Queen of the Condors

It was the night of the big rain in L.A. and I had sought shelter in Harry’s Bar and American Grill, where I have often found shelter from life’s vicissitudes.

There is a room to the left of the entrance where a person can sink back into a corner over a shot of Glenlivet and feel like Papa Hemingway contemplating an old man and his fish.

I was weary from the day’s chase and just wanted to be alone and quiet when I noticed a couple I knew seated across the way.

It was Benny and the Queen of Condors.

Everyone calls her that because she is an aggressive, no-nonsense amateur wildlife conservationist who would kill to save an endangered species.

If man and the dinosaur had existed simultaneously, paleontologists would find the skeletons of people like her clinging to the necks of the giants in a final, futile effort to save them from extinction.

On this particular night, Miranda, which is her name, was mourning the deaths of Chocuyens and Niko. Only someone who follows the fate of doomed creatures would know they are two condors who blundered into the hereafter through their own clumsiness.

Niko, for instance, was fried last week when he flew into 17,000-volt power lines in the hills above Fillmore. Chocuyens bought the farm last October when he tried sucking up an antifreeze cocktail near Pyramid Lake.

We give condors names to personalize their existence, thereby making them more human, the way we elevated Donald Duck from an anonymous entree under a peppercorn glaze to something alive and lovable.

Because we gave Niko a name, there are more quasi-conservationists weeping over a dead condor than ever wept over the nameless children of Sarejevo. Miranda is one of them.

*

Were I any kind of man I would have told Benny and the Queen of Condors to get the hell away from me, but propriety dictates a gentler response.

Benny, her husband, is harmless, but Miranda is eternally in the attack on behalf of anything that crawls, hops, flies, swims or attempts, however witlessly, to coexist with the human race.

Let me assure you I’m not the kind of guy you’ll find out maiming snail darters or otherwise assaulting a species about to drop off the edge of existence for all time.

I don’t eat Utah prairie dogs, manatees or mewing gnatcatchers and would go out of my way to avoid driving over a desert tortoise, should I encounter one crawling across the Pacific Coast Highway.

However, I make no effort to curry the friendship of more hostile animals, like grizzly bears, great white sharks or Miranda, the Queen of Condors. I find them all best left to their own kind. Cross-socialization rarely works in either the wilds or in bars.

But there Miranda was nevertheless, demanding to know why I had not written in outrage at the deaths of Niko and Chocuyens, whose memory she cherished beyond all others.

I have short patience with true believers and tend to react to their assaults with the savage annoyance of a cornered badger. I said to Miranda, “The general disappearance of condors and the recent suicide of two of them proves conclusively that God is tired of the ugly beasts and has programmed them for self-destruction. Now leave me alone or you’re next.”

*

I know a wildlife biologist who believes that man is the worst enemy of life on earth. Without us, there would be no high voltage wires to fly into and no pools of antifreeze to sip from.

“Then how come,” I said, “there are no more pterodactyls? Man didn’t wipe them out.”

He sidestepped the question by saying we were in a rape and reap mode before conservationists led us into human enlightenment. Now we are in a conserve and manage mode. If the pterodactyl existed today, we’d love him like an ugly brother.

As proof of our new enlightenment, the biologist pointed out that a bill has been introduced in the state Assembly to add a substance to antifreeze that would make it bitter and therefore less palatable to condors.

It would be like adding cayenne peppers to your strawberry daiquiri.

Getting back to Miranda, the Queen of Condors, she shouted at me that humans, not condors, are the ugliest of God’s animals and the only self-destructive creatures on earth.

I was tired of arguing and said maybe she was right. But then I asked if we are so self-destructive, why isn’t anyone doing anything to save us?

She was ready to explode in response when a waiter came over to take my dinner order. I said, “I’d like baked northern spotted owl, hold the beak and the claws.”

The Queen of Condors glared, grabbed Benny and was gone. I skipped dinner and had another drink instead. They were all out of northern spotted owl anyhow.