I’d always wanted to be a prize fighter. I dreamed of stepping in that ring in my black trunks with the silver stripes, tossing off my robe with “The Pugilistic Kid” embroidered on the back, dodging, weaving, jabbing, swinging, and holding that belt up triumphantly with blood dripping own my cheek. “He did it!” they’d all shout. “The Kid’s done it again folks! I can’t believe it!” And all the bookies in Vegas would be so pissed because I ruined the spread. Yeah, I had dreams. But they were futile, really.
Futile, because my father was a poultry farmer.
You see, to really become a prizefighter, I mean really become a prizefighter, you need to train. You need to train hard. You need to build up endurance and learn how to take a hit. You need to jump rope. You need to punch stuff. Hard. And you need something to punch. We were poor and simple – much too poor and simple for a punching bag, or even an inflatable clown. So I had to punch what I had. I had to punch chickens.
So I punched chickens. Sometimes turkeys or ducks or guinea fowl, or an odd goose around Christmas time. We once had a peacock, and I punched that, too. But the demand for peacock was great, and I soon lost my punchable friend.
All seemed perfect to me in my ignorance. I jogged. I skipped rope. I decked chickens left and right. But I soon learned that to become a prizefighter you need to learn power. But you don’t develop power by punching poultry. Birds explode rather easily. True, they’re relatively small, so you do learn agility. And agility I learned. My punches were excellently well placed. The Agile Aviarian they might have dubbed me. But I soon realized that without power, I was merely trying to knock down an elephant with very accurately thrown marshmallows. While this is theoretically possible, it would take a very long time. And if the elephant were to eat the marshmallows and gore their thrower (i.e. me), well, then no amount of time would be sufficient to secure a KO, a TKO, or even the decision.
I wasn’t discouraged. I was young and naïve. I figured that since life had handed me lemons I would make chicken francese. I developed my own regimen of poultry-based exercises. I’d “tar and feather” myself with egg batter and chicken feed, then let the coop peck it off me. I’d grab the turkeys by their waddles and toss them like an Olympic hammer-thrower. I’d jump-rope with barbed wire. I was tough, I was vital, I had callouses all over my body, and I could toss a turkey 125 yards. But I could never find that perfect thing to punch. I could never develop that power I so direly needed to make my dreams come true.
Then it happened. The great ostrich boom of ’86. The most revolutionary thing to happen to poultry farming since the resurgence of the Free Range Movement. My father jumped aboard this bandwagon and we soon had a bevy of ostriches running across the farm. I quickly claimed one and named him Sugar Ray Ostrich. I hung him up by his neck, and punched the stuffing out of him to my heart’s content. This was it! This was what I had been looking for all along! I was going to become a prizefighter.
It was all too good to be true. My father should have known better than to buy ostriches off the back of a truck, and we quickly found the parasites living in their gizzards. No wonder their serial numbers had been pried off. The only way to ensure the safety of the rest of the fowl was to incinerate them all.
So there they went. My dreams of prizefighting vanished like so much smoke. Like so much smoke from 44 smoldering ostrich carcasses. And boy did it stink. The dashing of my dreams, yes, but more so the stench of 44 burning dead ostriches.