My Empire of Dirt: How One Man Turned His Big-City Backyard into a Farm

by Manny Howard

  Bevan Jake, in an overexcited fit of pique, accidentally steps on one of the ducklings, maiming it. The little boy turns around to see what he stepped on; clearly fearing the worst, he looks to me first, though. In that instant Caleb scoops the dying bird up in his hand, holding it tenderly behind his back. “Jakey crushed a duck,” chides Heath.

  “No, he didn’t, hon,” says Caleb resolutely, mugging his best Obi-Wan Kenobi at Heath, “these aren’t the ‘droids you’re looking for.”

  “Yes, he did,” insists Heath, incredulous.

  “Did I, Daddy?” Bevan Jake asks, confused, somewhere in his heart knowing the truth, but relieved there is no evidence. My heart breaks for him.

  “Jakey, luv, if you had stepped on a duckling, it’d be there on the ground,” I explain, pointing, Bevan Jake following with his eyes, as Caleb, slipping past me to tend to Heath, palms the mangled bird to me behind my back.

  “He did!” demands Heath. “I saw it!”

  “Enough, Heath,” I bark. “You want to go inside? Go find your mother.” The bird twitches as I slip it into the cargo pocket of my shorts.

  “C’mon, kids, let’s count the chickies one more time,” sings Caleb, leading them away from the driveway among the peeping birds.

  Lisa returns from upstairs just in time to watch while I euthanize the duckling by putting it in a plastic shopping bag and, swinging it like a framing hammer, crush it against the driveway. I toss the near-weightless carcass into the garbage can. Lisa and I make eye contact; I smile weakly. “It’s a farm. Things die,” I say, attempting to ride it out.

  Lisa turns from me, expressionless. “You’re going to turn them into ax murderers,” she spits, gesturing toward our giggling children. Lisa has communicated her fear that the children will be permanently damaged by their exposure to the goings-on back here. I disagree entirely, insisting that contact with the source of their food will make them better global citizens. Well, I made that argument once. I shrug off her repeated objection now, mostly concerned that any substantive discussion about what is good and what is bad about The Farm will end in cataclysm.

  “Jakey? Honey? Time for dinner. Heath?”

  “Mama, Jakey killed a baby duckling.”

  “I did not, Mama.”

  “Then where’s the fourth one?” barks Heath, mimicking what is known as Dad’s Stone Voice. Bevan Jake’s face collapses in a heap of doubt.

  “That’s enough, kids,” says Lisa. “Dinner. Now.”

  Early the next afternoon, Lisa calls, says she can’t get out of a drinks arrangement after work and won’t be home until late.

  From this day forward through the summer, Lisa pretty much disappears from our home. She leaves earlier for work each day and suddenly has evening engagements she simply cannot beg out of. Whenever it comes up, she blames a recent promotion, says she never thought the job would require this much face time after work. She used to apologize for making these last-minute announcements. These days, she hangs up the phone before bothering to say sorry for the last-minute change. Today, though, before she hangs up, I overhear her announce, “Okay, we’re good. Let me buy the next round.”

  A CHICKEN NAMED CRAZY

  After breakfast at a diner on Christmas Eve about twenty years ago, my stepbrother, Justin, my friends Evan and Josh, and I are looking for some adventure to pass this long day before Christmas. I suggest we start by seeing what kind of excitement we can wring from the live-poultry market on Twentieth Street in Sunset Park. It’s a halal market run by Chinese and frequented predominantly by Dominicans. The early-morning arrival of four outsize white guys, one carrying a late-model video camera (Evan’s early ambitions as a filmmaker mean a camera attends any and all nonsense adventures we dream up), doesn’t cause any alarm until Justin marches straight back into the slaughterhouse with the camera running, giving no explanation whatsoever. The folks working the market begin exchanging glances, and Josh reacts by adopting the Voice of Officialdom, a caricature of a bullhorn-enhanced announcement, part entreat and part command. “Everybody stay calm. Nothing to see here. Please finish your business. And, please, have a merry Christmas.”

