That Which Has Led Me Here Before You

“I’ve never really been opposed to the idea of slaughtering animals.  Now, taken out of context, that statement can sound kind of bad.  But hear me out.  Before, when I was growing up, my parents never owned a farm.  They never plowed fields or woke up at some ungodly hour to trudge through the rain or snow to collect eggs from a chicken coop.  We didn’t live anywhere remotely city-like, but our shoes didn’t smell like chicken shit.  Oh, sorry, Your Honor.  Excuse me, ‘chicken poop.’  My experience with livestock came from the TV and a single trip to my aunt and uncle’s house in the country, one time when I was seven.

“Their farm wasn’t the biggest, and it was certainly nothing to bring in the big bucks.  Nothing more than a couple cows, a litter of good-for-nothing cats, and one pig that went by the name of Lucas Pembroil.  I’m talking, Your Honor, about my cousin, a fat little boy a couple years older than me, who decided it would be hilarious to show me the chickens.  See, it was his job to feed them each day, and on one of my family’s trips to see his parents, he brought me outside, out to the hen house.  They had a chain-link fence to keep the chickens penned up, but it was the most ramshackle thing ever laid eyes on.  The birds always got out and ran amok, bringing dogs and coyotes around.  It was Lucas’s job to get them back in the pen and fix wherever they’d managed to get out.

“So Lucas brings me to the chickens and tells me that they love to play.  ‘It’s sure fun trying to run and catch ‘em,’ he says.  And this, remember, to a little seven-year-old boy.  ‘Why don’t you try it?’

“And so I’m all full of energy from being stuck in the car for the ride there and then being inside while my mom and pop gab-gab-gab with my aunt and uncle.  So I go after this one chicken, a hen.  This little burnt red soccer ball of a thing that’s running around, jutting its neck out like it’s dancing.  Lucas, meanwhile, has a grin on his face that touches his scabbed ear, like my aunt smacked his mouth and sent it a couple inches sideways on his head.  And as I’m going after this chicken, he grabs this wooden pole, even taller than him at five feet.

“All of a sudden this bird decides it’s had enough.  It comes after me, jumping, flapping its wings, losing feathers like money in the state lotto.  Surely you’ve seen chickens when they get agitated, Your Honor.  Well, I hadn’t seen such a thing, and I screamed like a girl when I felt that first spur cut into my hand.  She got me several times, and by the time Lucas had beat her away with that pole, my arms were scratched to hell and back like I’d just lost a fight with a rosebush.

“That event was a traumatization.  That’s what my shrink calls it, anyway.  I’m just a good old boy from Cornhole, Iowa.  Ha ha!  I’m just joshing; that’s just what us locals call it.  You all probably know it as Compton.  That’s where I was born and raised.

“Anyways, that moment stuck with me for the rest of my days, and it still wakes me up in the middle of the night sometimes.  I’ll open my eyes to the dead of night, my hair matted with sweat, thinking that I’m surrounded by the prickliest feathers but which are really just the low thread-count sheets I bought at the Discount Decor over in Ridgemont.

“My parents didn’t have high hopes for me, and I guess maybe their lack of inspiration set me down the path that brought me here today.  I knew from a young age that the college education card got left out of my deck, and so I turned to mechanics in high school.  I thought about being an inventor, but I could never come up with something to invent.  ‘Well, think about something people need,’ my shop teacher would say.  ‘Try to fill a niche that hasn’t been filled.’

“Now that’s easy to say when you ain’t trying to invent things and you know what in the H-E-double-toothpicks niche means, but for me, the best I ever came up with was my own version of a clothes dryer for people who liked their shirts to smell like the outdoors.  You know that smell that comes with hanging clothes out on the line?  Well, this was a machine to get clothes dried fast but still get that outdoor-fresh scent, you see?

“Basically it was just a big vented metal tub attached to a motor.  It spun like the devil and dried things quicker than you could say ‘Kenmore can lick my — ’

“Well, you get the idea.

“After graduating I spent a few years moving from job to job, working as a dishwasher and a laborer and a few other little things.  But I never stopped thinking about how great it might be to invent something that people all across the country might use.  Something that would make me rich and give me what my shrink calls ‘validation.’  Ultimately, though, my parents kicked me out of the house when I lost my job as the high school’s facilities cleanliness specialist due to a marijuana addiction that I’ve recently gotten under control.

“I ended up heading back to my aunt and uncle’s farm, where I figured they could use a hand since Lucas had gone on to bigger and better things in the United States military.  Family, as they say, is the one place you’re always welcome.  So I helped them with the chores and duties they couldn’t do anymore, and they let me into their home until I could figure out what to do with myself.

“Corralling the chickens had to be my least favorite job, but I did it because I was grateful.  I swallowed the fear that had been my companion for all these years and took to those birds with my own stick.  After some time, I jerry rigged the fence around the pen, and they didn’t get out except for every once in a while.  Nothing like before, when Lucas had to take care of them.  Dealing with those chickens wasn’t so terrifying after that; feeding them was nothing like corralling them, but when my aunt decided to cook chicken for dinner it was my job to get one and pluck it.  It was bad enough having to get near them to feed them, but taking one in my hands was a whole other story.

“For months I had to go in that pen and hunt for the plumpest one.  Then, after the rigamarole of catching and killing it, I had to pluck the damn thing.

“My uncle had quite a workshop in an old shed out behind the house.  And one day I had an idea.  What if, I thought, I put that outdoor dryer to use?  So I went back home and got my dryer, and when I brought it to my uncle’s workshop I put little rubber spikes along the walls of the metal drum.  In my head I imagined that, if I put a bird in there and started the motor, the rubber pieces would catch the feathers, plucking them out with no problem at all.

“And that’s exactly what happened when I tried it out.  Sure, I had to use the hose to spray inside there to get that chicken clean.  And, yes, it made such a thudding, horrible noise that my aunt and uncle came rushing outside to check on what they thought was a derailed locomotive crashing through their yard, but that chicken came out naked as a Playboy centerfold!

“Of course, what I didn’t realize at the time was that putting a live chicken in there would be considered animal cruelty.  And that’s exactly what I did when I demonstrated my automated chicken plucker for the fine folks at the United States Patent and Trademark Office, which has led me here before you fine folks and you, Your Honor.

“That’s about it, I guess.  That’s all I have to say.  My mouth to God’s ear, I am not one for treating animals with anything less than the dignity and respect they deserve.  Those chickens, however…”