Unusual Box Labels and a Chicken
How to get a lot of attention you might not want.
This story happened a few years after both my sister and I had moved out. My little sister’s a vegetarian, and like my mom, she raises chickens for the eggs… and apparently as pets, though why anyone would want a bunch of angry, stupid, feathered shitbags as pets is beyond me. In any case, my sister was living in a house in Oakland with some roommates, who were also vegetarians, and their back yard was mostly taken up by a chicken run.
One of my sister’s friends who didn’t live at the house was apparently moving. This wouldn’t have come to my attention, except that the friend in question also had a chicken, and was moving to a place where she couldn’t keep it. Naturally, she isn’t going to just kill and eat it, and since the chicken in question had originally been one of my sister’s, my sister agreed to take it back. The only problem was that the friend had more or less waited until the last moment to deal with her chicken, and my sister was inescapably busy for most of the day. Not having any other options, my sister asked me to pick up the chicken and bring it over, because I guess everyone else is also busy.
I wasn’t doing anything important that day, so I decided to be a good brother and help out. I drove out to the place where the friend was moving away from, where I expected to meet said friend and somehow handle the transport of the chicken. Except the actual roommate wasn’t there. I waited around for a bit because the roommate’s house was twenty minutes away from my place and I didn’t feel like driving all the way back and doing it again. I texted my sister, and she told me she’d get on her friend’s case about getting back home.
Eventually someone did turn up, but it still wasn’t the friend with the chicken. It was her boyfriend, but he knew the situation and had keys. Between the two of us, we managed to catch the chicken, who very much did not want to be caught. Only problem was that we didn’t have anything to put the chicken in, and I wasn’t about to have a chicken loose in my car. They shit on everything, and the chicken had already demonstrated being one of the crazier ones. Naturally, because my sister’s friend was moving, there were a lot of boxes at her old house, but they were all full of her stuff. In the end, the only box we found that was large enough to hold a chicken was… well, I’ve known a lot of interesting people with interesting hobbies. The box in question had once been used to store costumes for a stage version of the Rocky Horror Picture Show, and if you’re familiar with the show, it probably wouldn’t surprise you to know that the box had a large permanent Sharpie label reading “Men’s Lingerie” on all four sides. Not that I cared, I was just going to use it to transport the crazy chicken. We got the chicken into the box along with some straw and a couple handfuls of chicken feed, and I put it in the back seat of my car. I had the windows down, of course, because the stupid bird had already shit its box.
Now that I had the chicken, I drove the twenty minutes or so to my sister’s place. It was midafternoon at that point, during the summer, so it was getting hot, and the chicken was less than happy to be in a box in a moving car. I got to my sister’s neighborhood and discovered that there were a lot more cars parked on the street than I’d expected. The closest spot I could find was about a quarter mile away from my sister’s place, and even that one involved parallel parking, which I hate. I didn’t mind the walk, but I wasn’t going to leave the chicken in my car on account of the heat and the smell, so I got the box out of my car and started walking.
That caused some problems. My sister and her roommates were all art students, so none of them had a lot of money, and the neighborhood they lived in was a pretty low-rent area. I’m not casting aspersions on her neighbors, but it’s been my experience that people from lower income brackets are less likely to be a part of the social circles that include things like the Rocky Horror Picture Show, and aren’t likely to understand the context of the label on the box I was carrying. Similarly, there are some neighborhoods where a big white guy like myself gets attention, particularly one who has dreadlocks like I did at the time. It also didn’t help that the chicken in the box felt me pick it up, and decided that was a really good time to completely freak out and make a lot of noise.
I was getting a lot of looks. Not very friendly ones. Big white guy with dreadlocks carrying a box labeled “Men’s Lingerie” which contained an insane chicken? Yeah. If that weren’t enough, when I got to my sister’s place, I discovered she was not, in fact, actually home, even though her car was parked in the driveway. I texted my sister again, then waited for a bit.
After ten minutes or so, I got tired of waiting. My sister’s porch had no shade, and it was getting hotter, which wouldn’t be good for the chicken either. So I picked up the box and headed back to my car, intending to sit inside with the AC on. Except that somehow in the process of getting the box of chicken out of my car, I’d managed to lock my keys inside. I could see them still hanging in the ignition and being completely unhelpful. Of course, the only person with spare keys to my car at that point was my sister, who still wasn’t responding to texts. Oh, and naturally there’s also no shade over my car.
Ended up having to wait almost an hour for my sister, sitting on the trunk of my car with the Men’s Lingerie box with an insane chicken inside, being stared at by various people. It got to me at first. Didn’t help that the chicken decided it was going to be quiet until it heard someone going by, at which point it would loudly start freaking out again. But after a little while, I put on a “This is perfectly normal, what’s your problem?” face, and it actually started being funny. Then my sister finally showed up. Her phone had died, so she didn’t see my texts until she’d gotten home. We got the stupid chicken to her place, laughed a bit about the afternoon, and I went home.
It took a couple days to get the smell out of my car.
