Sing a song of sixpence,
A pocket full of rye
Four and twenty blackbirds,
Baked in a pie.
When the pie was opened,
The birds began to sing.
Now wasn't that a dainty dish
To set before the king?
Andy couldn't eat one more pigeon.
He sat at a small metal table in a small, humid basement that smelled of sweat and cigarettes, lit only by a couple of naked lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling. His camp mates were easy to spot in the crowd- they were simultaneously the largest and the youngest people in the room, and they looked right at home among the animated Latinos, leathery-skinned Asian men, and world-weary white men loudly exchanging bets. There, in the basement of their dormitory building, with the counselors asleep, Andy and his friends were a world away from the personally-empowering, exclusive weight loss summer camp in beautiful La Jolla, California their parents had signed them up for.
The gamblers laughed at Andy's first tearful attempts to dispatch the pigeons.
"He cry! He cry!"
The tears hadn't dried off his face when he discovered an efficient way to twist off the pigeon's head with his sausage-like, but deft fingers.
"¡Vamos, gordo!"
Snap! Squirt! Rip! Rip! Glug glug glug!
"You can do it, Andy!"
One, then two, then, fifteen pigeons disappeared in Andy's cavernous mouth. Andy had found his zone.
Granted, he wouldn't have minded it if all 24 of the pigeons had been slaughtered first, bled, plucked, gutted, and plopped into a sizzling cast-iron skillet, and served with some nice white wine, maybe a Chardonnay. His parents, having traveled extensively, believed that children should be exposed to alcohol at an early age to develop a palate and to demystify it: two birds with one stone. And now, two birds were in the way of a king-sized Twix bar that had Andy's name on it.
"Andy, Andy, Andy!"
Andy closed his eyes and thought of chocolate. For a few long seconds, all he heard were his labored breaths and his furiously pumping heart. In that short period of time, he found himself at peace with everything in the world. He was a little meat balloon, gently drifting in the oceanic expanse of space and time. He was in the moment- no, he was the moment. One with everything.
There was a faint ringing in Andy's ears that grew louder and louder and erupted into cheers. Suddenly, Andy snapped out of his daze and discovered that he had eaten the second-to-last pigeon rather quickly, its down feathers still hanging in the air.
One, final, terrified bird fluttered frantically in its bamboo cage.
"C'mon! Do it kid! One more!"
"Do it, Andy!"
"¡Uno más!"
The voices of the crowd rattled the flimsy metal table.
At that point, Andy understood that he was part of something bigger. Yes, he had told certain people at the camp that he would eat 24 live pigeons if that meant getting a Twix bar from the junk food underground trafficking ring. Yes, consequently, certain undesirables found out and placed money on the outcome of Andy's performance. He had expected the consequences. But tonight, Andy knew he was more than a racehorse. He had seen those thousand-yard stares earlier. Now, he saw excitement, joy, a spark of life! A glimmer of hope in otherwise shady lives. Tonight, just for a moment, Andy was the light at the end of the tunnel, a snow day. He was Santa's presents underneath the Christmas tree. He was presidential candidate Barack Obama.
"Yes we can," Andy told himself, "yes we can."
***
It was a crisp, overcast morning the next day. Sparrows flitted above groups of groggy campers shuffling to the track for a few laps around the track before eating a nutritious and healthily-portioned breakfast. Somewhere, a group of girls gossiped and laughed, while another group of boys calmly debated the finer points of Pokemon. They would later find out from their counselors that a midnight police raid put an end to Andy's much-rumored gluttonous marathon as part of a crackdown on illegal gambling venues, and that Andy, for his part, had had his stomach pumped and was being treated for Salmonella poisoning.
