Cock-a-Doodle Dude

His head is the average, crudely realized fiberglass-chicken variety: red plume like a mohawk over a puff of white feathers; broad, bright yellow beak and slightly crossed black oval eyes. He’s called a boy but is built like a man, with long legs in blue jeans and a tight red T-shirt over bulging biceps. In his outstretched hands he holds a bucket--one would presume of chicken, though it proves empty.

“I think of him as very human--he’s more like a very odd-looking person,” says graphic designer Amy Inouye, the owner of “Chicken Boy,” a 22-foot statue that once adorned a downtown restaurant and has since, thanks to Inouye, attained the weirdly appropriate status of an L.A. pop culture icon.

In the early ‘70s, Inouye--then an insecure art school student and recent Bay Area transplant--spotted Chicken Boy atop the fried chicken dive of the same name on Broadway, where he’d roosted since 1969. “At that moment,” Inouye recalls, “I immediately felt it was OK to be in L.A.” She drove by regularly, she admits, “but it wasn’t like I was stalking him.” Then, late one night in 1983, she noticed that the restaurant--she’d never actually eaten there--was boarded up.

“He meant so much to me,” Inouye says. “I couldn’t see him taken down.”

Her emotional attachment to Chicken Boy--that inexplicable attraction many in L.A. feel toward ostensibly u-g-l-y roadside effluvia--became an obsession. After a slew of phone calls, Inouye nabbed him for free but had to pay the cost of dismounting, moving and storing him, which over the years has topped $6,000. “It has been major,” she says.

After safely stowing Chicken Boy in a Monterey Park storage yard, Inouye gave him a mantra, “Too Tall to Live, Too Weird to Die,” and produced T-shirts and lapel pins with his likeness to give away to clients. Friends started asking for them too, and soon Chicken Boy had turned into a cottage kitsch industry, spawning a catalog, now in its eighth edition, of Chicken Boy pocket protectors and floating pens and toothpick holders; “Chicken Boy: The Movie”--short, but a love story nevertheless; and a Sept. 1 birth date determined by a psychic.

While Inouye isn’t interested in selling Chicken Boy--his 6-foot-high head is the centerpiece of her airy 1920s studio near Koreatown, which she sporadically opens to the public on Saturday afternoons (his torso resides in a friend’s backyard)--she has offered to loan him longterm to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art. Both declined. A couple years ago, when a country radio station took interest in him, Chicken Boy was displayed for five weeks in downtown’s subterranean mall, ARCO Plaza. Inouye felt “he was quite perfect there,” but when winter came she was made to understand that he didn’t blend with the mall’s Currier & Ives Christmas decor.

Inouye still hopes to place Chicken Boy in a roost commensurate with his status. “I’d love to find a fantastic public space that would be safe and secure,” she says. But when offered a site across from Elvis’ statue on Beale Street in Memphis, Tenn., Inouye said no. Like any mother hen facing the empty nest, she wants him to stay close to home.