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

by Manny Howard

  “He doesn’t set up. Jones doesn’t set things up with his left jab. That’s the unorthodox part of his style. He doesn’t set things up,” squawks Merchant. Now, early in the fourth round, Jones disassembles Toney’s defense, delivering lefts, two, three, five at a time, from every point on the compass. In his first title fight Jones is busying himself upending the One True Thing left in boxing: you have to be close to do damage. “He’ll move with his feet and all of a sudden leap in with that left hook, and it’s very, very effective. But again, by doing that, he leaves himself open for a split second. But so far nobody has ever been able to take advantage of it. Nobody that he’s fought is so quick.”

  And nobody will be for years.

  In his two-decades-long career Roy Jones Jr. would win fifty-four of his fifty-nine professional fights, knocking out opponents 74 percent of the time. When Jones was still a boy, he learned what no other fighter understood yet, learned how to keep his distance, learned how to close fast and with finality.

  Jones learned all this from a chicken named Crazy. A game bird, his game bird, left for dead in a big-money fight when Jones was seventeen years old. The cold metal spur of Crazy’s opponent was still stuck in the bird’s head, straight in one side and out the other, while the apparent victor flapped and celebrated, still sewn into Crazy’s head. Young Jones mourned his game bird, but as he watched, he saw what none of the grown men saw. Crazy wasn’t dead. “He’s alive!” yelled the teen, who was just months away from a place on the team at Seoul’s 1988 Summer Olympics.

  And so, according to custom, the fight, already two hours old, started up again. The spur was removed from Crazy’s brain. Jones blew on the bird’s neck, down the length of the spine, keeping it warm, keeping the blood flowing, until the bird’s heart was again circulating fight throughout the rooster.

  Raring to go again before he could properly stand, back in the ring Crazy struck and withdrew, enraging the bigger rooster, goading him, Crazy always riding that line, engaged but keeping his distance. Then the big cock, victorious just moments ago, made one mistake and was dead.

  Whooping with joy, Jones grabbed up Crazy and hugged him to his chest. That’s how Jones tells it, anyhow. And to watch Jones fight, it’s hard to imagine any sane human mentor devising those moves. Unlike so many professional boxers, using the fight to escape the claustrophobic crush of a paved world, Jones grew up in the pine woods of the Southeast and never left them, just kept surrounding himself with more and more acres. Jones still raises gamecocks, and he never tires of their ways. Roy Jones Jr. loves his chickens.

  I’ll settle for like.

  “Look how this rooster walks in his cage,” says Jones, pointing out one of four hundred chickens as it struts across the run. “See that? It’s his cage. He owns it. It’s his world. Every other bird has to respect that.”

  [1]

  It’s called a lek. Male chickens congregate in leks. The lek has the specific purpose of attracting females. Though researchers continue to disagree about the specific behavioral mechanisms at work within these groups, they do agree that leks provide better opportunities for more males in a flock to breed—promoting hybrid vigor. The presently dominant “hotspot” theory asserts that rather than go it alone like male frogs, angelfish, fur seals, and of course lions, birds—and especially chickens—flock as a breeding strategy. Hens prefer to mate with attractive males, so less handsome males congregate with their more handsome counterparts, waiting patiently for a broody hen to lose her resolve and lower her standards or just make an honest mistake. Behavioralists call this strategy kleptoparasitism, but the move should be familiar beginning in junior high school and ending just about the time that hen loses her resolve and makes that mistake.

  A lek is not the riotous, three-deep-at-the-bar party it could be for chickens because this congregation is governed by an extremely rigid social order known as the peck order, or more commonly, the pecking order. A linear dominance hierarchy, not at all limited to chickens, often controls the distribution of food, water, and sex among members of a species who are forced to share the same sandbox. It governs life in most social animals—fish, birds, and mammals. Unlike in a despotic hierarchy—think Saddam Hussein—each individual in a linear hierarchy holds a rank and knows exactly where he or she is located. It’s pretty straightforward stuff for chickens. From moment to moment every chicken in a run knows who gets to peck him and whom he gets to peck. According to researchers, neither gender nor body weight has very much, and possibly has nothing, to do with placement in this hierarchy. Unflinching aggression and experience are the key. In the original research, conducted by the Norwegian behavioralist Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe, one hen in the study flock demonstrated the ability to recognize twenty-seven other individuals belonging to four different flocks, which may sound pretty impressive, but only if your junior high school didn’t have a clique of Popular Girls.

