Chicken Skinner

The local mall seemed like the land of milk and honey compared to the bleak industrial section of town where I worked. At the mall, they handed out free samples on toothpicks as you walked to your job. Teenage girls my own age were the regulars rather than the surly violent deadbeats I currently had for company. I cruised the mall applying anywhere I thought that I might have a chance. It was my luck that "Barnyard Bubba's House of Non-fried Chicken" had an opening for a chicken skinner. I thought the manager was joking when he told me over the phone about my job responsibilities. Boxes of chicken were stored in a large walk-in freezer. The chicken skinner would grab a box of poultry and manually disassemble the unfortunate fowl. The chicken would be separated into their various parts by hand. Skin and fats were thrown away as the legs, breasts, thighs and wings were laid out flat across a pan. Everything was then glazed with rich creamery butter and rolled in a special breading that was trademarked in both the U.S. and Canada.

The manager surprisingly could not find anyone that had prior experience in the field. Without an experienced chicken skinner available for employment, the manager decided to take a chance on a promising young prospect. Three days later, I was asked to report to work. The Barnyard Bubba's chain of chicken restaurants consisted of three stores. I had been lucky enough to find employment in the flagship store, the jewel of the corporate empire. The restaurant was family-owned and operated. Several members of the non-fried chicken dynasty were seated behind a large table at the back of the restaurant when I arrived for my training. They were undeniably related. They all had the same sandy blond hair and immense physical presence. The restaurant's mission was to supply a healthy alternative to the deep fried southern diet that was popular across the state. Their patented chicken recipe would keep a few more arteries open than the grease buckets they were serving over at Kentucky Fried Chicken. It was health food for people that only considered their health after the second double bypass. I could not imagine the patchouli and granola crowd that populate most health food stores giving up their veggie-burgers because a bucket of chicken was suddenly a viable dietary alternative to a bran muffin.

Three generations of the first family of non-fried chicken were represented at the table in the back of the restaurant. None of the Dillon family, aside from a recent addition by marriage, could be considered slight. They ranged from chubby to remarkably obese. They surrounded a big plate of thickly cut home fries and a bucket of their award-winning chicken. They were polite but not particularly outgoing in welcoming me. In my training I learned that they formerly owned a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in their hometown of Bedford, Indiana. They were long-time members of the KFC family going as far back as the Colonel himself. Some type of unfortunate corporate coup d'etat had forced them from the KFC community into their current renegade non-fried status.

The family members left most of my training up to Todd, a cheery twenty-two-year old manager with an undeniable love for his work. Todd had what he termed, “rock-and-roll” style hair. It was longer in the back and shorter across the top and the sides. With his bushy mustache that accented his look, he looked a lot like the NASCAR drivers in the posters that covered the back office. The first order of business was to get me into the official Bubba's uniform. The uniform was a T-Shirt and baseball hat combination that came in either a day-glow pink or a day-glow green. The uniform had a smiley chicken character on the front wrapped in a heart. The other restaurant workers excitedly shouted their suggestions as I was asked to choose between the two colors. I learned that there was some friendly inner restaurant rivalry between the pink and the green camps. The managers wore pink uniforms, as did most of the counter crew. I noticed that the majority of the cooks and skinners were wearing green uniforms. The pink uniform represented upward mobility and a quick rise into middle management, while the green uniform had more street credibility and seemed like a better crowd for after work drinks. My reward for choosing the green uniform was cheers from the back of the kitchen and a few slaps on the back. The die was cast, and there was no going back.

Todd showed me around the restaurant, explaining the responsibilities of each team member. We toured the ovens and sampled the menu. All of this was done under the watchful eye of "the family," who were now grappling with several full racks of baby back ribs. Finally, we got to my station in the back of the restaurant. A small radio, perched on a shelf over the chicken preparing area, was playing "Kiss", one of my favorite Prince songs. A skinny black kid with a Geri Curl was disemboweling chickens at a feverish rate to the seductive funk base.

