pheasantly numb.
© 1997 Jamie Zawinski
<jwz@jwz.org>
One of my coworkers, we'll call him Cleetus, grew up in a small town in Kansas. The world is very different in Kansas. Cleetus had a lot of interesting stories to tell about growing up there, especially with regard to the sorts of summer jobs that were available for a bored young man. Times have changed for Cleetus; keep in mind while reading these tawdry tales that these days, he walks around the office wearing thousand dollar Italian suits.
(I may be misremembering some of the details here, but that's
unimportant. We all create our own reality, after all.)
In Cleetus's town there was a pheasant-shooting range.
The theory was that gun-happy good-old-boys would go down to the range, wander around in the woods, and shoot down pheasants flying overhead. The staff of the range would then collect the birds, strip them and package them, and present them to the shooters on their way out.
In reality, the way this worked was, the shooters were wandering around in one area, and adjacent to them, but hidden by trees, was a small valley. In this valley lurked a herd of underpaid teenagers. These teenagers were armed with pheasants. Every now and then, they would take one of their pheasants, and toss it into the air, in the general direction of the hunters.
The hunters would then shoot down the interloper. It would hopefully fall into the valley, where another set of teenagers would collect its bleeding body and take it inside.
This was not the job Cleetus had.
Cleetus's job was at the other end of the conveyor belt on which the lead-filled pheasants arrived. His job was to strip the birds.
Of course, being shot from the sky didn't always kill the birds.
So before stripping them, he often had to kill them first (by breaking
their necks with his hands.) After that, the stripping was
accomplished by dunking the bird in a tub of
hot water, and scrubbing
at it until the feathers came off; then putting it back on the conveyor
belt for the next person down the line to do their part of the
dead- Aside from the revolting nature of this job, it was a fairly boring
one, being essentially a construction-line task. So, bored and
underpaid teenagers being what they were, they would play all sorts of
games.
Can you break open the bird's chest and pull out its heart
while it's still beating?
Can you twist the bird's neck around, and stuff its head up
its ass before it dies?
He regaled us with other repulsive tales of mutilation, but by this
point the screams and groans from the crowd he was telling the story to
drowned them out. Some of us were even unable to finish our meals,
if you can believe that!
Cleetus said that the worst part, the part that disgusted even
him, was what happened early in the season. In the spring,
just after the snow had thawed.
Sometimes the gatherers of the dead and dying birds would
accidentally toss one on the conveyor belt which was a bit old. A bird
which had been killed the year before, and had been frozen under the
snow all winter.
When Cleetus would pick up one of these birds, he would usually
come away with a handful of loose skin and
maggots, hidden under the feathers.
But, amazingly enough, this wasn't the least favorite of all of Cleetus's jobs. That honor went to a particular fast-food chain, where his job was to man the boiling grease pit. I don't remember which chain he said it was, or what kind of food it was that they were making there, but his job consisted mainly (or at least, most memorably) of wearing a huge asbestos glove on one hand, and with that hand, reaching into a trough of boiling grease. Repeatedly.
``The Glove,'' he said, and you could hear the capital letters when he pronounced it, ``had never been washed. Ever.''
Before he went home in the evening, he would wash his hands again
and again, trying to get the smell out of his skin. Then he would go
home, and usually awaken his roommate, who
would respond with a plea that he go and wash his hands
And so Cleetus would wash, and wash, and scrub, and scrub, like
some modern- Cleetus is also the only person I've ever met who claims to have
personally engaged in the time-honored act of
cow tipping.
(Sure, I've heard lots of people talk of cow tipping. Even people
from small towns. But none of them claimed to have actually done it
After one long and strenuous night of
cow tipping, and of course, the heavy
drinking which traditionally
comes along with it, Cleetus and his friends were walking home along a
country road.
What should they discover but a dead cow.
The cause of the cow's
death
was not apparent, but it had happened quite some time before; the earth
was beginning to reclaim her own. The cow's belly was swollen and
bloated; it looked for all the world like an over-inflated balloon (no
doubt due to the necrotic gasses within.)
One of Cleetus's companions thought this was
hilarious. He climbed
up on top of the cow.
He steadied himself. And then he began to hop! His guess was right, the
bloated, inflated corpse was springy! He bounced and bounced, and
eventually his friends coaxed him down, and the party staggered on down the
road.
But I can't help but wonder what would have happened had the
tensile strength of rotting skin not been
quite up to trampoline duty. I can only suspect that Cleetus's friend
would have been washing his feet, repeatedly,
for the rest of his natural life.
themselves, or seen it done; it was always a friend of a friend. The
whole thing smacks of being an
urban legend,
if you ask me. (Though I guess the appellation of
``
rural legend'' would be more appropriate?) I'm a
city boy, but I grew up in
Pennsylvania. There are cows in Pennsylvania.
I've driven by them, at night even. And there's one problem with the
whole concept, which is this: cows aren't horses. Cows sleep lying
down! But enough philosophy, on with the story.)
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