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yellow chicken
Sunday, August 11 2002
This afternoon I was puttering around in the living room and the backyard, working on another installation for the roof, this one to supply a variety of DC power and a handful of Ethernet connections. Meanwhile the New York Liberty were on teevee, having their asses kicked by the Charlotte Sting, the team whose coach, Anne Donovan, looks like a southern gradeschool teacher with pituitary issues. It was so depressing that we left before the game was done, taking a car service up to Astoria to attend a barbecue hosted by Jason (Mary Purdy's friend whom I met the other day at the Jackson Diner). Heading up the the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in the funny-smelling car, I noticed for the first time that the Empire State building looked a lot like an oversized church steeple. I'll know the American Taliban have taken over when somebody gets around to putting a cross up there. Gretchen tells me that a good fraction of the Empire State Building's floor space is already taken up with the offices of various Christian publications.
American barbecues don't vary much from one to the next. There's the beer, permutational conversations, big packages of cheap chicken, the few cuts of prime meat, and the black magic rituals necessary to make briquettes dispense with their stored up energy. With the exception of Gretchen, this particular barbecue had all the makings for a sausage party, but then Natasha, one of Jason's singer friends from Harlem, showed up. With the exception of Gretchen and me, everyone at the barbecue was either a professional or a semi-professional musician.
The recurring thread of the barbecue was the color of the chicken, specifically its somewhat unappetizing yellow hue. "Not exactly free range," "goddamn Queens chicken," and "they harvested their livers two weeks before they slaughtered 'em" were a few of the phrases used to describe it. (That last one was my contribution.) The main problem with the first batch of drumsticks was that the grill just wasn't burning hot enough, but after poking it from beneath and draining out the ashes, it ran much hotter. I made the mistake of accidentally grabbing the end of the fork that I'd been using to poke the ashes and surprised myself with an instant burn to the business surfaces of my right thumb and index finger. For most of the rest of the barbecue, I had to keep a cold beer in my hand to avoid experiencing pain. Maintaining a cold one in my hand was a good excuse for continuous drinking; I managed to drink at least five beers during the course of the evening, though for some reason I stopped the moment my fingers no longer hurt.
Since people seemed genuinely reluctant to eat any of the yellow chicken, the big hit of the meal was Jason's chili, which seemed to have a little bit of everything in it. Being a considerate Oregonian, Jason had been sure to prepare a veggie alt, potato salad, which Gretchen supplemented with some veggie burgers she'd brought. She was the only vegetarian at the barbecue, and though Jason thought she might make an exception for a turkey burger, she's not exactly that kind of vegetarian.
Aside from a little roll I got into when I was at maximum intoxication, I contributed little to the conversation beyond the odd wisecrack. For example, at some point in the conversation the guys were all talking in an insufficiently skeptical manner about celebrities who had possibly faked their deaths, and I suggested that maybe just once a celebrity really should fake his death, but then actually come back from it. Until a celebrity actually comes back from the dead, I will never believe in faked celebrity death. And, on a vaguely related note, as long as the Discovery Channel continues pandering to idiots with shows about the Loch Ness Monster, the Bermuda Triangle, ESP, and UFOs, I will regard all their programming with suspicion.
On the way home, Gretchen, John (Mary's on-again-off-again boyfriend), and I all took the N to Manhattan. Walking to the station, we passed a fish market and it smelled so bad that we could still smell it at the raised N station over 31st Street. But that wasn't the last of our foul odor experiences. A few stations further down the track our car unexpectedly filled with the fragrance of cooking broccoli, "kicked up a notch with the smell of fart," as John put it.
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