  I busy myself negotiating with the young woman who runs the cash register. How much for a chicken? I want to know. She tells me the per-pound dollar amount. I tell her fine. She makes a point of explaining that the birds are weighed before they are cleaned—often called wet weight in the trade. Fine with me. “We need a big one, please.”

  The young woman at the cash register barks at a stooped, skinny, older man drowning in a baseball cap from Dyke’s Lumber (a familiar local construction-supply outfit), black rubber knee boots, and a matching apron. He walks over to a cage, opens it, and grabs a white hen out of one of the stacked, low wood transport pens. “Bigger! Massivo!” I grin, speaking Spanglish to the Chinese and spreading my arms wide. The butcher shrugs, returns the original hen to the cage, moves to another stack of cages. He surveys the inventory and produces a mammoth hen. Held upside down by the feet, she flaps her brown wings aggressively and calls out in full-throated protest, adding her voice to the chorus of lamenting fowl. The butcher ties her ankles roughly with twine secured to the metal crossbar of the scale. The bird weighs a little less than eight pounds. A monster. He sweeps her off the scale and heads back to the abattoir. “No!” I holler. “Wait!”

  The butcher stops in his tracks and looks to the cashier. “Alive,” I say, smiling conspiratorially. “We want him alive.” The cashier shakes her head vigorously. No.

  “Alive. Yes,” I say.

  “No. Only can sell dead chicken.” The butcher, thinking the debate is at an end, proceeds to the killing floor beyond the thick plastic curtain. Josh reaches his arm across the door, blocking the old butcher’s progress. “Hang one second more, friend,” he says, smiling.

  “More money for alive chicken,” I insist, taking a twenty out of my wallet. “More money for chicken alive,” I repeat, looking around at the Latin American patrons now studiously ignoring me.

  “No. Alive is not allowed,” she barks.

  “It is a present for my mother,” I improvise. “A Christmas present. More money.” I add a ten to the pile and thrust the money at her. By now the customers who have not already quit the converted cinder-block garage have found a variety of things to be fascinated by in the far reaches of the dimly lit market. Justin emerges from the abattoir, obviously eager to tell a funny story. Josh puts his hand on top of Justin’s, which is gripping the still-running video camera, forcing it down and out of the cashier’s sight. Justin is followed by a retinue of confused and anxious butchers dressed in upside-down, blood-splattered clear plastic garbage bags with a hole for their heads and two arm holes cut into the bottoms of the bags. The cashier barks once and the butchers—all twice her age—disappear back behind the heavy plastic curtain.

  “Forty dollars. Okay!” the cashier barks, not modulating her tone.

  “Fine,” I say, handing over a pair of twenties as Evan relieves our butcher of the big chicken, grabbing its feet and deftly depositing it at the bottom of the plain brown-paper shopping bag we have carried in for just such an eventuality. As we march out in triumphant single file, the cashier mocks us: “Tell your mom merry Christmas.”

  Pleased by our brash ingenuity and our brusque retail style, we head straight for a bar across the river. Lurching around the East Village, we try and fail half a dozen times to find a bartender who is willing to overlook the specifics of the city health code and help us answer the burning question, what does a drunk chicken look like on video?

  It helps, I suppose, that no other patrons are in Joe’s Cowboy Bar, surprising for lunchtime on Christmas Eve. The bartender doesn’t bat an eye when we tip the shopping bag on its side and out marches our chicken. We take turns engaging the chicken in conversation; we interview her for the camera, try to convince her to join us drinking a draft beer, even serving the beer in an aluminum take-out dish. But the hen isn’t interested in anything but ba
r snacks, which, much to the horror of a nearby body-inked transplant reading the free alternative weekly, the New York Press, the bird pecks directly from the common peanut bowl. As the bar begins to fill, the bartender suggests that maybe it is time that the chicken and her boyfriends move along.

  Outside now, on East Fifth Street, the day is grayer, wetter, and colder. Our once merry band’s mood mirrors the change in the weather. The hen herself looks a little weary, and enthusiasm for continued chicken mischief is cratering when Justin, cradling the bird in both arms, suggests, “Let’s buy her a Christmas tree.”

