I’d lost the encyclopedia set Poppy had bought me as a kid; I’d lost love letters from various boyfriends and crushes over the years; I lost my baby pictures and the blonde curl from my first haircut; I lost my record album collection; I lost three gold rings Nona had given me, and my prom dress, my high school yearbooks, and a black duck stuffed animal Poppy had bought me when I was five. It was missing a flower on its head, and I had insisted he buy it for me out of fear that if I didn’t take her home, no one else would.
I learned that stuff is just stuff. But the birds weren’t just stuff.
Losses from the hurricane devastated Poppy, too. Looters had stolen his locked safe before we reached the house, and he had kept his most prized possessions there, a treasure trove amassed throughout a lifetime of traveling: gold coins, old foreign money, photos, and other irreplaceable keepsakes, including Nona’s wedding ring, the one she had fought to keep when fleeing Egypt.
My parents, Poppy, and I moved into a sunny three-bedroom rental house in north Fort Lauderdale, ten minutes from the beach. Our new home had a screened-in patio with limestone floors and sliding glass doors surrounding a kidney-shaped heated pool on three sides.
I started my flock again with lovebirds, pairing my current birds with new mates. While we were separated, Bonk had married a cute little blue-pied lovebird named Sweetie who had also lost his mate in the hurricane. Sweetie was one of my favorites, a precious guy who hadn’t been hand-fed, but allowed me to hold him. Bonk and Sweetie settled in by going to nest and tending to eggs.
Each new bird or clutch of babies fledging from the nest made me feel a little high. The world dropped away, and I was washed holy: Saint Francis in short-shorts. I had to be above reproach in everything I did, to ensure my animals were the best cared for animals in the world. I had failed during the hurricane, and I wouldn’t allow that to happen again.
Bonk’s babies with Sweetie were unlike her babies with Binky, which had been carbon copies of her: green, with a peach face and cobalt rump. Sweetie had something spectacular buried in his genetics that mingled well with Bonk’s genes, because their babies emerged in a palette of lovebird mutations: silvers and cinnamons, cinnamon pieds, blue pieds, jade pieds, and seagreens. I often wondered if Bonk might have been “cheating” on Sweetie in the new aviary I built, which housed all my remaining lovebirds. Whatever the case, whenever I heard her hatchlings cry for attention, I couldn’t wait to spy into the nest box and see what miracles Bonk had created.
I accrued not only dozens more lovebirds, but also noisy sun conures, nanday conures, mitred conures, and jenday conures—South American birds three times the size of the lovebirds, and far more raucous. I acquired red lorikeets and Australian cockatiels in a medley of mutations; Brotogeris canary-winged parakeets; Indian ringnecks; budgies, finches, and canaries; Poicephalus parrots; two more red-lored Amazons, one as a mate for Miami-Bird; diamond doves and button quail; clamorous Quaker parrots and Hahn’s mini macaws; and a Chapmani mealy Amazon named Sam someone had given me, an endangered species and the biggest—and fattest—Amazon parrot I’d ever seen.
I’d catch Poppy spooning baked ziti into Sam’s insatiable maw, or my dad handing him almond after almond. If we didn’t “invite” Sam to have dinner with us, he’d scream until one of us ferried him to his spot at the table. He loved lasagna and pasta—anything with red meat sauce—the food falling from his bottom beak as he ate; he’d just dip his head back into his plate and shovel it all back in. The corners of his beak were often stained pink, and he had garlic breath. He loved vanilla ice cream cones, too, and consumed foods I’d never give my other birds—Sam ate like a person and demanded to be treated like one. My mom spent hours bribing Sam with grapes to say “I love you,” which he learned to say on cue.
Most of my birds came to me as unwanted pets that needed new homes, gifts from friends at the bird clubs, or trades I made using my baby lovebirds. I acquired birds in a frenzy, not thinking, moving on autopilot to reharmonize my shattered avian world.