"We got us another greenie back here, boss?" he said when he saw the color of my new uniform. Terrance was the restaurant’s most celebrated chicken skinner. Sweat beaded across his forehead, and his hands and the chicken parts became an undistinguishable blur as he filled tray after tray with perfectly prepared parts. Terrance instructed me in a few of the finer points of his craft as I watched in open-mouthed awe.

After a full day of training, nine o'clock came and the restaurant closed for business. Todd and I were left to wash down the kitchen and close up. Todd told me that a few years prior he had also been a chicken skinner.

"It is a great place to start if you want to move into management," said Todd proudly.

He knew about my college plans but asked me to consider his own success story: with only a high school diploma and a successful employment history at Jiffy Lube, he had moved directly into management in less that a year. "I’m already making more money than those college kids and they think they know something I don't,” said Todd triumphantly.

He took his job seriously but assured me that he still loved to party, illustrating this by grabbing a Van Halen tape off the dash of a Trans Am parked outside. He put the cassette into the radio in the back and turned the volume up. Eddie Van Halen's screeching guitar solos bounced off the large conveyor ovens in the back of the restaurant as we scrubbed each tiny inch of the kitchen. Todd bounced his head back and forth mouthing the words as he picked assorted chicken scraps out of the grate. The energy of the music was translated into clean ovens and counter tops. When he could no longer contain himself he would break into an air guitar solo. I drove home humming a Van Halen song, happy with my new job. I liked Todd and Terrance.

I began spending upwards of twenty hours a week in my glowing green uniform, the bane of feathered creatures everywhere. Terrance and I became friends when he found out how we both shared the same taste in music and that I had a car. He was always upbeat and adventurous and soon we were hanging out on the weekends. I drove down to a predominately black neighborhood by the fairgrounds to visit Terrance a few times a week. At work we had several hours to talk while the chickens were being dismembered. Terrance had several interesting hobbies outside work. He spent many hours at night fishing in local streams and rivers. Our conversations would often turn to the fishing shows that he watched regularly. He often asked me to drive him to some of the fishing spots that were outside the metro Indianapolis bus routes. We would fish for several hours with a bucket and a portable radio between us. Terrance was a true urban naturalist eating whatever he caught no matter where he caught it.

The White River flowed through downtown Indianapolis and past several rust belt relics of the city’s industrial heyday. On warm summer days, my high school friends would drink cans of Budweiser and swing off a rope into the cool waters of the river. As I would swim back to the bank, I remember the river always having a faint odor, like a combination of rubbing alcohol and fresh asphalt. The fish that populated these waters were a rough and tumble lot. The Sport Fisherman refers to carp, blue gill and catfish as “trash fish” because of their hardy constitutions and prodigious reproduction.  They are blamed for being the evolutionary equivalent of a Sherman tank crashing through whatever post industrial goop we poured in our Midwestern waterways. These stinking urban tributaries have all the natural charms of a Greyhound bus station.

They were also the only source of fish within walking distance of Terrance’s house. He convinced me that I should accompany him to one of his favorite fishing areas after work. We did not start fishing until ten o'clock that night. The section of the river that we were fishing was conveniently sandwiched between Terrance’s neighborhood and several local housing projects, a few blocks from downtown. I tried to pretend like this was my normal Tuesday night as I walked through an inner city neighborhood with my plastic fishing pole illuminated by the yellowy gleam of the streetlights. Terrance pulled apart a cut section of a chain link fence under a rusted No Trespassing sign. We walked down a small dirt path littered with empty plastic bottles of Night Train and Miller High Life. A man with a dirty baseball hat, nappy Afro, and graying beard greeted us at the bank of the river. He was a sportsman like us, already proving his angling skill with the two small catfish in his bucket. We baited our hooks with small pieces of hotdog and got to work. The older gentleman, who introduced himself as Russell, sang little bluesy songs out loud as we cast our lures into the river. His deep voice added a beautiful soundtrack to the night’s strange odyssey.
 
