What we do is this.  There’s a hook thing—an instrument.  If we can’t find it, we bend a hanger straight.  We leave the hook part on the end and we quick-hook it around the chickens’ feet.  We snatch their feet out from under them.  We don’t snatch roosters.  Why would we do that?  Roosters are for inseminating the eggs.  We don’t eat roosters.  There’s usually only one rooster.  If you had more than one rooster, they would keep you up all night.

I go to Clarence’s parties and every time I go there I talk and talk and talk to his friend Robin, the Indian who lived in Iowa, who taught at Iowa State for a year.  Robin looks almost Asian, but he is Indian, American Indian.  What tribe, I don’t know.  We start the same story over every time I see him, about how I am from Iowa and how he lived in Iowa.  I want to ask him if his woman friend doesn’t mind his talking to me so much for so long every time I see him, but I am married so perhaps she thinks I am safe.  She is at least ten years older than he is.  Her skin is wrinkled, she has a waddle of skin under her chin that glows white in the light of the bulb in Clarence’s kitchen.  Her hair is grayish-white and frazzled, while Robin’s skin is the smoothest brown, like a polished tan rock and his long black braid hangs down his back.

After we have hooked the chicken, we snatch it up by its rubbery stick legs, watching out for their scratchy dull talons.  When we hook them, we hold them up in the air away from our bodies and faces. 

Robin’s woman friend and he have had a tumultuous relationship over the years.  They weren’t together while he was in Iowa.  This was years ago.  How I know this, I think Clarence told me.  She finally followed him out there.  I don’t get a loving vibe off him toward her.  Robin and I talk about snow and cold, snow and cold, blizzards, haphazard weather conditions, the roads, the need to plug a car in on sub-zero days, the ridiculousness of the wind chill factor.

Robin is an artist.  His girlfriend might be one, too.  Robin’s smile, his teeth are so perfect and evenly spaced, they press against each other, seamless in their whiteness.  He smiles often.

When you hook the chicken, hold it away from the body.  It will flap its wings vociferously.  It will try to curl its red head and poke your hand while you are holding it up in the air by its spiny legs.  Give it a shake to show it its place.  Shaking will unsettle its wing flapping.  Then, it will hang still, upside down in your fist.  Now, while it is still, fold its wings in even tighter and shove its head first into the cutting cone.  (If you are using a cone, you have to “stick” them quickly before you shove them in.)  If you don’t have the silver metal cones, simply string twine between two trees with open loops and hook the chicken’s feet in the loops.  Let it hang.  Sometimes two chickens hanging next to each other will in desperation flap and fight the rope and then they will scrabble with each other.  Eventually, hanging upside down will leave them breathless and they will settle down.  You know their little hearts are beating so fast while they are hanging upside down.

Some people dance in the foyer at Clarence’s party.  It is a space halfway between the kitchen/living room and the two bedrooms.  Berkeley apartments have such strange designs with their dark vertical strips of wood and high rails about a foot and a half from the ceiling.  Robin does not dance with me or with his mate.  So I dance with Clarence, who has a weight problem and round glasses.  Instead Robin wanders from room to room, analyzing Clarence’s art.  I’ve seen Clarence’s art many times and I wonder when he’s going to paint something new.  Everything is in the seventies style, bold geometric color-blocked patterns with numbers painted on them or vague amoebic shapes.  

After sticking the chicken in the neck with a very sharpened and pointed butcher knife—stick it clean through so it really bleeds out—let the blood, all of it, run out on the ground or in a plastic bucket.  If the sticking’s not done properly, the chickens will flap and make the blood splatter red on each others’ white wings.  When the chicken’s eyes are half-closed and frozen, it is dead.  You will probably stick a half-dozen chickens at once, so take them two or three at a time to the cleaning shed.  There, a man will dip them in a metal tub of boiling hot water.  The smell of wet hot feathers is like your dog’s hide after swimming in the bay.  After he dips them, holding them for thirty seconds or a minute to soften them, he will hold their bodies on a plucking machine.  This is metal contraption that has rubber tipped knobs on a rotating drum.  He will put the ones that aren’t rotating on the drum on a plastic covered table.

Robin’s girlfriend comes over to me after a half an hour of our second round of conciliatory talk.  She inserts herself between us but we keep on talking.  I had asked him, “What are you reading?”  We are talking about a book now, an author we both read a long time ago.  Anya Seton’s historical romances.  It is so strange that he read these books by this author.  Her books are books of unrequited love and intense longing.  Women’s novels I read as an adolescent. 

But he says, “They have so much history in them.”  He minored in Medieval Literature in college.  “Went to England for a year,” he says, “A long time ago.”  “Excuse me,” he says.  He has to go to the bathroom.

