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At dusk the other night, I flew to Central Park to see my old friend Flaco.
“Oh,” Flaco said, nodding his feathered head in the direction of a newsstand. “Looks like I’m on the cover of the Post again.” I could tell he’d chosen our meeting spot for that reason, but I just gave him a long, low hoot, like, “Wow, impressive.”
Flaco usually hunts solo, but I hadn’t seen him in a while, and he insisted that he didn’t want to forget the “more common” owls who’d shown him the ropes.
As we scoured the park, coasting on a mighty wind, I noticed that Flaco had dropped his Carolina drawl and affected an old-school New York accent, like Ryan Gosling. He said he’d been working with a dialect coach so he wouldn’t sound like a hick on his new podcast, “Beyond the Enclosure.” “I’m not some sparrow at J.F.K.,” Flaco said. “People are going to want to hear this pod.”
We grabbed a couple of fat juicy rats and found a quiet rock in the Loch to eat them on. Flaco asked if I wanted his rat tail, explaining, “I’m off tails. They’re murder on my plumage.” He told me that he was considering going pescetarian, then asked who I thought was more famous—him or Pizza Rat. I told him that Pizza Rat was probably long dead by now, and Flaco smiled.
I was fighting off a food coma, having eaten two big rat tails, but Flaco said that he had to make the rounds because he was single-handedly putting the photographer David Lei’s kids through college. He took us to the Beresford and loomed atop a tower, broodily watching over the city like Batman.
His ear tufts looked extra-pronounced, and I wondered if Flaco had had work done. I hopped forward to scrutinize his perfect little beak, but Flaco said I was ruining the shot, so I glided down to the base of the tower to wait for him to finish posing.
After an hour, I peered up to see if he was ready to go. Without making eye contact, Flaco said, “Don’t ever look at my legs.”
Later we flew all the way to the East Village because Flaco “knew a place.” We landed on a fire escape outside the bedroom window of a fourth-floor apartment, inside of which a woman was drinking red wine in the blue glow of her laptop. “I could mate with her,” Flaco said. “If I really wanted to.” He seemed like he really wanted to.
We sat outside the window for a while, until the woman saw us and screamed. She was clearly dialling animal control, so we fled. Flaco said that eventually she would come around because human women couldn’t resist his six-foot wingspan and apex mentality. He mused that maybe “Apex Mentality” should be the title of his next podcast.
As we made our way back to the Upper West Side, Flaco kept checking an Apple Watch around his left ankle that he’d snatched off a jogger’s wrist. He was getting push notifications from Manhattan Bird Alert. At one point, he saw an update, shook his head, and said, “Who gives a flying fuck about purple sandpipers?”
The sun was coming up by the time we returned to Central Park. I yawned loudly, but Flaco ignored the hint and said he was going to perch on a nearby water tower in case Lei showed. I said good night and flew across the Ramble to doze off in the crook of an oak tree.
Before sleep overtook me, I saw Lei, baseball cap on head, camera in hand, transfixed by Flaco—who was stretching, preening, puffing his chest out, and squinting majestically into the dawn, his orange eyes almost matching it. I had to admit: freedom looked good on him.
Then a newspaper blew into Flaco’s face. It was the Post. ♦
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