Taking out my trash this afternoon, I came upon Rodolfo, the building’s super, sitting out back on the patio with two roosters. A friendly fellow with a shaved head and omnipresent cigar, Rodolfo explained that he ran into some friends in the park who asked if he wanted the roosters and he thought, why not. So now they bunk in the building’s basement adjoining his apartment. He feeds them corn and sometimes bread, lets them roam around in the garden, and hoses them down when it’s hot and sunny like today.
The young one is two months old and spends most of his time flopped on the ground, as if still exhausted from the rigors of birth. But when I tried to pick him up, he came alive and darted around in annoyance, then stood just out of reach to bob his head and train a beady eye on me to gauge the possibility of further encroachment.
The older one is six months old and already the archetype rooster, with regal red comb, a frisson of earth-tone feathers covering his neck, wings and bulbous body, and sticklike yellow legs ending in feet with curiously elastic toes. He seems to spend most of his time preening and investigating bits of gravel and cigarette butts as potential food sources.
I asked Rodolfo, who’s from the Dominican Republic and whose English isn’t great but a dictionary better than my Spanish, if the older rooster was crowing yet. He didn’t understand my verb, so I said, “Is he, you know—cock-a-doodle-doo!”
Rodolfo laughed and said not yet, confirming that the onomatopoeia is different in Spanish: “In my country, every day at 5 a.m., quiquiriquí!”
Saturday, September 29, 2007 Update: I heard a rooster crow for the first time today. It happened at 11 a.m. Let’s hope it stays that way.