Because I’ve been thinking so much about Good Friday and Jesus, Easter and all its spiritual significance just naturally popped into my head. But in our house — because we were Presbyterians — Easter was always about the eggs. What should have been a celebration of chocolate bunnies was always a kind of sad day because all we ever got were those hard shell nasty candy eggs that had a shelf life of thirty-three years. Occasionally, we got Peeps but they weren’t so great either.
I did like painted, hard boiled eggs; I can remember decorating them a couple of times but the real trick was hunting those babies down before they started rotting. It was around this time — when we did three straight months of church — that I saw the movie, Cool Hand Luke. While everybody in America was obsessed with the “failure to communicate” line, I was thinking about that egg eating contest. The one where Luke was popping boiled eggs into his mouth like Red Hots.
So I decided to replicate that scene. I got my brother to witness what I thought would be my crowning achievement in life. I took that first egg and what the fuck did I try to do? Swallow it whole, that’s what. So there I was, swallowing and panicking like a Burmese python that took on too big of a family pet. It took about two or three minutes but I absolutely willed it down. Afterwards, I did not emulate Luke’s crucifixion pose but my brother did play Pontius Pilate and whack me on the back a few times.
My brother still laughs — at me, not with me — about that day. I’m still a little sensitive about what a dumbass I was. I’ve tried to do a little revisionist history and tell people that I had trained for the event and had my esophagus in game shape but no one’s buying that.
But still, I swallowed that bastard whole. And no one can take that away from me.
Cool Hand Luke About to Puke
