I need to preface this story with a disclaimer. It contains a few profanities and references to drug use. If this offends anyone, I apologize and request amnesty for this one story. It will never happen again. It was necessary to wallow in the mud once again to transmit a profound message. Like the Grateful Dead sang, “Once in a while, if you look at it right, in the strangest places you get shown the light.” Or as Gandalf said, “Not all who wander are lost.” In Kabbalah, we learn that God hid the most intense sparks of holiness in the darkest corners of Creation. And in case you are wondering, it is a true story. God showed great mercy in allowing me to somehow not die despite being incredibly stupid. Darwin was wrong, and here I am, still breathing in and out.
Dancing Chicken
It was one of those adventures when making it there alive was part of the thrill. We had a lot of those back in the day. Against everyone’s better judgment, or perhaps due to everyone’s totally twisted judgment, Rich was driving. Jack was the usual choice. Despite being eternally toasted, Jack could steer and roll joints at the same time without spilling a single seed. Being a professional stoner meant he had two modes, both mellow. It made for a Zen-like driving experience. Like the song said, we were going to hell in a bucket, but at least we were enjoying the ride.
Rich, on the other hand, thought that highway driving was an opportunity to provide shock therapy for anyone on the road who might be in need but couldn’t afford it. It also led to fervent prayers from all of us, and I am pretty sure anyone unlucky enough to be on the road with us, which might have accounted for our semi-miraculous near misses. God wanted us to stay alive in order to drum up business in an unlikely market. In addition, being a city boy meant that Rich had learned navigation in the subway and was totally out of his element above ground. In those pre-GPS days, his solution for being lost was to turn on the absolute grungiest music available and play it until his eardrums bled. He said it helped him think. I figured the intense volume meant he could reasonably ignore our entreaties for mercy.
Rich’s strategy actually had several advantages. First, if we got into a horrible accident and died, we might be too busy complaining about the music to notice until we were safely tucked away in body bags. Also, it made it impossible to ask for directions, something a carload of stoned urban hippies must absolutely avoid no matter how lost we got. Oddly enough, Rich’s technique usually worked. Just as the tweeters began to pop and crackle, and the woofers caused geologic anomalies to appear around us, we would start screaming at him to cut the music. That was always the precise moment he spotted a familiar landmark. Bleeding eardrums meant we were almost there.
This time, though, Rich’s turn at the helm was slightly worse than usual. We had just executed a tire-screeching drift around an entrance ramp. We picked up a ticket from the automatic dispenser on the Turnpike when it suddenly became clear we were heading in precisely the wrong direction. The music got louder as Rich took charge. He cranked up the volume several notches until it was way beyond saturation. He spun the wheel, guiding his oversized beast of a car onto the grass median separating three lanes of southbound traffic from three lanes of northbound. Overinflated bald tires, a vehicle put together as if it were destined for maritime service, and newly mown grass made for a driving experience with no relation to how Rich turned the wheel. We were going to die, or not, and it had nothing to do with anything Rich was doing at the helm.
It wasn’t really his fault, so our screams for mercy became generic, aimed at any passing deity who might be inclined towards helping our hopeless cause. Rich ducked down. With his head below the dashboard, he could safely ignore the horrifying things the rest of us were forced to watch. He calmly changed the music to something even grungier. I would have yelled out a warning, but I was too busy trying to remember how to pray. The car spun around several times, passing through three lanes of traffic before settling onto the gravel shoulder of the northbound side. We were now pointed in the right direction, just a few meters from a toll booth.
Rich drove up to the booth and rolled down the window, letting out a cloud of smoke that would make anyone standing in the vicinity fail a blood test. The tape ended on one side, and the tape deck clicked back and forth, trying to decide if playing the same side again would be better than risking the horrors of side ‘B’. The guy in the toll booth looked at us with his mouth hanging open. Rich handed him the ticket. The toll collector took one look at the card and began to stutter.