These weren’t the only birds in my life—every dusk, a flock of dozens of feral nanday conures landed on the screened patio to talk to my nanday conures, screeching and shrieking. Sometimes, a wave of Quaker parrots arrived at dusk, too, and pushed my birds into an uproar of squawking and screaming that continued until the sun succumbed to the stars. My dad complained about the nightly ruckus, so I conducted a “parrot non grata” patio watch in the evenings, shooing the wild birds back into the trees with a broom.
My daily tasks were performed by rote, caring for the birds and continuing college classes; but at night, when the world quieted, my thoughts abused me in a voice I didn’t recognize. You killed the birds, it said. You killed the birds. I couldn’t argue with it and I couldn’t shut it up. You killed the birds. I couldn’t shake the images of their wet, drowned bodies, imagining the surge overtaking their cages, and their first—and last—breath of water, suffocating them as they panicked, clinging to the last pocket of air as their cages sank beneath the surface. I’d come home from class and curl in a ball on the floor, drinking cheap port wine, rocking and apologizing to the dead birds over and over until I passed out. Often, I’d crawl into my closet and close the door, curl as small as I could in the corner, knees to chin, and drink from the bottle until the bad thoughts ceased. Sometimes I woke up there.
Our rented Fort Lauderdale house was three blocks from Baja Beach Club, thirty thousand square feet of wall-to-wall toned and tanned flesh and tequila shots. I hadn’t been to many nightclubs before, having spent most of my twenty-first year preoccupied with birds. The club represented a new world for me.
Fort Lauderdale sweltered, but one foot inside Baja’s double doors and the chill prickled the hair on my arms. The club smelled like suntan oil, liquor, and oranges. The gym-bodied male bartenders wore only tight black shorts, and had their names written on their naked pecs in black Magic Marker. The female bartenders wore bikini tops and short-shorts, and girls in G-string bikinis sat in front of aluminum horse troughs filled with ice and beer, selling brews and multicolored liquor shots in test tubes.
All of the bartenders wore whistles around their necks, and tossed handfuls of napkins into the air when someone ordered a “body shot,” which meant that a patron was allowed to lick salt from the chest of a male or female bartender, have the bartender pour tequila down his or her throat straight from the bottle, and take a lemon from the bartender’s mouth. Every now and then, a siren sounded and a bartender stood on the bar to aim a toilet paper machine gun at the crowd. In the bathroom, girls vomited and snorted cocaine off toilet seats before boogying back to the dance floor.
I hid among the chaos and danced drink in hand on top of the huge elevated speakers, wanting nothing more than numbness among the excess. If I danced alone on the dance floor, within minutes I’d have a guy grinding behind me and a guy grinding in front; when I danced on the speaker, the guys watched me but left me alone.
Scantily clad ladies didn’t have to wait in line, and a sixteen-dollar Cherry Bomb was equal to five drinks, because it came in a large plastic beach bucket. Tuesday at Baja brought two-for-one drink specials, and Thursday was ladies’ night—girls drink free until midnight. I’d stop drinking at about three so I’d be slightly less drunk for the three-block drive home at four a.m. After a while I realized I could drink until closing if I stumbled home on foot, so I’d either walk to the club or ditch my car in the parking lot and pick it up the next afternoon.
Despite the almost daily drinking, I could still wake up and tend to the birds, commute to college over an hour each way, and write papers on Shakespeare’s tragedies or Robert Frost’s early works. Keeping all those birds and drinking the way I did was expensive, so I took a part-time job in a pet store at the mall underneath the Baja Beach Club, working the register and selling pet supplies and animals.
The job was dangerous because I brought loads of animals home, all sorts of unwanted pets people brought into the store—
a giant white rabbit named Hoppy that I found in the back room in a trash can, several turtles, and a one-eyed hamster named Euripides who had a giant wound on his head that cost me fifty dollars at the veterinarian’s office. This was in the first couple weeks.
No matter where I traveled or for what reason, if I saw a bird store I had to pull over. On one stop in Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood, I walked into the bird store to find a large fish tank full of fluffy yellow chicks among the usual finches, canaries, and parakeets. I stuck my hand into the middle of the tank and caressed the hatchlings, their warm, fuzzy bodies wandering over my palm like silk. One of the chicks stood taller than the others by more than a head. I watched him for a while as he milled around with the others, pecking at the cracked corn in the feed dish.
