The Boys of McKinley House

Chapter Eight—The Hard-Boiled Egg Factory

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When David was fourteen years old and working in the marine life department of Wiedner's Pet Shop on Seventh Avenue, a girl came in at four o'clock on a Saturday afternoon and spent nine and a half minutes watching the angelfish in the second-largest tank in the store. She was very small, with china-blue eyes, a pointed nose and chin, and fine, dark hair cut in a blunt Cleopatra bob, held back with a dark green ribbon. As she watched the fish, she hummed a song which David would not hear again for a very long time. When at last he heard it, and found out what it was, he would buy the record play the song over and over again, until he knew every last note in it by heart.

To David, the girl was, for those nine and a half minutes, the most beautiful creature who had ever walked on the face of the earth. The mere idea of talking to her, even making eye contact with her, made him want to die. Chad Bevilacqua, a night student at CUNY who had three girlfriends and looked like Don Johnson, was working as aquarium salesman, the same job David would have later that year, and it was Chad's job to chat up the customers and shill for the different fish tanks and cleaning devices. It was David's job to feed the squid. That afternoon, for the first time since he started working at Wiedner's, David neglected his duties. For those nine and a half minutes, all David could do was watch the girl through the glass of the angelfish tank, and try very hard to look as if he hadn't seen her at all. Whether this worked or not remains unknown, but to this day, David can picture the girl down to the last detail. He can take himself back to that moment, standing in Wiedner's Pet Shop, looking at a face that made his heart stop, while the angelfish—white, yellow, and blue—swam past.

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When David was fifteen and a freshman in high school, and his sister Sarah was sixteen and a sophomore, their parents went down to Florida for four days to visit his grandfather Murray, who was currently involved in a lawsuit brought against him by a twenty-two-year-old fan dancer named Wanda. While Esther and Mayer were out of town, Sarah, who had not yet discovered communism and was still co-captain of the cheerleading squad, took the opportunity to host the after-prom party at their apartment. At the dance that night, Sarah not only had the distinction of being one of the most popular girls in the room, but also (since she went with Chad Bevilacqua) was the only girl there whose date had a pregnant wife and an apartment in Staten Island. Sarah Jacobs had reached the pinnacle of the high school social structure that night; the world was at her fingertips, and when, three months later, she showed up on the first day of year as the leader of the Young Communists' Club, all of her old friends on the cheerleading squad agreed that it really was a shame she had thrown her reputation away to become a Marxist.

That night, though, Sarah was still the most popular sophomore at P.S. 118. She looked beautiful in her orange chiffon dress, and everybody loved her. The party, which was catered and decorated by Chad Bevilacqua's friend Sergei from Brighton Beach, who may or may not have been a member of the Russian Mafia, was magnificent, and everyone who was invited had a fabulous time. Eight of the nine cheerleaders there—Mindy C., Mindy K., Mary-Frances, Elise, Allison, Janet, Margot and Julie—got frisky with their dates, and many would look back on that night fondly in the years to come. Naomi McCrane, the other co-captain of the cheerleading squad and the girl with the best-looking boyfriend at P.S. 118, ended up with David.

Here is how it happened: it was dark. The music was loud. Naomi's boyfriend, Robbie, had just left the apartment to get a pack of cigarettes from the Korean deli downstairs, and five minutes later David came in to see if the party was over yet. (As soon as the first guests had started to arrive, he had left to spend the evening at the apartment downstairs, where his little brother Les was staying the night with a friend from school. David had just spent the last five hours watching "You Can't Do That on Television" and playing Battleship. He wanted very badly to go home.) David opened the door and stuck his head in, was confronted with the darkness and the sound of Disco Inferno, and knew instinctively that the party was not over, was not even close to being over, and that the party would go on probably for his entire life. He was just about to close the door and resign himself to spending the night with two eight-year-old boys when, without warning, a warm body pressed up against him, and whoever it was put their tongue down his throat. David's first kiss tasted, memorably, like 115-proof vodka, mentholated cigarettes, and carpet.

"Robbie," the voice said, "what took you so long?"

"Naomi?"

"…Robbie?"

"Um."

Naomi squinted, scrutinized his face in the darkness. There was a very long pause.

"Davey?"

David could only nod "yes," and while Naomi bent over to throw up in the kitchen sink, David, having realized that nothing in the world was worse than an after-prom party, made a quick getaway. He slammed the door as hard as he could behind him.

