Calvin Trillin - The Chicken Vanishes

 

 

l live in Greenwich Village, which I usually describe as a neighborhood where people from the suburbs come on Saturday night to test their car alarms. [audience laughter] Some years ago, I fell into the habit of taking out of town guests for a walk in Lower Manhattan, which started out at my house, go through the Italian South Village, through Soho, spend an awkward two or three blocks in the machine tool district, [audience laughter] then Little Italy, and then Chinatown, where after a dim sum lunch, the guest was permitted to play tic-tac-toe with a chicken. [audience laughter] 

 

This was a real chicken in an amusement arcade on Mott Street, lived in a glass cage. The glass cage was outfitted with those backlit letters that you're familiar with, if you wasted your childhood playing pinball. On the cage were words like bird's turn, your turn. [audience laughter] And there were buttons you could push to put your x’s where you wanted them. When you did that, the chicken would go behind what was called the thinkin booth. [audience laughter] And Peck gets answers. 

 

And if you beat the chicken, got a large bag of fortune cookies worth probably 35 cents or 40 cents. [audience laughter] And it only cost 50 cents to play. [audience laughter] But the chicken was very good at tic-tac-toe. [audience laughter] Everybody, I took down there looked over the situation and said the same thing. The chicken gets to go first. [audience laughter] And I would say, “But he's a chicken. [audience laughter] You're a human being. [audience laughter] Surely, there should be some advantage to that.” And then many of them, not all of them, but a distressingly high number of them would say, “The chicken plays every day. [audience laughter] I haven't played since I was a kid.” 

 

They were wise to get their excuses in at the beginning of the game, because none of them ever beat the chicken. [audience laughter] Chicken was very good at tic-tac-toe. There were different explanations to explain why this was true. Some people thought a computer was involved. Some people thought it was a very intelligent chicken. [audience laughter] In my house, it was common to refer to somebody we'd met who seemed particularly clever by saying, “She's smart as a Chinatown chicken.” [audience laughter] 

 

Even before I started taking people down there, the writer Roy Blount Jr. told me that from what he had heard once, the chicken had been trained by former graduate students of B.F. Skinner, [audience laughter] the legendary behavioral psychologist. I always hoped this was true, since it was a refutation of the false teaching that gradual work is of no value in the everyday world. [audience laughter]

 

It turns out that Roy had been accurately informed. A former graduate student of B.F. Skinner had gone with her husband to Hot Springs, Arkansas, and started training animals, including chickens who could play tic-tac-toe. In fact, it turned Hot Springs, Arkansas, into the small animal training capital of the world. [audience laughter] It also happens to be Bill Clinton's hometown. [audience laughter] As far as I know, those facts are unrelated. [audience laughter] But there is a cottage industry of animal training in Hot Springs. 

 

I once interviewed a man who ran a place called Educated Animals, the former IQ Zoo. He had a Vietnamese pig who drove a Cadillac, [audience laughter] a parrot who roller skated and an act that consisted of a chicken dancing while a rabbit played the piano and a duck played the guitar. [audience laughter] I said, “What tune do they play?” [audience laughter] He said, “Their choice.” [audience laughter]

 

And then, the chicken died. I was, of course, heartbroken. I was cheered by the story about it in the New York Times, which was a beautiful story. Obviously, somebody who had played the chicken many times [audience laughter] had respect for an opponent even after being beaten by the chicken that many times. I've seen congressmen set off with less effusive obituaries. [audience laughter] 

 

There were still people in Hot Springs, Arkansas, who trained chickens, but the chicken was not replaced. Another one of those electronic games came in its place. From what I heard, the animal people had put some pressure on the arcade not to have the chicken. And they can be quite persistent. I once wrote a column about something I had heard on CBC in Canada, that a hummingbird weighs as much as a quarter. That's an interesting fact. 

 

What made me think was, does it weigh as much as two dimes and a nickel? [audience laughter] But my daughters were alarmed by how you'd go about weighing a hummingbird, because they always seemed to be in motion. And to set their minds at rest, I said, “We've all seen those nature documentaries where somebody shoots a stun dart into a wildebeest. And after putting some tracer on, it wakes up and it's good as new, you do the same thing with hummingbirds.” [audience laughter] The hard part isn't even hitting them with that little bitty dark. The hard part is slapping them on the cheeks to bring them around. [audience laughter] The animal people objected to that.

 

Once I happen to mention in a column that corgis are a breed of dog that appear to have been assembled from parts of other breeds of dogs, [audience laughter] and not the parts those dogs were all that sorry about losing. [audience laughter] You'd be surprised how many corgi owners there are. [audience laughter] Well, my hopes for the replacement of the chicken were dashed when it was obvious that the animal people were not going to give up. They said that a chicken playing tic-tac-toe, that was demeaning to a chicken. [audience laughter] 

 

I wish they could have seen the film clip that I've seen of B.F. Skinner himself playing tic-tac-toe with the chicken. B.F. Skinner is smiling, but if you look closely, it's a nervous smile. [audience laughter] Being one of the giants of behavioral psychology, he knows how good that chicken is in tic-tac-toe. The chicken is looking supremely confident. He knows he is about to beat in tic-tac-toe, a distinguished professor of psychology from Harvard. Demeaning [audience laughter] that chicken is stinky with self-esteem. Thank you.