“You got on at this entrance. That’s impossible. No one’s ever done it before. You can’t get off at the same entrance.”
Rich smiled like a man who had a dead body in the trunk. “But that’s exactly what we did. We just hung a U-turn. You can still see the tire marks in the grass.”
“That’s illegal.”
Rich’s insidious grin got wider. “It’s only illegal if a cop is there to see it. If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no philosopher to see it, you know what I mean? You can’t give me a ticket based on tire tracks.” Rich’s dad was a taxi driver in Manhattan, so he had grown up hearing these arguments at the dinner table.
“But I don’t know what to charge you.”
The tape deck had finally made up its mind and began playing the band tuning up the insane animals it used as instruments. Rich turned up the music. “How far to the next exit?” he screamed.
“Ten miles, but you didn’t get on there. If I have this card, my supervisor will fire me.”
Rich pulled out his wallet. “How much is the toll for that exit?”
“A dollar, but you didn’t get on there.” The man was getting desperate, and a thin layer of sweat covered his brow, and foam was forming at the edges of his lips.
Rich reached into his wallet and pulled out some change. “That works out to ten cents a mile. Here’s a quarter. Fifteen cents is a tip for doing a helluva job. Invest it wisely. One day, your job will get automated out of existence, and you’ll thank me for this.” The scary thing is, thirty years later, Rich’s rant proved to be prophetic. Toll collectors have gone the way of rotary phones, the milkman, and photo developing. It makes me wonder how much that quarter would be worth today after thirty years of compound interest. I sometimes sit around wondering if the hapless public servant invested wisely or if he blew it all on a pack of gum.
Henry was riding shotgun in the passenger seat. He reached over and turned down the music as we pulled away from the toll plaza. We had a rule that Henry always drove shotgun. He had a glass eye, and his eyes pointed in different directions, making it seem as if he were looking in two directions at once. He claimed that he could see more than the average person since he had an expanded field of vision. Everyone knew it was bullshit, but we never called his bluff. Truth was, we never got stopped by a cop when Henry was sitting in the front seat, so maybe it wasn’t BS.
Fat Steve gave out a horrendous belch in my ear. He was drinking cheap beer, and another rule was that Steve always sat in the middle. Since Fat Steve was really fat, the people on either side had to squish into the corners.
“Hey, Steve, how’s about we switch seats?” I said.
Steve belched again. “Nah, that’s not fair. If I sit in the middle, you guys are uncomfortable, but it’s only two of you. If I sit in the corner, then I’m cramped, and there’s a lot more of me than there is of you.”
I thought about it, but by the time I realized it didn’t make sense, Steve was talking about something else. I hated sitting next to Fat Steve and demanded travel reform every time Rich drove, but I rode a motorcycle when we weren’t planning on drinking, and when I knew the way. But I’d never been to Wo Hops, and since I couldn’t take passengers, especially not Fat Steve, my opinion didn’t carry much weight. Steve didn’t drive either, but he was Fat Steve, and that was the end of any discussions about seating arrangements.
“You guys are in deep shit,” Steve said.
I looked at Steve as he poked a hole in the top of a can, shotgunning the warm beer into his mouth, managing to get slightly less than half the beer onto me and the vinyl seat. “Why are we in deep shit?”
Steve belched before explaining. “With Rich at the wheel, we are definitely going to die. They’re going to run out of body bags trying to wrap my fat ass up, and then the coroner is going to pop a hernia or throw his back out trying to load me into the hearse. After that, he’s going to leave your bodies lying by the side of the road until the coyotes eat them. We are all going to die, but at least my corpse will be treated with dignity.”
“Steve, this is Queens,” I pointed out. “The only coyotes on this side of the continent are on television chasing roadrunners.”
Henry turned around, one eye looking at us while the other watched where Rich was driving. “Steve, you need to learn Spiritual Geometry. You think death matters. Where does the candle go when you blow it out?”
Steve belched again. “Brooklyn.”
