Some Bullshit

I bought the chicken bag from Pylons about a year ago, which I only remember off-hand because a month afterward, as Thanksgiving was approaching, Pylons filled their display window with chicken bags, suspended from the ceiling. I was in love with the little chicken the moment I saw it; it's plump shape and something about its two lifeless, wide-set eyes instantly filled my heart. My happiest memory with the chicken bag was soon after at Beacon's Closet.

Over summer 2007, which had recently passed, the employees of Beacon's Closet got into the habit of taking MDMA and painting their faces white and pouring boxes of Nilla Wafers around Death By Audio. There was a boy among them and his t-shirts were routinely longer than mine are. This raver behavior was an alarming contrast to the surly, dismissive attitudes the clerks usually cop. They don't respond when I say, "Thank you," for handing back my credit card. They make fun of people outside of the dressing room. I don't know why they decided they wanted to see Todosantos.

On my first week out with the chicken bag, I took it to Beacon's Closet. The surly boy employee was behind the counter. He was wearing a floral jumper and pretending he couldn't see Jenny, even though she was next on line. [She had worked at the store for a few days and then quit because she didn't like it, so maybe that was driving him rude.] He glanced over and saw the chicken bag.
"Oh my god," he smiled, surprisingly. "Is that a chicken? Oh that's so cute."
"Yeah, it reeks of rubber," I beamed, trying to be modest about my perfect little chicken.
"Oh," cooled down the clerk. "I thought it was leather." He turned his back on us again.

I retired the chicken bag about six months ago. I was disgusted by how excited people were to see it, just the way I was when I first saw it. Some people I had met would forget my name but remember the chicken bag. It was becoming an identity crutch when I've always walked well on my own.

And just as the association between me and the rubber chicken had waned, this trashy, rockstar daughter gets into NYMag's Party Lines with it, thus stealing the association I thought I didn't want, and then tells a pretty awful story about the chicken bag:
"I bought it for a friend who had actually lost a chicken. It was a family chicken they'd raised, and it died. She didn't want it, so now it's my handbag."
With a friend like Theodora Richards, who needs inner-city high school Halloween pranks? [The meanest pranks of them all.] You don't know what you like to wear 'til it's gone.