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In the fall of David's sophomore year, he worked for two months on a science project with Karen Livermore, the best science student at P.S. 118. She was very smart, and understood a lot of things that most girls didn't, but even so David didn't think she was all that pretty, or interesting, or even very nice, and he tried to spend as little time with her as possible. Nevertheless, Karen seemed to like him very much, and she asked him out one afternoon while they were working on their presentation board. They went to the movies, sat through the credits, didn't touch, and stopped get something to eat afterwards. David couldn't think of anything to talk about that wasn't related to chemistry, and he thought it must have gone horribly, but Karen asked him out again the next time they saw each other, and again after that. They went on a total of six dates, each one exactly like the one before, until the day of the science fair, when Karen and David's project received second place, right after Arthur Hamill's study of the reproductive behavior of the Eurasion box turtle. Karen never called David again, or went out of her way to talk to him, and when, two weeks later, he saw Karen and Arthur kissing in the frozen novelties aisle of the grocery store in front of a display of vanilla ice-cream cakes, he wished them all the happiness in the world.

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The preceding pages detail the complete romantic history of David S. Jacobs, and are included to provide a context for the position he found himself in on the morning of Thursday, October 27th, when he woke up in the arms of Jack Kelly, the boy who had once thrown up on his toothbrush.

The position David found himself in was known, in most western countries, as spoon—the larger party resting behind the smaller, body molded to the other's, perhaps with arms wrapped around the smaller boy's shoulders, perhaps with forehead pressed against the nape of the smaller boy's neck. For a shy, confused teenager who just wanted to get an A in biology, waking up in the arms of another boy was never a good thing. But if you happened to be named David S. Jacobs, and your complete romantic history was limited to the fabulous fatuous catalogues of Karen Livermore and Naomi McCrane, and one far-off encounter with the most beautiful girl in the world—then, waking up in a compromising position with a boy who had once thrown up on your toothbrush was more than cause for alarm. It was probably closer, in point of fact, to the end of the world.

David somehow managed to calm himself, after the initial shock of finding Jack's face centimeters away from the back of his neck, so close that he could feel the other boy's hot breath on his skin. David gasped, controlled his breathing, managed not to scream—and then lost all control when he looked over at the digital clock sitting on the end table, between a grocery list and a photograph of Spot standing in front of a Ford pickup, smiling with all his un-brushed teeth.

The clock read 1:03. David was going to die.

"Jack!" he shouted, jumping off of the mattress, then wishing he hadn't when he fell, banging his left knee on the metal stand of the sofa bed, and then standing again, one hand holding up his ankle so he didn't have to put any weight on the injured leg, the other hand being used to hit Jack, to try and wake him up.

"Jack! We have to get up! We have to go! We have to get up! We have class! We—"

But David never got to finish telling Jack what they had to do, because it was at this time that Jack, half asleep, reached out blindly and belted David across the face.

"Thank you," David said, and sat back down on the edge of the mattress.

Jack mumbled something unintelligible and burrowed deeper under the afghan.

David wiped some blood away from his mouth. His bottom lip was bleeding, but for whatever reason, he wasn't bothered by it. In the last twenty-four hours he had consumed alcohol, been inappropriately touched by a WASP, and skipped school for the first time in his life. Somehow a split lip only seemed to be a natural conclusion.

"I hate you, Jack," David said quietly. "You think you can do anything to anybody. Do you even really like me? Do you even want me to be your friend, I mean? Or are you just one of those people who does things to other boys? Because I'm not," he said, and now he looked and Jack lying on the mattress in only his shorts, his warm skin flushed with the sun on it, his dark eyes closed. "Do you even want me to be your friend?" David asked again, and then he began to cry, partly because his lip hurt, and partly because he was missing school, but mostly because no matter how much he hated Jack he wanted to be around him all the time, and looking at him now he almost wanted to be in the same position he had been in when he woke up, and for maybe the first time in his life he couldn't figure out the right thing to do.

He finally settled for lying down again, and trying to go to sleep again. He did not touch Jack, and Jack did not try to touch him.

-

"I'm going to show you the mysteries of St. Helens," were the first words David heard when he woke up again, and for a moment he thought he was still dreaming.

He shielded his eyes from the sun, and looked up at Jack, now fully dressed in a shirt and tie and standing over him, smiling innocently with his beautiful teeth. David sat up a little against the couch cushions. "What time is it?" he managed.

"Four o'clock." Jack grinned. "It's already too late to get back to school in time for newspaper activity. So you have no excuse but to go with me."

"But today we were going to do the exposé on the silverware washing process in the dining hall!"

Jack nodded. "Yes. Dave. I know. It's going to be hard to bounce back from that."

"Well, it will be!" said David, almost furious and even madder because he had a feeling Jack was making fun of him.

"Look, Davey, there'll be other stories. I got a million scandals up my sleeve right this minute. Most of them happened in my family. You can have 'em for free."

David didn't say anything, but Jack could tell he was warming.

"But right now," he said, "we're going on a grand tour of the mysteries of St. Helens. It's an all-inclusive tour of the greatest parts of this town, and you've been at Caldwell for almost two months without seeing anything of it. It's time."

"But St. Helens is nothing but a few houses on the edge of a highway."

