The commercial was supposed to end with the wagon rolling serenely off into the sunset, in this case, down the meandering road, presumably leaving behind a pair of fat and happy customers on the hill.

It was not to be.

The problem once again involved chickens. I think I must have done something bad to a chicken in a previous life, like running over one before it got to the other side of the road. I still have problems with chickens, namely roosters, here in Key West. For some reason, the population of local loose chickens has increased by what seems like a thousand fold over the past three or four years. There are roosters everywhere, and contrary to the belief that roosters are only supposed to crow at the break of dawn, roosters crow all the time -- morning, noon, and night: especially at night. Once you've been awakened by a rooster, it is like hearing a dripping faucet. You lay awake listening and waiting for the next interruption of your evening's peace. And until you get up and put a towel or something under the faucet, or cut off the water supply to the house, you can bet it is never going to end.

In the case of roosters and chickens, you've either got to go out and catch them, which is about as impossible as catching a fox (I frankly don't know how on earth a fox can ever outrun a chicken); or, you've got to go out and shoot them with a shotgun, in which case you go to jail.

In response to threats by irate citizens to annihilate the roosters and chickens by poisoning, neck-wringing, or dog-sikking, a Key West group of chicken aficionados announced that because Key West is a bird sanctuary (which it is), and because chickens are birds (good thinking, folks), therefore chickens should come under the protected species act. When reminded that a bird sanctuary is designed to protect wild birds and not barnyard alarm clocks, the group backtracked and formed the Chicken Rescue League (this really happened) and offered to trap annoying chickens and relocate them.

Relocate them? I asked myself. Well, where? The most popular suggestion (which received tacit approval by the City Commission) was to fence in the now defunct city dump affectionately known as Mt. Trashmore, an acres-big monster mountain of trash which is sealed with something that will hopefully keep the toxins inside and which is covered with some kind of mesh through which some kind of scrubby brush is miraculously growing. This volcano of rotting refuse, which still occasionally bursts into flame through venting pipes in the crust, looms over the city of Key West in the direct path of the North winds. Before Mt. Trashmore became dormant, when the cold fronts blew down from the upper Keys, the whole city smelled like one big cozy fireplace, except it wasn't the smell of logs burning. It was garbage: smoldering mattresses, acrid melting plastic, bubbling mold-covered vegetables, smoked rats, fried pelican droppings, you can fill in the rest.

So, with the implementation of the Chicken Rescue League Mt. Trashmore Chicken Sanctuary Program, the city would be replacing the not-too-long-forgotten smell of burning garbage with the fresh new smell of thousands of pounds of concentrated chicken you-know-what.

Give me back the roosters.

Here I am reminded of a chicken-brained song I heard as a child, and considering the current subject, it seems appropriate to print the words:

God bless him.

P. S. One of the added benefits of the proposed Mt. Trashmore Chicken Sanctuary program, (according to those that envision Utopias of that sort) is that the chickens would breed and lay eggs which could be used to help feed the homeless. It will be an interesting experiment: Chickens eating worms and bugs and grass growing on top of a garbage dump that still oozes some sort of purple slime into the ocean. The same chickens laying eggs. Homeless people eating Mt. Trashmore Omelets. Homeless people turning radioactive blue and having two-headed babies. The City Commission on trial at the Hague for inhumane experiments on the innocent.

Anyway, as I was saying, the last scene in the commercial was a corker, and it involved chickens.

As part of the finale (a bit of "local color" as the production house called it), a group of chickens were to be seen pecking at something in the road and were supposed to scatter at the approach of the wagon and run cackling across the pasture. The problem was to keep the chickens in a group until just the right moment: "scatter time" it was called. The method was ingeniously simple: All of the chickens were tethered by one leg to an nearly invisible yard-long piece of monofilament line. The end of each line was tied to the others in a central knot so the effect was like a wagon wheel with a chicken at the end of each spoke. It worked fine as long as the chickens were preoccupied with pecking.

As the wagon lumbered down the road, a chicken trainer hunkered down beside a clump of bushes out of camera range and prepared to shoo away the chickens with a big flapping towel. The wagon got closer and closer, and one could feel a certain apprehension in the air as it approached the point of no return. I looked at the expression on Bull Robot's face. He was leering like a monster in a slasher movie.

"Scatter time!" shouted the director.

Nothing happened.

"Scatter time!" he repeated.

The next time his voice was hysterical "Scatter the damn chickens!"

The trainer was waving the towel furiously and the chickens were trying to scatter as best they could. But because they were tethered to a central knot and all trying to run in different directions (did somebody actually expect the chickens to all run the same way?), nobody went anywhere. It was just a mass of chickens hopping frantically up and down in a cloud of dust.

