How Some People Like Their Eggs
by Sean Lovelace
General Patton:
He orders his eggs like his battles, pitched. Eats them fast off the plate—fork, mouth, fork, mouth—with no condiments. Finishes them off with a room-temperature beer (learned that in Luxembourg). Picks up his hat. Stands tall and shouts, “Thank you, egg, this morning! You genius bastard do-your-damndest chicken coffin son-of-a-bitch!” Looks around and nods. Places his hat. Winks at a girl on a wall calendar. Marches outside. Salutes the sun, and if there is no sun, salutes a cloud in the shape of malaria.
Yogi Berra:
Doesn’t eat eggs anymore. “No one does,” he says, with a shrug. “You can’t find them at the grocery. They’re always sold out.”
Billie Holiday:
Served sunny side up, inverted. Like two dreams dropped from a great height. Big and round and shiny and flat. Served with a glass of rusty tap water. Served fourteen minutes after cooking. While cooling. While cool.
Andy Warhol:
Upstairs, on the paint-spattered floor, an eight-step process. He does the following:
1.) wakes.
2.) checks to see if anyone has stolen his Sony Walkman. No one has.
3.) finds this grainy video (an old SX-70 camera, smeared a layer of Vaseline and cigarette ash on the lens) of Marilyn
Monroe digging the cotton from an asthma inhaler and eating it with a loopy smile.
4.) freezes the video and takes a photo of the TV screen with a Polaroid and then drops the developed image into a pan of milk.
5.) heats the milk on a hotplate.
6.) tweezes the photo from the saucer.
7.) uses three Q-tips and a burnishing tool to manipulate the emulsion inside the Polaroid.
8.) admires the unexpected surprise of the TV lines (monitor phosphors caught on film) but finds the final image less than
pleasing.Less than art, certainly. So he smokes two low-tar cigarettes, poaches an egg, eats it.
Howard Hughes:
Steam-basted. In an autoclave.
Bonnie Parker:
However Clyde wants them. But he don’t want them at all. He wants a Baby Ruth for breakfast. Three of them and a chocolate malt, and so he drives the Ford V8 hard to Dallas. She thinks about eggs, a poem of eggs, to write in her red notebook: White hens, white eggs. Red hens, brown. A good egg floats; a bad one sinks. The moon is a floating egg, yellow light on the fields, square-shouldered…“What you thinking on?” Clyde says, swerves to hit a scrawny beagle crossing the road, misses, belches, and tosses a milk bottle out the window. “Nothing,” she answers. “I’m just hungry.”
Archduke Franz Ferdinand Karl Anikò Belschwitz Mòric Bálint Szilveszter
Gömpi Bzoch János Frajkor Ludwig Josef von Habsburg-Lothringen of Austria:
Franz invites a Slav to breakfast. Then a Croat, a Serb, a German. All decline. He sits alone in his castle, glances around, and thinks: Why do others seem to have more friends? And the friends I have, even they seem distant. Or does it only appear that way? Sophie rides up on a horse and carriage, and this makes Franz’s heart go all Mylar balloon: shiny and floating and free. “Please don’t go to Bosnia,” she pleads and places a newspaper and a goose egg on the table. “They want to kill you in Bosnia.” “I-am-going-to-Bosnia!” Franz declares. The egg is boiled.
Anne Sexton:
She rises early, for domestic chores. Vacuums the air of dust motes. Wet mops the ceiling. While her family sleeps in their well-made beds, she fries their eggs, occasionally nibbling the crisping edges, the whites. She thinks: Here I am again. She thinks: What word possibly rhymes with spatula? She listens to the refrigerator hum. The freezer hum. Her own humming. Then she pierces the yolks; they bloom and bleed: a peony, a water clock, a lioness clutching at a crow.
Che Guevara:
Che likes a bold omelet. He’ll add anything: asparagus tips, bread, a handful of spare change. He was the first to think clarified butter. He eats on a promontory, above the Gulf Stream, alone. An attractive girl walks up and takes a photo of his head.
Robert Capa:
Mr. Capa tries to cook his eggs on an outdoor grill. It can not be done. He stumbles inside, to the kitchen. The phone rings. He answers and someone yells, “How dare you wear that helmet in public! That’s GI issue. You took it off a dead man!” Capa throws the phone down, the cord coiling about his leg like a snake. He sits and thinks about sex, where to get some. Sits in the nude and eats his eggs runny, with a chaser of Polish vodka. On a tin plate inscribed with the words “Property of Robert Capa, great war correspondent and lover.”
Cher:
Coddled eggs.
Buzz Aldrin:
Looks at the clock. Phones up Armstrong, says, “You had breakfast yet?” Armstrong answers, “Hours ago, my man.” Buzz hangs up with a sigh. Pushes his eggs around the plate. They are raw.
Thelonious Monk:
No human being knows how Thelonious Monk likes his eggs. |
