They Who Feed on Shadows - Episode 6

The Chicken's Mask

They Who Feed On Shadows - Episode 6: The Chicken’s Mask

Note: This essay is nonfiction based on true events and contains depictions of psychosis. Names and locations have been changed to protect the innocent. Some dialogue and details have been reconstructed for clarity and narrative flow.

Sometime in the mid-1990s

Fantasy finds me.

A seven-foot chicken is walking out of our house.

It’s a full-body costume with yellow feathers and a molded headpiece that makes the man wearing it look 95% like a huge cock. If he had wings and a gizzard instead of arms and a flat chest, he’d be all the way there.

I stop at the west end of the house and get out of my car to watch. The chicken walks down the brick front steps that lead to the office entrance and plods across the driveway to the patient parking area.

Behind every great cock is an exasperated woman wearing enormous sunglasses. She waits discreetly for her man behind the wheel of a sleek oyster-blue BMW convertible. Her top is up. It’s a sunny day in late May.

This is why I think convertible people are deeply troubled. I’ve seen it before. I don’t know why I’m surprised. Smoke coils out the window from her cigarette. Somewhere, I realize, there is another story waiting to be told about the designated drivers of psychiatric patients.

Her rooster walks up to the car and throws open his wings, presenting himself. He does a little jig. She claps once and shakes her head and flicks her cigarette into our driveway. The pair have a quick, heated exchange. I can’t hear his costume-muffled mumbles.

The woman’s voice is high and bright, however. Like the song of a faraway, fussy bird that is predatory.

From this distance, I can make out the phrase, “You’re an idiot!”

She starts the BMW and jerks her thumb backwards. The trunk pops open. The man visibly deflates, and only now does he remove the head of his costume. I instantly name him Richard. The chicken head is huge. He tries to hold it under one arm and almost drops it. His hair is slicked back and black. I wonder if everything else in his life is this disproportionate. Is he unbalanced? Or just heartbroken? Richard’s glasses are thin-framed and hip. His skin is clean-shaven, gleaming pale in the sun, and I imagine he smells like German cologne.

I wait for him to detach his human head and put it in the trunk also, but that never happens.

After a couple of attempts, he gets his large, taloned feet awkwardly in the passenger seat of the Bimmer and shuts the door on the second try. The woman has been talking incessantly. She continues shaking her head as she drives them off, chiding furiously, a few yellow feathers fluttering from the passenger door of her car as they sail away, convertible top sealed tight under a cobalt dream of a day.

I should pause in moments like these.

But I don’t.

I’m 24 and am employed as a mental health tech at a short-term psychiatric crisis unit. I’m as comfortable with insanity as someone sane is going to get. In the last year alone, I’ve experienced men making mortal threats against my family involving basement-made napalm, a grave robbing, abuse of a corpse, people hallucinating conversations with Napoleon, ghost-sightings, a suicide attempt and an arsonist’s confession.

And that was just at our house.

I’ve also got stories about institutionalized psych patients. But I don’t want to bore you.

However, the chicken…

I had only recently moved home to the farm because there were no professional jobs in Ashridge. It’s a college town after all. So I was living with Sylvia for the first time since high school when this rooster appeared.

An explanation seemed requisite.

My mother’s recent actions have been troubling, so our conversations have been terse. I am using the chicken as an opportunity to talk to the parent I have left.

I opened the pocket doors off the dim foyer and entered the parlor. It was a different house in 1996. The royal pendulum of our family’s grandfather clock reflected the afternoon sun in a prism of gold light that spilled across a spacious blue and white Persian rug. Crown molding, a tufted gray velvet Rococo revival settee, and a fireplace accented by an oak mantle and hunter green tile greeted my eyes. I involuntarily stood there at the entrance feeling the resonant energy of memory. The parlor was my father’s favorite room - artful and timeless, with nods to science, music and the wisdom of good conversation. A square-nailed banquet table covered with books of classical sheet music sat between the couch and the black Steinway grand. My dad’s Prussian blue Cave Astrola 8 looked both industrially classic and refined. The polished telescope towered on its wooden tripod before an antique vitrine which stood against the far wall displaying shining shelves of silver service and 19th century Chinese porcelain. 1970s floor speakers draped with Asian tapestries were positioned on either side of the piano. The speakers framed a colonial-style picture window that looked out over a rear lawn edged by a limestone rock wall that curved around a lone redbud tree. The wall separated the lawn from the forest.