“No.“
“Staten Island?”
“Staten Island doesn’t really exist,” Henry said. “It’s a fantasy created by wandering ferry captains. Has anyone ever been there?” A murmur went around the car as we all admitted that we hadn’t. “The theory of Spiritual Geometry states that there is a necessary illusion that makes it seem that life for the individual is a straight line, with a beginning and an end. It is only when you step back from the illusion that life takes on its true shape: a circle. When the candle of the soul lights another, it is complete, and it becomes a circle.”
Henry wasn’t deep. He was a stoned babbler, and since he was constantly stoned, he was always saying shit like this. Now that I look back on it, the car was full of prophecy that night. Rich foresaw the rise of computer gentrification of society, and four years later, Henry, a closet heroin addict, was dead from an overdose. Steve, on the other hand, is still fat.
Fat Steve belched one more time. “Bullshit. We’re going to Chinatown to eat some meat before it eats us. I eat the meat; the worms eat me; the meat eats the worm. That’s the circle of life. If we crash and die tonight, the worms get us a little earlier than they expected, and we die hungry. Good news for them and the chickens. Bad news for us and any herniated stretcher-bearers, and any other unfortunate motorists who get between me and my wonton.”
Henry nodded, his eyes going up and down out of sync. “So, you agree with me?”
“I’ll only agree with you if you toss me another beer.” Henry tossed him a can, and the matter was settled.
We got to Chinatown in one piece and, more importantly, without getting stopped by a cop. Rich found a parking spot behind a car that he only had to push forward a few feet to make room for his boat. The plates were from Connecticut, which had us all scratching our heads. Steve was sure it was in Europe, which left him wondering how the car made it across the Atlantic. Rich pointed out that the owner was certainly from out of town and wouldn’t know how to park without a parking brake, which turned out to be the case. The parking brake was on, and the wheels screeched as Rich’s boat pushed the SUV forward.
“He’ll be pissed, and we are parked right behind him,” Henry said. “He’ll know we dented his bumper.”
“He’s parked in front of a fire hydrant now,” Steve said. “They must not have hydrants in Connecticut, or he would have known better.”
Being good citizens, we called the cops to report the situation and left before the tow truck arrived. We tried not to laugh when we heard the driver screaming at the tow truck operator while we were down the block waiting in line at Wo Hops. We felt bad for him for all of one minute since the line was already moving forward. Getting someone’s car towed isn’t nice, but he had been in line in front of us before the cops showed up. This meant that everything worked out fine since the whole point was getting food into our bodies as efficiently as possible, and the dude whose car got towed looked like he could stand to skip a few meals.
It was after midnight, but the line was still around the block. I don’t think Wo Hops ever closes, except maybe Chinese New Year, which is an unofficial day of fasting for the Jewish people. The Health Department showed up once, and they had to close for half an hour while they cleaned out the carcasses that weren’t identifiable as food.
I was grumbling because I hate waiting in lines, so Jack offered to take me to see Dancing Chicken.
“What’s that?”
They all turned around to stare at me in shock. “You’ve never heard of Dancing Chicken?!” Jack asked. “We’ve gotta take you before we eat.”
Henry offered to stay and hold our place in line while Steve, Jack, and Rich took me to see the famous Dancing Chicken. They had all seen it before, but Henry wasn’t as excited as the other guys. It turned out that Dancing Chicken was right across the street in a penny arcade. We walked into the noisy game room, ignoring the fake pachinko and outdated pinball machines. All the way in the back was a large glass box with blinking lights and a wire-mesh floor. Inside the cage was a chicken, pecking away at some food. On the front of the cage was a box with a slot for money.
Jack nudged me. “Put in a quarter.”
I slid in the coin, and loud music started playing. I was amazed when the chicken started dancing. “How do they do that?”
Jack stared at me with a strange look on his face. “Do what?”
