ADVERTENCIA: This blog is not appropriate for lovers of all animals, PETA activists, and, quite possibly, even casual vegetarians. It is appropriate for Frank Perdue, unrepentant carnivores, and those with incurable insomnia.
The first thing that I hear every morning in Cofradia, just like most of the residents of our humble dusty town, is an earnest cacophony of roosters, crowing their feathery hearts out in a broadly scattered chorus. First one part of the neighborhood comes alive with this unnerving yet oddly rhythmic sound, and then another, and then another. A rooster standing at attention at the peak of one of the slanted roofs of the houses in our neighborhood, crowing vigorously as the mist rises behind him like a curtain, is an extremely picturesque sight. Chickens are as ubiquitous in Honduras as reggaeton and Olimpia soccer club fans, and are only slightly less annoying. Even the poorest families living in the most desperate-looking laminated shacks will often have at least one rooster prancing about the property, stabbing his beak at anything he finds to be edible.
Roosters like to greet the dawn with their relentless chorus, and I often wonder what they are saying with all of that racket. There must be some inscrutable language being spoken that only members of that species can decipher. Is all the hemming and hawing simply to mark their territory? Is it to seek out a mate or defend one already found? Is it to express a primal need for unity across geographical space? Or, in a more sinister and unimaginable way, do roosters engage in their pre-dawn crowing ritual merely to piss off the sleeping homo sapiens who are lucky enough to be higher up on the food chain? Does all this gosh-darned racket have merely to do with an urgent need for revenge against an inevitable fate as some carnivorous person’s protein source?
This latter explanation for rooster noise might at first appear to be absurd, but is in fact rendered more logical when one considers the following two facts:
1. Since arriving in Honduras, which has the best fried chicken I have ever tasted, I have consumed more pollo in a shorter period of time than at any point in my 31 years on this Earth.
2. The most inescapable aspect of being the Program Administrator for BECA in Cofradia is chronic sleep deprivation. This chronic sleep deprivation worries me and can make life difficult at times when I am awake.
The owners of our house have decided, for the past couple of weeks, that the most cunning and blatantly impudent rooster ever born should inhabit our backyard, a dusty expanse of construction wreckage, rotting fruit, healthy orange and mango trees, and piles of dead leaves. He has the most obnoxious singing voice ever, like having to listen, over and over again, to fifty of the worst whiny boy bands recording a double live album together. He usually doesn’t start crowing at five am, but prefers the true madrugada of two or three in the morning, which makes it difficult, if not impossible at times, for me to sleep through the night. On the rare occasions when he does hold back until five am, he makes up for his earlier vocal inactivity by letting out even more intense bursts of hardcore screeching, like he is the falsetto trying to hold the high note in some twisted opera. Moreover, he manages to position himself in the most opportune places to wake me up and make my life totally miserable-on the roof directly above my bed, where his squawks echo though the aluminum, or else right outside my window, where I can sometimes see a nose-thumbing gleam in his eye.
I have decided to name this rooster, and I wanted to name him after the person I most detest in the world. After some serious deliberation, I decided to choose G.W., after the thoroughly evil squatter who has taken over La Casa Blanca for the last six dreadful and dangerous years with his own peculiar brand of Christian fascism. G.W., my early morning nemesis, likes to see me suffer. He pops up in my nightmares, and then his early morning screeches arrive before I want to open my eyelids. The transition between sleeptime and daylife is far from ideal.
For the first week of his disturbances, I was quietly angry, fatalistically accepting that there was nothing I could do but wait it out, because even after a number of hours, G.W. did always shut up in the end. I even accepted, at weaker moments, that all my reckless chicken consumption in Honduras merited this form of pre-dawn abuse, as if my bad karma, as a true Buddhist would say, was coming back to haunt me. A part of me also believed, in vain, that G.W.’s days were numbered, that his fervent attempt to deny me sleep was a last ditch effort at unfocused vengeance, me being the unfortunate surrogate for general humanity, or at least the man with the hatchet who can probably sleep right through his commotion.
After the first week of G.W.’s screeching, in which I suffered in relative silence, I realized he did not intend to cease, so I decided that I needed to face my adversary directly, in the sense of an old fashioned type-duel. In this duel, I was determined not to go out like Alexander Hamilton. Wherever G.W. was outside making his racket, no matter how dark it was, I was determined to find him and persecute him mercilessly, to give back what I had been getting.
The first night, when I blazed out into the darkness to confront him, I could see the outline of his grizzly head in the moonlight, perched right on top of the roof. I searched for a rock to scare him off the roof, and found a decent sized one, hopefully not large enough to wake up my slumbering wife and housemates in the event that I missed. Despite my darker fantasies, I did not want to kill him with the rock, just teach him a lesson. I clutched the rock and got into a Major League Baseball pitcher stance, preparing to aim at G.W.’s grizzly outline. I cocked my arm and unwound, and missed the outline entirely. G.W. must have felt the breeze of my pitch though, because he decided to fret feverishly, and let out a worried series of squawks that stood in stark contrast to his normally self-assured, neatly cadenced screeches. I was at least comforted by the fact that somehow the rock did not land on the aluminum roof and wake up the other residents; in fact, it was like it just disappeared into a black hole, landing nowhere.
Score: G.W. 1, Jon Power 0.
The following night, I found G.W. squawking from a lower perch-the steps to the landlord’s house, at the top end of our nuclear wasteland backyard. It was about three thirty in the morning. There was a bit more light than the night before, so we could make eye contact for about three seconds. He looked confident and hard, like a steely-eyed crook caught with the bag of money but determined to hold his ground. I decided this time that, since I had him at ground level, I would grab a stick and chase him, and attempt to give him forty lashes. I looked down slowly and, good providence, found one nearly right in front of me, thin but spiky-the ideal whip. G.W. had not budged, but he was no longer looking my way either. I decided that, since he already was aware of my presence, sneaking up on him would probably backfire. An assertive sprint would probably yield a better result. I hunched forward into a runner’s stance, feeling the power of a bull about to charge through the streets of Pamplona and skewer the first smarmy running Italian tourist I saw. I heaved forward and went straight for him at a fast clip, but the moment I started to move, he just knew that he had to get away somehow. G.W. began squawking and flaying maniacally, and somehow managed to lift his sorry hide off the steps and into the air, so that by the time I arrived at the spot, he was already out of reach. He propelled himself up into the big tree at the top of the yard, and sat on a branch giving me the middle finger. He then let out a more defiant squawk than is usually evident, giving me little doubt that in addition to being one of the most cunning roosters ever born, he was also one of the most cocky. All I could do was stand there, trying hard not to let my face show defeat, swinging the stickwhip in the air blindly, like a child trying to hit a piñata-but always missing it.
The score was now: G.W. 2, Jon Power 0.
The next morning, sluggish and licking my wounds, I decided that direct confrontation of any sort was probably going to backfire. I began to brainstorm about less noble ways that I could persecute (note: I am still not saying kill) my feathery adversary. I was not against the well-conceived sneak attack or sudden ambush, but it appeared that G.W. had a sixth sense about my whereabouts at any moment that I was on the property. An option would have to be created that relied on not alerting him in any way as to what my plans were. I would clearly need to meditate on this further…