After the plucker has torn the wet feathers from the bird’s body (Some men like to leave the head on the chicken during this part of the process to be able to hold the chicken in a horizontal fashion.  Others chop the bird’s head off, holding it by the legs and bouncing it vertically off the rubber knobs.), he will singe the smaller pinfeathers off quickly with a torch.  Sometimes a little surface of the flesh gets burnt.  It turns an ashy black.  This is solved by razoring the skin with a butcher knife, but the best men know how to singe pinfeathers without harming the flesh.

Next the man usually hands the chicken to two or three gutters waiting there.  What they do is cut the chicken a new asshole, reach in, grip out all the guts.  This includes hearts and livers and gizzards.  There is also a small blue pouch to watch out for because it is filled with an inky substance that smells chemical.  This pouch has to get broken and thrown away—if animals eat it, they get ink stain on their faces, snouts.  The gutter places the hearts in one bucket, the livers in another, and the gizzards, which need additional cleaning, go in another bucket.

When Robin goes to the bathroom, his girlfriend suddenly grips my arm fiercely.  “I need to tell you something,” she says.  Her nails bite into my flesh.  “The last time you were at Clarence’s party, you sat by Robin all evening.  I think you owe me an apology.”

I snatch my arm away from her.

Gizzards are interesting.  They are purple and blue and have clumps of yellow fat clinging to them.  They are shaped like a round fat clamshell and are smaller than a human’s heart, but larger than a clamshell.  To clean these you must cut along the hard ridge of tissue and push the opening inside out.  A crumbly, wet, yellow and brown mixture that is gritty like sand and pebbles comes out and it smells like warm wet chicken feed.  Rinse the gizzard out with hose water.  Then you will see the clean ridges of muscle on the inside of the gizzard. 

“You touched his arm,” she said.  She was following me around Clarence’s apartment.  Reaching out for my arm again. 

“Ouch,” I said.  She scratched me with her old lady’s hand. 

“I didn’t mean to do that,” she declared. I kept moving.  “You know my history with Robin,” she said.

It’s true.  I do know that Robin has had several long-term affairs with other women.  I only know this because Clarence warned me and also because, once, Robin’s woman friend, this woman, befriended me for a minute and told me about one of the affairs.  This was the first time I met her.  I didn’t know she was with him when she told me.  I thought she was just gossiping.  I couldn’t remember her name from party to party or her whole story.  I do remember she was talking about having her Tarot cards read and she believed in that.  

“Robin almost left me again last year,” she says.

“I am not attracted to Robin,” I tell her, yanking my whole body away from her presence.  I zone into the kitchen looking for Clarence.

After you rinse the gizzard, toss it in a clean bucket full of icy water.  There are as many gizzards as there are chickens.  Gizzard meat is chewy and hardy.  The liver has its special tang and the heart is a nugget that gets eaten in a second.

She grabs my arm again and squeezes it like she is going to twist it off.  “Stay away from him,” she hisses at me just as Robin returns.

Really, all there is left to do is cut the chicken up into parts for special orders.  Some people will pay a dollar more a pound for this.  Cut the wing off at the joint where it adheres to the body.  Cut the thigh at this point, too, then disconnect the drumstick.  A joint is curved, so push down sharp and abrupt with the knife, but try to joggle it a little in the middle, so it slips right over the bone.  If your chicken is fat and happy, people will want the breast halved.  To separate the breast from the back, cut the ribs on the sides of the body, then push the breast through away from the back until it breaks away. 

This is the pain in the breast and the back—this is where the body holds it.

She says to me like it is my fault, stay away from him.  I try to explain to her, I was telling him about cleaning chickens.  That’s not attractive. 

It doesn’t matter.  She has the look of a crazy woman.  So I keep moving away from her. 

Crack the breast in half with a direct push from a thick butcher knife vertically down the center of it.  Then finish quickly and sharply. 

            Then what?

            Little things.   Cut the back in half, a horizontal curve above the wishbone.  Be careful with the wishbone, not to break it.  Children love the wishbone.  The meat here is very tender, too.  Leave the lungs inside the back.  Some people like to eat those after they’re fried, actually probably mistaking them for meat.  Cut the neck off.  Many people boil the neck for stock while others fry it and like to gnaw on it.   Put it in the stuff sack with one gizzard, one liver, and one heart.  The chickens will not get back their own hearts and innards.  They will get one of each from whichever one the hand grabs first. 

            She clutches at my arm, grabs it, grips it.  Stay away, she hisses, but he has already been hooked with my knowledge of gizzards. 

“I like meat,” I say to him. “I think that there were many more cannibals in American history than just the Donner party.  They were just stupid enough to admit that’s how they survived.”

            There is nothing she can do to prevent it.  Besides, she is a vegetarian.