The Pigeon Story: That Time A Pigeon Laid An Egg On Our Queer Couch
An ‘Extremely Victoria’ story from British Columbia
I lived in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada for six years as a young adult. They were six extremely messy, extremely closeted, extremely destitute, extremely youthful years. The Pigeon Story is one of what I think of as a small collection of my most Extremely Victoria stories. One of the handful of tales that really just sort of epitomize the general vibe of that time.
When I first moved to Vic I was just barely 19. The first proper apartment I lived in was a rundown but pinteresty-cute apartment in a house in the oceanside, be-cherry-blossomed neighbourhood of James Bay. I had found it through an online roommate listing, the roommate being a very cool tattooed lesbian a decade older than me, who unfathomably agreed to live with me, a 19-year-old child. We lived in the attic, and our landlord and her preteen daughter lived downstairs. Being too much 19 to recognize the red flags, I was immediately in love with the wood floors, the crown mouldings, the crumbling staircase covered in vines.
It didn’t occur to me to consider things like rot, or rats, or the pigeons that nested in the eaves outside the kitchen window, or how dang hot an attic apartment could get on a warm day.
Sure, mating pigeons bobbed daily across the roof right outside our kitchen window. Yes, for some godforsaken reason no one in Victoria is legally obligated to put screens in the windows of rental units. And absolutely, rats did ultimately gnaw a hole through both the wall and a bookcase into my roommate’s bedroom in the middle of the night one night in January. But we simply did not leave the kitchen window open unsupervised. Our landlord poisoned the rats and left them to rot and stink in the walls.
These things were not foremost on my young, young mind.
I had bigger problems.
One of the bigger problems was that I had moved across the continent alone as a 19-year-old with no safety net and no plans and no job, and so I ran out of savings pretty quickly. When I did finally start finding work, I needed money so badly that I was just like, yes I will take EVERY job that will hire me and then I will just work them all at ONCE. And so for a while I had two near-full-time jobs, in that way that shitty minimum-wage employers will give you juuust under full-time hours so they don’t have to provide you with any benefits.
Several days a week, I would get up at 3am and take the bus across town, and do a 4am stockroom shift at the Purdy’s Chocolates in Mayfair Mall. I would open up the chocolate store and work the retail floor til noon; and then I would take the bus back downtown and do another eight hours and close out at an abusive-but-chic gourmet food import shop in the very bougie Hudson Market, and then take the bus home.
I was then, and still am, criminally insomniac. And specifically, the more tired I would get, the harder it would be to sleep. So I would often spend the six hours between work days more just sort of dissociating than sleeping.
My roommate was, much like I found myself a decade later when I hit the age they were at the time, on the board of directors for the local Pride organization. So when South Island Pride lost its office space, my roommate moved the organization’s entire office archives, including a sizeable library of queer erotica and literature, into our crawlspace.
For a teenager in the closet and confused, this was a dragon’s hoard of arcane knowledge and secret tomes, to be uploaded into my consciousness piece by piece and in absolute secrecy. And so that was how, the night before this story takes place, I had come into a copy of John Green’s gay teen novel, Will Grayson Will Grayson, and read it cover to cover in its entirety while sitting numbly on the bathroom floor instead of sleeping. (As you might imagine, that one sentence contains pretty much everything I remember about John Green’s gay teen novel, Will Grayson Will Grayson.)
That roommate was in what was then kind of baffling to me, but what with the eyes of elder gaydom I now understand to be one of those complicated gay situationships — with an ex who is still your best friend and also maybe not really truly an ex.
The ex was a transgender guy in mid-transition from female-to-male, and there was a whole, ‘oh I’m not attracted to men so we have to break up but also we’re still going to have “sleepovers” once a week’ kind of 2010 lesbian-panic vibe. But the guy was, as most trans guys I’ve come to know since have been, extremely sweet. And he was also the first ever trans person that my Catholic-school ass had ever met and I was trying SO hard to be cool about it. So even if he had not been extremely sweet, I would never in a million years have suggested that he should not stay over at our place whenever he wanted, for as long as he wanted, basically any time he wanted.
I was trying so hard to be a cute and quirky Zooey-Deschanel-New-Girl-era roommate, and I had been staring at chocolate and gourmet food all day and not sleeping for so long, that when Easter rolled around I had the extremely quirky and cute roommate idea to bring home several dozen little foil wrapped chocolate eggs and sort of scatter them around our apartment. I hoped that my roommate and our friendly resident trans guy would find this extremely charming and lovable of me.
