Little Joe O'Connor and Machismo

On last Sunday while BBQing with Al we were told a story, a fantastic story about a women and her chicken. Well Al and I could not believe our ears there is someone in Chicago who has an actual live chicken running around in her house. Obviously we were beyond intrigued and needed to know more. Who, what, where, when, how, why? So many questions and... Kind of a lot of time. After our curiosity was somewhat quelled we went on to dreaming, what would it be like to have a chicken or what if there were other animals we could get, a goat, ducks, sheep, little pigs... We could start a petting zoo in Bucktown, charge a dollar and then let people feed the animals. Man our minds were racing a mile a minute. We knew that we were in over our heads but you could no longer stop the train of ideas that had begun. Eventually we calmed down, a few people had come over by this time so we had to concentrate on cooking food.

When the food was all gone and people were inside watching the NCAA tourney we had our opportunity and slipped away from the party to see if we could verify the legend of the woman and her chicken. We ended up on Chicago and Paulina, Al, Tina and I were walking in a somewhat crowded Mexican neighborhood when I spotted it from across the street, the chicken store. I took off running through traffic to a dirty storefront that had a giant yellow awning with green writing that simply said Pollos.

When inside I had to hold back the vomit that was trying to come up because of the putrid smell of chickens and probably death. The store looked as though it at one point was a deli and had the glass windowed counters where you would pick your meats, but instead there was nothing in any of it. The whole Store was empty until I noticed the back room. There was a door to the back with two men standing in front of it. A little old lady was talking to them and through the door you could see small cages all up and down and around the walls filled with live chickens clucking and rustling around. "Tres pollos" the lady asked the man and he went into the back room grabbed three chickens by their necks brought them out to a scale right near the door weighed them and then took them into the back. Don't know and don't want to know what happened next, but I am sure you can guess. I now wanted to get the hell out of here, but first I had to ask. "How much for a chicken?" He went into the back grabbed a chicken by its neck threw it on the scale and said $5.90. Holy crap a whole chicken for 6 bucks. I had to do it. I paid the man and as he went back to grab it I said, " I'll take it. Alive" The man looked at me as though I was completely insane, (even though he kills chickens all day long) and said, "what?" I said, "I will take it alive" and so reluctantly he put the chicken in a corona box and handed it to me. So, I walked out of the store onto a busy street in the middle of Chicago with a live chicken in a corona box.

Tina, the one who told us the story of the woman and the chicken in the beginning, called her friend and told her of what we just did and she told us to come by and we could have her chicken, she did not want it anymore. So of course we did. We now had two chickens and then decided to name them...Little Joe O'Connor and Machismo.

They now live underneath my stoop in a make shift chicken coop and are doing quite well and definitely doing better then if they stayed in that store.