Up on the roof, in my car/
Up all night, I’m pulling through signs like Dolomite/
The mack, I’m the Egg Man/
Taxi Driver, I’m the Egg Man
- “Eggman,” Paul’s Boutique (1989)

“Get over here! Stop! Now!” The words cut through the chatter all around me, through the noise of a crush of friends by the bar, laughing, passing rounds of Beam shots through the group. I was feeling that early numbness, the initial full-body novocaine sensation of the liquor, but even in a sedative state, the voice was deeply alarming. “Now! Stop right now!” It was foreign – Turkish, Moroccan… perhaps Lebanese. And it was Bent – angry and looking for blood, and headed in our direction, louder as the syllables kept coming. “Now! I’m calling the police!”
I didn’t need to guess at the cause.
“Hot stuff.” “Whoa.” “Coming through.” “‘Scuse met there, ladies.” “Pardon me.” “Sorry about that.” Henry was cutting and slashing through the lines of people near the bar, holding a plate over his head with one hand and shoveling what looked like a quesadilla into his face with the other, bobbing, twisting like Barry Sanders in heavy traffic, firing the engines and gunning ahead in the occasional empty spaces.
Turn your back. There is no way this is good. I saw what looked a line cook or manager five or six feet behind him, screaming and waiving his arms. Don’t look at him. Don’t let them connect you to the crime. After a few years in the company of people like Henry (well, in fairness, like me… like most of the people I knew), you understand the informal “joint and several” form of liability management applies to the group of friends, or as they see it, enablers, who come along with these miscreants. Whatever they destroy, steal, or soil in a fashion that renders the thing useless under state health regulations, You Now Own. That’s right. Though they’ve no legal right to do so, if your buddy vomits onto the pizza display or cheese steak griddle at the late night place you took him to after a margarita marathon, management looks to you to pay for the lost inventory or cleanup expenses. Or get beaten in the alley next door by a couple of line cooks or bouncers. Poor man’s indemnification – you make the establishment whole in the moment, then collect it all back from your asshole friend in the morning.
I turned, tipped my head down and waved at the bartender. “Another round of bourbon shots, please. Yes, Beam.” Don’t you know by now, goddamnit? Jack Daniels is not a bourbon. It’s a sour mash whiskey, made in Tennessee.

I could feel Henry barreling through a nanosecond later, knocking everyone around me sideways, like a pile of bowling pins. Guess he didn’t feel the need to twist and weave around us, being friends and all.
“Hey! Hey! What the fuck!” I heard another friend of ours, Erin scream as the train rolled through. “He knocked my drink all over my dress!”
Stay focused. Look down, at the bar – straight ahead until he passes. You don’t know the man. Never met him, never seen him before. I checked my pocket to see if I’d put down my Visa for the tab. Oh, thank God. I was lucky; been paying cash. If the owners were looking for restitution for whatever that fool had done, they didn’t have my credit card to hang over my head.
“Damnit! I just bought it today and I have to wear it to dinner with my boyfriend’s family tomorrow night.” I could hear Erin harping in the background as the manager ran through our group, chasing Henry toward the door. Erin was a law student in California at the time, in her third year, waiting to finish and do a clerkship with some heavyweight federal judge out West. Third year of law school being an absolute waste of time once you have a job – even more so than the other two – she was taking a week long vacation to hang out in the New York area, catching up with college friends and, apparently, meet her significant other’s folks.
“It’s black.” Martin assured her. “No one will notice.”His comment made me suspicious, as Erin was wearing a white t-shirt and jeans, and it was Victoria who was wearing a black dress. Christ, is he that drunk already? Had the prick been holding out back at Bennett’s apartment? Doubling up on shots when no one was looking?
I turned toward the door and caught a last glimpse of Henry just as he slammed into a waitress and everything turned to shit. She was short, blinded by a tray of food on her shoulder and never saw it coming. And for that matter, neither did Henry. She came into his path from the side, never even glancing in his direction. He swerved to try to avoid her, almost trying a limbo move to slide underneath the food in her hands, but his every contortion was futile. He couldn’t adjust his stride. Couldn’t slow, brake or freeze. He hit her like a bear running downhill, with the full brunt force of his mass, sending her tray straight into the air. The food, glasses and silver, the bottles, plates and salt shakers – all of it daring gravity for a tiny sliver of second, then crashing all over the floor.
