by Marginalized Margarine Queen ©1999
That’s how it goes. It’s open, you’re in. Closed, you’re out and that’s your fate.
-- Bernard Malamud, in The Jewbird
He says there are parrots living there. Green ones.
“Green?” Polly asked herself why his memory would paint this picture, “ Green with envy?” she wondered. “A grinch greed green? Or an Eden-green twinge of reminiscence recalling some parasite or paradise lost? The soylent green of a planet regurgitating the aftermath of a three-thousand year homo sapien bash or the verdant green of nature returning in spring?” She figured it was probably something he picked up in the Gall Street Journal, or he may have confused the color of the parrots’ ruffled feathers with the Kelly-green folder summing up her profile in 32-pages of discursive rhetoric lying on the cluttered conference table of an admissions committee—or the metallic lacquer on his forest green Jaguar parked outside in the parking lot below in one of those spots otherwise reserved for the physically handicapped and forces that created the body, not those that merely represented it.
At any rate, he told her there were parrots living there—escapees from domestic captivity. That’s what his wife believed, but he’d never paid any mind to much of anything she said but “Dear, we have reservations at six,” or “Not tonight, I have a headache.”
Of course, it’s the most ridiculous thing in the world—to believe in neo-tropical Argentine birds fleeing domestic captivity who could possibly survive even one quarter in the cold climate of the University of Chicago campus with its intricate maze of quads and clods navigating the concrete and ice clumps to avoid stepping on the cracks, but she was his wife after all, and thus enjoyed the tenuous prestige of “faculty affiliations”—something no dues paying member of the American underclass could afford to get by on—not even in a pinch.
Anyway, Polly had always believed more in parody than in parrots.
At least that’s what she thought until the day she left a statement of academic purpose on his desk. She’d been invited to meet with him because she was a candidate for a PhD program in anthropology there. She brought to the table 15 years’ experience in the field and a series of publications of her dubious findings in journals of greater or lesser repute. He asked her to tell him about herself, so she did. Then they chatted. Mostly about the weather, and the parrots, of course—they were more principled than Polly and probably more interesting, especially as objects of academic inquiry. Just as he was about to nod off, the interview was over and he escorted her to the depression glass green elevator doors, sending her and her interfering self on the way back to the ground floor.
Since then, she’d been wandering the 6-block grid in search of the parrots, sniffing around the outer perimeter of the Harper Library and lurking on the fringes of Harold Washington Park like a bitch in heat seeking satisfaction or satiation, anything to still her momentary misery—because she doubted she’d ever actually find the parrots, and unless she did, of course, she wouldn’t have a shot in hell at getting in to the University of Chicago. She’d have nothing to say in those intimate interludes between conference sessions and committee meetings. So, she set her sights on finding a pot to piss in the park. And that was a paltry substitute for finding a misplaced parakeet.
She wasn’t sure whether it was because he was a professor or just because someone she knew said he was the kindest man she had ever met. Maybe it was because he held the key to her most recent mid-life crisis in the palm of his hand. For her and about 2.5 million more of the nation’s most gifted and talented, her fate and her future were sealed behind the locked door of a conference room, and this professor held the key.
In one moment of weakness, he had nonetheless made a believer of Polly, and she had been looking for the parrots ever since she left his office on the seventh floor of Godspeed Hall. He had convinced her of their existence—and the futility of her own. The aesthetics of stuffiness wafted through the window cracked ajar and ruffled the leaves of paper in the files. Their feeble flutter was the only sign of air in the room.
The mercury was hovering just below the zero mark and a brutal wind pierced her ear as she crossed the Midway at the intersection of Woodlawn Avenue. The professor was right about one thing: the wind on the Midway is merciless and there isn’t a soul alive who’d move to Chicago just for the weather. Polly quickened her step. She wasn’t like the others who would stiffen their collars or scrunch their necks down more deeply in the woolen scarf from Marshall Fields crisscrossed on their chest. She’d never been good at coming in from the cold. Nesting was an instinct as alien to her as homing and the hunt.
That was probably what caused her to make her home in Manitoba of all places. But migrating south to the University of Chicago seemed a step in the right direction. Of course, as Polly’s grandmother would have said “one dasn’t admit” you chose this university above all others based on geographic location. No one in his right mind would move to Chicago’s South Side just for the weather, and certainly not for the ambience. Polly had had the good sense to lie about that on one of those multiple-choice trick questions they put on the application forms in the hope of ferreting out some character flaw that didn’t show up in the 32-page paper profile that was the official representation of who you were, where you were going and why. Undoubtedly, she knew she was likely to have answered some stupid question incorrectly—they would find something that didn’t quite echo the lofty academic ideals Chicago projects in its literature and this, in turn, would expose the little white lie she had told about the place and her reasons for wanting to come in now from the cold, hunker down and make herself comfy in an overstuffed, upholstered chair in someone else’s office.
