Birdman

After a nine-hour car ride of my dad nonstop talking—something I legitimately categorize under “cruel and unusual punishment”—we had arrived back at Chapel Hill. My dad’s doing the usual: talking to strangers, bossing me around, and his favorite, micromanaging the whole move-in situation. I love my dad, but he is a special character.

I manage to tear him away from the unenthused parking attendant with whom he’s started a conversation (“You better not ticket us, ok?”). Wearing his favorite pair of New Balance shoes and sporting his trademark mullet-afro hairstyle combination, he begins unloading the car. He calls me ugly and swear he’s “not sure if he loves me,” and I remind him that he’s close to being a classifiable midget.

Naturally, we have to abide by his authoritatively rigid methodology of bringing stuff in. “We each bring in three bags. We save the cases of water for last. Let’s make this a two-trip process, ok?” I roll my eyes, paying him little attention.

A few more moments of contention ensue before we finally get everything in my apartment. I beg him to leave, offering to pay for a hotel room or the next plane back to New Jersey. Then, I pretend I have a stomachache, and he puts away all my clothes and belongings. He acts like he’s doing me a favor, which he is, but I know he’s reveling in the glory of having control of where my things go, in what order, and the overall setup of my room. Doing so, he still continues to talk, and I beg for a two-minute break from his voice.

After everything is squared away, we decide to go to dinner on Franklin Street. I hand my dad the keys, since I know he’ll want to drive my car. We walk out the side entrance of my apartment building, when the best thing happened.

We are walking side by side when all of a sudden, a flock of four to five birds dive down and violently start pecking at my dad. He screams, and so do I. It was like something out of Hitchcock’s The Birds.

“WHAT IS HAPPENING?” he screams distressingly.

“I don’t know!” I reply.

We managed to get away from the bloodthirsty beasts with wings by seeking asylum in my Honda Civic. My dad is still traumatized, especially since he seemed to be the main target of the attackers. After a few minutes of regaining composure, I hear the ring of my dad’s phone (He keeps it on the loudest volume, since his hearing basically qualifies him for a hearing aid.).

It’s my mom. It’s hard to tell her the story without laughing, since I keep remembering the now permanently engrained image in my head of my dad being attacked by birds. She bursts out laughing and offers a rather sound theory for the attack. “Ryan,” she says with a sudden tone of solemnity, “I think those birds thought your father’s head was their nest…”

And honestly, it’s hard to argue with that theory.

Written by Ryan Schocket