  Pecking order is a phrase too casually bandied about. I use it much more selectively now that I have seen its multiplier effect in action. The term has always had the giddy glow of a Warner Bros. cartoon: lots of violence but no permanent damage. I’m probably not unique in making this mistake, but in modern American middle-class experience one hears the term pecking order and one reflexively locates oneself right smack, well, in the middle. Watch the goings-on in a chicken run and in no time your gaze will shift from the mundane middle of the order (if you can find it in the first place) to the plight of the omega chicken. The chicken on the bottom of the order doesn’t have time to consider the beneficial organizational effects on natural selection that the peck order offers, never mind a moment to compare the relative merits of the linear versus the despotic whatchamacallit.

  The omega chicken is moving too fast, trying to hoover up a scrap of corn or a drop of water or grab a sideways glance at an egg vent before another member of his flock, absolutely any other member of his flock, takes a hunk out of the flesh where his tail feathers once were. The last thing on Omega Chicken’s mind is the location and disposition of the alpha bird. In fact, life for Omega Chicken is so fraught with danger that he would in a heartbeat happily trade life in the chicken run for good old-fashioned despotism. When food gets scarce, as it did on occasion in my chicken run, it is pretty much all over for Omega Chicken. Because the licks he’s taking minute by minute, day in, day out, are just about maintaining flock status quo. This is tame stuff compared to the abuse doled out the moment there’s a hiccup in the system and the birds above him (and, remember, all of them are) get stressed in any way. It’s simply a matter of time before they’ve worked through his tail and he’s tripping on his own intestines. Why that doesn’t kill Omega Chicken outright is beyond me. But he will continue trying in vain to evade the rest of the chickens in the run for hours, tripping over his guts as if his pants were at his ankles. The demise of Omega Chicken provides only a momentary lull in the violence for the birds in the run, unless his gruesome dispatch solves whatever scarcity (real or imagined) has plagued the lek. If the flock is still agitated, it has a replacement omega bird waiting in the wings. There is no election. Every bird in the run knows not only who is in the line of succession, but exactly whom he is standing next to. And if, as one omega passes, that chicken isn’t standing between two other birds, he’s the next designated omega.

  GET OUT

  “Get out!” When Lisa started screaming, she was standing in front of me in the hall, but now, after repeating herself twice, she is in a fetal crouch, her arms covering her face. I wonder how she manages to hold herself upright crouching on four-inch heels.

  “Get out!” she both begs and demands.

  I step back to lean against the doorframe.

  “Get out!”

  I take it as a generally good sign that I am not panicking. As a rule I am overly dependent on her approval and if I even suspect that she is serious, I would already have set about dismantling The Farm.

  “Get out!” Lisa doesn’t often have a complete l
ock on her emotions. I am annoyed by how volatile she is during mildly difficult moments at home. In times of profound distress I always expected, hoped really, that she would be all businesslike. It is my understanding from stories told by professional associates that while at work Lisa is steely whenever events conspire and things come apart. If she could be a little more like that around here, our home would be so much higher functioning, I muse.

  “Get out!” This tantrum is unprecedented, however. Her exclamations are as regular as a heartbeat, metronomic, really. “Get out!”

  “Get out!” Her voice is growing hoarse.

  “Lisa?” I say, so calmly that my tone might read as condescension. “Lisa, can you hear me?”

  “Get out!”

  “Lisa.”

  “Just get out!” She finally looks up at me. Her face, not flushed as I had imagined, is pale. I was certain I’d see tears. There are none. This breakdown is not fueled by anguish. This is pretty much entirely rage. My name is not on the deed or the mortgage. Howard Hall is, theoretically, hers to decide who gets to stay, not that I think she really means to turf me out, but even as the metrics of my analysis shift, I know enough not to cede this new ground too easily. Domestic precedent is being set here and now. If I leave our home now, like this, in my filthy work clothes, Lisa dressed for corporate success, ordering me out—

  “Get out!”