But mostly what happened was that nobody really made a concentrated effort to locate all the eggs, and I, being extremely cute and quirky and 19, had not thought to keep track of how many there were or where they were. And so weeks later we were still finding stale chocolate in the bathroom cabinet and atop the crown mouldings and in the vegetable crisper.
And finally one dark, unseasonably warm, spring morning, as the last of the chocolate eggs gathered dust in the shoe rack, I got up off the bathroom floor at three AM and took the bus to Purdy’s Chocolates. My roommate got up at 6 to pick up the kids they nannied. Their ex got up at 7, made breakfast in the increasingly stuffy attic kitchen, and then left for his government job.
I don’t remember the specifics of that workday. I imagine it went about how you would expect for someone who had been awake for at least 38 hours at this point. But where my memory kicks in with absolute vividity is on the bus, 8pm, headed home. I receive a single text from my roommate. No punctuation. All lowercase.
“there are pigeons in the living room.”
“what?”
“the pigeons from the roof”
“what the fuck?”
“i’m trying to catch them with a pot”
“what do u mean they are in the living room?”
“im calling the landlord.”
And you know like, that special level of sleep deprivation that you can get to where the world sort of starts to turns inside out? Waking becomes the new dreaming. Adrenaline becomes the new sleeping. A quarter cup of gourmet imported Italian extra virgin olive oil becomes “lunch.” And when you are in that very special place between reality and unreality, the simultaneously least and most possible thing in the world is that there are pigeons in your living room. Truly a special kind of twilight zone. I arrived around the corner of the house just in time to see my landlord stomp into the front door of my apartment, and emerge barefisted with a pigeon flapping in each hand, arms outstretched above her head, long red hair curls trailing behind her, like some sort of feather-fingered biblically accurate angel.
Apparently the roommate's ex, being an itinerant in our household, hadn’t been quite keyed-in to the pigeons nesting outside the kitchen window. No one had briefed him on the rules of open-window supervision. He had been left alone in the apartment that morning, the last person to leave. He had noticed it getting a little toasty in the sunny attic kitchen, had opened the window to enjoy his morning coffee, forgotten about it immediately and forever, and then sauntered off to work.
Nobody knows for how long the pigeons were in there, but it might have been hours. They had obviously been panicking for a while. Bird shit and feathers were everywhere. The doors to every room in the apartment were open; there was shit on the dishes in the kitchen, on our clothes, in our beds. My roommate had arrived home to find a pigeon perched on the top edge of their bedroom door, gently swinging.
39 hours on no sleep, we walked around the block to the grocery store for disinfectant and a case of beers. 40 hours on no sleep, we started to meticulously clean every surface in the apartment. Somewhere around 45 or 50 hours on no sleep, middle of the night, scrubbing the bathroom elbow deep in pigeon shit, a little drunk and just absolutely hallucinating at this point, I hear my roommate just sort of weakly call my name from the living room.
“Hey… did you… did you hide any easter eggs in the couch?”
And I’m like, what? Brain not working, ideas not quite clicking into place. But they’re like, come out here, look at the couch. And I wander out in my sleepless daze, trying to figure out if this of all times is the moment my roommate has chosen to call me out for just leaving old chocolate everywhere like a dipshit. And I look at the couch.
And there, in the middle of the couch cushions, right in the centre of the couch; exactly chocolate-egg-sized; tiny, perfect, blue; sat a single pigeon egg.
Truly a miracle of nature.
After that we stayed up all night and cleaned the whole apartment. I must’ve gone to work again the next day but I have no memory. A couple weeks later I quit the chocolate store job. We kept that egg the whole rest of the time I lived there. My roommate wanted to try to eat it (lol) but in the end it just sat on the kitchen table next to the candles and fruit bowl. I think it was still there when I moved out a few months later.
In the next couple years in Vic, I went on to have every kind of pest problem you can think of: wasps burrowed through the walls in one house; there was a near-supernatural, Hitchcockian-level silverfish infestation in another; and in my first solo lease I had a particularly traumatic and permanently personality-altering ordeal with bedbugs. A landlord (landlords being the most bloodsucking pest of all) literally gaslit me about an actual gas leak that nearly killed me in my sleep. I don’t know if that is a normal amount of home issues, or if it’s just truly bad to be 19 and queer and poor, or if it’s just a nightmare to rent in Victoria in general, or if I just got extremely unlucky.
And honestly, if anything, the pigeons were the least destructive and most quaint and charming to deal with out of all of those disasters.
But there is just something truly unforgettable about the fever dream of it all. I will never forget. A very special encounter with nature where I stayed awake for 57 hours and a pigeon laid an egg on my couch.
