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Victor, age 53, raises only white pigeons because of a dream he had while in a three-day coma brought on by an asthma attack. In the dream, Victor promised to keep only white birds if God would cure him. Victor has been true to his word for the past 26 years, and has never had another attack.
“One day, when I was a little kid, seven or eight years old, I seen a pigeon in the street, wounded, and I picked it up and my mother nursed him and she let him go. Now, there was a pigeon coop up on my roof, and I didn’t know any better, and I went up on the roof, and I seen all these birds inside … and I went inside and I grabbed a bird and I took it downstairs to my mother. “Now, the next day, at dinner, I said to my mother, ‘What happened to that little bird?’ and she said, ‘You’re eating it. I made that soup out of it.’ My mother was a hillbilly from Puerto Rico, a country girl, and she didn’t know no better. And she said, “Are there any more like that up on the roof?” “So, the next day, I went back upstairs and I went into the coop again, and I was grabbing a bird, when this tall Spanish guy said, ‘What the fuck you doing?’ and he grabbed me behind my back, ‘scort me out of the coop and kicked me up my ass—twice—and smacked me in the face—hard—and he sent me downstairs crying. And my brother said, ‘What happened?’ and I said, ‘Don’t go up to the roof, man, there’s a crazy man up there. He hit me for a bird!’ So, my brother, he went up, and he got hit, too! “We moved to this neighborhood in ‘60. We came in a nice big truck, and we jump out of the truck, me and my brother, and we look up, and this roof, it had two big pigeon coops in the front, belong to some Italians. Me and my brother, we said, ‘Oh! We hit the jackpot!’ “But when we went up, we got the same shit that the other guy did to us: smacked us, beat us up and sent us downstairs! They gave us knuckleheads on the top of our heads, called us dirty spics. We were the first Puerto Rican family on this block. This whole block was Irish and Italians, then. But little by little, the Italians, they started getting to like us, and finally they let us come up to see the pigeons. And I started to raise my own pigeons up on this roof as soon as they left, in ‘63 or ‘64. “You know why I fly pigeons? ‘Cause ever since I was a little kid, I wondered, ‘Why did that man smack me for a bird? Why he care so much about a pigeon?’ I still think about that smack he gave me, all these years later. If it wasn’t for that smack, I would never have had pigeons.” |