The screaming was a cross between something out of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and a mash up of Rosie Perez’s worst movie dialogue (all those confrontational scenes where she wags her finger in the air and drops science on somebody with a homegirl affectation). On one hand, the waitress was howling, wiping food of her dress and hollering in the manager’s face. “What the fuck are you doing? You chased him right into me!” On the other, a busybody hostess near the door was barking indignantly at Henry. “You stop yourself right there! You stop! Don’t you run from me!”
As if that would ever work. I’ve always felt embarrassed watching people without a stitch of enforcement capability try to compel fugitives to stop in those situations. Reminds me of throwing snowballs at cars as a kid – how every now and again, one of the drivers would pull over and scream at you. “You! Get over here! Right now! I want your names! I’m calling your parents!” They seem to think some cosmic sense of justice or shame will stop the criminals in their tracks, compel the evildoers to recognize they ought to be punished and turn themselves over so Right and Order can prevail. So they can learn their lesson, be Rehabilitated. Even as a kid, you wonder, Don’t they realize the rule here? Punishment isn’t a necessary or automatic product of bad behavior. Punishment’s what happens when you get caught. And if they can’t catch you – if you can run, well…
But that’s not a popular view. In a lot circles, particularly those where life’s tough enough already, people want, need, to think there’s some Great Leveler at work. That somehow, some way, if they demand someone does what they think’s right – give them their satisfaction – the offender will pay his debt. I watched the woman bark for a while, no doubt thinking she’d stop Henry cold. Blast through the haze from the liquor and that low grade mini-mart speed… Make him realize what he’d done, why he needed to turn around and own up to the mess he’d made.
And I knew she’d be disappointed. Henry wasn’t turning around. If they caught him, bagged him, all but threw him in a cell – that’s where he’d cop his plea. But if nobody had that leverage, Henry was gone like a ghost. I kind of felt bad for the woman, yelling herself nearly hoarse. It wasn’t like she cared about the place, or her job or her manager flipping out nearby. This was a deeper annoyance, stemming from a lack of respect. He couldn’t just ignore her like that. There had to be some kind of whiplash – an adverse, painful comeuppance. What kind of world did we live in where a rotten, trashed white kid could barge into the kitchen like he owned it, start eating other peoples’ dinners, knock over a pile of plates trying to fix himself a sandwich, take out a waitress running for the door and escape into the streets untouched – another fat, loaded freak, stumbling through the midnight ether? Where was the justice in that?
I wanted to take her aside, to explain the folly of her anger. There’s no use in getting upset. None of this mess is deliberate. It’s like a basement pipe bursting, a blackout or a grease fire. No rhyme, no reason, no point. He’s oblivious is all… Just doing what he does. It’s terrible, I know, but you can’t take it personally. This is all just collateral damage. That’d never work. She’d have to give the thing a back story, to differentiate people like Henry from people like her, to create a narrative in her head that fit her view of the world and aligned with her “value set.” The values of people like her, people unlike Henry. Probably tell me he over and over how she knew Henry’s kind. How he was “ignorant” for acting the way they did. That he’d pay one day, and dearly. Inevitably, somehow, life had to be fair.
“You! You!” I didn’t dare pick up my head, but I could feel the manager’s finger aimed at my back. “You are his friends!”
Shit. We’re going to have to run for it. This was more than an altercation. This was threats, and fists, and cops. This was all of us taking the shakedown, picking up the cost of the damage, as though it was all our fault. As though we’d put those pills in Henry’s mouth, started him drinking at two in the afternoon. Wouldn’t be any use in explaining the complexities of the situation to a fuming immigrant manager. You see, ephedrine’s a complex drug. Like really bad coke… but different. All he’d know in his effective, direct perspective was that we were Henry’s friends. And those like him, with him, however disconnected from his clearly aberrant acts, should still pay for the man’s abuses. Guilt by association – another variation on that “lay down with dogs, get fleas” speech I’d heard from my mother a million times before. I could only imagine the manager’s response. You’re all the same. Thick as thieves! I want your credit card numbers, now!
“I’m running for it.” I mouthed the words at Martin.
“How?”