  We are off, piling into Evan’s mother’s late-model beige Volvo sedan with only one remaining hubcap and a manual sunroof permanently half-open, driving up Sixth Avenue bound for the busiest Christmas-tree merchant we can locate. Camera rolling, we approach the tree vendors, explaining the annual family tradition requires that a chicken select our family Christmas tree. It is an Albanian cultural thing, we explain. Justin makes a great show of reading retail preference into the chicken’s every twitch and change of cadence, and after half an hour we tie a spidery, four-foot Norway spruce to the roof of the Volvo. “Where to?” chirps Evan, as snow dances across the Volvo’s windshield, the sky visible between the buildings an ominous slate.

  “Macy’s,” I pronounce. “Henny Penny’s final act.” At the curb of the department store’s main entrance on Sixth Avenue, Josh, Justin, and I bound out of the car. The sidewalk is alive with heavily laden, panic-propelled last-minute shoppers. We ford the human current, marching purposefully through the double brass doors, careful to protect the cargo within our shopping bag from any panic-inducing contact, and into the throng of driven consumers. Once we have our bearings, we head toward the nearby handbag department. Finding a momentarily unattended counter, Justin deposits the shopping bag atop this polished glass surface and quickly steps away. “Tip it over,” I hiss.

  “You!” Justin protests.

  “Tip it now,” I say, turning and walking toward the door. I can see Evan idling his mother’s late-model Swedish sedan, refracted through the multiple glass panes of the Sixth Avenue entrance, our getaway car, idling by the curb. What is the sentence for animal abandonment? Will the judge consider that it is Christmas Eve as a mitigating or an exacerbating circumstance? The snow is sticking to cabs, and shoppers, but I can’t see one flake that has made it past foot traffic to the sidewalk. Josh grabs my shoulder. “Wait.”

  I wheel around, expecting to find Justin detained by brown-blazer-wearing security guards. But Justin has cleared the bag and is a safe distance from the bird. Our hen steps gingerly out of the overturned paper bag and looks around, confused. She then takes off down the counter toward a heavyset saleswoman with a spiky but practically coiffed mop of jet-black hair. “Merry Christmas, Henny Penny,” says Justin, laughing, as the first exclamation rises over the thrum of the crowd. A scream follows. We quickstep through the grand entryway and pass a guard as his radio crackles to life, sending him in the direction of the handbag department. Pushing through the herd of shoppers, we pile into the backseat of the waiting Volvo. For Evan’s sake, the continuation of our holiday prank requires that we imagine hot pursuit. “Drive!” I command. “Drive, Ev! They spotted us!” Evan skids through the slush, driving across the current through a sea of yellow cabs.

  Back at the Cowboy Bar, we relive our antics with giddy, beer-fueled abandon until we’ve managed to bore ourselves and no one is left nearby who hasn’t already overheard our shouted repartee or still gives a damn. After a brief, deflating lull, I pimp roll over to the pay phone, pick up the receiver, call information, ask for Macy’s. “Lost and Found, please… . Yes… . Thank you.

  “Hello, Lost and Found? … Hi. I was shopping in your store earlier today, Christmas shopping, and I seem to have misplaced my bird. I wonder if I may have left it there?”

  “Was it a chicken?” asks the concerned gentleman at Lost and Found. I flash to floor-to-ceiling shelves, an aviary populated by eagles and egrets, ducks, swallows, gulls, piping plovers, a bevy of doves, and our lonely chicken.

  “Why, yes, it was a chicken.”

  “It’s good you called, sir,” the attendant says, brightening. “I have to close up soon, and I was about to call the ASPCA.”

  “Goodness. Well, I’ll be right over to pick it up.”

  “I’ll wait for you as long as I can.”

  “Thank you, sir. I’m coming right over.” I hang up the phone and order another round. We spend the balance of the evening imagining the Lost and Found at Macy’s roiling with birdlife of every description. “Was it a chicken?” one of us shrieks, whenever the hysteria wanes.

  “Was it a chicken?”

