The Bird Market of Paris (13 page)

Did I have possession of the last red-whiskered bulbul in South Florida? Did fate somehow put us together: this rare bird and a bird girl? I had to find a way to save him—I would have tried regardless of his species, but now it was critical. I borrowed a phone book and called a wildlife center, but they were filled to the rafters with orphans after the storm, so they gave me the name of someone who handled wild birds, who gave me the name of someone else.

Finally, a sympathetic wildlife rehabilitator agreed to take him. The lady wasn't going to be home when my mom and I dropped off the bulbul, so I put him in a carrier and set him on her doorstep. I called her to ensure that she had found him, and she said he was fine and eating a lot of fruit. He was a little dehydrated and seemed to have a lame foot, but he was hungry and perking up, and was going to be OK.

I didn't call the lady again. I hoped she released the bulbul so he could find another surviving member of his species and start the rare colony again. Since bulbuls weren't native, she wasn't required to release him. Maybe he never flew free again. Birders say there's still a population of red-whiskered bulbuls in South Florida, in the same area where Matt found that little guy. Maybe that bird helped to rebuild the foundation of his species in the one small area in North America they called home.

 

Chapter 11

After Hurricane Andrew my material possessions consisted of a beat-up gray Oldsmobile Cutlass Calais; one boom box radio; two changes of clothing; a pair of cheap silver heart-shaped earrings; Bonk's first egg; my blue security blanket, BaaBaa; and the globe Nona and Poppy had given me when I was nine. With a little FEMA relief money, we bought beds and linens, a dinner table, and some silverware. Friends in Broward County gave us clothing and shoes.

I'd lost the encyclopedia set Poppy had bought me as a kid; I'd lost love letters from various boyfriends and crushes over the years; I lost my baby pictures and the blonde curl from my first haircut; I lost my record album collection; I lost three gold rings Nona had given me, and my prom dress, my high school yearbooks, and a black duck stuffed animal Poppy had bought me when I was five. It was missing a flower on its head, and I had insisted he buy it for me out of fear that if I didn't take her home, no one else would.

I learned that stuff is just stuff. But the birds weren't just stuff.

Losses from the hurricane devastated Poppy, too. Looters had stolen his locked safe before we reached the house, and he had kept his most prized possessions there, a treasure trove amassed throughout a lifetime of traveling: gold coins, old foreign money, photos, and other irreplaceable keepsakes, including Nona's wedding ring, the one she had fought to keep when fleeing Egypt.

My parents, Poppy, and I moved into a sunny three-bedroom rental house in north Fort Lauderdale, ten minutes from the beach. Our new home had a screened-in patio with limestone floors and sliding glass doors surrounding a kidney-shaped heated pool on three sides.

I started my flock again with lovebirds, pairing my current birds with new mates. While we were separated, Bonk had married a cute little blue-pied lovebird named Sweetie who had also lost his mate in the hurricane. Sweetie was one of my favorites, a precious guy who hadn't been hand-fed, but allowed me to hold him. Bonk and Sweetie settled in by going to nest and tending to eggs.

Each new bird or clutch of babies fledging from the nest made me feel a little high. The world dropped away, and I was washed holy: Saint Francis in short-shorts. I had to be above reproach in everything I did, to ensure my animals were the best cared for animals in the world. I had failed during the hurricane, and I wouldn't allow that to happen again.

Bonk's babies with Sweetie were unlike her babies with Binky, which had been carbon copies of her: green, with a peach face and cobalt rump. Sweetie had something spectacular buried in his genetics that mingled well with Bonk's genes, because their babies emerged in a palette of lovebird mutations: silvers and cinnamons, cinnamon pieds, blue pieds, jade pieds, and seagreens. I often wondered if Bonk might have been “cheating” on Sweetie in the new aviary I built, which housed all my remaining lovebirds. Whatever the case, whenever I heard her hatchlings cry for attention, I couldn't wait to spy into the nest box and see what miracles Bonk had created.

