Chicken Slaughter

At the end of my first week working at Cesar Pelli, I received the customary set of 3 books that Pelli  gives all new employees. Within the ‘observations for young architects’ book was a handwritten note in black marker from Pelli himself. ‘Luke, thanks for joining our team, Cesar Pelli.’ Within 30 minutes of receiving the books I quit my first architecture job to accept an offer elsewhere. The day before, Polshek, the architect I really wanted to work for called to offer me a job. It was a decision that was a real moral dilemma, be loyal to those who hired me first, or go after my dreams. I thought hard about it for a couple minutes, and then went after my dreams.

In my first week of work at polshek, I met Justin. He sat a couple rows from me. I didn’t know anyone at the firm, so I asked him if he was interested in eating lunch with me. Over the next two years we would each lunch together almost weekly and became good friends. Justin is different from most architects in that he hails from a blue collar background. His father lays 100 degree tar on highways which make summer days feel more like 120 degree smelly hell. Growing up Justin worked on farms in rural Pennsylvania to make extra money. Mowing lawns, picking garlic, and chicken work.  All this work of his youth makes drafting on a computer seem like a vacation, I asked about his chicken work. He told me one of his jobs was to catch chickens in a 50x400’ coop so they can get inoculated, sent to slaughter, or debeaked.

I asked him, “so how exactly do you catch a chicken, by the neck?” 
“No” he laughed... “by the feet. If you get one foot, it starts flapping around, and you quickly get the other one.” He mimicked the motion of his arm making a rainbow motion as if he had caught a chicken by one leg, and it was flapping its wings hysterically till he could get the other leg.
Then I asked, “how do you debeak a chicken”
“There's an electrical set of pliers/clippers that when plugged in gets very hot. You just cut of their beaks with that machine.”
“Why do you have to debeak”
“Cause in the coop, the chicken start pecking each other and hurting each other”
“Did you slaughter the chickens?”
“No, we sent them to be slaughtered offsite. This work was grueling. There the employees were all ex convicts..”

Then I started to talk to him about a comic I was thinking about making, about a chicken slaughterhouse across my workplace, and then we started talking about chicken shit. In English, there’s a term you use when you call someone a coward. You call them “chicken shit,” like “he was so ‘chicken shit’, he didn’t have the guts to fight Tyson in the ring, he just ran around the ring like a little girl.” 

I told Justin, “The poultry butcher store is a mysterious operation where chickens go to die. A low 2 story outfit painted in two tones of gray, with tacky color pictures of various poultry on the facade, a big vertical black and white sign that reads ‘HALAL’, another sign that reads ‘Granja #2’, and 2 industrial exhaust ducts mounted on the facade that feed large roof top mounted fans. When they open their doors in the morning you can smell the scent of chicken shit from 2 blocks away. I try to walk the opposite side of the street to minimize my exposure, but catching a whiff of this place is inevitable. Now when someone says ‘chicken shit’ in my mind I think not of a coward but a rank odor, a vile stomach turning stench. If I were to describe the smell of a vagrant who hasn’t showered in weeks during the summer and has defecated on himself, I would say that he smells like “chicken shit.”

Justin agreed with my assessment of chicken shit odor... and laughed. he said his chicken coop odor was only rivaled by the smell he acquired by picking garlic.

“How bad could it smell?” I asked because I thought you couldn’t get any worse than chicken shit.
“Imagine you’re picking garlic all day, and then have to peel it. The garlic oil goes all over your body. You can bathe 3 times and that garlic smell would still stick to you.” 
I imagined Justin covered in  chicken shit  and garlic after a hard days worth of work. it was great to see him in such a light, and laughing. After probably dining with Justin several dozens of times between 2003 and 2005, I’ve regrettably have  seen him only a handful of times since. It was mainly my fault our lunches ended cause I got fired for insubordination and moved to a different part of town and a new job.  Polshek was my chicken slaughter house. I went in like a naive clucking chicken, was thrown into the bloody reality of office politics, real world construction detailing... was overworked and crammed with other fellow young chickens out of school, laid some nice  eggs, then sent to the slaughter after a deadline to make room for the next batch of eager chickens. But our conversation flowed without a skip of a beat... rhythm  guitar, social housing history, construction — dialogue flowed like a clear river. Justin himself had gone through a lot having gotten married, moved to Austin, then San Francisco, then back, had a kid, moved between various jobs, so the conversation was different  than 2005...  tempered with life experience.

I continued with the chicken shit operation by my workplace, “Anyways I’ve passed by Granja #2 many times during the course of weeks and days to get a sense of their operation. Early in the week, you hear the sound of clucking. A large truck full of crates with boisterous chickens.  The air is full of life and activity. Midweek, sometimes the back door is open and you can peer at these men wearing white lab coats pushing metal cages around the floor. Thursday at random times, a guy comes out and dumps a large blue plastic barrel of blood into the road drain by the sidewalk. Friday, the same truck that came to deliver the chickens appears, and is filled with empty plastic crates ready to return to the coop it came from.”

After our morbid laughter of chicken slaughter subsided. I told Justin stories of Gluck's particular workplace’s food rituals. Gluck believes in being social, and uses food ritual to bring people together. The kitchen and dining table are open to the office. A lot of people cook and eat together. Beyond the ice cream competition which brings everybody together every summer, Gluck invites the whole firm and families to his houses upstate for 3 days to a pig-roast in the fall. Since they build their designs, it’s only natural they roast their own pigs too with custom designed spinning steel parts for rotisserie over an open flame. Last year my friend who sits next to me was in charge of picking the pig up from the slaughterhouse. The farmer tried to give him 2 different halves of 2 pigs instead of a whole pig, but my friend refused it because it’s hard to sew it back up to stuff it. So the farmer promptly went out back, slaughtered a poor pig fresh and gave it to him whole. My friend hauled it into a car and drove upstate, putting it  in a bathtub full of ice while the stuffing was being prepared in the kitchen below. The pig was so large it had to roast over the flame overnight. Imagine 20 architects sitting by a camp fire, in the dark, exhausted, trading stories, taking turns rotating a pig, talking while the flames crackle. It’s a bonding experience. Everyone smells of roast pig smoke and for three weeks upon our return to nyc, we savor the leftovers of the pigroast stored in the office fridge.