Monday, 05 April 2004 | Pigeon keeper

His name is Benny, and he's been breeding pigeons on a Brooklyn rooftop for thirty years. On the day that I visited, a friend of his named Mattingly was keeping him company—sitting on the edge of the roof, calling out to his Doberman, and talking in circles. Mattingly comes to see Benny often, even though he lives in New Jersey and says he's sick of New York.

More than once, Mattingly pointed to the street in Williamsburg where he was raised ("back when it was dangerous") and kept repeating, "You're from North Carolina, and you wanna live HERE?!" We were surrounded by three-dimensional rectangles sprouting out of the ground like colorful concrete flowers, the sky was a pink and blue painting, and the Manhattan skyline glistened just across the river. The timing of his question made me as incredulous as he was. I just nodded.

The path to the roof (from the floor below) was a tall metal ladder and two square openings, the second of which gave way to the view. Mattingly's dog, "Red," had to be hoisted up through the hole with ropes. I really wanted to see the creature descend to the lower level via rope harness, legs stiff and useless, but, at the end of the day, they left him on the roof with the pigeons and with the chewed-in-half Ziploc bag that he trotted around with.

"You're a good dog," Mattingly would say, again and again. "Good for nothin'!" He always said the punchline with vigor, as if he'd just come up with it for the first time. He told us how he was sure Red would turn on him one day, just like his last Doberman did. He showed us the scar on his hand and said he didn't waste a second before putting that dog down. He talked like a faucet, unlike the pigeon keeper, who kept to himself unless asked direct questions.

It's breeding season, I learned. The pigeons sitting in and on the coop were only six weeks old or so, though they looked the same age as all pigeons look. Once they're old enough, Benny will swing a pole with a trash bag attached to the end, scaring them into flying in a beautiful swooping oval around the crown of the building. From the ground on clear a day in Williamsburg, you can see the pigeons of various keepers climbing and diving all around the edge of the sky. They fly together, turning from a black to white unit as they expose their backs then their bellies.

If you scare the pigeons too early, Benny told us, some of them will fly smack into the wall and die. September is when they'll be ready, when all of the pigeon keepers in the area compete with each other and try to steal each other's birds.

The pigeons sat plumply on the coop or had their tails poking up from the feeding trough. They strutted and ran and cooed in an unsynchronized choir. Once, when I stood on a step next to them, they suddenly launched by themselves and drew fluttering crescents in the sky. Standing at their starting point, I could feel them move past me and hear their wings beating, as if I was in the middle of the pack.

To my left, I could hear Mattingly mutter, "Why on Earth you wanna live in New York?!" "Good dog...good for nothin'!"