I accrued not only dozens more lovebirds, but also noisy sun conures, nanday conures, mitred conures, and jenday conures—South American birds three times the size of the lovebirds, and far more raucous. I acquired red lorikeets and Australian cockatiels in a medley of mutations;
Brotogeris
canary-winged parakeets; Indian ringnecks; budgies, finches, and canaries;
Poicephalus
parrots; two more red-lored Amazons, one as a mate for Miami-Bird; diamond doves and button quail; clamorous Quaker parrots and Hahn's mini macaws; and a
Chapmani
mealy Amazon named Sam someone had given me, an endangered species and the biggest—and fattest—Amazon parrot I'd ever seen.

I'd catch Poppy spooning baked ziti into Sam's insatiable maw, or my dad handing him almond after almond. If we didn't “invite” Sam to have dinner with us, he'd scream until one of us ferried him to his spot at the table. He loved lasagna and pasta—anything with red meat sauce—the food falling from his bottom beak as he ate; he'd just dip his head back into his plate and shovel it all back in. The corners of his beak were often stained pink, and he had garlic breath. He loved vanilla ice cream cones, too, and consumed foods I'd never give my other birds—Sam ate like a person and demanded to be treated like one. My mom spent hours bribing Sam with grapes to say “I love you,” which he learned to say on cue.

Most of my birds came to me as unwanted pets that needed new homes, gifts from friends at the bird clubs, or trades I made using my baby lovebirds. I acquired birds in a frenzy, not thinking, moving on autopilot to reharmonize my shattered avian world.

These weren't the only birds in my life—every dusk, a flock of dozens of feral nanday conures landed on the screened patio to talk to my nanday conures, screeching and shrieking. Sometimes, a wave of Quaker parrots arrived at dusk, too, and pushed my birds into an uproar of squawking and screaming that continued until the sun succumbed to the stars. My dad complained about the nightly ruckus, so I conducted a “parrot non grata” patio watch in the evenings, shooing the wild birds back into the trees with a broom.

My daily tasks were performed by rote, caring for the birds and continuing college classes; but at night, when the world quieted, my thoughts abused me in a voice I didn't recognize.
You killed the birds
, it said.
You killed the birds
. I couldn't argue with it and I couldn't shut it up.
You killed the birds
. I couldn't shake the images of their wet, drowned bodies, imagining the surge overtaking their cages, and their first—and last—breath of water, suffocating them as they panicked, clinging to the last pocket of air as their cages sank beneath the surface. I'd come home from class and curl in a ball on the floor, drinking cheap port wine, rocking and apologizing to the dead birds over and over until I passed out. Often, I'd crawl into my closet and close the door, curl as small as I could in the corner, knees to chin, and drink from the bottle until the bad thoughts ceased. Sometimes I woke up there.

Our rented Fort Lauderdale house was three blocks from Baja Beach Club, thirty thousand square feet of wall-to-wall toned and tanned flesh and tequila shots. I hadn't been to many nightclubs before, having spent most of my twenty-first year preoccupied with birds. The club represented a new world for me.

Fort Lauderdale sweltered, but one foot inside Baja's double doors and the chill prickled the hair on my arms. The club smelled like suntan oil, liquor, and oranges. The gym-bodied male bartenders wore only tight black shorts, and had their names written on their naked pecs in black Magic Marker. The female bartenders wore bikini tops and short-shorts, and girls in G-string bikinis sat in front of aluminum horse troughs filled with ice and beer, selling brews and multicolored liquor shots in test tubes.

All of the bartenders wore whistles around their necks, and tossed handfuls of napkins into the air when someone ordered a “body shot,” which meant that a patron was allowed to lick salt from the chest of a male or female bartender, have the bartender pour tequila down his or her throat straight from the bottle, and take a lemon from the bartender's mouth. Every now and then, a siren sounded and a bartender stood on the bar to aim a toilet paper machine gun at the crowd. In the bathroom, girls vomited and snorted cocaine off toilet seats before boogying back to the dance floor.

I hid among the chaos and danced drink in hand on top of the huge elevated speakers, wanting nothing more than numbness among the excess. If I danced alone on the dance floor, within minutes I'd have a guy grinding behind me and a guy grinding in front; when I danced on the speaker, the guys watched me but left me alone.