Titus Moody reined the horses right, then left. The wagon careened off the road then back again and came to a halt. It had missed the mass of chickens by a mule's hair.

We ran to the wagon and feared the worst. I was expecting to find Titus, who was a fairly old man at the time, to be dead of a heart attack. And it's a wonder he wasn't, because the ravishing young Danish actress was practically in his lap, clutching him in a bear hug that must have set off a testosterone meltdown.

Bull Robot, with the client in tow, rushed up to me, sputtering. He climbed up on the wagon and put his arm around Titus and the actress.

"Titus Moody is a national treasure and you almost killed him. And this young lady, look at her. You owe them both an apology." (As if I had personally written into the commercial a chicken-booby-trap assassination plot.)

The actress was still holding onto Titus like he was Prince Charming, and the director was filming the whole thing.

"Best time I ever had," said Moody, grinning.

Both of us noticed that Robot was giving the girl's shoulder a little bit of extra attention with his fingertips. Titus reached up and pried them loose.

"Please don't squeeze the Danish," he said tartly.

The commercial never saw the light of day. Not because of the terrified actress. Or because there wasn't a extension cord hanging out of the wagon. Or even because of the chicken disaster. The director managed to put together a perfectly respectful commercial except for one thing:

As I mentioned, the commercial was supposed to be set in the Connecticut countryside, the home of Pepperidge Farm. And it could have easily passed for that. The farmhouse was right. The barn was right. The accent was pure down-east Yankee. There was a sign on the roadway that said, "Hartford 5 Miles. And there was a gorgeous stand of oak trees in the background, just like you see in Connecticut. We had even removed all the palm trees and palmetto plants.

But somewhere along the line somebody in the production department had failed Botany 101. Because, while there are oak trees in Florida, and there are oak trees in Connecticut, there happens to be one big difference: Everybody knows, and I mean everybody, that oak trees in Connecticut aren't full of Spanish moss.

So, the commercial was scrapped and Bull Robot graciously took the blame when we showed him the film clip the director had taken of him up on the wagon pawing at the actress.

By the time Spring came I realized that I had spent nearly my entire year's salary on a mind-snarling phobia. I went into what I guess was a version of writer's block. I wouldn't open the boxes. I wouldn't read the books. I wouldn't even think about jewelry. I couldn't face the possibility that I had bought all of this stuff for no reason at all and was now going to be forced either to try to sell it or try to use it. The alternate was to just keep it, like people keep a collection of stamps. The basic fear was that I did not have the ability or talent for making jewelry at all. There was no reason to think I did. The rock-polishing project had been a failure. And the only thing I had ever created of any complexity was a castle made of toothpicks, and that fell apart in a day.

Then I saw an ad in the Village Voice for a jewelry-making class and in desperation decided, as they say, to bite the bullet. I went to the Y.M.C.A. and signed up for the course. On the first day the instructor, a thin hatchet-faced man with a loathsome Hitler-like moustache, began by handing each of us a pencil and a piece of paper and saying to the class: "Design a piece of jewelry."

I got a sick feeling in my stomach. I could not think of anything at all. What did he mean by "a piece" of jewelry? All I could think of was a round flat white rock on a chain, my Lemures Stone. In a burst of creativity I drew and oval shape instead of a round one. Then I added something that looked like a piece of frayed rope. The instructor came over and looked at it for a moment.

"You've just drawn the most difficult shape to make of all. Why on earth did you pick an oval? You're in for a lot of trouble."

I hated him then. I hate him now. But he was right. Making an oval was a project right out of Hell's workshop. Worse yet, he told me that, if the piece was going to have any character, it had to be shaped in a dome. This meant I had to saw an oval out of a sheet of metal and then hammer it into a dome on some kind of steel ball. Worse yet, the instructor told us that we had to have a stone set in our piece and that, because I had an oval piece of jewelry, I had to have an oval stone.

No matter what I did, the piece looked crooked. One end of the oval would be more rounded than the other. Or one end of the dome was higher than the other. As I kept sawing and filing and reshaping, the piece got smaller and smaller until the stone that I had picked to put into it (an appropriately gloomy black oval onyx) was bigger than the metal part itself. I picked out a smaller stone. Then I had to make an oval bezel ( a metal band) to go around the stone and solder the oval bezel onto the misshapen oval of domed silver. No matter what I did, the stone appeared to be off center. It looked like a drooping eye or a breast with the nipple in the wrong place. The instructor nagged at me like a horsefly. On my final try at soldering on the bezel I thought of aiming the torch at him and singing off his moustache. Instead, I just held the torch on the piece and melted it into a pool on the workbench and walked out of the room.

(TO BE CONTINUED)

Wherein Bull Robot tangles with God and the Morals Squad, and Betty reveals to me the wish she had made on her Lemures Stones. She could tell it to me now. It had just come true.