“How much are these?” I asked the clerk. He looked at me and blinked. “Cuánto es?” I tried.
“Dos dollars,” he said, holding up two fingers.
Two bucks, and the big chick was mine. The man plopped him into a brown paper lunch sack, stapled it at the top, and handed him to me. He peeped inside of the sack the entire way home.
I placed him with Hoppy the rabbit in a large cage, which looked more like a giant dollhouse painted orange and pink. I knew they’d be fine together. When Poppy came home from the racetrack I showed off my new chicken, rubbing the bird on my cheek as Poppy reached to pull my hands away from my face.
“That’s not a chicken,” Poppy said, unconcerned that I was now bringing home barnyard animals.
“How is he not a chicken?”
“That is a turkey, Chérie. You see this?” He touched the fleshy tab growing at the top base of the bird’s beak. “Turkeys have this, not chickens. What are you going to do with a turkey? Is he for Thanksgiving?”
I clutched the fluffy bird to my chest, now noticing the growth near his beak. “No, come on,” I said.
“You are now the proud mother of a turkey, Chérie. Congratulations.”
Tom the turkey grew fast, and ran around the house after me with twice the devotion of a golden retriever puppy. White feathers emerged from his fluffy body when he became a gangly teenager. I allowed Hoppy the rabbit to bound around the house, too. He stood on two feet against the kitchen counter as my mom made salad in the evenings and gave him vegetable trimmings.
On a routine trip to Dr. Z’s office, I mentioned that I had an adolescent turkey in the house.
“You have a what?” she exclaimed, turning to me, a pen dangling from her fingers.
“A turkey,” I said.
“Absolutely not. You can’t keep fowl and parrots together. The diseases are crazy. I swear if you don’t get rid of that turkey, I won’t treat another one of your parrots, ever. Get it out.”
“Are you serious?”
“No turkeys.”
I left her office dejected, but Dr. Z’s word was avian gospel to me: I’d have to rehome Tom. I called a few petting zoos and found one that would take him. The lady seemed experienced with birds, and placed him in a big cage with an adolescent duck. At least he’d have a bird friend.
Despite Tom’s departure, our house remained a menagerie as I kept collecting. I grew mealworms in the kitchen pantry so I could feed them to some of the birds who needed insects. When the mealworms matured from the larval stage, they turned into big black beetles. I spent at least three hours a day tending to the pets, and Poppy and I fell into an unspoken routine of cleaning and feeding.
One day, Poppy pulled me aside on the patio as I hosed down the bottom of the birdcages.
“Nicole, I need to talk to you,” he said. We sat down on two floral patio chairs. “I do not sleep at night when you are out. Can you please come in earlier? I worry so much for you. There are hunters out there.”
It didn’t occur to me that I was disrupting Poppy’s life.
“Chérie, you are still naive and young. You come home all hours of the night and I think you are drinking.”
“I am not,” I countered, feigning offense. “I’m almost twenty-three. I have nothing else to do here.”
“I understand. I was once your age. I like to have fun. But sometimes I see you leave your car somewhere else and you concern me.”
I decided to take Poppy to Baja Beach Club to show him that it wasn’t a dangerous place. On Wednesdays they had a happy hour buffet. The spread was a Fourth of July party meets Cinco de Mayo: hamburgers and tacos. The crowd was sparse, the lights bright, and the music not as loud as it would be later. We walked up the tall staircase to the double doors and I winked at the doorman as he handed us four free drink tickets. I walked Poppy to my favorite bar and we ordered soda. We filled our small plates and sat in a booth on the far side of the club, where black lights shone on fluorescent murals and made our teeth glow purple.
“This place is nice,” Poppy said, eating a taquito. “We should do this every Wednesday.” So we did.
I still attended all the local bird club and society meetings, and I started writing and mailing the newsletter for one of them under the pseudonym “Lolita Lovebird.” I became an expert in lovebird genetics and color mutations, and received at least a dozen phone calls every day from people asking questions about breeding birds, bird behavior, and bird problems. I called one of my mentors when I didn’t know something, usually Dr. Z. Bird Talk magazine—the gospel in birds and my New Yorker with feathers—hired me to write for them after I had submitted dozens of unsolicited articles.
