For Whom the Cock Crows (It's You, Bub)

It was back in April that our civic club newsletter, ordinarily one of the biggest wastes of paper in the Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area, carried a peculiar but highly informative front-page item (the newsletter has a front and back page—dig it!) warning neighborhood dwellers THAT IT IS ILLEGAL TO KEEP A GODDMAN CHICKEN IN YOUR YARD IN THE CITY OF HOUSTON! Actually, it’s not exactly illegal, as the fine print explained: according to city ordinance so-and-so, it’s against the law to “possess or maintain” chickens, turkeys, geese, etc. in a pen or other enclosure “within 100 feet of any actual residence or habitation of human beings …” So if your domicile sits on one of those huge lots in River Oaks or Memorial it’s likely you can keep enough hens and roosters to satisfy all the egg and fried-chicken needs of a medium-sized Texas Department of Criminal Justice facility. But in our neighborhood you must live outside the law when it comes to chicken-keeping. (This strikes us as patently unfair—a for-sure “disparate impact,” if you will—and as soon as we get a minute we’re gonna email Obama and see if he can fix it. We know he'll hop right on it.)

As we suspected this notice of city law was not a random newsletter space-filler (curbside recycling is on the 28^th of this month, by the way) but was aimed at neighbors of ours who for several years brazenly keep a lil’ red rooster in their garage IN VIOLATION OF THE CITY ORDINANCE. These folks are not your average urban chicken-keepers, being neither a hard-working family from the hills outside of Zacatecas (if there are no hills outside of Zacatecas, let’s move along) nor the kind of SWPL white folks you find up in the Heights. They are indeed Anglos—no, let’s scratch that; it’s an insult, as the paterfamilias is a hard-shelled little Irishman from upstate New York who, in fact, answers to the name of “Mick”*--but like heavy-metal music and as far as we know had no previous experience in animal husbandry aside from keeping many and various cats around their place.

It seems they acquired the rooster when their son’s girlfriend--at the time he and she were students at the public high school for artsy kids--purchased a baby chick to star in some movie she was making for a visual arts class** (we believe it was a remake of the remake of Mutiny on the Bounty, with the chick playing the Brando part), and after the chick had fulfilled its cinematic duties the son and his family took a liking to it and lodged it in a roomy pen in the dark recesses of their garage (why, we don’t know). The chick grew up to be a full-bodied braying Chanticleer, and as we learned many years ago when we briefly lived way out in the sticks between Slim's Y-Ki-Ki Club and Lawtell, La. (you know it as the home of the Lawtell Playboys, of course), roosters don’t just crow at the crack of dawn but are liable to let it rip at all hours of the day. This one did raise his hue & cry just before daybreak—we’d hear it crowing, faintly, from its garage perch when we’d go out for the morning papers—but otherwise seemed to follow no natural clockwork and could be heard cutting loose at 9 a.m., 9:23 a.m., 12 p.m. (when the hand is on the prick of noon), 2:57 p.m., 3:10 p.m., 5:30 p.m., etc.--but never too loudly or after dark.

We grew accustomed to the sound, imagining that it somehow put us in touch with the ancient rhythms of a more pastoral life, perhaps like the one our grand-père Slampeaux lived in the Old Country before he hopped a boat and washed up in East Texas. But we were amazed that the rooster was allowed to do his natural thing for a couple of years, maybe longer, unmolested by the constabulary or one of the neighborhood busybodies. Someone, though, finally took offense to the rooster’s presence and instead of speaking with the owners took the weasel’s path by complaining to the ordinarily toothless civic club, which further took the weasel’s path by printing up the blind newsletter notice. Our neighbors, not wanting to upset the commonweal, hastily returned the rooster to from whence he came, the feed and seed store up on Washington Avenue, and as of this writing know not of his fate.

It’s been a couple of months since his departure, but the other day we realized how much we missed the cock’s crowing when we saw one of those trippy Ambien CR commercials on TV, the one where the bleary-eyed white woman finds herself awake at 3 a.m. with a rooster crowing at the foot of her bed but then she wrangles a script for the sleep medicine and the stalking rooster is banished, last seen wandering off at dawn down the street of some godforesaken outlying suburb (side effects now include becoming “more outgoing or aggressive”) in search of other sleep patterns to disturb.

This modern life: It ain’t no good life, but it’s the life we choose.

*We don't make up the news--we just report it.
**We don't make up the ... etc.