After looking around the airport unsuccessfully for my non-existent livery driver, I retrieved my luggage and called my father on my mobile phone.

"Dad! What's the haps, man? I'm in Atlanta."

"Why are you calling me?" Not exactly the enthusiasm I'd hoped for, given this was the first opportunity I'd had in three months to land a job that would get me out of his house and off his "payroll." Perhaps he was just having a tough day at work.

"Well, I seem to have -- ahem -- misplaced my itinerary and need the name of my hotel so I can get a cab and take it to my, uh, hotel." I am a very articulate young man.

"Why do you do this, son? Why are you seemingly incapable of getting yourself from point A to point B without assistance?" I recognized an unpleasant if familiar subtext here that would have rattled a lesser man's confidence.

"Just want to make you feel, you know, like part of the process. I know you like that."

"I am part of many processes, Andrew. Too many," he said. In the background I heard the staccato tapping of fingers on a keyboard echo through my father's cavernous office. He retrieved the e-mail I'd sent him earlier in the day. "It's the Georgian Terrace Hotel, Peachtree Street. Goodbye." And with that, he was gone.

Luggage in hand I exited the airport and emerged in the moist southern air, which even in January brought to mind girls with slow drawls, seersucker and sex. I could live here, I thought. I hailed a cab. The cab did my bidding and stopped. I was in man in control of his destiny.

"The Georgian Hotel, my good man," I told the large West Indian cab driver after he loaded my luggage into the trunk and I was safely settled in the back of the car.

"You in fa' the chicky show?" he inquired in a thick patois.

I'm not a big fan of strip joints or prostitution. I'm not a prude, but the Scotsman in me figures why pay for what you should be able to get for free. Also, I thought that West Indian Cab drivers only offered to procure women for their customers when in the West Indies. Then again, I was pretty far south. I soon received much needed clarification.

"The Chicken show? You in town for the Chicken show, man?"

Oh. The Chicken Show. Of course! He wasn't welcoming me to Atlanta with pleasures of the flesh; he wanted to know if I was in town to see MC Chicken. It had been a while since I'd seen MTV Jams, what with all that time spent dodging emotional knives hurled at my dignity from across the kitchen by my mother. I was sure that MC Chicken was all the rage in the "dirty south," and seeing as how I was wearing my more "urban" green corduroys with my "Bling-Bling" Barbour jacket, the cabbie clearly pegged me as a white guy with a hip-hop affectation. Sort of like Eminem, only Canadian and with wavy brown hair and a love of sweaters.

"Actually, man, I don't know Chicken. What's Chicken about? Is that tha' dope shizzle?" I cloaked my ignorance in the vernacular of the street. I felt I was missing something, some bright shining cultural bridge built in rhyme by a fine-feathered rapper (maybe he was Asian?) to connect large black men with small white ones in cabs in cities all across America. MC Chicken. I bet he like the thigh, but he like the breast best -- Word up.

The cabby was incredulous. "What's it all about you say? Man, you crazy. You don't know Chicken you say? Everybody knows Chicken, man. Where you from, you don't know Chicken?"

I hadn't heard a hip-hop radio station in a while, maybe a year. But how did I miss the meteoric rise of MC Chicken to the pinnacle of popular culture? Like the Beltway snipers, I was now clearly operating outside the loop. I felt so distant from my fellow man. I sank in my seat, looked at my feet -- Word down.

"Chicken, man! Like you eat, man! Like you eat! The bird, you know."

Oh. Chicken. Like you eat. The bird. I am an idiot, and probably a racist.

"There a big chicken show in town man -- a Poul-try Con-ven-tion," the cabdriver explained. Despite the heavy accent, he had the patient tone of a mother speaking to her small, retarded, ice-cream-eating child. It was a tone I would come to know quite well during my brief stay in Atlanta.

The chicken show. Apparently poultry dealers and their associates from countries far and wide had convened in Atlanta for the largest trade show in the world devoted to the little fowl and their shelled embryos. I imagined a giant convention center cacophonous with clucking, the air crowded with feathers like a schoolgirl's bedroom after a particularly raucous pillow fight. It was also a scene redolent of something rank and sinister. I was certain evil geneticists were huddled together in a shady back booth, discussing the engineering of grotesque, beakless near-chickens that were fed by a tube connected directly to their digestive track. These quasi-chickens had neither wings nor legs but breast and breast alone; these were the kind of chickens that turned Kentucky Fried Chicken to KFC once and for all. Out front jiggle-jowled men in bad suits slapped backs while speaking passionately of guano and grain and such. Greasy, bloated white men from Arkansas with names like Lyman and Doyle made poor puns involving "chicks," bourbon Old Fashioned in one hand and a flaccid rubber chicken in the other. Actually, it sounded like it might be sort of fun.

I momentarily entertained the idea of bagging the next day's interviews in favor of mining the chicken show for rare gems of human experience. Then I remembered my mother as she drove me to the bus station earlier that day. She was trying to quit smoking and the combination of nicotine withdrawal and deep resentment toward my lack of professional progress made her frothy and insane with rage. She threatened to puncture my thin veneer of dignity with razor-sharp barbs about "sitting on my ass fishing like a goddamn Rockefeller while my unemployment ran out." I was definitely going to those interviews. I would definitely get that job.

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