Bird Steve and Carmen

I found a baby bird on my doorstep. It had been intentionally placed there by someone- it was on a piece of cardboard with a brick set up to protect it from the wind. They were excavating piles of trash from the thoroughfare between my building and the one next door, so it seemed as though perhaps the workmen had rescued the foundling but knew that the bastard Steve, my next door neighbor who’s trash it was, wouldn’t probably give a fuck about the chick. Our front door must have eminanted a certain air of empathy.

I had taken on baby bird projects in the past, always with tragic results. I decided that I had best just let nature take its course, so I moved the chick across the street to a patch of grass- a green island in a sea of concrete where the helpless animal might at least die in a quasi- natural setting.

My girlfriend had dumped me that day. I was walking home from a night of drowning my sorrows. My glance could not avoid that patch of grass where I had abandoned the chick. It was there, shivering. Drunk, and characteristically superstitious about love, I decided that this bird was a sign. A sign that I was a compassionate being. So, I would take in the bird and give to it the love that I had so much to give, particularly now that I was available.

Carmen is also an amateur naturalist. He identified the bird as pigeon- which had been obvious enough, I suppose. It seemed hungry. We stayed up with it most of the night, feeding it tahini with a medicine dropper. Carmen made a nice little nest in a shoe box. It was our baby. We ironically named it Bird Steve after my despised next door neighbor whose fucking trash pile was obviously to blame for the bird’s estrangement from its mother.

We fed him nutrient rich baby bird formula and he ate a lot. And he began to grow- maybe this baby bird project would have happy results. He was active, growing feathers, standing on two feet. He graduated to a milk crate. We let him wobble around to gain strength. He was nearly mature in about five weeks. And then one day he seemed weak. Within the afternoon he was dead.

I paid more attention to pigeons after acquainting with Bird Steve. There sure were a lot of them around. In the park just to the south of me, where I jog regularly- tons of pigeons. Lurking over Ekhart park is St. Boniface, a run-down and abandoned Catholic cathedral. A grand old building, it seemed as though it must have been quite a focal point of the neighborhood in its heyday. Now its gates cinder-blocked over. The pigeons roosted atop the church. One day while jogging past the church I was stopped by a man. He would not look at me straight in the eye and twitched a bit, it seemed as though he suffered from a condition. He asked me what happened to the church, I had no answers. He had grown up attending service there, so had his mother. He was confused that it was no longer open and thought it a shame. I was touched by his sadness and reached out for his hand. At that moment, we were showered by the flock of pigeons swooping down from atop their perch on St. Boniface. Perhaps I was high on adrenaline from the jog, but that man and his story at that abandoned cathedral and the serendipitous moment of the pigeons raining upon us felt to me like a transcendental moment.

I always noticed piles of stale tortillas and bread set out for the flock in front of the church. I imagined it was an old woman and perhaps the strange man’s mother, paying her alms to her now shuttered site of piety. The pigeons, the angels. Then one day I spotted a peregrine falcon roosting in a tree in the park. Once, endangered, these birds now were re-emerging with a taste for pigeon. As I jogged past the flock one afternoon, like a gunshot, a pigeon was struck by the falcon. The flock scattered. The falcon took to work on his prey. Birds of prey are really thorough in their butchery. This changed my relationship to the pigeon, perhaps resetting the reverence that had developed over the years in my experiences with the flock of Noble Street.

They moved from the cathedral after that day to the building across the street from mine. I could now view them from my bedroom window. One morning, early for me, walking home from Jessica’s I actually spied the pigeon feeder. A man with a garbage bag. The exchange was fairly efficient compared to my romantic wonderings- he dumped the goods, and whistled- that part was of interest- summoning the birds. They ate quickly and returned up the block to the building across from me. This bird was evidently easily trainable- maybe I could feed the pigeons. Maybe I could roost them on my roof.

The falcon had reminded me of my place in the food chain, so maybe this seeming pest could be a food source. The rat with wings. Some cultures eat rat. Many cultures eat pigeon apparently- first brought to North America as domestic fowl by the French in 1606. Enjoyed the world over from France to Morocco to Egypt to Vietnam. Not much different from quail. Squab apparently is the young pigeon, analogous to veal. I’ve paid big bucks for that stuff.

But how could I kill and eat Bird Steve’s family, the sacred guardians of St. Boniface, the cousin of the bird of peace?