Looky here at my, ahem, vintage fan.
It’s a blast (of Fresh’nd Aire) from the past. The machine pictured here was built about seven decades ago, in the Illinois city made famous by a poem about slaughtering hogs. (We don’t talk about such things these days . . .)
I discovered the fan while rummaging in the crawlspace of the house I built for my dad and step-mom, about 24-years ago. The two have been dead for 15-years, she dying a few months after him. In those intervening months, some step-kin moved in, ostensibly to care for the out-of-step-matriarch (and enjoy the free rent). After she died her daughter and son-in-law stayed on, and proved themselves to be chicken people in every way, declining to pay property taxes on time, if at all, and repeatedly allowing the insurance on the house to lapse. In the years the chicken people were there they enjoyed the benefit of at least a quarter-million dollars in free rent. Oblivious and undaunted by the fact that the uninsured house could go up in smoke as a total loss, the two lovebirds had turned their dull attention to converting the garage into a quail-raising facility, and enclosing the back porch and turning it into a chicken coop. You think I’m kidding.
No, brothers and sisters, when the chicken people either died or were finally evicted —the life estate having expired with the deceased daughter — other kinfolk, of a more respectable nature, took possession of the premises and began the arduous task of cleaning up the mess bequeathed unto them. One forty-cubic yard dumpster later, the cleanup continues.
At this date six healthy rats inside the quail breeding facility have been tricked into dining on peanut butter, unaware that one taste would result in immediate execution. They were not mice. They were rats, big, ugly, ferocious rats. No quail or chickens had remained. In the garage there were cages, bags of animal feed, forgotten tools, junk, clutter and filth. It was a white trash hoarder’s Nirvana. Looming over it all was Jackson Pollack nouveau art splattered and plastered on every square inch of everything. Just imagine a bunch of quail flapping around inside what had been a pristine, two-car garage. Ugh. The art was 100-percent organic, the sort a visitor would see smeared by frothing lunatics on the walls inside a psycho ward. Why didn’t the dumb bastard responsible for the disaster keep the birds in cages? (That was a stupid question, because the man is stupid.)
The back porch-cum-chicken-coop, though much smaller than the garage, was equally as bad. The floor consisted of chicken shit saturated sawdust, about four-inches deep. Light fixtures hung by their wires. Every square inch of wall and ceiling was coated with Pollack renditions. Such was the view from the window above the kitchen sink.
And, oh yes, before I forget — as though I will ever be able to forget — there was the stench. It was beyond description, heavy and wet, oppressive and ubiquitous. The stink had permeated every last nook and cranny in the house, not just in the converted porch or garage. No no. It was everywhere. And those were the conditions the chicken people lived in. It is not a reassuring commentary on the human species.
The story does, though, reinforce the adage: Birds of a feather are nasty and repulsive. (I made that up. Pretty good, eh?) It seems inconceivable that of billions of people on earth, two could meet and come together to spend their lives in a house full of chicken shit; but I now know better. One estimate from an environmental cleanup company came in at nine-thousand dollars. Yes, it was going to take more than a little sweeping and dusting to make the house livable again.
As for my fan, chicken man had put it in the crawlspace years before, evidenced by the rust that had formed all over the thing. But it is, after all, 70-years old. Once found, and with the application of a few hours of maniacal scrubbing and rubbing and sanding and brushing, my childhood fan, as you can see, at last emerged from its torment.
More on the fan later.
Quails???