Previously: A chicken flaps, a chicken scratches, a chicken pecks, and a chicken clucks, but this chicken was doing none of those things.
The First Trip
Well before the chicken and the dog and the yard and the daughter, Matt and Jody took a trip.
Check this out: Key West has a law that prohibits the killing of chickens. There’s chickens everywhere. They’ve taken over, dude.
Matt’s friend Jody was in the passengers’ seat, reading through The Lonely Planet guide to The Keys. Well before the chicken and the dog and the yard and the daughter, Matt and Jody took a trip. Jody had just quit his job as a parking garage attendant, a job that he’d held for over three years, a job he took so he could read scripts during the day and audition at night, a job that literally put his ass to sleep, a job that was lonely. He never fit the job, or, really, the job never fit him. From the time he could walk, he felt the world tug at each of his limbs. The world tugged and the booth felt wrapped around his neck. Each day the world tugged a little harder and the booth felt a little smaller, until one day it felt like if he watched one more car come and go and leave him behind he would choke to death. So he got up and walked away, in the middle of the day, on a Wednesday.
He wanted to go to the ocean with Matt Lang because they had been friends since they were five and, though they had gone on many adventures together, Matt Lang had never seen the ocean, a fact that did not sit well with Jody.
How could someone, especially someone with a car and a bank account, not have seen the ocean. It’s three-fourths of the globe for fuck’s sake?
I grew up poor and my parents didn’t love me.
Yeah but since then?
The lingering trauma. Thanks for bringing it up.
They drove south on I-95, stopping only for gas and the bathroom, living on peanuts and beef jerky, singing along to the radio whenever the occasion called for it, and the occasion called for it often because Jody loved to sing and he could sing like God’s favorite angel.
They stopped in South Carolina, in the middle of the night. As they set up their tent, as they unrolled their sleeping bags, they could hear the ocean.
Let’s hit it, said Jody.
Hit what?
The ocean. Let’s swim.
Are we allowed?
They hiked up a dune and from the top, in the light of a half-full moon, Matt Lang saw the ocean for the first time and he was afraid in the way he was afraid the first time a woman reached behind her back to unhook her bra, in the way the ancients were afraid to see the face of God.
Jody was already halfway across the sand, pulling his clothes off as he ran.
Thank you for reading. Up next:
Six months later, Jody drowned, alone, in that same ocean.