  Chickens inhabit a unique corner in the culture. Flightless, largely senseless, husbanded entirely for human consumption, still chickens are a potent, if unspecific, symbol of the country’s agrarian past, the myth of it at least. It’s the official bird of contemporary domestic fetishists. There may no longer be one in every pot, but there’s a chicken in every Williams-Sonoma catalog. Martha Stewart tended a flock of chickens at her manse in Connecticut for more than a decade. She has periodically updated readers on the flock’s welfare, most recently announcing in her magazine the arrival of a brand-new crop of Cuckoo Marans, a French breed known colloquially as the chocolate egger; Mottled Cochins, originally from China and described by her publication as good, gentle mothers; and to finish the collection, the extremely attractive show breed, “one of the prettiest chickens in the hatchery,” Porcelains.

  Only dogs have been bred for their flesh as domesticated animals longer than chickens. All these handsome, collectible birds descend from a common ancestor, Gallus gallus, the marauding scavenger of the bamboo forests in Indonesia. The rooster’s fabled cock-a-doodle-do is not the quaint bugle call to, daily, wake the countryside, but rather what evolutionary biologists call a mate investment. It is a much sought-after antipredator alarm call—and thus, the louder the call the better.

  A hen starts her egg career at about twenty weeks. If she’s healthy, and regardless whether a male bird is around to fertilize her eggs, she will lay one just about every day. As far as I can tell, for a hen, laying an egg is a fresh experience every time she starts the project. Stewart calls her chicken coop the Palais du Poulet. By all accounts, and just as we’ve come to expect, Stewart’s coop is a spectacular affair.

  Stewart is a busier person than I ever hope to be, and still, it is reported, she greatly enjoys watching her chickens wrangle table scraps, especially spaghetti. Stewart has credited the subtle shades of the eggs that her flock produces for some of the more than 250 colors of paint in Martha Stewart Everyday, the home-decorating line she markets through Kmart.

  When my friend Sarah installed a small flock of chickens in the backyard of her Brooklyn Heights town house, she called excitedly, soliciting advice about everything from coop construction to sanitation. I was happy to share what I knew, but during the conversation it became clear how much more I had to learn. “Oh, hang on, one more thing,” she exclaimed before we hung up. “What kind of treats do your chickens like to eat?”

  If it ended there, in domestic idyll, that would be one thing, but there’s a dark corollary of America’s cult of the chicken, and it finds adherents in the long tradition of fighting game birds.

  Roy Jones Jr. cocks his right elbow, lifts his right glove almost above his head, and there it hangs, an implied threat. A challenger, experienced, respected, but fighting for his first title and untested in the looking-glass world of professional boxing, Jones has his body wide-open, exposed to James “Lights Out” Toney, a man undefeated in forty-six bouts, a man measured pound-for-pound the best prizefighter on earth. The young challenger sets his feet apart, his stance wider than his shoulders. This Las Vegas crowd is scandalized, confused. The play-by-play announcers exclaim heresy; the man’s boots are both pointed straight at his opponent. Jones’s left glove is cocked at his side and well below his waist. N
ow he’s bending his knees—half squat, half pounce, all this promising that something terrible is about to happen to someone. Who, though? Leading, just so, with his face, Jones stands as if he’s preparing for Toney to jump into his arms like a small child.

  “His unorthodox movement and his unorthodox punches are completely befuddling Toney to this point,” barks HBO ringside commentator Larry Merchant, in a masterwork of understatement.

  He continues to chatter nervously, wondering out loud if this young Turk is showboating or what, and then it’s all over: one, two left hooks connect with Toney’s head, and Jones is only now stepping to the champion, delivering a jab with that left and then, impossibly, one and two more hooks with the same fist. Toney is staggering backward, folding like a beach chair, into a sitting position, his gloves covering, doing what they can against the avalanche of punches that does not follow so much as sweep over the champ as he falls toward the ropes in the corner of the ring. Jones is there. Hammering away at Toney’s head as if he were chopping wood, walking right alongside and then beyond and away from Toney, now in a heap in the corner of the ring that, less than a minute ago, bookmakers said he owned.

  Toney, who earned each of his championship fights, regains his feet almost instantly, but he isn’t chasing young Jones down. Toney stands stone still in that terrible corner, waiting for the referee’s ruling. The third round not yet complete and Jones has delivered a withering knockdown. Jones has already rolled away, jogging really, across center ring and to his corner beyond, his wings spread wide and low.