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

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 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 a woman wearing enormous sunglasses. She waits discreetly for her rooster behind the wheel of a BMW. Smoke coils out the window from her cigarette. The chicken walks up to the driver’s-side window and throws open his wings, presenting himself. His woman claps once and shakes her head, 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.

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. 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 in his life is always this disproportionate. His glasses are thin-framed and hip. His skin is clean-shaven, gleaming pale in the sun, and I imagine he smells like German cologne as I wait for him to detach his human head and put it in the trunk also.

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, a few yellow feathers fluttering from the door.

I should pause and say, “Huh…”

But I don’t.

I’m 24 and employed as a mental health tech at a short-term psychiatric crisis unit. I’m comfortable with insanity. In the last year alone, I’ve experienced men making mortal threats against my family involving napalm, a grave robbing, abuse of a corpse, people hallucinating conversations with Napoleon, ghost-sightings, a suicide attempt, an arsonist’s confession, and a high-speed police chase across Westvale that uncovered a secret weapons lab.

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 from Mom was required.

I opened the pocket doors off the dim foyer and entered the parlor. It was a very 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 large 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 firebox tiles also greeted my eyes. I involuntarily paused there at the parlor entrance. It was my father’s favorite room in the house - supposedly timeless. A square-nailed banquet table covered with books of classical sheet music sat between the couch and the Steinway grand. My dad’s blue Unitron 700 seemed out of place. The telescope towered on its wooden tripod before an antique vitrine which stood against the far wall displaying glittering shelves of silver service and 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.

Then as now, I swiftly exited the parlor.

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

“Come in.” Sylvia stopped taking notes and examined me over the tops of her reading glasses. Her hair was bobbed short. 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?”

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

Sylvia smiled brightly, obviously pleased with herself, “That’s Burt Thomas.”

“The weatherman from Channel 7?”

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

“It’s only 2:00 in the afternoon.”

“There were obstacles. His wife perceives it as demeaning.”

“I mean, it is kinda.”

She twirled a finger lazily. “And… an affront to his masculinity.”

I shrugged, “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. “If only that was their sole problem.”

“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.”

“Enlighten me, Mom.”

“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. 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 sound therapy, Mom.”

“Honey, he has to own the chicken. 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, Janine, 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 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 it worked. 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 embarrassed hands found my pockets, my shaking head hung down. “Okay. That’s not even close to a diagnosis. I just wanted to know about the chicken.”

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

“Thanks, Mom. I get it.”

But I didn’t.

I could never empathize with my mother’s brand of psychotherapy. Publicly, she told her patients what they needed to hear, bolstering them upon the surrealistic pillows of her movable reality. Privately, however, she spoke of her patients as if they were confused pets in need of a leash connected to someone with a stronger existential grip. Hers was the hand that held the leash. In her office library, 1994’s The Bell Curve sat adjacent to 1994’s DSM-IV.

Pitiful was a popular adjective.

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.

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 an arrogant surgeon - if her stitches close your wound. You can forgive a gambling cardiologist - if his angioplasty keeps your heartbeat alive. A psychiatrist’s mouth is a scalpel. Their words are creatures that bed down with you in your dreams. Psychiatric diagnosis is a chimera of science and story. If your storyteller is compromised, the tale itself becomes a labyrinth of your sadness intertwined with their madness.

These doctors do not repair broken bones. They tell you how to exist.

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

In 2005, as Dale’s obsession with my mother tightened like a vise clamping bone, his own brother sat down at what I imagine to be a stately desk and wrote Sylvia a letter. It contained no hidden codes, no secret intimacies, nor fantastical metaphors. It was a simple warning written in the voice of a man who plainly sees 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,

Richard Colgrave”

My mother replied to Richard Colgrave on office letterhead and ordered him to stop interfering with the treatment of her patients. She returned his check. The words of Dale’s brother could not be more plain. 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 did not see it. She preferred the Colgrave voice that spoke in terms she resonated with - dreamscapes of angels, injuries, and the brutalization of boundaries. One letter is a fever dream. The other is daylight. And it was daylight my mother, the psychiatrist, could not see.

Be careful with yourself. If you ever walk out the door in a costume - feathers, scrubs, a saint’s robe - make sure it’s your choice, not someone else’s. And if it’s your doctor’s idea? Get a second opinion.