Hatched (9 page)

“None of your fucking stupid business,” he thought, and then smiled to himself.

“Well, whoever he is,” he continued to himself, “he’ll probably come to Fabergé Restaurant tonight, though, and buy his mistress a $291.00 eggy meal!”

He looked around the restaurant, fuming.

“On second thought,” he thought to himself, “the stupid fuck who invented the $36.00 in fees jerked off to swaths of bank balances that glimmered upon his computer screen late at night. And I don’t do that.”

But whoever did do it, he, and she, got away with it. And whoever it was, this fact was at this moment beside the point. All Jude knew was that he now faced a frightening abyss, six or seven more transactions, $36.00 each, because the fees had driven his account down towards the negative. “Fuckity fuck, fuck, fuck,” he thought. “FUCK!”

And that was that. He banished the thought. There was literally nothing at all he could do. The barbed-wire fence loomed in front of him as he skateboarded on the pathway to economic slice and dice. No one could save him, least of all himself, so he might just as well ingest the egg of rebirth, the fragile egg of life, the cracked egg of catastrophe—
splat
.

This unfortunate guest of Fabergé Restaurant, this Jude-the-Writer, had come to New York to write a novel, and not to move people’s furniture all over the United States, as he’d done for the past four years. He had come to write, what was that expression? He had come to “write the Great American Novel,” to emerge from obscurity and become an Everyman edition, a Penguin Classic. A writer. Jude-the-Writer. And, amazingly, Jude-the-Writer had been successful, sort of, even though he really was mostly just Jude-the-Mover.

Jude, as Jude-the-Writer, was writing to shed the image that he’d had of himself as a perennial mover, as in one who is always moving someone else’s crap from one state to another, instead of moving masses of readers from their normal state to a state of literary excitement. Jude wanted to be famous, to figure out what it would take to write the Great American Novel. To fuel his ambitions, obscure Jude had entered what seemed like several hundred writing competitions.

“Write about your first experience on a bicycle!” (For a local advertising campaign designed to bolster the mayor’s effort of raising taxes in order to subsidize bike paths.)

“Describe your experience with anxiety.” (For a pharmaceutical company in search of a talking head for a new ‘performance’ drug.)

“Tell us, with intimate detail, about your first blowjob.” (For a ‘teen’ porno magazine. This was one of his favorite pieces of writing, which he ultimately had to tear up before submission on account of his having felt strangely sullied by the experience, not of writing, but of thinking about it afterwards.)

And finally, “Submit a 300-word essay about what it means to be an American.”

This last one, perhaps combined with thoughts of blowjobs, was the one that really got him started on the “American Novel” idea. The very thought of it convinced him to be that great American writer who Mr. Carmichael, his high school English teacher, had talked about in class, because he himself wanted to be that same person. Mr. Carmichael, however, had traded in his dream for teaching, just as Aunt Doris had traded in her Montblanc pen for vicarious lust and passion—via her nephew, Jude. Maybe Aunt Doris, too, imagined the Great American Novel, and thought that the pen would vehicle Jude to write about it. For the moment, it didn’t do so. For the moment, it mostly just leaked.

Jude had certainly thought about it, even if the pen lay limp beside him when he did. What does it mean to be an American! He’d win that competition, find and then mine a vein of understanding of the United States, based upon his travels with everyone else’s furniture, across this great land. The great American travel novel, the story of a man who moves people’s crap, and their lives, from one great American experience to another, an
On the Road
for furniture that turns into a penetrating exploration of the American soul. He would translate his experiences into words, his words into a novel, and the novel into sufficient cash to cover every stupid overdraft fee he had ever paid to American capitalist pricks, and then some! He would sell a million copies, and thus transport himself from obscurity to immortality, assuring him mortgage-free home ownership, the definition, according to his mother, of true success.