“First shot of daylight.” I had to put him on notice, so he’d plot his own route out. Leaving him hanging with the tab, without fair warning, was an unforgivable foul.
“What’s his name?” The manager was short and stocky, moving quickly with a jerky gait. As he closed in our group at the bar, I shifted left along the drink rail, to position myself for escape.
“He has seizures.” Didn’t know where it came from. Just seemed the right thing to say.
“Seizures? That make him break plates? Ash cigarettes in the ground beef?”
“Epileptic.” Martin gave me a lifeline.
“Epileptic?”
“Insulin withdrawal… He starts drooling, wetting himself. It’s horrible.” As the manager turned in his direction, I slid another foot closer to the door.
“I don’t care. Who’s paying for this?” By the time the manager turned back to me, I was already setting to run, tiptoeing around the pile of food scattered on the floor from Henry’s run-in with the waitress.
“Is that salsa verde?” I needed a solid line to change the subject, make it appear I was merely inspecting the mess, rather than sneaking out through it. This was not an optimal selection.
“You’re not going anywhere! I’ll call the cops.”
Fuck it. I felt along the floor for traction, to ensure I wasn’t standing in enchilada sauce or a puddle of frozen margaritas, then turned on the burners. Halfway to the door Martin broadsided me out of the blue, pinwheeling me sideways into the hostess’s podium, all but spearing the woman, bouncing off the fixture, out the door and stumbling sideways into foot traffic on the sidewalk.
“What the fuck?”
“You don’t go at the same time I’m going.”
“How did I know you were going?”
“You were watching me go.”
“I wasn’t watching you go.”
“You had to have been watching me go.”
“What? Like everyone’s watching you? Hey, let’s see when ‘Hollywood’ goes?”
“Do you run in front of a blocker? Is that how you run?”
“I played soccer.”
“Of course you did.”
“You stop! Stop!” The hostess emerged from the doorway, followed by manager in tow. We collected ourselves and took off down the sidewalk.
“Get back here!” The manager held to us tightly, ten or so yards behind.
“Why the fuck doesn’t he just grab Bennett?”
“He took off. Snuck out behind Henry as soon as the shit happened.”
“Fucking– He’s like a fucking cockroach.”
“Would you fucking watch it?” Martin leapt in front of me, to avoid being railroaded into a crowd of women walking toward us on the left.
“Do you have any idea how to run in traffic?”
“What the fuck do you know? Did you play football?”
“I had a girlfriend.”
“I said stop!” The manager’s voice was growing faint, but I didn’t dare turn to look in his direction. Any false move – tripping and falling or running into someone – and we were done.
“What does having a girlfriend have to do with playing football?”
“You play high school football to get laid, right?”
“You play lacrosse to get laid.”
“Either way, nobody ever got laid because of soccer.”
“Fuck you. You didn’t even play football.”
“I did the lifting and conditioning shit.”
“So?”
“They wanted us to do double sessions. Eight hours a day? Running in pads in the heat?”
“Candy ass… You’d die playing soccer.”
“I wound up banging a chick. Didn’t need it anymore.”
“You’re fucked, you know that?”
“No ‘team’ in ‘I.’ Which way do you think Henry went?”
“Listen for sirens. He’s either being arrested or been hit by something.”
“I got to take a break, seriously.”
We’d run at least two blocks, with the manager trailing behind us, dropping further and further back as we moved along, when Martin decided to turn. “Here… Take a right. Just to make sure we lose him.”
“I really need a break. I’m dying here.”
I was twenty yards down the sidewalk after the turn, still running full bore, when I felt the first pain in my throat. It came like a lightning bolt, shocking me just north of the collarbone – sharp, stinging, sucking all the wind out of my esophagus. What the f– I’d barely had a chance to think when the next pain shot through the left side of my neck, just below my jaw, radiating up through my teeth and snapping my head straight back. Motherfu– What the hell is happening?
Panic would’ve normally ensued, but the whiskey was cutting the edge. I staggered to a car nearby and leaned on it to catch my breath.
“What are you doing?” Martin turned and ran back toward me. “We can’t stop yet.”
“Two city blocks?” I could barely cough out the words, struggling to breath as the air was still missing from my throat. “There’s- there’s no way he’s still on us.”
“What the hell’s the matter?”