A large group of teenage black kids, fashionably coordinated with blue bandanas and tennis shoes yelled down to us from atop a bridge. "Yo Easy, what Ya got?” Terrance's cousin called him “Easy” in references to popular rap star Easy E who shared Terrance oily early eighties hairstyle. The group broke into shouts of laughter as Russell held up a small catfish. We could hear the loud rhythmic base of their extensive car stereo systems as they slowly disappeared into the night.

The rest of our expedition was very peaceful. Russell sang for a few more hours as we sat on the riverbank with fishing lines in the water. Occasionally a car or truck would drive by. I contently watched the streetlights form and reform yellowy patterns in the eddies of the river or in the suspicious looking foam that gathered in the weeds.

One unfortunate carp bit into the small piece of hotdog that I was using as bait, around 1:30 in the morning. The fight only lasted a few seconds. Once the carp realized that he was being pulled toward the shore, he resigned himself to his fate by rolling over on his side and halfheartedly flopping his tail. The carp did not look particularly appetizing to me but Terrance insisted that we throw it into our bucket. When we finally picked up our fishing tackle to leave, we had three fish in the bucket: my carp plus two larger catfish that Terrance had caught. Though we did not have any potential candidates for the taxidermist, Terrance was satisfied with the night’s catch. We bid farewell to Russell and walked back to Terrance's house. Terrance suggested that we make a dinner of our catch, and get together for a meal the following evening. I already had plans for dinner with an ex-girlfriend so I had to decline his offer.

My friendships at Barnyard Bubbas were not limited to Terrance. I enjoyed the company of most of the staff. Patrick was one of the younger members of the Dillon family. He and his brother were being groomed to take over management of the entire chain when the family matriarch, Susana Dillon, retired. He was only twenty-one so he worked next to me in the kitchen a few times a week. It took us several weeks before our interactions became familiar and comfortable. Patrick was a sports fan. His favorite team was the Indianapolis Colts. I had not been to or seen a football game in many years and did not enjoy his lengthy freeform diatribes about their strategies in upcoming matches. Patrick spent two years at Purdue University studying civil engineering before dropping out to help with the non-fried chicken business. When the subject of my upcoming college education came up, he related his own unfortunate experiences. I had high aspirations of leaving the watchful eye of my restrictive parents to enjoy some healthy youthful philandering and drinking. He spent his two years of college locked in a dorm room with his civil engineering books. The only relief to his loneliness was a friend that lived on the other side of the campus. I sympathetically listened to his story about the football games that he attended by himself or his unsuccessful attempts to create friendships with the beer guzzling electrical engineering crowd. Meeting a girl in Indianapolis was all the impetus he needed to leave school and start disemboweling chickens.

I had not seen many girls my own age since I started working at the chicken restaurant. The GAP acted as a strange epicenter for any attractive gals in the area, and the chicken restaurant was located well away in a remote outer strip mall. Not surprisingly, our menu attracted patrons who were more likely to be found at the Elk’s Lodge or Senior Center than cruising the mall for prospective prom dates. The shops located near us were all useful businesses but not the type that attracted window shoppers. My chicken skinning job was about as thrilling as a good porno compared to the Mailboxes Etc, Waterbed Warehouse, and Picture Framing businesses that surrounded us. A popular Chinese restaurant a few stores away had a staff that was still struggling with a mastery of basic English. We bartered our Southern cuisine for their sweet rolls and spicy Szechwan dishes in the alley behind the restaurant. Our conversations consisted mostly of smiles, nods, and primitive hand gestures.

The one business on the block that had any potential for real social interactions was the franchised frozen yogurt restaurant on the corner. My coworkers depicted TCBY as some kind of exclusive singles bar run by ravishing nymphomaniacs. I found out that a few members of the Dillon family worked at TCBY. The Dillons had connections through second cousins or other relations at almost every business in the strip mall. The Kennedys had a large extended family at their bayside compound in Martha's Vineyard. The Bushes vacationed with their second and third cousins at an exclusive coastal area in Maine called Kennebunkport. Not to be outdone, the Dillons, one of Bedford, Indiana's first families, spread their rotund relations throughout the franchised stores of the Castleton Farms strip mall.