He’d find an incredible, successful, and brilliant woman who would love him, and who he’d adore to no end. He would support her fascinating work, and she would tolerate his bizarre habits. She’d leave him smoke his cigar, no, his pipe! He would buy a dark-brown or cherry-colored pipe that he would smoke while writing, and also while doing awesome tricks for his adoring fans on his skateboard. When he’d return home from puffing and skating, he’d make love to his wife on a plush, leather couch in his mortgage-free mansion, and then they would spend hours discussing important ideas while drinking champagne and eating food prepared for them in the style of Fabergé Restaurant.

They would live in a beautiful home, with a wood-paneled library, just down the hallway from the sunroom, and in the basement they’d have an indoor skating park. The whole place would be magnificently furnished, thanks to piles of money in a bank filled with awe-inspired tellers who’d clamor to serve him so that they could admire the number of zeros that followed the numbers in his account balance. And when he and his wife would be together in their bed, he would take her hand in his, and he’d feel good and not desirous of other women, because in the deepest recesses of his very being he would admire, adore, and love her. Then he’d take her in his arms, and they would kiss each other, savoring the taste of a life shared together, and they’d make love again, and again, and again. Ah, bliss! And all because of his writings! All because of his Great American Novel!

What are we dreaming about in each of the incomprehensible pastiches of present and past worlds that populate that eye within our minds? Perhaps we’re all in search of the kind of congruence that is captured in mundane moments, like the image of a sleeping cat who seems in such perfect harmony with the carpet upon which she has spread out her furry self. Or like an egg, perched in silent perfection inside a nest, an incubator to a distant world.

Chapter 8

Jude still hadn’t started the Great American Novel, but he did finish that little essay about America. It told the story of America from the perspective of a chair that had been handmade in 1776, and which had traveled through every state in the nation (except Alaska and Hawaii), en route to different owners. He submitted it to the Society of America, whoever the hell they were, and they never even acknowledged his entry. And then he moved, because he couldn’t afford the rent, or any rent for that matter, and so he never won that competition, and if he did, well, he would never know he had won it, which amounts to the same thing.

But all was not lost, because Jude did finally win his first writing competition, in January of the current year, just a few weeks after getting a post office box, a solution to his nomadic existence. The breakthrough came thanks to an essay he had written for the AEFB, the venerable American Egg Farmer Bureau. He had never heard of any of the organizations that sponsored these contests, and never knew, or cared, why any of the competitions he’d entered had been launched. But when he actually won $1,000 ($1,000!) for his contribution to the AEFB, the accompanying award letter included a paragraph explaining that the AEFB had been looking for positive publicity in the face of two separate salmonella outbreaks in a period of only eight months. These unfortunate events were undoubtedly the result of endless doses of hormones and antibiotics pumped into chickens as a means of avoiding precisely such catastrophes.

Negative press about the outbreak had led to a major decline in egg profits for farmers already hit by a recently marketed, cholesterol-free egg replacement that allegedly increased, ‘good’ cholesterol. Jude hadn’t intended to become a poster boy for the Egg Lobby, of course, whatever the fuck that is. Who ran the Egg Lobby? Chickens? Lobsters? Whatever. He was instead more concerned with just figuring out how to have a regular stream of meals come his way, and, moreover, how to have time to write his novel rather than carting crap around the country. But the idea of eggs grew on him, and, apparently, he had been convincing in this relationship.

Jude’s winning essay was one thousand words describing a half-dozen eggs that had been laid by a group of happy hens, and that had each brought joy and nutrition to a half-dozen different people in a half-dozen different states (the theme of moving around was often present in Jude’s writing). One egg had been consumed by a farmer before setting off to his Wisconsin barn, in which he milked cows for a brand of cheese that fraudulently sported an Italian crest so as to convince American consumers who would never have known the difference anyway that their pizza had an authentic Sicilian taste.

The second egg had been fried in fresh butter and served to a florist in Omaha, Nebraska, who, inspired by the wonderful taste and the gorgeous yellow color, had made a new and beautiful floral arrangement of various yellow flowers for a wedding bouquet for a gay couple who had imagined that the generous people in their state would vote “YES” on proposition G. They didn’t, but Jude never expanded upon that story, and it somehow made it past the AEFB censors that he was advocating for gay marriage, not eggs.

