Pushbroom Heroics & The Giggling Malignancy

“And the morning dove gets caught In the telephone wire.” –Thursday

Sometimes in these topsy turvy times you encounter a story where the cop is the hero, not because he ‘does his duty,’ but because he rises above the artificial separation of station created by the badge and does the actual right thing.

This is not one of those stories.

I was outside walking in circles, a common enough avocation in the state pen since ‘around the track’ is the only place you can really walk, when I saw people looking up and pointing.

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s – yeah, the first one. A seagull, to be precise, and has there ever existed a more loathsome avian breed? Just as we bluē-clad human blanks are scum of the Earth, seagulls are scum of the sky, as universally hated as any creature inside these walls could be.

I’ve seen a lot of horrible things done to human beings in prīson by other human beings, but I’ve also seen a lot of horrible things done to birds – specifically seagulls. When you spend enough time under the gun you learn to harden your heart (or, like many of us, you join the party so broken it hardened itself long before some laundry clerk handed you your first fish kit.)

Hard heart or not, when I saw the seagull that stopped foot traffic I cringed – stuck in the razor wire above the canteen, someone beside me described it as ‘crucified.’ The yard bird got away from the quick end promised by the chasing hawk only to meet a slow institutional death instead; the yard bird became LWOP bird.

‘Is it dead?’

It looked dead. At first I thought it might not even be real, a life-like paper maché hobby project tossed up into the wire like a middle finger to the man, an existential statement of the voiceless, a Halloween decoration of questionable taste.

Then it slowly turned its head to look behind it at the gawkers and mockers – about a dozen convicts and one sociopath. I could sense it consigning itself to its grisly fate; ‘well, these jerkoffs aren’t going to help me, thank you and goodnight.’ As the pit in my stomach grew, realizing this bird was going to die in front of us with not a damn thing we could do about it, the solitary yard officer wandered closer to appraise the situation. He looked at us, looked at the bird splayed in the wire, looked back at us... then he started to laugh.

So much for the one person who might have been able to help. The seagull may well have been Nostradamus.

But really, only a fool would expect the cop to help. The cons ignored him, conferring amongst themselves. The guy next to me kept telling me I should climb up and pull it off since anywhere I go I’m the second or third tallest person on the yard but scaling a ten foot cinderblock wall is the province of American Ninja Warriors, not lanky nerds in cat ears beanies.

To be real my best idea was to break its neck and put it out of its misery, but maybe I’m not always the best at being an optimist. Luckily more hopeful heads prevailed.

While the only one among us who could have got on his radio to Vector Control and summoned the person whose job it is to deal with birds and animals on the prīson grounds just kept giggling away, the rec box worker took the lead on the rescue attempt. He and his buddies ran off, returning with a wooden box the size of a tipped over fridge on wheels full of horseshoes and basketballs.

The one person present deranged enough to find the seagull’s plight hilarious radioed nobody, but he didn’t impede Rec Box Guy from wheeling the box beside the wall (not an exterior one; there’s razor wire on top of every building here, even the ones that would serve no purpose whatsoever to surmount). The giggler and the rest of us watched as Rec Box Guy stood atop the box with a long-handled broom and tried to lift the seagull off the wire.

Since razor wire is designed so that anything with skin gets hopelessly stuck in it, this worked about as well as you’d expect. The seagull screeched, writhed, flailed, shredded itself worse, and did not win free. Backseat drivers editorialized, naysayers did what they did best, and the giggling malignancy flashed the most fantastically whīte smile I’d ever seen as he yukked it up.

Another guy jumped up on the box with a second pushbroom. Together they tried to raise the seagull off the wire. The gull’s legs kicked and its right wing bent in ways I couldn’t imagine fragile bird bones bending without breaking to bits. Those stunning pearly whītes made an encore appearance as the agent of the state tasked with maintaining law and order inside the forlorn walls and upholding the DOC’s mission statement of rehabilitation broke into a fresh fit of chuckles.

Then, like almost nothing I’ve seen in 18 years of purgatory: against all odds, the pushbrooms and the flapping wings worked in concert for one perfect moment. The seagull flailed free of the wire, one foot mangled but head held high. It glided down to the ground and warded off everyone around with a wary stare – especially the giggler.

After catching its breath, it took off. It flew only a short ways, then came to rest again. It did this several times, never getting more than a few feet off the ground. People started speculating that the seagull wasn’t going to get away from the hawk that chased it into the wire after all – the hawk still circling overhead.

‘At least he’ll die free,’ I said.

The sentiment echoed. That’s the lifer’s dream. I’ve known lots of guys who spent decades inside and got out just to die within days – somehow it’s ten times less tragic than croaking with your blues on.

But the yard bird kept flying. We watched it sail around the yard, making circles of its own. It flapped those wings, miraculously unbroken despite the manhandling, and on the third round it caught an updraft and soared just high enough for that mangled foot to clear the gunrails atop one of the housing units.

The seagull flew to the freedom waiting in the greyness of the fogbank just beyond the walls, safe from even hawk eyes – an LWOP bird no longer.

–ronin.