Cluck Cluck

It what ways has your life remained normal? It is easy to focus on how coronavirus has changed us what with masks at the supermarket and empty stands at baseball games but there have to be sections of our existence that the virus can't touch, right? 

It occurs to me that the pandemic that has kept Liz and I home from work for the better part of a year, has cancelled trips and restricted access to the ones we love has had absolutely no affect on how often we go to Raising Cane's, the chicken finger fast food restaurant that, because of its proximity to the grocery store, has become a staple whenever we get groceries. I almost dread telling you this but we have eaten at Raising Canes every week in 2020 except for the week Effie was born. Besides being convenient when we're out of groceries, the restaurant offers a menu that can satisfy a family of two adults and a toddler. All they sell is chicken fingers. You can get them in baskets of three pieces, four pieces or six pieces. If you want a sandwich, they put three chicken fingers between bread. There is literally five things on the menu—chicken fingers, fries, this sauce which is insanely good, Texas toast and coleslaw—and each meal creates some combination of those five. It's also the reason that the drive-thru line goes incredibly fast, completing your order is simply a matter of putting the right number of those five things in a box. 

The company is based out of Louisiana and was founded in the mid-1990s. The founders raised money for the restaurant by fishing for sockeye salmon in Alaska and was going to originally call the place "Sockeye's Chicken Fingers," which would have been thoroughly confusing both for confusing fish and chicken and because of the proximity to Popeye's Chicken (itself named, inexplicably, after Popeye Doyle, Gene Hackman's character in The French Connection [by the way, the rooster on the Corn Flakes box is named Cornelius]). After listening to their wives, Raising Cane's' founders wisely agreed to name the restaurant after one of their dogs, who is prominently featured in their marketing and decor. There is also a disco ball in each restaurant for reasons I can't explain and the fact that neither can reddit leads me to believe that there is no explanation. 

The chain spent most of its existence in the South where it is based but is apparently one of the fastest growing fast food chains in the country and Des Moines now has two locations (but no Steak 'n Shake, which is a tragedy beyond words). I first had it about 10 years ago, in Waco, Texas, at the behest of my friend Clayton O'Toole, who went to the University of Virginia where Cane's is a favorite. Clayton told me that a nutritionist friend of his explained that the healthiness of a meal can be measured by how colorful the food on your plate is. Meals from Raising Cane's come only in different shades of brown. Even the coleslaw is a little muted, as if being around the other fried stuff is rubbing off on it. If you are foolish enough to forsake the Cane's sauce for ketchup, the splash of red on your plate has the effect of Dorothy's trip to Oz. 

I should hasten to mention that the fact that we have had Raising Cane's some 30 times this year overstates how much we enjoy it. Truth be told, I'm more partial to Popeye's. I find chicken fingers to be a little childish (which is why Rocky loves them) and prefer a fully boned piece of bird, plus biscuits. When I was a kid and we would take summer trips to North Carolina through the Smokey Mountains, I would stump for Bojangles, which is still a fine place to eat chicken. Zaxby's, which must watch Cane's' success with envy seeing as they very much occupy the same space, focuses too on chicken fingers though their sauce is more bitter. I've never been under the spell of Chik-fil-A and its been years since I've been to a Kentucky Fried Chicken and you won't get a complaint out of me if I never go again. Raising Cane's, though, has risen to the top of the list as far as frequency goes out of a weird confluence of convenience and the need for routine. It's nice to have things to count on in this time. I have no control over how many new cases will be found in a given day, how many of my friends will lose their jobs or deepen their struggles, how many people will be stuffed in unmarked vans by federal agents but I can control pulling into the drive-thru line and have a bored teenager rotely recite "Hey-o, hey-o, want some chicken to go?" It doesn't feel good as hugging people or going to the movies, but it's nice. 

There is a chicken in Des Moines that I would like to get my hands on, however. A rooster has moved in to one of my neighbor's properties and its crowing can be heard throughout the day. This is, I believe, illegal but I can't imagine that city limit rooster removal is a priority for the police department at the moment. I love Des Moines but can be insecure about its reputation as a city in the cornfields where people ride cows to work. We had friends from Chicago over a few weeks ago and presenting the city as an urbane cosmopolis proved difficult when a fucking rooster could be heard from our back porch. My guess is that the neighbor bought a bunch of yardbird chicks and didn't realize until maturity that one of them was a male. The irony about cocks is that they don't actually have them, which makes identifying a male bird quite difficult (in fact, the male of 97% of bird species are dickless, which is why I guess they poop on you from such far distances, the cowards). 

Chickens are rare amongst animal species in that they can see red. In fact, they are enraged by it. If a chicken on a farm starts bleeding, its roommates will peck at it incessantly, starting a feathered frenzy if left unchecked. Red-tinted cock contacts were developed so that chickens would see nothing but that color and therefore not distinguish the real thing but putting them in was a chore inconsistent with the benefits or, in the parlance of the day, the cure was worse than the disease. Dogs are not fully colorblind but they can't distinguish between green and red, which is dicey for guide dogs who must help the blind cross the street. They listen to the sound of traffic to distinguish when it is safe to cross, the clever devils. Bulls, which cartoons tell us hate red, are actually drawn to the movement of the toreador's cape which could be any color. Even the phrase "seeing red" is not derived from the anger of a bull but from the crimson hue that tinging our vision when something makes us angry like, say, when a rooster invades your neighborhood. 

So while it seems that COVID has upended everything, life indeed goes on. If you ever think that the pandemic has you running around like a chicken with its head cut off, know that that activity can be sustained for quite awhile, about two years, actually. In Colorado, a farmer beheaded a chicken in such a way that while it removed the bird's noodle, there was enough jugular and brain stem left to keep it alive indefinitely if it were fed and watered using an eyedropper. The animal, who toured the West under the stage name of "Mike the Headless Wonder Chicken," gained six pounds despite not having a head, making the equivalent of $10,000 a month. And it wasn't even the ax blow that eventually killed him, he choked to death at the hands of an inattentive feeder. An associate said "He was a big fat chicken who didn't know he didn't have a head," we can all hope to be so accurately and succinctly summed up. For the last 30 years, the city where Mike was beheaded but not killed has held a "Mike the Headless Chicken Day," attended by thousands, it was cancelled this year because of COVID. Perhaps the disease gets to everything after all.