"Exactly!" Jack said. "Have you ever actually looked around town, or did you just glance out the window on the way here from the airport? There's the 217 flavor ice cream restaurant and bait shop. There's the lighthouse. There's the aphrodisiacs hut. There's the abandoned train station. There's the river. There's the oil refinery. And there's—best of all, Davey, I bet you don't even know this, my God—there's the hard-boiled egg factory. The last one in all of America."

"But hard-boiled eggs aren't made in a factory," David said incredulously, trying very hard to hide his interest.

"Ah, Davey," said Jack, grinning his crooked grin. "How little you know."

"I don't understand," muttered David.

"Change out of your cowboy jammies," said Jack, "and I'll show you."

And that's exactly what David did.

Jack had packed a lunch for both of them, using, he swore on the soul of all his ancestors may they burn in fiery hell forever, the finest ingredients he could locate in Spot Conlon's kitchen. As so, their provisions consisted of three olive loaf sandwiches on white bread with Miracle Whip, part of a Jell-O salad, seven grapes, soda crackers with grape jelly and peanut butter, and a thermos of Tang.

"Do we really have to eat this?" David asked. "See, there are fast food places all over. We could go to a Wimpie Burger! We could eat real food!"

"No," said Jack. "We could not."

David sulked his way through the lighthouse, the aphrodisiacs hut, the abandoned train station, the oil refinery, and the ice cream place (Jack had a double scoop of lavender-rose hip and curdled cream, and David, who felt very sick from eating half a pound of olive loaf, ordered nothing); it was getting dark, and he was about to ask if they could go back to school when Jack stopped in his tracks, his breath visible in the cold night air. He pointed, and said, in a voice that was as close to impressed as he ever got—"there it is."

David looked up. A great white monolith loomed out of the darkness, spires and stairways going up and up like the battlements of a castle. The lights shone bright; it seemed to glow. The parking lot was empty. From inside could be heard faintly the machinations of a thousand various tools.

"The hard-boiled egg factory?" David asked, when he at last had his breath.

"The hard-boiled egg factory," said Jack.

They snuck in through a back window, and crawled on their elbows along the length of a catwalk forty feet above the factory floor, until they had a clear view of the factory's workings. It was the most amazing thing that David had ever seen. On the floor a hundred men in perfect white space suits were pouring egg white and yolks into long, cylindrical molds, sending them into baths of boiling water, and then pulling them out and onto a conveyor belt, where they cracked them with tiny hammers. The molds shattered like eggshell and revealed beneath it was a perfectly straight cylinder of hard boiled egg, then sliced into thin rounds. It was infinity; the egg went on and on, with no end.

"They sell the egg slices to airlines and cafeterias and things," Jack whispered, "or they used to. Before, the hard-boiled egg factory was the biggest industry in St. Helens, right after the fish canneries."

"And now?" David asked.

"Now, nobody eats hard-boiled egg anymore, the airlines and cafeterias don't buy it. It's bad for the heart, you know."

"But they still make them," David pointed out. "It's night time and there are a hundred men working here. They're making hundreds and hundreds of pounds of egg right now."

"I know," said Jack. "But have you seen hard-boiled egg slices anywhere in the last few years? I mean anywhere?"

David hadn't, even at home, and he admitted it. His father had been eating egg whites only with his breakfasts for a long time; Esther was worried about his heart.

"So the question is," Jack whispered, "where does all the hard-boiled egg go?"

David watched another mold being cracked open, more perfect satiny egg being carefully removed by gloved hands. He couldn't see any of the faces behind the masks. "I don't know," he admitted.

"Neither do I," said Jack. "That's why this is the most amazing thing I've ever seen." He paused, looked at David and smiled his great crooked-toothed grin.

"What?" David said.

"Nothing. Would you like some Tang?"

"I would like that very much. Thank you, Jack."

And so they shared a thermos of Tang, looking out over the factory floor. They stayed for a long time, occasionally talking, most of the time not, and when Jack asked David, much later, if he didn't think it was time to go back to school, David said that they should stay a little longer, and that, after all, even silverware washing exposés could wait.

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Author's Note

DALTON: That was incredibly strange.

Well, I'm rusty.

DALTON: If by 'rusty' you mean that you haven't updated in about seven months, then yes. I guess you are.

Dear readers who have put up with me so long and loved this skimpy little fic long after it outstayed its welcome—I can't thank you enough. I have no idea how to begin. There probably is none. And I can't believe it took me this long to give you an update on the Ballad of Jack and David, but here it is, finally, with more to follow—sooner or later, but hopefully sooner. You are amazing. And I know you probably don't trust me at all, but I will say, even if this fic isn't updated again a while—I'm starting college in a week and things are bound to get weird—I've been thinking abut this story for such a long time, and know so much about what will happen and who will have incredibly graphic gay sex, that I will never, ever abandon it.

I think of it the same way as the Princess Bride. In the immortal words of Westley (I'm paraphrasing): "Death cannot stop this fic. It can only delay it a little."