“I don’t– I don’t know.” I reached up and grabbed my clavicle and felt what at first seemed a soaking sweat. What the fuck? It’s freezing outside. Then I ran my hand on along my neck, up and over the left side of my jaw. Same thing. Totally soaking wet. But it was strange, viscous where it should have been water, like somebody’d poured a bowl of Chinese shrimp sauce over my head.
“Dude, you’ve been egged.”
“In the middle of New York?”
“There’s bits of shell all over you!”
“Motherfucker.” I ran my fingers through my hair and sure enough, it was filled with hundreds of bits of shell and rapidly gelatinizing remnants of yolk and whites. “The fuckers hit me twice!” I looked around on the street to find the source the attack, but all I saw were taxis. “From a moving car! And both head shots.”
“Dude, that fucking sucks.”
“It’s fucking amazing. The Yankees should find that kid.” The pathetic fact was, I knew something about throwing eggs from moving cars, and as loathsome a practice as it seems – as rotten and callous and cowardly as pelting a pedestrian might have been – from a vehicle doing forty, fifty miles per hour in the middle of downtown Manhattan, nailing a person not once, but twice in a single pass, was like throwing someone out at home from the warning track of center field in a major league park.
“Wasn’t the same kid throwing both.”
“I don’t know.” I opened my jacket and shook out the pieces of shells that had splattered into the thing when the first one hit me in the neck. “Felt like it was. Same speed, same velocity… Hell, he hit in the same spot twice. I think it was one person.”
“No fucking way. Nobody could do that. You see how fast those cars are going?”
“I’ve seen it done.” Or at least something like it. Which was probably why as much I could have been angry, I had to applaud the effort. The kid had tagged me good and I knew that he was smiling somewhere, out there speeding in traffic, with the picture of my head snapping back like a solider taking a bullet replaying through his mind. That he was giggling under his breath as he remembered me clutching my throat in confusion as the second one slammed into the side of my neck. He’d never make that pair of shots again in a million tries, and though it might sound monstrous to some, the memory’d stick with him for life. Twenty years later, working as a stockbroker, lawyer or salesman, he’d be sitting in a cab at a light nearby and the image would flow back in color – that time he got off two shots and from the back seat of his cousin’s Tahoe and leveled some yuppie jogger in his tracks. And from twenty, thirty yards, on half a bottle of Glenlivet stolen from his folks’ basement bar.
I know this. I’ve been that rotten little prick.
Growing up in a place like Pennsylvania, everybody goes through his vandalism stage. Mine wasn’t particularly special, pranks more anything else. Stealing lawn jockeys and throwing them in people’s swimming pools, setting off stink bombs in fast food joints at lunchtime, loading the back of the truck with flashing signs from construction sites and placing them at interchanges so that people would be detoured around their developments in endless circles or led onto entrance ramps for toll roads. Eggs were the bottom barrel kick, a last ditch default selection when you’d nothing better to do. Sophomore year shit… Hanging at a buddy’s house on a Wednesday night, drinking his old man’s Coors Light and playing basketball in the driveway, inevitably somebody’d want to drive – go somewhere, do something, but what?
That’s where the eggs came in. One of us would go into a 7Eleven to get dip and come out with a couple dozen. And so the ugliness would commence. Start out small and simple, throwing them out the window at stop signs, billboards or mailboxes, which was actually quite athletic (If you could hit a small target at sixty miles an hour on a dark rural road, you probably should have been pitching, varsity level). But then it would go to shit. Somebody’d see a kid from a rival school, nail him in the small of the back and watch him jump, lurch forward grabbing his spine, flipping us off and screaming in the rear view mirror. “You fuckers! You fucking cocksuckers! I’m going to fucking kill you!”
Not if you can’t catch us.
Everything would change from there. Once you got into moving targets, the stationary stuff wouldn’t do. It’s addictive, the same way you could stand off the highway as a kid and throw snowballs at passing cars for hours. Something about the timing – measuring the distance and speed in your head, and throwing against the momentum of the vehicle you were in, rolling left and firing to the right. And the payoff, that “SMACK” where the shell explodes on the target, is a sickeningly satisfying sound. We never hunted the small or weak or old, but still I know… If there’s a Hell, apart from the myriad things I think have earned me a ticket, most of which won’t mean shit, those malicious drive-by eggings will somehow doom me forever.
