Have all the legends already been made?
On an old episode of MSNBC’s “Lockup,” there’s a prisoner at San Quentin the staff call “the bird man.” That’s what the bird man, named Mike Miller, says they call him, anyway. Ever since he arrived at San Quentin, he says in the episode, he’s been a bird magnet. They perch on his shoulders, sit in his hands, and stand nearby when he’s out in the yard. And not just pigeons, either, but all kinds of birds — finches, red winged black birds…
Birds wallpaper his cell walls. Bird calendars, bird close-ups, birds in veritable glamor shots.
I can’t help but think this is the kind of man who, before the advent of all-things-recorded and released to the public, might have become one of the legendary prisoners whose story makes it over the penitentiary walls and is passed down through generations. A few years after the bird man’s eight-year sentence for burglary ends, fellow inmates would start telling the stories, some of them true, some probably grossly exaggerated (“No shit, man, he had a fuckin’ Cooper’s Hawk in his cell.”), until he one day earned the same legendary status as original “bird man” Robert Franklin Stroud.
“Maybe [the birds] are confused and think I’m the Bird Man of Alcatraz,” Miller says in his “Lockup” segment. He removes his hat and turns his face to the side and says they look alike.
