- Every day my dad's flying this thing around,
and everybody in all the rooms are staring out,
being like, "Is that guy flying a fucking falcon?"
[dark electronic music]
- Welcome to "This Is Not Happening."
I'm Roy Wood Jr.
We all come from somewhere, from someone,
who nurtures us, protects us,
and teaches us.
- Ah!
[silverware clattering]
- Some are better at it than others.
♪ ♪
[girl giggling]
♪ ♪
- Ow!
[cheers and applause]
You can hear him on his podcast "Danish and O'Neill,"
Ryan O'Neill, ladies and gentlemen.
[cheers and applause]
- So my father was an illegal falconer.
Anybody else? Is there anybody else in here?
All right, if you guys don't know what falconry is,
here it is.
So it's been around for a couple thousand years,
and it's basically people, they kidnap falcons out of the wild,
and then they train them to hunt for them.
Now, the popularity fizzled out
with the invention of the supermarket.
People were like, "Hey man, I don't know if we need
a bird of prey to bring us our super anymore."
We can just go to the meat aisle at the grocery store."
But a group of lunatics kept this tradition alive,
and my father was one of them.
Now here's the thing: You can legally do falconry,
but you need a license.
And in order to get a license,
you got to jump through a few hoops.
Number one, you have got to do a two-year apprenticeship
with a master falconer.
Now, of all the people that I could spend two years with,
I think master falconer is probably at the bottom of that.
After that, you have to build an enclosure for this falcon
to live in.
Then you need to take a written test.
Well, my dad's like, fuck that. Okay?
I'm not gonna let the government tell me
what I can and can't do.
And so he gets a book on falconry
and he reads about three chapters into it,
and then he comes home with a baby falcon.
To this day, I have no idea
where he actually got this falcon from.
He claims he found it while he was hiking through the woods.
Now, I've done a lot of hiking in the woods,
and I have never seen a baby falcon just laying there
looking for a good home.
And it seemed like an odd coincidence
that he just happened to be reading a book on falconry
and he finds a falcon.
Either way, he brings it home.
But he doesn't have an enclosure.
He didn't build an enclosure.
So here's what he does.
He reassembles an old dog crate we have in our living room,
and he throws it in there.
Now, I have to admit, as a kid, we have a pet falcon,
it's kind of cool, all right.
I had a friend come over,
he's like, "Hey, I just got a new dog."
And I was like, "I see your dog,
and I raise you a fucking falcon, my friend.
Get that dog shit out of here."
But then something happens.
About six, seven months goes by,
and this thing grows up, and it is now
a full blown bird of prey.
And I'll tell you this: It does not want to go back
in the dog crate anymore.
So here's what my dad does.
He lets it fly around our house,
so right off the bat we let our cats out one day
and they're like, "We're out of here.
Like, fuck you guys, we're out."
One of 'em I think had, like, a stick with a handkerchief
with his shit filled on it hobo style and just...
Our dog all day long just hides under the desk, okay?
He's traumatized. He's got PTSD.
But here's the worst part.
So this falcon loved to perch itself on our refrigerator,
right on the freezer door,
so literally every time I went to go get a Klondike bar,
I had to ask myself, what would you do for this Klondike bar?
Like, is it worth getting a talon in your nut sack
for that delicious vanilla ice cream,
chocolate covered goodness?
One of the scariest things is,
when you would open the freezer door,
it would just swing open with it and then just swing close.
No change of expression on its face whatsoever.
I don't know if it was thinking of unicorns and rainbows,
or thinking about mass murder of my whole family.
Now, once a day, my dad has to take this thing outside
in our backyard, but falcons don't want to live
in captivity, so here's what you have to do
to keep them from flying away.
You have to tie a string to their leg, give it some slack,
and then hold on to the other end.
By the way, my dad had none of the falcon gear
that was necessary.
Like, you're supposed to have a thick leather glove;
he had an old oven mitt.
That's what he would carry--
that's what he would carry it out into the backyard with.
So we'd hold the other end, and he would let it go.
And so it was basically like he was flying a falcon kite
in our backyard.
And it probably wouldn't have been a big deal,
but at the time, we lived in a motel.
Yeah.
So my parents thought it would be a good idea
to buy a motel and then we would live in an apartment
attached to it.
So every day my dad's flying this thing around,
and everybody in all the rooms are staring out,
being like, is that guy flying a fucking falcon?
And now word's traveling through our small town
in Indiana, that once a day you can watch a guy
fly a falcon behind our motel.
And so now we're scared that something's gonna happen,
because here's the thing:
Illegal falconry, if you get busted for it,
it's not a slap on the wrist.
It's two years in prison
and a $50,000 fine.
That's insane, right?
You can kill a man and get less than that.
I didn't know illegal falconry was like that big
of a problem where they need to levy these sorts of penalties.
So now we're freaking out.
We're like, "Holy shit, if he goes to jail,
there's not a lot of street cred that comes
with illegal falconry when you get to the big house."
Like, not a lot of dudes are like, don't rape that guy;
illegal falconer. He'll fuck you up.
So then something happens.
So, a little twist of fate happens.
So my dad every day, he would feed this thing a live mouse.
So he goes to the pet shop, he gets a live mouse,
puts it on the living room floor,
and then the falcon flies off the top of the dog crate,
swoops down and murders the mouse in front of me
while I'm trying to watch "Dukes of Hazzard."
Just rips its insides out.
So then one day my dad goes to the pet shop
and he tried to buy a mouse.
They're all out of mice. I don't know what happened.
Snake convention in town, I don't know
how a pet shop runs out of mice.
So here's what he does. He has a backup plan.
He has some pork that's thawing out in his refrigerator,
so he feeds the falcon some pork.
The falcon eats it, next morning we wake up,
the falcon's dead. Yeah.
I don't know. I think they're Muslim
or something.
I don't know the exact science behind it.
I don't know.
So then my dead reads, like, three chapters ahead
and he goes, "Oh, shit, you're not supposed to feed 'em pork."
So now we have this dead falcon,
which I got to be honest with you,
if you're getting two years for just having a live falcon,
if you murder one, it's probably way more than that.
So now we have to wait for nightfall to come.
We march out into the woods,
my brother and I dig a hole,
we bury it like ten feet deep,
and my dad was just so brokenhearted about this.
He was devastated. He was devastated.
He thought that he was super tight with this
fucking falcon.
By the way, he was not tight with this falcon at all.
This falcon didn't give a shit about him.
But my dad, he never gave up, man.
He tried to get other falcons unsuccessfully,
and he passed away last year,
which is why I'm legally allowed to tell this story now.
But one of the last conversations I had with him
was in his backyard, and he was grilling,
and there was a falcon
that actually lived in his neighborhood.
And it was soaring overheard, and he was looking up at it,
and then he just turned to me and he goes,
"I'm gonna catch that motherfucker."
And then he died. Thank you guys!
Thank you very much.
- Ryan O'Neill, everybody. Ryan O'Neill!
[cheers and applause]