Already, she began making excuses for herself, “But I came into the world with fisted hands and a scream in a stark white room that reeked of sickness and sterility. I never learned to unclench them like other people do, if only because there was nothing to cling or hold on to, nothing to reach for but the stars which were clearly beyond my grasp because I was born and bred in the clutch of bankruptcy. My clan poor and uneducated—underprivileged—or, as my colleagues over at the Social Services Administration might say today, ‘economically disadvantaged’— unless the politics of correctness have since upgraded our status into the ‘fiscally challenged.’ I don’t know. I’m rather out of the loop on these things. All I know is that we were fed on welfare and commodity cheese; we aggregated our nests into colonies to house twenty families and more, four to a bed. Anyone with a GED and two years at the community college was put in a file labeled ‘successful case history.’ It was one way of putting us in our places and keeping us there.”
Polly’s great grandmother had been a fur trader’s wife—more by virtue of force than of fate, and when her daughter came of age, she ran a little cafe called “Connie’s” downtown across the street from the station where cabbies and fishermen ate breakfast, lunch and dinner. But when her grandmother was hit by a city bus while stepping off the curb on her way home one night, she had to close the cafe and took to drinking. It wasn’t long before poverty set in, followed by the gangrene that robbed her of her left leg. By the time Polly entered the world, alcoholism had become a mainstay and welfare a way of life. But it was cancer that killed her mother in the end. It wasn’t the cause of her death, just its catalyst. The cause had come from chronic crises and catastrophes. To this day, the manner of death remained undetermined.
It was always something: Either her mother was arrested for some drunken stunt like pulling the geraniums out of their larger-than-life-sized clay pots lining the main drag, or the cops were crawling in the windows to bust up a party with underage guests in the tenement apartment above the tavern where Polly’s mother worked as a barmaid and she was charged with contributing to the delinquency of minors. Missed demeanors, unlawful detainers—crimes, crises and constant calamities: that was all Polly knew. Christmas was likely spent in the hospital emergency room waiting to see who’d survive the latest suicide attempt, or scrounging together the cash to post bail on a drunk driving or disorderly conduct charge. By Easter of her ninth year, social services stepped in to remove Polly and her brother from the home. They were sent to “shelters” that were none and to detention centers that really did detain.
It was as though time did a walking handstand backwards, and Polly realized she didn’t have a shot in the world at getting in because the professor didn’t believe in parrots or people. Far more, in papers and pedigrees. And principles? Well, she was sure that he had some, but they were unlikely to resemble any that she’d ever known. Her case and her cause would be removed and there would be no room for appeal. Application denied.
Because she didn’t have an alibi for forty years of outsider status or the thousand-year stare stuck on her face like a remnant of red ink you just couldn’t remove in time to rush from the stack of papers to correct to the 4 PM meeting of the advisory board: She hadn’t committed any crime heinous enough to make the tale plausible and pathetic enough to merit further investigation; hence, there was no point in telling it. Polly hadn’t done any real time. Not like in the federal penitentiary or corporate America. She wasn’t a reformed cop killer or serial racist and the only felony on her record was a publication with the wrong point of view. There was no sensational rise or demise to Polly’s life that the papers could pick up on to reassure the public of the rightness of law and order in the fascist state her native habitat had become. Skillfully applied layers of Lancome and Esteé Lauder work wonders in covering up the traces, and Polly knew none of this was written on her face—it certainly wasn’t included as a footnote to the 32-page dossier she’d left with the department chair.
On the news that night, Black folk gathered on the steps and the stoops of the state capitol. Fighting for freedom, equal rights and justice. Ha. On a good day, the words were worth a chuckle. The new independent governor who got in on a promise to get out of the game has appointed an all-white cabinet. There is uproar and revolution in the air—and that was what put him in office in the first place. Now he’s pulling out and being penalized for early withdrawal. Polly was moved by the sight of the Black masses walking the long walk to the glistening dome of the government edifice, but shook her head and thought to herself: This is a closed-circuit system—a gilded cage in an ivory tower, perhaps a penthouse suite overlooking Washington Park or a nest cobbled together with sticks, stones and bones, and some stupid story about gall-green parrots fleeing domestic bliss is the best you can hope for and thank your lucky stars for that much. Besides, the orthinologists say that this is not the season for successful pest species which are characterized by high mobility, flock feeding and roosting, and above all, opportunistic breeding patterns. So all you can do is present your case and hope like hell the judges are blind, deaf, dumb or all of the above. Keep your nose clean and your hands out of the goddamned cookie jar; do it for Christ’s sake and you might have a shot at redemption. In any other case, you know what the answer will be: O.U.T.—out!
