“Enough of the hypothetical duck talk,” I said, and Eric Trosko raised his eye-brows. It was one of the Bushwick gallery nights, and we were slowly melting our intellectual gallery experience immediately preceding this moment, in one of the number of kinds of the Six Point beer.
Eric is probably the tallest painter in Bushwick, known for his peculiar sense of humor, FLAN, priest outfits, a strangely sounding UFO-inspired band, and as of lately, well, because of ducks….
Thanks to the super cool ducks that Eric has been painting lately, he received a lot of attention, maybe even a bit too much, because now he might be expected to have commited to this specific poultry kind…
“What if I want to paint something other than ducks?” says Eric in a short moment of hesitation when we’re walking on Broadway towards the Bushwick City Farm, the only place with real ducks in Bushwick, as far as I know. But the hesitation dissolves quickly, because Eric is pretty excited about all the props that he’s carrying in his backpack. He has a loaf of bread, cookie cutters, yellow rubber ducks, and a stick, to which I refer as a Gandalf stick, but Eric dismisses this reference with an annoyed ‘pff’. Eric is planning a sacred duck ritual at the farm, he says he has a vision that he will cover himself up with strangely cut out pieces of bread, and the ducks will eat the bread off him. I am cracking up because of the reference to last week’s article about Julie Torres, but I am also a little concerned, because there are only 2 ducks at the farm and about a million of shameless chickens…
At the farm, both of the aforementioned ducks are chilling in the shade, not caring too much about what’s going on around them; they only make an annoyed quack whenever a chicken tries to drink from their water. Eric’s eyes sparkle when he realizes that his totem animal is a little aloof, just like in his paintings. Masha from the farm, however, strictly forbids us to feed the ducks any bread, because it’s not good for them, she says. She suggests we give them bananas. Also it’s starting to be pretty clear that we’re not getting rid of the chickens any time soon. They are following us around as we’re following around the ducks; and furthermore, Silky, a white, innocent-looking Chinese rooster attacks Eric. Eric says that it was a charming attack indeed, and Masha explains that Silky had so much sex lately with all the chickens, and now he thinks he’s the shit. Generally, there is way more fuzz and chaos among the poultry than normally, and many of them have large featherless parts on their bodies. It seems like there were some kind of riots going on. Eric inquires about this with Masha, who promptly responds that spring caused the roosters to be over-sexing the chickens. “Mainly the fat ones,” she says. “We had to isolate all the roosters except Silky.” Eric asks me to specifically mention the chicken sex riots in this article.