  —I will almost certainly return. After all, I reason, if I leave, even for a day, who will feed the chickens and the rabbits? Who will muck out the cages? Who will water and weed the plants? No. If I leave now, like this, I will certainly return.

  But I will leave again. Precedent will drift and become pattern. I will be a visitor in my own home, reliant on permission based solely upon what Lisa believes is sufficiently good behavior. That is no way to run a farm.

  “Get out!”

  “I will leave, Lisa,” I hear myself say, interrupting the established pulse of her eruption. “But if I leave, I will not come back.” My marital Alamo, and the tomatoes have not even flowered.

  She stares for a moment, then wills herself out of her crouch. She runs her hands over her skirt to smooth it, looking through me standing less than two feet away. “Just get out,” she croaks, turns on her heel, and clicks upstairs to her dressing room, where she will change out of her business rig into what we call her civvies, her civilian gear. Most days this is a moment I lament. As we rush headlong into our lives each morning, I often waste precious moments watching her dress for the life she has at the office. The authority and confidence she radiates from inside her uniform is inspiring and, simply put, arousing. Lisa’s career, its requirements, are as alien to me as her childhood as a prodigy competitive swimmer. Her mother still keeps the newspaper clippings of her record-breaking victories at six and seven years old. She competed, stacking victory on victory through high school and into college, eventually earning a spot at the Olympic trials. She carries herself like a victor. Even when she’s sitting on a bench at the local YMCA cheering our tiny kids through their swimming lessons, she adopts an athlete’s pose, elbows lightly touching thighs, her right foot cocked away from her core as though fighting a vestigial cramp in her instep.

  So, most days, I consider her disappearance into her dressing room at the end of a day a missed opportunity of some kind. Not today. If after Lisa has changed out of her uniform, she still wants me to get out, she’ll tell me, I reassure myself. Right now, though, I have a few precious moments. I turn to the back door. If I am going to leave, I better make sure the chickens have enough food and water for a while. As for the weeding, I suppose she’ll let me down the driveway through to the backyard if she is not around.

  COLLAPSE

  Lisa has been planning our trip to the wedding of a young cousin. Ryan is getting married in a small lake town in Georgia, and Lisa has decided we need a long family drive together, far away from The Farm. After significant resistance from me about adding two precious days to our itinerary by driving rather than flying, I make careful arrangements for Josh and his wife, Diana, to watch over The Farm, with a promise from Caleb that he will conduct day-to-day management. As I anticipated, Lisa wins the argument in short order, though she is forced to employ her powerful and controlling and rarely resorted-to Money Trick. She expounds on the high cost of flights, tactically inserting the spiraling credit-card debt generated by The Farm into the assault like a flanking cavalry charge. If I wasn’t so determined to insulate myself as The Farmer from The World, so dedicated to controlling my cultural inputs, it would be such a simple thing to submit that expense report. Next thing I know, we’re packing the car, Heath’s big, fluffy, white flower-girl dress in its special box on the roof rack.

  Two days later, we arrive in Georgia. Having driven the entire way, I’m exhausted and angry with the kids. Lisa bounds out of the car and runs straight into the arms of her sister, then her father, and at the same time her six nieces and nephews have rushed out to play with their long-lost cousins from Brooklyn. As just about all of them have migrated from Mississippi, Lisa feels lucky if she sees her family once a year. I am not at all secretly grateful. My family is easy. Lisa’s is complex and fraught with what I believe to be a Southern Gothic temperament. They are all overachievers, extremely smart, with successful careers and supportive marriages. Lisa’s big sister, Marian, is a pediatrician. Dave, her husband, is an emergency-room surgeon and a hospital administrator. I think that means he’s in charge of keeping the kill ratios low, but we get along too well to talk about work. He married into the family years ago and apparently considers it his responsibility to make my immersion as easy as possible. I make this much more difficult than it should be. Dave and Marian are delightful and with two excellent children and the kind of life you imagine for yourself were you to move to Northern California for the quality of life.

