The Victorian Error: Rooster
Note: The Victorian Era was a long period of prosperity for the British people, a time of cultural revival, and of great advances in engineering and fashion. The Victorian Error is a weekly column where I bitch about my life experiences.
I recently read an article that said chickens are becoming popular suburban pets. When I read this, I was delighted. What better way to annoy the hell out of your neighbors than having a chicken? Having a rooster, of course. How do I know? I shared the same space as a rooster the summer of junior year of college. Lived is not the right terminology for what happened, because when you say lived, it usually implies you enjoyed it.
Cock-a-doodle-torture-a-Jew
It was the summer of ’07, and I was interning in Philadelphia. I have a lot of family that lives in the area, and my cousin graciously agreed to take me in for the summer. I have a lot of respect for a person that lets me live with her, keeping in mind that I used to pinch her on the back as she was bending down to tie my shoes when I was five. I settled down in the house, which was situated in a relatively wooded area and where the neighbors were well out of the way. I went to bed early, not wanting to be late for my first day on the job. I fell asleep, my head full of excitement for what the next day would hold in the exciting world of executive compensation.
At 4:48 the next morning, I woke up to a tone-deaf burglar trying to break into my window, five times in a row. It sounded like this:
I was jolted out of sleep, my heart racing like a heroin addict’s, looked out the window, scanning the green growth. I looked around for something to throw at the intruder. Since I was barley unpacked, the only thing I had was a roll of socks. I felt kind of bad throwing them out the window because I am a cheap Jew and I didn’t want to lose a pair of socks, even if it meant arresting the assailant. The rooster crowed. I thought about throwing the socks again. My pecuniary fortitude prevailed. I slumped back down on the bed and covered my head with the pillow, curling into the fetal position. The rooster crowed.
I fetaled my way to 5:50 am and couldn’t take it anymore. I got up for the day. The next day, I passed my cousin in the hallway. “Hey,” I put a hand on her arm. “Do you guys have a rooster?”
“Oh yeah, ” she said, “the neighbors keep the rooster. It’s a pain, but we can’t do anything about it,” with the same level of casualness as someone would say, “Oh yeah, the lint got stuck in the dryer again.” I’d never seen a roster before, because I hadn’t grown up in Boone County, Iowa. We had random roosters around at our dacha when I was little, but I don’t even remember the time a bookshelf fell on my head. How am I going to remember a rooster? Although, that fall does explain a lot about me.
It was the same way every day that summer. I threw away my alarm clock. 4:48 am was always exact, anyway. The second night, I went to sleep dreaming of taking an axe to the rooster. The third night, I dreamed of Russian roulette. By July, I had thought up twenty-seven different ways to commit gallucide. However, somewhere after July 4, I started getting used to the rooster. He soothed me, in the same way that Beltway traffic is soothing: it’s an inevitable constant that sometimes leads to coronary failure.
By August, I had succumbed to fate. I was even crowing a little myself. I started talking to the rooster, like the heroine from Morozko, who has to knit socks for her step-sister before the sun comes up, or her hair gets cut off by her wicked step-mother. She begs the rooster not to crow so that she can finish the last few stitches (about 6 minutes in)*. Except I was just talking to the rooster for the hell of it.
I did end up learning a lot of valuable stuff on my internship. I think the most important thing I learned, was how to live with a rooster.
*Russians, I never understood why she wastes her time talking to the sun, the rooster, and whatevs. Why doesn’t she just finish the stitches? Ah, socialism.