And if I had to break it down even further, I think I know exactly the one… That amazing Hail Mary toss – the same type of strike some kid in New York still laughs about laying on me – which’ll land me in Dante’s fifth ring.
It was the end of sophomore year and we were parked in strip mall lot, across the street from a well trafficked mini market. One of the places where those kids who looked like stoners but weren’t hung around out front, smoking cigarettes, downing Mountain Dew and Doritos and giving menacing looks to anyone trying to use to the pay phone they seemed to be guarding. It was late and we just sitting there, taking a respite from another of the endless exciting evenings of driving around, listening to It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, British Steel and The Doors, Live at the Hollywood Bowl, finishing the last of a twelve pack of Piels or Genesee Cream Ale, when the idea struck me.
“Those guys over there by the phone, across the street? I bet I can hit one of them from here. The big fucker on the right.”
It was a clear warm night and a little bit sticky – not the best air for a distance throw, but I was buzzed enough to think I could get it there. I wasn’t blessed with many skills. Didn’t have wheels, couldn’t hit for shit and as to ball handling, well, let’s just say I stuck to rebounding. And not much else. But I always had a killer arm. Don’t know where it came from, don’t know how it developed, but even to this very day, whatever type of ball or object it is, if it fits in my palm, I can throw the thing far enough that you won’t be able to see it anymore, and land it pretty much where I want.
There were three eggs left in the box, leftovers from earlier target shooting. I stepped out of the driver’s side, warmed up my shoulder and took aim on one of the kids facing the pay phone sideways. We had to be fifty, maybe sixty yards out. He looked like a stick figure in a jeans jacket in the distance.
“Dream on… You are NEVER going to get that there.” I didn’t pay any concern to my buddies taunting me from the truck. I was scoping out the exits of the lot, in case our quarry spotted us and gave chase. They were fuck-ups, but big, and the sorts who knew how to fight.
One, two, three… I pulled my arm down low, Ken Stabler style, and fired the egg a hundred feet in the air, sending it sailing into the night, lost above the glow from the mini-market and its gas station billboard lighting up the sky across the street.
“Never. Not even close,” were the last words I heard coming from friends before I heard this amazing “CRACK,” and like my own private Zapruder Film, I saw the figure in the jean jacket lurch sideways and crumble to the ground, his head snapping to the side as the little white orb streaked out of nowhere and exploded on his dome. “Oh! Oh, what the fuck! Fuck!” I could hear him yelling, half moaning, half in shock as the people around him scrambled, searching for the source of the projectile, ducking behind cars at the gas pumps and running inside the store like crowds bolting from sniper fire. “Somebody egged me! They egged me!” But they never looked across the street, never in our direction. It couldn’t have come from that far. Nobody could land that shot.
“Did you see that?” Nobody in the car said a word. Just sat there dumbstruck for a moment. It couldn’t be done again, in a million repeated attempts, with exactly the same conditions. And it worried me there for a second. I mean, what if you only succeeded in so many of these statistical long-shots in life? I’ve never been superstitious, but a head full of cheap, shitty beer and the sound of an old Doors record can put a sixteen year old in a contemplative frame of mind. What if the Great Leveler only gave out three or four of those Hail Marys per person? Did I just waste one here? Fuck it. Next time the lamp comes around, I’ll be smart. Ask for a million more wishes.
But the guilt just wouldn’t abate. And it wasn’t about what I’d done. Nobody’s ever died from an egging, even at fifty yards. No, this was a more a confusion – wondering why we were there in the first place. I could blame the state, I guess. Pennsylvania’s dead as rot, a long blue-mountained corpse. You feel like a prisoner growing up in the place, with all the geriatrics, unemployed blue collar refugees and “permanent disability” invalids… Everything’s built for the old, the sick and the ought-to- be-dead-already. The streets lined with nursing homes, bingo parlors and undertakers… The fixations with mindless local politics and that Archie Bunker cynicism, built around sepia-toned myths of simpler, glorious yesterdays. They’re that thin strip of Jersey apart, but the difference between a place like New York and Pennsylvania feels like forty or fifty years. Like one place died somewhere in the early sixties, and nobody buried the body.