My head was still buzzing from puffing on Jack’s weed in the car, so I tried to think out loud. “They don’t have ears, but I’m pretty sure chickens can hear. They don’t sing like other birds and probably don’t recognize that sound as music. I mean, I’m no farmer, but I know enough about chickens to tell you that they are the dumbest creature that god put on the face of this planet. They’re just a barbecue waiting to happen. So, how did they train the chicken to dance?”
Steve nudged me hard. I fell forward, banging into the glass, making the music skip. The chicken jumped backward before resuming its dance. “You numb-nuts! They don’t teach the chicken to dance. When you put in a quarter, the music starts, and electricity starts shooting through the wire in the floor. The chicken’s getting fried alive. Even a chicken is smart enough to dance if you plug it in.”
I looked at the cage in horror while my friends laughed at me. The chicken was dancing wildly, staring at me with red-rimmed eyes. I wondered what he saw. Was my image engraved into his soul as the ultimate Nazi torturer of chickens? I began to claw at the machine, searching for a plug or a switch, anything to turn the machine off and stop the poor bird’s suffering. Eventually, the music ended, and the chicken stood in the center of the cage, staring calmly at me with accusing eyes, its neck twitching occasionally.
We left the arcade, and I took a few puffs from the mercy joint Jack handed me. I was still shaking, horrified at what I had done. We joined Henry just as he got to the head of the line. Wo Hops was a crazy place, always crowded with a circus mix of people. There was no choice in tables. You took whatever was available, and you had half an hour to eat and run. If it were really busy, they wouldn’t even let you order. You would sit down, and ten seconds late,r the table was covered with whatever was coming out of the kitchen at that moment. New Yorkers who would pull a knife on you if you cut in line to catch a cab accepted it all meekly and without a word of complaint. The food was simply that good.
As soon as the waiter handed us menus, all the other guys pointed at one item, and the waiter nodded and scribbled it down. I scanned the menu but didn’t recognize anything. Finally, I saw it, and they all laughed at the look of understanding and horror on my face:
“Dancing Chicken Special, eggroll and rice included. No MSG. Extra juicy.”
Fat Steve guffawed, his belly banging up against the table, making the silverware rattle. “What do you want them to do with them when the chicken gets too old and tired to dance?”
Rich chimed in with the same grin he had flashed at the toll collector. “The meat is soooooo tender and juicy on the inside, so crispy on the outside.”
Henry looked at me while keeping an eye on the food coming out of the kitchen. “One way or another, you are going to eat the chicken, and it’s not supposed to be fair because it will never be the other way around. Chickens are a flightless ball of meat, inconveniently covered by feathers. If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him, but first give him a good meal, preferably Chinese food, best at Wo Hops. The only way life can ever be fair is if you eat the worms before they get a chance to eat you, but you won’t do that, which is strangely illogical. Why do you think we have a natural, built-in revulsion to eating worms? It’s nature’s way of protecting the holy circle of life. Do you understand? It’s not about fair, and it’s certainly not about ‘nice’. It’s all about the eggroll. Roll, baby, roll, but look out for the egg.”
Jack tried to console me. “At least the chicken got to listen to some good music and dance before we ate him. We do it, too. Listen to some music, eat some good food, and then it’s off to feed the worms. We get buried in a box because, for the worms, it is home delivery. The worm version of pizza.”
Looking back on the rest of that night, I have some regrets and many questions. Henry seemed to have understood the problem in a profound way, yet his approach confused me. Perhaps he knew that he was destined to die soon, and that gave him a deeper understanding of the reality of how things stood. Every junkie is just half a step away from eternity, dancing on the edge of the cliff in a slow-motion, half-step boogie, with a smile on his face and a needle in his arm. Maybe watching the chicken dance just before it became his supper was Henry’s way of coping with death. Even if it seems unfair, death is not about fairness.
My biggest regret that still weighs heavily on me to this day is that on that night when matters of life and death hung in balance, I sidestepped, took the coward’s path, and ordered tofu.
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