“Oh, I know, I know,” Polly was always already beseeching a someone who seemed no longer there, “You needn´t tell me again, I know the strategy and the rules of the game: Success is seeing what’s in and what’s out, then adapting your goals and aspirations to the ups and downs of discursive deregulation. No wonder I’ve always been out when in was in and in when it was out and have thus always identified with outcasts and outsiders and believed more than anything in illegal aliens and alien invaders. It’s a good way to get yourself caught in the crossfire of a war of worlds: Sought out and destroyed on indigenous terrain with a half-hearted but two-fisted war waged against you. Still, you wouldn’t think I could be much of a threat in a place like Hyde Park where the ghetto and Gucci co-exist on the border between war and peace—located on a fine filigreed line between poverty and prosperity one might have crossed if it weren’t for the policies of removal.”
It seemed the perfect refuge for a remnant population of displaced parakeets!
Polly had known a chatty bird or two in her lifetime. Her grandmother had a talking Mynah bird when she was still young enough to be kept from its reach just by virtue of height. But the bird, perched in a cage atop a 6-drawer highboy with chipped bird’s eye maple veneer that they’d picked up on sale at the St. Vincent De Paul store one spring, was never out of earshot. His name was Tony and he spoke in a dialect that mimicked precisely the grandmother’s who had moved in with them after the cafe went under and, with the loss of her leg, spent her days sitting around talking to Tony. “Hi Tony,” he would say, and if you weren’t there in the room to see what you were hearing, you could never be quite sure whether it was the bird or the grandmother talking. But Tony flew out the window and escaped to the ghetto one day while his cage was being cleaned. And so Polly learned to live with the uncertainty of auditory illusions and hearsay: sometimes people say “yes” when they really mean “no.”
What Polly remembered most about the bird’s repertoire was the phrase, “Let’s go to Chicago.” She never knew what it was about the city that had so fascinated her grandmother and what was so funny about Tony’s incessant invocation of the place, but “Let’s go to Chicago” were four little words that followed her like a mantra through three continents of travel and rang now in her mind like the chime of a church bell and a silly reminder of some bygone past. There she was in Chicago wandering the quads of the campus in search of these parrots, yet all she could hear was this sound of her grandmother’s voice replicated verbatim by a bedraggled black bird saying, “Let’s go to Chicago.”
She didn’t know then that the character flaw in the Hyde Park parakeets which caused the Department of Agriculture to implement a program of eradication against them was their screech and constant clamorous clatter. It was disruptive of the atmosphere of academic rigor at the University of Chicago, they said.
Polly shrugged her shoulders and hooked her hands beneath her armpits to counteract the cold, but left the silk scarf to flap against her face and the feral wind. Black bird or green? What’s the difference these days where one is as rare as any other and they all fly and file in formation in an aviary lineup of arbitrary allusion? Nowadays, folks can’t seem to tell the difference between a crow and a cockatoo.
Sign on the dotted line. Walk the talk and talk the walk, but for god’s sake don’t admit you believe in errant aviators or color-blind conspirators: They’ll lock you up and throw away the key. What is more, if you ever escape, they’ll enforce policies of eradication and call it pest control because talking birds are definitely out in this day and age where parroting the party line is all the rage. Mimicry, mockery, mediocrity: that’s the name of the game. Dast you dare cross the meridian but once, you’re out. Walk a straight, narrow, but oh so fine white line, you’re in. Waver—ever so slightly —and you’re out.
So, when the big brown envelope arrived in the mail, Polly didn’t even bother to open it—she just tossed it into the recycling bin. “So,” she said to the bulging manila, “now you’re in, dammit!” and with no one in particular in mind, “Let ‘em eat crow.”
A few days later, she picked up a copy of Newspeak magazine while standing in line at the grocery store. The headlines read “Inside the College Admissions Game.” She was sitting on the front stoop watching the recycling truck pull away from the curb when she got to the part of the article that said: “This week, Chicago’s decisions on whom to accept for the fall will land in mail boxes around the globe: big envelopes for those who’ll be invited to the great Gothic campus and small ones for the ones who won’t.”
Polly Anna Synonymous moved to Chicago anyway, thinking she needed a change of scenery more than a terminal degree. Oh, sure, had she taken the University of Chicago up on its offer, she may have gone on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in the year 2020 and become their 75th-some-odd-something Nobel Laureate. As it stands, she became the first in her class to have found a pot to piss in in Harold Washington Park, and considered that her greatest measure of success.
The story is perhaps better appreciated against the backdrop of the following links:
Feral Monk Parakeets in Chicago!
Comed Evicts Deadbeat Parakeets
Monk Parakeets: Urban Outsiders
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