People gave me more unwanted birds, including a large blue-crowned Amazon named Lolita who had become homeless when her human owner died, and who trilled her own name in a singsong voice, over and over, endearing herself to everyone in the house.
“She is so cute,” Poppy said, handing Lolita an almond. “But I think she is saying lorita, not Lolita.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Lorita is ‘little parrot’ in Spanish,” Poppy said, studying her. “Maybe we should teach her to say ‘fat bird’ instead.”
Someone brought me a double yellow-headed Amazon parrot after his dog had torn off one of the bird’s wings. I took the parrot to Dr. Z to see if “Captain Hook” could be saved. She said someone had rubbed a salt poultice into the bird’s wound, so she cleaned it, added a thousand dollars to my already lofty vet bill, and then wiped my bill clean because she was touched that I’d been taking in unwanted parrots.
“Why don’t you find a man and have some kids?” she said, handing me Captain Hook’s carrier. Dr. Z had just returned from maternity leave after the birth of her first child, and showed me photos of her adorable newborn. “Kids will cure you of this bird mania.”
“I have feathered kids. Fids,” I said, looking into Captain Hook’s carrier, the frightened one-winged bird huddled in the back.
“You look terrible,” she said, scrutinizing me up and down. “How are you going to find a husband in this condition? Preferably one who doesn’t like birds.”
I might have had bird poop on my shirt and a little in my hair, but “terrible” seemed an excessive estimation. “This from the avian vet who owns only one bird,” I said.
“I can’t stand birds anymore. Birds are driving me crazy. And you’re driving me crazy. Get out of here. Stop taking in all of these birds.” She waggled a finger at me and I hugged her.
* * *
My parents had left the car dealerships and were back in the garment business by my early twenties, making screen-printed T-shirts with tropical birds and fish on them for hotels and cruise ships. They let me sell the shirts at bird fairs and expos to support my bird habit, which had grown to well over a hundred birds.
I’d done well at a pet expo in Coconut Grove one weekend and was packing my unsold T-shirts when I overheard the people in the booth next to mine complaining that they hadn’t earned a dollar. I’d been eyeing a Meyer’s parrot that rode around on the lady’s shoulder for the entire three days, and when I heard them talk about needing to cover the booth, I asked about him. The lady said he was fou
r years old and his name was Jesse. He was a deep shade of brown, almost dark gray, with a bright yellow head and a turquoise chest. I had other Meyer’s parrots, but they were breeders, not tame, and they were also terrible parents who always ate their eggs or killed their babies. I took Jesse onto my finger and he lowered his head for a scratch.
“How much?” I asked her.
She paused. “You can have him for two hundred and seventy-five dollars.”
“You’re going to sell Jesse?” the breeder’s husband asked her. “Seriously?”
“We haven’t sold anything else,” she said.
I had sold enough T-shirts at the expo to not haggle about the price. Jesse perched on my shoulder the whole drive home. I didn’t know it then, but I had just bought myself a future lifeline.
Careening on avian autopilot with no brakes, I also brought three huge macaws into the house: a blue and gold macaw named Comet, whom I bought as a baby from a breeder friend; a green-winged macaw named Sonnet who was seized in a legal situation, auctioned, and given to me; and a vicious scarlet macaw named Satan-Bird-From-Hell who had become useless to his breeder after he killed three females. These birds were beautiful, like avian supermodels, but louder than all the others combined.
If the house had been noisy before, these guys cranked the volume to deafening. My parents and Poppy liked the macaws—the birds were flashy, intelligent, and status symbols—and my mom had a particular relationship with Comet, so for a few months no one said anything about their noise. Everyone loved Jesse, not only because he was sweet and marched around like a confident little Napoléon, but also because he was quiet. My mom didn’t even care that Jesse hung out in the kitchen and chewed up her cookbooks.
The Bird Market of Paris Page 10