Scantily clad ladies didn't have to wait in line, and a sixteen-dollar Cherry Bomb was equal to five drinks, because it came in a large plastic beach bucket. Tuesday at Baja brought two-for-one drink specials, and Thursday was ladies' night—girls drink free until midnight. I'd stop drinking at about three so I'd be slightly less drunk for the three-block drive home at four a.m. After a while I realized I could drink until closing if I stumbled home on foot, so I'd either walk to the club or ditch my car in the parking lot and pick it up the next afternoon.

Despite the almost daily drinking, I could still wake up and tend to the birds, commute to college over an hour each way, and write papers on Shakespeare's tragedies or Robert Frost's early works. Keeping all those birds and drinking the way I did was expensive, so I took a part-time job in a pet store at the mall underneath the Baja Beach Club, working the register and selling pet supplies and animals.

The job was dangerous because I brought loads of animals home, all sorts of unwanted pets people brought into the store—a giant white rabbit named Hoppy that I found in the back room in a trash can, several turtles, and a one-eyed hamster named Euripides who had a giant wound on his head that cost me fifty dollars at the veterinarian's office. This was in the first couple weeks.

No matter where I traveled or for what reason, if I saw a bird store I had to pull over. On one stop in Miami's Little Havana neighborhood, I walked into the bird store to find a large fish tank full of fluffy yellow chicks among the usual finches, canaries, and parakeets. I stuck my hand into the middle of the tank and caressed the hatchlings, their warm, fuzzy bodies wandering over my palm like silk. One of the chicks stood taller than the others by more than a head. I watched him for a while as he milled around with the others, pecking at the cracked corn in the feed dish.

“How much are these?” I asked the clerk. He looked at me and blinked. “
Cuánto es?
” I tried.

“
Dos dollars
,” he said, holding up two fingers.

Two bucks, and the big chick was mine. The man plopped him into a brown paper lunch sack, stapled it at the top, and handed him to me. He peeped inside of the sack the entire way home.

I placed him with Hoppy the rabbit in a large cage, which looked more like a giant dollhouse painted orange and pink. I knew they'd be fine together. When Poppy came home from the racetrack I showed off my new chicken, rubbing the bird on my cheek as Poppy reached to pull my hands away from my face.

“That's not a chicken,” Poppy said, unconcerned that I was now bringing home barnyard animals.

“How is he not a chicken?”

“That is a turkey,
Chérie
. You see this?” He touched the fleshy tab growing at the top base of the bird's beak. “Turkeys have this, not chickens. What are you going to do with a turkey? Is he for Thanksgiving?”

I clutched the fluffy bird to my chest, now noticing the growth near his beak. “No, come on,” I said.

“You are now the proud mother of a turkey,
Chérie
. Congratulations.”

Tom the turkey grew fast, and ran around the house after me with twice the devotion of a golden retriever puppy. White feathers emerged from his fluffy body when he became a gangly teenager. I allowed Hoppy the rabbit to bound around the house, too. He stood on two feet against the kitchen counter as my mom made salad in the evenings and gave him vegetable trimmings.

On a routine trip to Dr. Z's office, I mentioned that I had an adolescent turkey in the house.

“You have a
what
?” she exclaimed, turning to me, a pen dangling from her fingers.

“A turkey,” I said.

“Absolutely not. You can't keep fowl and parrots together. The diseases are crazy. I swear if you don't get rid of that turkey, I won't treat another one of your parrots, ever. Get it out.”

“Are you serious?”

“No turkeys.”

I left her office dejected, but Dr. Z's word was avian gospel to me: I'd have to rehome Tom. I called a few petting zoos and found one that would take him. The lady seemed experienced with birds, and placed him in a big cage with an adolescent duck. At least he'd have a bird friend.

Despite Tom's departure, our house remained a menagerie as I kept collecting. I grew mealworms in the kitchen pantry so I could feed them to some of the birds who needed insects. When the mealworms matured from the larval stage, they turned into big black beetles. I spent at least three hours a day tending to the pets, and Poppy and I fell into an unspoken routine of cleaning and feeding.

One day, Poppy pulled me aside on the patio as I hosed down the bottom of the birdcages.

“Nicole, I need to talk to you,” he said. We sat down on two floral patio chairs. “I do not sleep at night when you are out. Can you please come in earlier? I worry so much for you. There are hunters out there.”