This Book Brought To You By My Student Loans: Unpublished Chapter
So advance copies of my book, This Book Brought to You By My Student Loans, mailed out today. As a present for all of you who patiently ordered and waited, and as incentive for the rest of you to buy a copy, here’s a chapter that didn’t make the final cut but I still love.
Biology 101
When I was eight we had a chicken that tried to have sex with a plastic planter full of petunias.
In the rooster’s defense, the object of his affection was shaped like a chicken; it was large and white with off-center yellow eyes airbrushed vaguely where a chicken’s eyes would be and green grass airbrushed at the squared off bottom of the planter. Every good country home in the 80s had one of these suckers out front.
The petunia enthusiast was smaller than a regular chicken and if at all possible, a bigger asshole. For obvious reasons, my mom named him Richard. Richard was a glossy oil-slick black, except on his head where his feathers exploded in a Phyllis Diller poof of white, obscuring the potted plant aficionado within. One lone yellow eye bugged out from the coif of white feathers and would lock on to you with a dim sense of purpose as he sized up your sneakers, figuring out if they were friend or foe. Friend meant you’d have a small chicken gleefully humping your foot. Foe meant you had a small chicken clawing the shit out of your foot for god and country.
Richard got punted across the yard a lot.
He chased all the lady chickens around, yes, but he also chased our horses, cats, dogs, and the lawn mower.
This is actually a story about employers trying to dictate an employees birth control coverage, but please keep Richard the Tiny Horny Rooster romancing a plastic bucket of flowers in your mind.
I once had a supervisor named Shane who was in his early fifties. Shane grew up on a chicken farm, squat and broad, balding and paunchy with cloudy blue eyes that made you ignore the spark of meanness and ignorance behind them because he had resting manager face. At a staff potluck lunch (mandatory because we weren’t getting along as an office so forcing us to cook for each other and expecting us to abide by the honor system and not put Visine* in the fruit salad was a great idea) we got on the subject of chicken husbandry. During a question and answer game, one of my coworkers asked Shane how chickens had sex. Shane primly wiped his chin and daintily folded his hands.
“Oh. The females lay eggs in the nesting boxes and the roosters come by and spray the eggs with a sperm-filled mist,” he said.
If you’re confused: Chickens procreate via sexual contact. The roosters mount the hens, so if you ever see chickens giving each other piggyback rides, that’s totally not what’s happening.
As Richard the Tiny Horny Rooster showed me one sunny Saturday, chicken sex is fluttery and complicated and ruins your mom’s petunias.
Richard had been kicked out of the chicken yard by a bunch of hens who were sick of his shit. He wandered, lonely and heart sick, on to our porch. His eyes locked on the beautiful, gigantic, plastic lady chicken that held my mom’s petunias. With a determined hop, he latched on to the sharp rim of plastic and, in thirty-seconds of flapping ecstasy, ruined the flowers.
Throughout the next few weeks, Richard would cause a ruckus on the porch trying to get to his beloved, who we’d had to move even further out of his reach after each attempt. He’d sometimes sit at the foot of the porch steps, clucking up at the planter like some poultry Romeo and Juliette.
During that mandatory potluck, I thought of Richard trying to cluck a plastic chicken with gleeful determination and I realized Shane was dangerous. A man of some authority, who had lived on this planet for 55 years, still thought the prissy story his mother probably told him to cover up her own embarrassment was how the world actually worked.
The previous insurance enrollment period, Shane had me collate all the employee insurance packets to mail out. One of the insurance memos I had just printed out sat on the copier. He picked it up between thumb and forefinger like it burned him. In big bold print it read:
ALL METHODS OF ORAL CONTRACEPTION ARE COVERED BY THIS PLAN AT A ZERO COPAY.
His face turned a deep shade of puce and spittle gathered at the corners of his mouth. “That is just irresponsible and unprofessional,” he whined at me.
“If I was allowed the pick the plans, and obviously my input wasn’t important here, we wouldn’t be dealing with this nonsense.” He crumpled the flier with contempt.
“You all shouldn’t be allowed to have an abortion every day for free on the company dollar!” He stomped to his office and started playing the Fred Durst cover of Behind Blue Eyes at top volume, which is how I knew he felt especially put-upon.
Shane had been explained away by HR as being someone they couldn’t fire because it wasn’t technically HR’s responsibility to correct where public education so fabulously failed. Rumors swirled about Shane’s intense lack of basic common knowledge, and this did explain why he was upset about the unisex bathroom. I had heard him say that men could get cancer if they shared a toilet with a “bleeding woman” and there was a rumor that he had asked a female staff member if women wore padded bras because our boobs always leaked and what did we do with the milk after our kids were weaned?
Shane was in charge of way too much for how ignorant he was, which made him dangerous. He lived in a dream world where chickens reproduce like salmon and women can make our own whipped cream if we jump rope without a bra on. We need to think about things like this when we promote people, or vote them into office, or give them driver’s licenses, let them own guns, be police officers, doctors, teachers or basically do anything other than work the air-brush machine at the factory that makes chicken shaped planters. No woman on this planet should have to pay insane out of pocket costs for birth control because some stupid man is sitting behind a desk, thinking vaginas are icky, women are terrible, and that chicken spawn like fish.
I will be forever thankful that nobody took his input regarding our employee healthcare plan. I will be forever horrified that this is not always the case. I will always be on the lookout for ways to tell people about Richard, the Horny Tiny Rooster.
Epilogue:
I want to tell you that something awesome happened for Richard the Horny Tiny Rooster. I want to tell you that Petunia the Planter laid a bunch of plastic easter eggs and some flower/chicken hybrids hatched and lived happily ever after. I’m not sure what happened to him, but I like to think he had a great life on our farm, fucking plastic planters and chasing the lawn mower.
Post Epilogue: My mom says he was eaten by a coyote. I can only hope he met his death with dignity and honor, unlike most chickens. RIP Richard.
*Please do not put Visine in someone’s food. This causes hospital-admission level diarrhea. Not that I’ve ever done it.