  Lisa’s brother, Brennan, an M&A lawyer, married his college sweetheart, also named Lisa. They live in Atlanta with their four kids and are bravely battling Lisa’s rare form of brain cancer, which for a year now has been stable. Lisa’s mother, Elise, is the matriarch of the family, heavily opinionated, particularly about me and my career choices. Lisa loves them all intensely—more so for her absence. She left home to train as a swimmer when she was fourteen and has never been back, not really. I have still not left home. Five miles away now, Lisa and I live the farthest I have ever lived from my mother’s house. My mother insists we take terrible advantage of her proximity, and we often do, relying on her for everything from child care to a quick stop for a pee on the way home from shopping.

  Lisa and I have gotten by on pretty close to the bare minimum of marital interaction for nearly a month now. On the driveway, making my way between the car—still clicking and twitching—and the front door of the vacation house, I am overwhelmed by loneliness.

  Lisa’s father, John, greets me with a beer and a pat on the back. He’s kind and good-spirited, prudent and busy—unless he’s unconscious in front of the television. Lisa’s adoration of John is childlike. Every morning, to hear Lisa tell it, he exhorted all three of his children to do good, avoid evil, and obey their teachers. Lisa also likes to tell a story about how, when she was growing up, her dad used to shoot the heads off water moccasins in the lake behind their house. There’s more to John than Lisa acknowledges; he lives in the world and that’s not precisely where Lisa locates him. Maybe that’s fathers and daughters; maybe that’s walking out the door to go for an especially fast swim one morning when you are fourteen and never, not really, coming home.

  Thing is, I don’t know much about the transition between being a child and adulthood. My parents and I grew up together. As a result of our proximity, I have an evolving understanding of them independent of the mythology of parent-hood.

  The preliminary events and the wedding ceremony go off without a hitch. I move aggressively to reverse that trend. It’s fair to say that after that first beer John handed me on arrival, I continue to drink steadily, f
urther deepening my isolation from Lisa. At the reception, already happily toasted and oblivious of anybody else’s rate of consumption, I am struck by a petulant distaste for the wine. I share this opinion with ungoverned vitriol and further insult my host, Lisa’s aunt, by not-so-secretly purchasing what I determine is a superior wine from the venue’s reserve stock. In the Ryan family, uncomfortable situations such as this don’t get addressed, certainly not out loud. I drink more.

  Later that night, much to my frustration, the party returns to our house. I am downstairs in bed now, still drunk, angry, and unable to sleep. Lisa is trying to settle the kids because we have to leave first thing in the morning for the two-day drive back to New York. I can’t stand the loud footsteps over my and the children’s heads, the even louder talking and inebriated laughter, so I get out of bed, stomp upstairs, and tell Lisa’s family, including her grandparents, to shut the fuck up.

  Lisa’s sister tries to defuse the situation, as we have adored each other since the moment we met. There’s no appeasing Dumb Bear, though, and my six-foot-four-inch frame towers over her petite, five-foot-one-inch body. I point my finger at her angrily and begin to make pronouncements. I pull back, alarmed and embarrassed by my ferocity, then storm away down the stairs. Lisa, having heard my outburst, goes upstairs, and her family is cold with shock at my behavior. She apologizes, makes excuses about stress and alcohol, and everyone goes to bed. The alcohol and adrenaline take their toll, and I pass out almost immediately. The next morning I wake to hear Lisa sobbing, knocking on her sister’s bedroom door.

  She wants to say good-bye but her sister is so upset about the night before that she won’t face Lisa. Marian doesn’t open the door but, through that door and muffled by tears, she says that I have hurt the family and she is scared of me and never wants to see me again. Lisa is shattered. She has always sought approval of me from her family. And she has often sought approval of her family from me. I have betrayed both of these efforts. Lisa shares Marian’s opinion about me, but unlike Marian, Lisa has to spend the next two days sitting next to me in our car. She sits on the floor outside her sister’s door for a while, calms herself, then makes her way upstairs and, fighting back more tears, apologizes once again to her family. I apologize to her father, but can’t seem to face anyone else. I have loaded up the car, put Heath and Bevan Jake in their seats. They’re confused and wait patiently for Lisa to say her last good-byes to her family. Lisa does not speak for the first day. On the second day she addresses me once. I have ruined her relationship with her sister, someone she cares about more than anyone else in the world outside our kids, she says. After everything else that’s already happened, she doesn’t know how she will forgive me, or if she wants to. I tell her that I understand.