A Rooster Called Pepe

Brain Thoughts with Joselyn

Every day on the way home from school was an adventure, but my favorite days were the ones when my dad picked me up.

He would tell me stories about his day: the crazy customers at the store, the characters he encountered at his other job at the school deli. My dad has always had the best stories, delivered with the kind of casual humor that makes you forget you are just walking home and feel like you are watching a movie instead. He was also, crucially, the more sympathetic parent when it came to my lifelong dream of owning a farm. My mom ran a tight ship. My dad just wanted to make me happy. These are two very different parenting philosophies, and as a child with agricultural ambitions, I knew exactly which parent to approach.

“Can I please buy a chicken? It’s only five cents.”

Five cents was not nothing back then. My mom would go to the store with one dollar and come home with a quart of milk, a few eggs, some chicken for dinner, and a small bag of rice and oil. Five cents had real purchasing power in our household. But I was a child, and my dad was my dad, and after a back and forth I cannot fully reconstruct from memory, I got my chicken.

My dad, ever the pragmatist, had also quietly reasoned that a five-cent chick was an investment. When it grew up, it would be lunch, dinner, and maybe leftovers. He was not wrong about that, but he just did not account for the fact that I would name it.

Before Pepe, There Was the First One

I should mention that Pepe was not my first chick. There had been one before him, weeks earlier, who did not survive. The official cause of death was exposure to cold and rain. My personal diagnosis, at five or six years old, was a combination of pneumonia and a broken heart, because I had not been allowed to sleep with him and he had missed his mommy and died from the sadness of it.

I stand by this assessment.

My parents, to their credit, eventually caved and got me a second chance. And that second chance was Pepe.

Pepe

I picked Pepe specifically because he was not the most handsome boy in the box of chicks being sold outside my school. Honestly, he did not look like he was going to make it through the ride home. My dad thought it might be a waste of five cents. But something about Pepe called to me, and I have never been able to explain it any better than that.

He was a beautiful soft yellow, with the smallest wings in the world and the longest, pinkest little toes you have ever seen. Pepe in the drawer of my armoire, nestled between my clothes, which I thought was a perfectly reasonable arrangement. He liked to cuddle next to my face during our siestas together. I am surprised I never squeezed him in my sleep, given that I move around a lot, but I have a strong suspicion my parents quietly relocated him to his own bed once I fell asleep. They will neither confirm nor deny this.

Pepe grew up to be the most majestic rooster. And I mean majestic in the way that only someone who loved him could, because Pepe was, bless his heart, not the sharpest beak in the yard.

The Identity Crisis of One Pepe

Because Pepe had grown up alongside our two dogs, Linda and Maravilla, he had reached a certain conclusion about himself. He believed, with full conviction, that he was a dog. He would waddle and strut around the yard attempting to bark. He would pick fights with the street dogs from the neighborhood, which required my mom to constantly rush outside to save him from his own demise. Every afternoon when I came home from school, he would run up to greet me at the corner of the street, right alongside Linda and Maravilla, unbothered by the fact that he was the only one without four legs.

He was so dumb. But he was so sweet, God bless him.

The day he got too big to sleep inside next to my bed, my mom told me it was time for Pepe to move to the backyard. I did not take this well. I lay awake that first night listening to every sound from outside, convinced that each rustle was Pepe needing me. He did not need me. But I needed to check on him anyway.

The Day I Learned About Loss

One afternoon I came home from school and Pepe did not run out to meet me.

Linda and Maravilla were there. But no Pepe. I asked my dogs where he was, because that felt reasonable. Then I asked my dad. Pepe hadn’t come to greet me, he must be feeling sick or something. I searched the yard. I called for him. Nothing. I went inside, still looking, and that is when I smelled it.

My mom’s cooking. Specifically, her chicken soup, which smelled absolutely incredible. My baby brother was already at the table, destroying a chicken leg with the kind of enthusiasm that made me briefly consider abandoning my once-a-week vegetarianism, which I had adopted specifically in solidarity with Pepe since the day I brought him home.

I sat down. I looked at the soup. I looked at my mom. And then it clicked.

My mom’s face, in the moment she realized my dad had not told me, said everything.

I cried and told my parents they had committed a crime. But my dad said God created Pepe to be eaten, so he had fulfilled his destiny. I, however, thought my parents deserved jail time for killing our family pet rooster.

I did not eat the soup. I ran next door to my aunt’s house to report the injustice and the crime my parents had committed against my pet and my son, Pepe. My aunt hugged me, she consoled me, she asked why I was crying. And then she said, with complete sincerity: “Mija no llores, la sopa que preparó tu mami estaba muy rica.” My aunt had also eaten Pepe. I cried louder.

To this day, every time I see someone absolutely destroying a chicken leg with zero remorse, I shed an internal tear for Pepe. My pet, my rooster, my five cent investment who thought he was a dog.

Rest in peace, Pepe. You were one of a kind.

And the soup, apparently, was excellent.