Vernon and I met when we were 14. We both worked at a placed called Pioneer Chicken in San Jose. It was a classier KFC; it jet-set KFC. Pioneer Chicken didn’t do nuggets; they did strips. They tried to lead the way with strips, and Vernon was their strip cook. I did the fries.
And Pioneer Chicken, what they were “pioneers” of was trying to minimize animal cruelty, really early on. So instead of keeping a bunch of little chickens in the basement, they kept one giant chicken and it produced all the meat for the restaurant. It was gigantic. It was huge. They tried to reduce cruelty, but they pumped this thing full of steroids. I’d say it was about the size of a small pig. It was really strange.
These people were crazy. It was a family who ran the restaurant, and they made us pay for any food that we messed up or spilled. One day, Vernon accidentally dropped a strip in the fryer. He had to stick his hand in to pull it out, and he basically fried his hand, otherwise we’d get busted. They took him down to the basement, where they kept this chicken, and put some salve on his hand. They paid him for the day and sent him home.
They made us wear hairnets all the time, even when we serving people outside. It seems like we shouldn’t bring up how filthy this place is out in the front. They weren’t like plastic hairnets, either. They were really weird. They were like low-grade flypaper because there was a weird kind of stickiness to them.
It was a nightmare job. I think we just kind of bonded because we were basically working in a nightmare. When you’re in a nightmare world, you’ll get along with anybody. If you’re stuck on a plane for 36 hours, you’re probably going to start to relate to people who would be your enemy.
I guess it was kind of like Stockholm syndrome. We identified with the bird; the tortured one. And we identified with our torturers. Any job, I guess you get Stockholm syndrome. I guess that’s the definition of a job—it is mental torture.
I don’t remember if we quit at the same time or… It was around Christmas and I got another job, so I think Vernon quit because I was leaving, but his friend got hired as the wing guy. He started doing wings. And he said that they started like—I forget—he said something about how they started grafting wings onto the chicken. But you know what? I think that dude was fucking with us, now that I think about it. That can’t be real. That guy was full of shit. That guy’s a liar.
But it makes sense, if you want less animal cruelty. If you just make one animal suffer as compared with a lot? We can probably all agree with that as a society, right? If there was just one cow that suffered but he was really awesome, that’d be OK.
This is funny, though. There was this main fry cook, who was really funny. He was this really old weird black guy named Curtis and he would give us just the fucking weirdest VHS tapes with these women dancing. You know, that world probably doesn’t exist anymore—where some weirdo would give you VHS tapes—but it used to. And he’d give us these weird movies, which were almost just mix tapes of women dancing, and they were really shitty; they barely had any plot. And it turned out that Curtis and his friend were making these movies. We’d watch these movies and then, all of a sudden, this guy’s best friend, I think his name was Mookie, would come into the restaurant and we realized, “Oh, that’s the dude from the movies!”
Man, that place was weird. I should have known better, looking back; but we were kids, you know? It’s your first job, though. You say, “I guess this is what work is like!” We were so confused and confounded. We think about that chicken to this day. I don’t know if it’s alive or if it died. We talk about going to visit but it’s just too crazy. But in a way, that chicken informed all of our comedy. It was totally creepy. It’s called “a nightmare,” dude. A minimum-wage nightmare.
John Lee is a member of the production company PFFR. Their previous credits include Wonder Showzen, Xavier: Renegade Angel, and Final Flesh. They are currently working on a live action horror soap opera for Adult Swim.
