26 Jun 2025 / {Not} Fiction

The Nudist

Incidents defy probability. I know this sounds a little far-fetched, but incidents do defy probability; they actually do. Oftentimes, and especially when you realize your life has been a grave error. About sixty years ago, I took up a job at a chicken farm called Cluckers & Pluckers. Why I went there no longer matters. What I found there is the subject.

It was early days of the 1960s, my job was to pluck chicken after I had ground up male hatchlings, after a receptacle had collected feather, flesh, bone and gristle. After it had sent this mashed hash further down the line and just before it left Cluckers & Pluckers as compost manure. Process led, repetitive task. Not pleasant, not unpleasant. I was indifferent you see. I had just called it a day after work, sitting down to fried chicken and cold beer. I don’t know if it was the beer or the weather or my tiredness or all of these ---- I suddenly saw a huge bald rooster, perfectly plucked, loom over me. Stark and unabashedly naked at ninety degrees. Perfect perpendicular. Straight ahead and uncomfortably close. Ramrod straight and expressionless. Nothing said it was a wraith; nothing said it was real. Everything said it was there. Plain sight. Now, I have done a long time on earth and my only consistent experience has been of being looked down upon. Everybody has looked down upon me ---- figuratively at least, sometimes literally as well. The huge bald rooster towered over me and looked down at me very decisively. Not judgmental, not derisive, only decisive. Literally and figuratively, both. You can get a sense of my incredulity. You cannot get a sense of the experience.

“Show respect” clucked the rooster. “Pluck away, pluck all if you will, but pluck with respect. You are dealing with the closest living kin of the Tyrannosaurus Rex. We may have plummeted from fighters to food, but you must doff to the toff of birds.” The rooster was not done yet. And I had not quite figured the situation. It opened a dimension between reality, fantasy, imagination, and something else I cannot fathom. The rooster, despite his nakedness, dominated the situation. Nonchalant. Blasé, even, about his shameless nakedness. I suppose this cocky indifference came from refusal to accede to acceptance ---- of his condition, of his status, of his situation. And from knowing that I too was naked….In a sense, I certainly was…more naked than him. He’s a stoic, I thought. Mr. Rooster was in an expansive mood. “Now, let me educate you on long-forgotten fact ---- we saved Western civilization at a turning point in history. The time was 480 BC and the Athenian general Themistocles was headed to what is called the Battle of Salamis. Earlier that year, the Persian, Xerxes had attacked Greece. At Thermopylae the King Leonida’s Greek forces held back the numerically superior Persians. When they were betrayed, the Persians began to prevail, Leonidas sent the bulk of his army away, choosing to remain behind with a small force to hold the invading army as long as possible. During this conflict, the Greek city-states {as on a few other occasions} stood united. Themistocles the great warrior heading to the battle-front saw two roosters fighting. The birds were going at it ---- no fear, no hesitation, fierce combat. ‘Look at them’ said Themistocles. ‘They don’t fight for country or for the gods or for glory. They fight only because neither will yield to the other. When birds are so brave, what’s our excuse? None, apparently. Re-invigorated Greeks fought hard and prevailed. Do you get the drift? We had your back.”

‘And our front as well’ I thought. Atmosphere in the shack was thick. With us, the occupants, the smell of beer, fried chicken, stressed tissue, a deeply sour smell and all the rest of it…pretty heavy and unsettling. ‘I am getting squeamish and am a sissy’ I thought to myself. ‘How on earth can I be intimidated by a chicken?’ He seemed to read my thoughts…..I know you must consider with no little skepticism, the narration I assert. I assure you it is fact and I know it to be true, clear as day….since the day….till the day….you must understand, agree and believe that I do not want this to be a story of thrust and parry. This is simply a re-telling of what and how it happened. I cannot answer the why of it.

Mr. Rooster was no longer bound by memory or emotion or pain. Every neuron in his body was a conduit for expression ---- transformation. Access to knowledge beyond comprehension. And what should be. Mr. Rooster clucked, I was a hatchling….male, quite useless to the poultry farm…I was thrown on the conveyor belt. Twist to neck, grind, mix with the hash of unrecognizable tiny bodies. Hardly any pain much less comprehension. Theft of life, blatant brazen theft, rankled. The theft laid heavy and thick with the indignity of it all, the insult. Mr. Rooster cluck clucked…I was a rooster. A very lucky chap with free run to romp all the hens…before becoming a very unlucky fellow on the plucking practice with bound feet….outrageous, most painful, dreadful – how may I reduce experience to words…..I was watching me pluck myself. Experience is experience and must be experienced. Mr. Rooster clucked again….I was a hen cramped in a coop – industrial massive scale farming you see – the coop and the coops thousands of them terribly stuffy. My space the size of A4 paper. All others too….impregnated….kept pregnant…very very sore…..as we laid eggs incessantly in that forever electric daylight, forever noisy world… Then, once we were broken in body we were dunked alive, head first, in boiling scalding water….huge vats of dirty bloodied water laded with feaces….boiled alive…agonizing death. “But I only eat chicken” I heard a woman say…200,000,000 of us forced into existence and slaughter each day…manipulated to grow horrendously fast in shortest possible time…hasta leugo was the boiling vat…the pluck…the grinder…one could choose…there wasn’t a hasta la vista……

This citation, reproduced here, was signed by illegible hands ---- too many…set to seal in dripping red. I have new-found respect for chicken. And great dread. Be very careful if you eat this bird. It is now working on rising from the dish – gravy or dry, whole or piece – and dragging diners through a distinctly chickenesian portal into the hell and strife of being….through gates of greed and gluttony…As I conclude my experience with a warning, consider the fact that people love to eat with other people. They must, however, shit alone… all by themselves. Wager and wages of eating what once was live tissue must be paid alone. All is just a heap of shit. It is this….it is thus…it is so…..It is true afterall.

Order of the Most Gallant, Most Valiant Personages

To all who shall see and not just look; all who shall listen and not just hear; all who shall feel not feign: This citation of the order of the Most Gallant, most Valiant Personage of fowl treated most foul. For incalculable, incessant, indefinite forebearance in the battle of palate, profit, persecution and pain untold, unconsidered, unimagined. To the second most abused, tortured being on Planet Earth. Our acknowledgement for providing livelihood, economy, protein, cuisine, taste and recipe. May the family of Gallus Gallus be the grist and the gristle, the flesh and the fashion, the terror and the taste ----- ad nauseum and forevermore. {I managed a not-so-good photo…the stance in forward leg. It speaks..of futures in extruders} END (?)