After meeting a good cross section of the Dillon family, I had a hard time imagining the TCBY bloodline to be as promising as it was described. I needed to see for myself. During a lunch break I decided to make a reconnaissance run for a cone of the new coffee flavored frozen yogurt. Two teenage girls were working the counter as I entered the store. They had dark hair and were both within what would be considered a normal weight range by Dillon family standards. One of the girls, Shawna, was a second cousin of the Dillons. She was only fourteen and constantly giggled as she handed me my order. The second girl, Brenda, had no genetic bond with the Dillons but shared a similar personality to Shawna despite the four years separating them. I introduced myself, gathered my cone and walked back to our restaurant.

I had met Shawna a few times before at the chicken restaurant but did not realize that she was part of the TCBY dating pool. She was a fanatical New Kids on the Block fan and she came into the restaurant to exchange anecdotes and posters of her idols with Stanley, a boy my own age that worked the counter. Stanley kept an impeccably clean restaurant; he wore a tight uniform that was spotless while mine looked like I had been rolling in the ingredients. I naively assumed that he and Shawna had some type of romantic relationship. Despite our protests he was constantly showing Terrance and me glossy magazines with full-page photos of his teenage idols. The only problem working with Stanley was the way that he would commandeer the little radio at the skinning station during his breaks. When we were occupied, our Public Enemy tape would be removed and replaced by the painful bubblegum pop vocals of Stanley's New Kids. The majority of the employees at Bubba's understood that the radio in the back, by all accounts, was the property of the skinners and cooks. We were not required to interact with the general public, and left with only our recently deceased fowl and each other for company, the radio helped pass the time.

Even with our claim to the radio, we would return from our coffee breaks to find Stanley mastering his new kids choreography with our radio. Stanley seemed to think that we did not like his band because we had not really listened to any of their top hits. When Terrance would remove Stanley’s New Kids tape he would register a whiney high-pitched protest.

"You didn't really listen to the song. These songs have meant so much to me, I just know when you hear this next one you will see what I am saying. You should go to one of their concerts. Everyone is screaming, and they are such talented performers. They really have inspired me to pursue my own dreams."

We were respectful of Stanley's opinion. Actually, I was a little afraid to upset him. Stanley was very sensitive, and I thought that Todd was always a little too hard on him. I saw Stanley in the corner by the walk-in freezer, holding back the tears a few times when Todd would reprimand him too harshly. I did not want to upset Stanley so we always politely agreed when Stanley would voice his undying admirations.

I certainly never wanted to attend a New Kids concert, and I am sure Terrance would not be caught dead at one. I could not imagine Terrance clapping his hands wildly while sandwiched between throngs of fourteen-year-old girls as the New Kids sang their latest pop hit. I had seen New Kids on the Block concert footage on television. I was quite sure that it did not contain any young black men with well-lubricated pompadours. I think it would scare the shit out of the white Midwestern parents who were chaperoning a squealing pack of fifteen-year-olds like a Montana wrangler caught in a stampede.

It took me a few weeks to discover how truly sordid the inter-office relationships at Barnyard Bubba's had become. Seventeen-year-old Stanley and Shawna maintained an innocent platonic friendship bonded by a mutual love of overly choreographed one hit wonders. Shawna's heart belonged to someone else. While hauling out a box of fats and gristle, I stumbled upon a horrific scene. Afternoon talk shows could not be more salacious. Twenty-two-year-old Patrick and his fourteen-year-old second cousin were embraced in what can only be described as a tender moment. I am not sure about the legal or genetic ramifications of this budding romance but I had seen enough. It turns out that the majority of the workers at Bubba's were well aware of this, as was the Dillon family. I was not sure about rural Indiana but here in the big city of Indianapolis this cannot be considered normal. I made two decisions at this point. First, I would make every effort to change the subject whenever the skinning table conversation turned to Patrick's romance. Second, I would make a hell of a lot of noise when taking out the trash. I was glad I had discovered this affair when I did. I cringed when I thought that had I waited another five minutes to take out the trash I might have come upon a sight that would endanger my own ability to reproduce.