The third egg had been boiled and cooled for painting by a young child in Wichita, Kansas, while his mother joyfully prepared omelets for her family on Easter Sunday.

The fourth egg had been carefully separated in order to serve as the basis for a delicate and delicious crepe recipe by a young entrepreneur who’d opened his first outdoor stand at a county fair in Nashville, Tennessee.

The fifth egg had been ridded of its yolk and then whipped and beaten until it formed a frothy, little mountain that was combined with sugar and cooled to create a little specialty cookie in Burlington, Vermont.

And the sixth egg, well, that one had been saved by the hen, so that she’d have a cute little offspring that would one day be a source for a new half-dozen eggs. This of course was rather unlikely, but, oh well, it’s fiction.

Number seven, if a half dozen could include a bonus egg, would have been eggs that would be gently cracked, and then skillfully opened up and poured onto the pouty nipples of his cooing lover in San Francisco, but he figured he might want to save that one for a future teen-porn magazine writing competition.

He had written the whole thing up, including number seven, in half an hour, half-asleep, after a night of plotting out his Great American Novel with a half bottle of bourbon; and so he was all the more surprised that his half-assed text, and rather dazed effort, had lead anywhere, let alone further, in fact, than anything else he’d ever written. And it had. It had produced one thousand dollars, $20 per word. He did that kind of calculation constantly, particularly now with his newfound obsession with saving enough money to allow him to hatch another text.

This next effort was originally supposed to be the first draft of the Great American Novel, but instead he found himself working on another text about eggs, because his essay, published in a women’s magazine, had captured the attention of The Creationist Institute, in New York City, which was looking for some provocative writings about eggs. They had decided that the image of Earth as an egg would help sway those who believed in evolution; that a place as wonderful as Earth couldn’t possibly have evolved, but must have arrived, like an egg, from, well, from God. Not from one of his orifices, presumably, but from Him. So here was Jude, cheap ballpoint pen in one hand, thick, black Montblanc pen on the table, a negative balance in the bank, staring around Fabergé Restaurant in search of inspiration to fulfill his dream of becoming a famous writer. His first book would be about eggs, it seemed, so that his second could be the Great American Novel. But eggs would give him the start he needed, he decided.

“All I need to do,” he thought, “is to write about eggs, in an array of manifestations and, of course, recipes. And, obviously, what better place to succeed in this effort than in the renowned Fabergé Restaurant, devoted to the fine art of cooking and preparing eggs?”

The problem, of course, was that this is one of the most expensive restaurants in the city, and therefore one of the most expensive restaurants in the entire world, which made the little matter of the $291.00 rather serious. What was he going to order that would justify his being there for the next five hours? He realized that he might as well buy whatever he could afford with his remaining $12.00, because one way or the other it would vanish at midnight when the stupid banking system updated fucking files and caught up with the present after having dwelled in the past in order to cheat him out of $291.00. Bastards.

“Since when do instantaneous computer transactions need to update?” He kept repeating his own question, as though he was a chicken in some egg factory endlessly reproducing the same commodity to similar effect, twenty-four hours per day. “Since when?” He asked this question of the universe, and the universe had no answer. He reached for the closed menu on the table and turned to the page of appetizers. There were, amazingly enough, a few choices, because this was the far, far cheaper lunchtime “specials” menu. Unbeknownst to him, Tina had insisted that John stoop downwards in order to broaden the restaurant’s clientele, and so today’s affordable specials, that is, today’s creations that could be procured for a measly $12.00, included a fried partridge egg, strawberry-coated egg whites, a single (!) caviar egg, or a few salmon roe adorning a little mountain of puffed-up egg whites appropriately called “Santa on Mont Blanc.” This was a seasonal favorite, and with the colder weather of a New York fall, it seemed like an auspicious choice. Most importantly, it would provide him keys to the Fabergé Restaurant kingdom for one more day.