exploded?"
Through cracks in the chicken's blackened skin I see sticky raw chicken flesh.
"Am I... can you still eat me?"
"I'm pretty sure that's a no," I tell it, "I'm pretty sure you'll kill me if I try."
"I won't! I wouldn't! I promise!" Bloody smoke billows from its neck hole.
"Yeah... I think you will. I think I have to put you in the Big Trash Can Outside. It's garbage day tomorrow so it shouldn't be that bad. And I'll weight the lid down with something," I add for decency's sake, "to keep the cats out."
The chicken sighs wetly, filling the kitchen with a dark fog.
"Okay," it relents. "And hey, I'm really sorry about all this."
"Don't even worry about it," I say, carrying the chicken out to the garage. "We've got some leftover pizza." I pry the chicken from the grill tray and set it on top of the trash before putting a couple of bricks on the lid. As I walk back into the house I can barely hear the chicken crying.
Part 2: April, 2009. I grab the grill tray out of the pantry where it's been sitting for more than a year. I cut a chicken free from its plastic bag and toss it in the sink, scraping out its assorted organs as I go. "Hey," the chicken pipes up, "Aren't you going to
use any of that stuff?" I toss what I presume to be a heart, a liver, a gallbladder and what, a lung, maybe, into the garbage disposal. "Because it's kind of a waste," the chicken says over the grinding motor, "some of that stuff is pretty good." I grab a pair of scissors; we've got some chicken skin that has to come off. "Whoa, what are we doing? What are we...
hey!" I trim a healthy wedge of skin from the top and bottom of the chicken and cram it into the disposal. "Fire hazard," I explain. "Th...th... that's okay," the chicken replies, shivering.
Setting the chicken on the counter, I pour sea salt into its cavity. The chicken's ensuing screams fill the kitchen. "I'm all
raw in there!" it wails. "Can't you do that on the
outside?" I ignore the snuffling of the chicken and attempt to jam it on the roasting spit thing. It takes like four tries because the chicken's opening isn't big enough. On try number three the chicken loses consciousness.
It wakes up as I'm opening the barbecue. "Wait," it mumbles, disconcerted, "Don't I at least get a butter massage?"
"Too flammable," I say, "We're going to have to count on your natural juices for flavor."
The chicken attempts a shaky thumbs up with its neck nub. "I won't let you down!"
Five minutes later: The chicken let me down. I grab it and hustle it into the house.
"Son of a bitch," I mutter. "What the hell
happened out there?"
"I... I don't know," the chicken moaned. "Things seemed to be going pretty well, but then all of a sudden..."
"You exploded?"
"Maybe? I'm not really sure. It felt pretty bad, though."
I upend the grill tray over the sink and give it a good shake. The chicken slides loose with an unceremonious
plop! and slides neck down into the drain hole.
"I think maybe this part is good right here," the chicken mumbles hopefully into a sponge, gesturing to an upper thigh. "This part isn't hurting me." Ignoring it, I grab it with a wad of paper towels and head out to the Big Trash Can. Trash day isn't for four days. And I'm out of bricks.
Part 3: Two weeks ago. The whole chicken on the counter bobs its neck nub with excitement as I draw near. "Hi! I am just so excited to be here, I can't even stand it." I open a utensil drawer under the counter. "Oooh, what are you getting? A baster? Oooh, oooh! Or one of those flavor injectors? Because I've heard good things!" I grab a mallet. And a cleaver. And close the drawer. "Wow," says the chicken. "That looks a little overkill."
Anything else that chicken has to say it says to itself, presumably in its Happy Place, as I proceed to chop and smash its body into manageable, less likely to explode pieces. I mercilessly trim the skin and cover everything halfheartedly in salt and pepper. I dump the chicken on the grill and make sure all the burners are set to LOW. Right before I close the lid I see the chicken attempting to roll its traumatized pieces into seven separate fetal positions.
I sit inside, eyes narrowed. Waiting. Waiting. Nothing. Everything looks fine out the window, situation normal. I let my guard down, stupidly, and concentrate on salad. Suddenly and without warning the house fills with the smell of burning plastic; running to the window I see that the yard is full of smoke. Had a Chicken Jedi Master been over and waiting for dinner he would have felt a great disturbance in The Force.
When Randy emerges from his backyard reconnaissance mission, he explains that the barbecue somehow became so hot that all of the hard plastic control knobs melted off and formed little rubbery pools on the patio.
We silently agree not to discuss the chicken.
I now live in a state of perpetual fear. Fear that one day I'll find myself in a dark parking garage or a drizzly back alley and my peripheral vision will catch the silhouette of a shadowy figure reflected on a wall, a figure slowly approaching; a hulking, heaving chicken, wearing a tight trench coat and hellbent on revenge.
Makes me glad we're not really beef people.