By this time I had only three weeks at Barnyard Bubba's before I left for Wyoming to start college at an outdoor school. Thankfully, I did not hear anything about Patrick's relationship through my last month. I enjoyed the company of my coworkers and the challenge of my trade. My skills were starting to improve. I figured I still had at least six months before I got to Terrance's fantastic speed. I admired Terrance not only for his skills at the skinning table but the way he could dance to the hip hop and funk music coming from the little radio.

While my own jerky, Caucasian movements elicited groans and smiles from Terrance, he moved with a rhythmic grace that I could only admire. I was depressed after going to a predominately black dance club only a few weeks prior and standing against the wall admiring the girls who walked past me. The crowd consisted of young black men dancing with White, Hispanic or Asian girls. I made the mistake of asking a beautiful Filipino girl in a miniskirt out on to the dance floor. This decision did not seem well planned, as I had virtually no ability to carry a beat outside my time in the trumpet section of the high school band. Strangely this did not help. I cringe even today to think of the look on my partner’s face when she realized the tragic error of her judgment.

Terrance decided that I was going to need some help before he turned me loose on a college campus. It was his opinion that my atrocious lack of rhythm could not be simply written off to a middle class suburban upbringing. He told me to pick him up on Thursday. I thought that there was little chance of reversing what I saw as a profoundly accurate stereotype of white America. Terrance, however, was convinced that he could help me. We went back to my house in the suburbs and Terrance produced a variety of tapes that he thought would help with my education.

He concluded that we had two major problems. First, like many people, I danced with an assumption that I would never be able to move like the black kids that dominated the hip hop and house tracks. Basically, I did not have the brazen confidence and reckless abandonment that would allow me to make a few mistakes while on my way to ruling the debaucherous dance floors of central Indiana. Secondly, my whole concept of dancing was colored by my misconception that people dance to the words and the melody rather that the rhythm. Once he figured that I had found the beat, he explained that I simply had to move my body to it. In two hours he turned me not into the greatest dancer but someone that could move his body at some level of social acceptability.

I permanently left Bubba's, my friends, and poultry dismemberment a few weeks later for Lander, Wyoming. Two months after my departure, I received a letter from Terrance. He wished me well, told me about his latest catch and included a picture he drew of me in full hip-hop gear climbing a mountain at my school. He managed to put his entire letter into an inventive timing scheme that turned into more of a rap when read aloud. When I got back to Indianapolis after my semester course ended, we got together for a few drinks.

I started at Indiana University that winter. I had forgotten about Terrance’s lessons as I jumped wholeheartedly into my Midwestern college experience. A few weeks into the semester my high school friends invited me to a party. The stereo played a variety of Prince, Public Enemy, NWA and Too Short. Most of the other freshman boys stood around in small groups talking amongst themselves. A few of the upper classmen danced in what we termed the frat boy shuffle. It consisted of jerking movements while holding a cup of beer in either hand. The shuffling is usually performed in strange fits and jerks that have little to do with any known music. I realized that the social bar had been lowered significantly since my embarrassing display in that Indianapolis nightclub. Five minutes later I got my groove. Three hours later I was fully engaged in a serious bout of heavy petting with a Junior from an Indiana University sorority down the road. I am sure that this sorority girl’s brief window of bad judgment would not have been possible without Terrance’s intricate dance instructions.

I lost touch with Terrance several years ago, but I have not forgotten his lessons. They have been an invaluable social skill, producing some significant relationships and a multitude of one night stands. In the end, my inheritance from my summer job at Barnyard Bubba's includes a completely new relationship with large meaty birds and a CD collection that would more likely be found in South Central Los Angeles than above the desk of a middle-aged computer geek. Thank you, Terrance.