Maybe that was the reason, that no parent had any business raising a kid in a state like this – that a young mind deserved a lot better. Or maybe that was just an excuse. Blame it on whatever I could, to avoid the obvious fact: We might just have been dicks. Some of the millions and millions just like us – those rotten, indulged minds that think everything has to be fun, that life’s for our entertainment, something to be attacked like an endless keg party.
I’m just another idiot in a tattered baseball hat, that’s all. Nothing personal in that egg stuff… Never thought I’d actually hit you.
From Henry to you to me, from your cousin doing tequila shots and lines of Ritalin in his dorm room at Boston College to the old man on the side of the road by the golf course trying to whine his way out of a field sobriety test… From the lawyer down the hall accidentally sending the whole floor an email about his new secretary’s tits to the clown skipping Con Law class to bake in his living room and jack off to pay per view porn… From the guy billing clients while he plays fantasy baseball four hours a day at work to the broker signing up and flipping garbage mortgages to cash out before the shit hits the fan to the lobbyist jamming bills with useless pork for his corporate clients to pay for a new home theater system and the crowds of fools who’ll piss away next month’s rent on hookers in vodka blackouts this weekend in Vegas – the rule’s as simple as this: The male doesn’t age as we think. In fact, he doesn’t age at all. He assimilates, placates and slows, accepts the reality around him and plays what he’s told to play. But just a little bit deeper, a scratch below the mask, he’s eighteen-to-thirty forever, and every now and again, in the right combination of circumstances, with the right mix of triggers or enticements, that selfish, single minded monkey will break out and escape the cage. And flowing from his greed, gluttony or vice, or a combination of the three at once, a trail of damage will follow. But he’ll never be directly blamed. It’ll all be collateral damage, the sort of thing that happens when you lock the animal down too tightly, rob him of natural releases.
What else can a man do but try to steal enough “fuck you money” to never have to work again? Or run amuck on strange drugs, remembering what it was like when he was actually, truly free? If nothing else, just forget his narrowing options – give Mr. Hyde the wheel for a bit.
“You need tonic water.” Martin dragged me to my feet. “Get rid of the egg stains.”
“You mean peanut butter.”
“Peanut butter’s for gum.”
“Tomato juice is for gum.”
“Tomato juice is for– Just– Shut up. Just buy some fucking tonic.”
We staggered into a bodega down the street and picked up the necessary cleanser. “I look like I got a fucking swirly.”¹ I had to laugh when I saw myself in the mirror behind the cash register.
“You have eggs on you. On your head.”
Your talents are wasted here. I grabbed the bottles of tonic and change from the clerk.
“Sit still!”
“I’m cold.”
“You fucking pansy.”
“It’s really, really cold. I’m freezing.”
“Fucking baby.”
“Wait!” Martin was pouring the bottles over my head as I massaged the tonic water through my hair when it struck me… “Is this diet?”
“What?”
“I need diet! Do you know how much sugar regular has? My hair will be like fucking cotton candy! Martin?” I picked my head up in time to see a pair of mid-twentyish women in mini-skirts staring at us as they lit cigarettes outside the store. They weren’t the hottest women I’d ever seen, but they were easily solid eights, even in New York. Nines or better in Philly.
“Uh, uh… Hi.” I searched for a charming line, something to make a joke, but nothing escaped my lips. Just a stuttering, pathetic hello, like Robert Carradine first running into the cheerleader he falls for in Revenge of the Nerds.
“Does he do your nails, too?” One laughed to the other.
“Where’s your change cup?” The other one flicked off a used match and the two of them set off down the block.
As I checked my reflection in a car window nearby, trying to comb the slime and shells out of my hair, molding it into a jagged, oblong mess, half Don King, half Johnny Rotten, I couldn’t help thinking about that hostess back at the bar. It wasn’t a 1:1 payback, but she might have known something I didn’t. That it might not happen quickly, and it might not be a straight-up eye for an eye type of thing, but maybe, just maybe, things are actually fair… That the inevitable brushbacks come, and it’s only a matter of when.
And that can scare a man from time to time, when he considers how many he’s owed.
To be continued…
______________________________
¹ Swirly (n.) – A temporary ice-creme cone like hairstyle created by holding a person’s head in the bowl while flushing a toilet.

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