A memory of my father hand-placing those stones unsteadied me. Each stone came from our land.

Finally, I broke out of the drift. I swiftly exited the parlor.

I passed through a soundproof hallway that led to the patient waiting room and knocked on the door to my mom’s office.

“Come in.” Sylvia stopped taking notes and examined me over the tops of her reading glasses. She was in her mid-60’s, hair bobbed short and gray. She wore a purple old lady sweater and practical slacks. A fresh cup of tea steamed on a small table beside her chair. “Oh Jude, hello son. Are you okay?”

This was always her first question.

I walked in and sat on the client sofa. “I’m fine. A chicken just left?”

Sylvia smiled coyly, obviously pleased, “That’s Burt Thomas.”

“The weatherman from Channel 7?”

“Yes. We’ve been working up to this. His moment.”

“What moment?”

“His Tyson sponsorship. He has to do the weather in a chicken suit from the parking lot of a Safeway tonight at 6:00. Say, sponsored by Tyson… and all that.”

“It’s only 2:00 in the afternoon.”

“There were obstacles he needed to work through. His wife perceives it as demeaning.”

“I mean, it’s goddamn ridiculous. He’s a scientist.”

Sylvia paused, “Well, a weatherman.”

I threw open my hands, “A meteorologist, mom.”

She looked at me like I had the brain of a gerbil, “Of course. Like a chiropractor is a doctor. It’s a different time now I suppose.”

I hung my head, “Ugh…”

My mom’s voice pepped up, “Getting back to Burt and the chicken, his wife. Well… she also sees it as an affront to his masculinity.”

I shrugged, happy the conversation was moving again, but feeling sarcastic, “So he’s addressing masculinity issues by dressing like a chicken?”

My mother clicked her pen against the book she was using as a writing surface and rolled her overly big brown eyes. “If only the issue was that rudimentary, or that their sole problem.” She suddenly sounded as if it was all just so basic.

“What did you tell him?”

Sylvia sighed. “I told him to come here dressed as a chicken.”

“How does that help?”

“It’s a professional setting. He’s very nervous around me.”

“I don’t see…”

“Oh, Jude,” she interrupted. “When you’ve been practicing longer, you’ll understand.”

Now it was me rolling my eyes. “Enlighten me.”

“Okay,” Sylvia pointed her pen at the door. “Burt has to stop conflating his sense of self with a costume. I reminded him he’d lose his job if he didn’t.”

“Why would you tell him that?”

“His boss told him. I reminded him of a simple fact. There’s a difference. He committed to the Tyson sponsorship. He has to dress like a chicken. Just once.”

“So…”

Another sigh. “So, I made him sit through his session in a costume. When we finished, I got him to put on his head.”

“I don’t see how that is therapy.”

“Honey, he has to own the costume, intellectualize it. He can’t let the chicken own him. He needed to dispel the charade by embracing it, walk out, and present himself to Janine.”

“I don’t think Janine was impressed.”

Sylvia frowned. “His wife is a textbook case of borderline personality disorder. The woman is constantly testing the boundaries of their relationship by flirting with other men!”

“And your advice was to send him out there dressed like a damn chicken?”

“Yes. It’s crucial that he display agency over his identity with her, even more so than with himself.”

I stood and walked to the door. “Well, I’m not sure. She seemed pretty pissed.”

“She’s a slut.”

“Mom!”

“What?” Sylvia put her reading glasses back on and took a delicate sip of tea. “When I was growing up, we didn’t call women like Janine borderline. We called them what they were, hysterical sluts.”

My hands found my pockets. “Now we’re off the reservation. That’s not even close to a diagnosis. I just wanted to know about the chicken.”

“Don’t be upset.”

“I’m not upset!”

“The chicken is just a metaphor, Jude. I tell these people what they need to hear.”

I couldn’t take anymore. I had turned to go.

“Honey?”

“What?”

“I love you.”

“Ugh.”

“The chicken is really just a metaphor.”

“Thanks, Mom. I get it.”

But I didn’t. As I grew to be a young man, I found myself increasingly unable to rationalize my mother’s scorch and burn brand of psychotherapy. Publicly, she bolstered her patients upon the surrealistic pillows of a curated reality, endlessly peppering them with prescriptions, platitudes and therapeutic ingratiations. Privately, however, she spoke of her clients as if they were confused pets in need of a shock collar and some time in the culture kennel. Her people needed a leash connected to someone with a stronger existential grip. Culture was a bead of mercury in the palm of her hand.

In her office library, 1994’s DSM-IV sat adjacent to 1994’s The Bell Curve.

My father would not have allowed that book in the house if he was still alive.

But my dad was a very dead man.

In his absence, pitiful had become a popular adjective with mom.

Sexual exploration was acceptable up to a certain age. Promiscuity was not. Unless you were a man. There was black, there was white, and there was gray, the abandoned puppy of the family. Sylvia was the arbiter of acceptability, and she dispensed acceptability’s definitions to her clients like they were the bedrock of conscious consciousness.

Beware, intrepid souls.

This is the hazard of hiring a psychiatrist to tell you what is right and what is wrong. Words stay with you forever. You can forgive a gun obsessed, arrogant surgeon who hunts baby wolves - if her stitches close your wound. You can forgive an alcoholic cardiologist with three DUI’s - if his angioplasty keeps your heartbeat alive.

But the psychiatrist’s mouth is a scalpel that cuts more deeply and more passionately. Their words are creatures that bed down with you. Their voices massage your dreams. Psychiatric diagnosis is a chimera of science and story. If your storyteller is compromised, the tale itself becomes a labyrinth of half-truths where your sadness is interwoven into the blackness of their madness.

These doctors do not repair broken bones. They tell you how to exist. How to be. A morally balanced therapist, with character and conviction in their heart? This person can save your life. My father was that sort of physician.

“My patients already know the answer to every one of their questions. Especially, What should I do?! I tell them they need less therapy and more common sense.” Dr. Grant Kellor

In 2005, as Dale’s obsession with my mother tightened around her soul like a vise clamping a femur, his own brother sat down at what I imagine to be a stately desk and wrote Sylvia a letter. This letter contained no hidden codes, no secret intimacies, nor fantastical metaphors. It was a simple warning written in the voice of a man who plainly senses danger, and hopes the doctor in the room will too.

Here is that letter.

January 3, 2005

“Dear Dr. Blackmoor

Dale Colgrave, who is under your care as a patient, is my brother. Our family loves him deeply, but we’ve grown increasingly concerned. He’s been struggling to manage his finances and has received several overdraft notices; I’ve enclosed a check to cover his 11-1-04 statement. If you believe additional sessions would benefit him, I’m willing to assist with the cost.

In the last several weeks, two separate people have told me Dale hurt them physically. One is a neighbor woman in her fifties who had a finger bent back, and the other is our mother who Dale has pushed at least twice. I thought you should be made aware of this.

Dale also farms land belonging to our family, but in recent years his delays in planting and harvesting have reduced our yields. He doesn’t seem concerned about these losses. I would appreciate any guidance you can offer about how we might address this behavior constructively.

I am a regional manager for Summit Valley Bank. You can reach me during the day at our branch in Clearwater Bend.

Respectfully,

Jeffrey Colgrave”

My mother replied to Jeffrey Colgrave on crisp office letterhead. She ordered him to stop interfering with the treatment of her patients. She returned his check. Dale Colgrave was allowed to see her for free from that moment on.

The words of Dale’s brother could not be more plain, and perhaps that was the problem. They are the words of a farmer’s son, a bank man who says openly: my brother is hurting people, he’s failing at his work, he’s failing at his life, and we’re worried.

Sylvia preferred the Colgrave voice that spoke in terms she resonated with - dreamscapes of angels, injuries, and flickering, false boundaries.

One letter is a fever dream. The other is daylight.

It wasn’t just danger my mother couldn’t see. She was also blind to sunshine itself.

Be careful when something doesn’t feel right. A higher wisdom is speaking to you.

And should you ever walk out the door in a costume - feathers, scrubs, a saint’s robe - make sure it’s your choice and not someone else’s.

If it’s your doctor’s idea?

Get a second opinion.