2–2–2–2: Toast Christ
The bulk of the drive from my hometown in Ohio and my new home in Chicago is split between two radio stations: a contemporary hard rock channel I can access for a bit over fifty miles on 65 North through Indiana, and a contemporary mixed hits channel that can be heard once closer to the Illinois border. Between these two points of Ohio and Illinois, I flip between stations intermittently, gaining miscellaneous pop and rap, and occasional fuzzy access to NPR. But no matter where you are in Indiana, driving North, driving South, hitting Jasper County (The Sloppy Manure Capital of Indiana!) or just hitting the state line (Lincoln’s Boyhood Home!) the stations that come through clear as a bell are the religious stations.
I don’t mean the Christian music stations, which are clear enough anywhere you go. The content I hear are religious talk radio and sermons, stations sponsored or owned by the frequent protestant and evangelical megachurches that web the Midwest. Hosts read Bible passages, take calls for debates and discussions, and distribute prayer requests. Sermons are recorded live from the stadium seats.
This November, I drove to Chicago from my hometown three times: Once after my paternal grandfather passed away on my brother’s wedding day and I needed to go home and check on the apartment before spending the rest of the week at my parent’s house. Once after the funeral. And lastly, once after Thanksgiving at the end of the month. On one of these drives North (I can’t remember which) I heard a sermon comparing a pastor and his congregation as a shepherd and a flock, and greater, how Jesus Christ is a shepherd to the globe, even over his earthly shepherds (those in charge of the church). This sermon found more compelling the relationship between earthly shepherds and flocks, and less so the submission required from earthly shepherds in relation to Jesus.
“You hear a lot these days,” this pastor said, “About the failures and responsibilities of the church leaders — You hear a lot about how they should behave, how they should react, what they should do, what they should have done — I hear less about the actions of the flock, the congregations. What are the responsibilities of the sheep? How should the sheep behave and accept guidance from their shepherd?
“You hear less about that, don’t you?” he said. “We hear less about the sheep gracefully accepting the place where they’re called. That’s why I don’t get too close to my congregants. That’s why I stay right up here, on this stage!”
Titters and chuckles from the seats.
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When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I went to Golden House on a frigid, Saturday morning with my dear friend Laura from college, to meet my other dear friend Erika. Laura ordered a side of potato latkes and something else I don’t remember, Erika ordered buckwheat pancakes, I ordered the 2–2–2–2 which is reasonably two buttermilk pancakes, two eggs, two sausages, and two bacon slices. Let’s meet the Meat.
In my last guest post for food reviews, I investigated the 9-dollar mistake duck sausage dog at Hot G Dog and wrote about childhood and my grandparent’s home and lesbianism through Dragonball Z screenshots and bitter hot dog disappointment. I had just moved to Chicago four months previously. I had a few cute little jobs, a cute little room above a cute little cat shelter, I had come out to my family in a cute little way. I was working seven days a week as a swim instructor and the chlorine arrested the growth of my leg hair, which I had recently mowed down for a visit home. I was active and tired and happyish.
Now it’s 2018! As of February 6th, I’ll have lived in Chicago for two years. I have a bank account in the city, a legal assistant job in the Loop, health insurance, and a studio apartment that is not above a cat shelter. I can order checks, move money around, buy furniture, and get an Illinois driver’s license. I can join a church and then become seriously disturbed by the workings of that church. I can feel rejected by religion, then feel like a dimwit for even trying. I can watch my little brother get married and watch my grandpa die and then wonder if I’m disappointing everyone who knows me and loves me because I am not a famous author or a rich professor or a whimsical artist buying daily pomegranates in a Munich fruit market.
Let’s get one thing clear regarding my 2016 hot dog review: I am still desperate for power. Not power through immense wealth or property, but the clean and simple power of tearing off my shirt, baring my flat nipple-free chest and rock-hard abs so there are absolutely no distractions when I summon a dragon of the spirit world, devour it, and harness its energy to incinerate my opponent.
Adulthood in real life, free of this simple macho power exchange, is seductive with its comforts and terrifying with its responsibilities. You can come out, but then you deal with the consequences of coming out. You can Take a Stance on your reintegration into Catholicism, then expose yourself to the pain administered by the church. You can gain a lovely little apartment and live in terror of how you might lose it. You can negotiate a raise that makes some worries go away, then wonder if this is how the smaller, weaker self you never listen to anymore would want your career to go.
Most often, you can present yourself to the world as a grown-up, then live with the mistaken assumptions the world makes. I, to date, since coming to Chicago, have been mistaken for a Christian, a lawyer, a mom, and a dude.
Here are the insidious grown up reflections that sprout from these descriptions, these ways of being, each represented by a popular breakfast item:
EGG/CHRISTIAN — What If I’m not good enough for God or good enough for marriage?
SAUSAGE/LAWYER — Have I doomed myself to find comfort in secretarial roles and is there something perverted with how I can’t not stop caring a little about the emotional state of my richer, established bosses who are paternal and kind to me?
PANCAKE/MOTHER — How the hell am I ever going to get a baby, even though I want that baby? What if wife/motherhood is not my vocation? If so, if I don’t get fucked soon, am I gonna start turning squirrely and weird?
BACON/MAN — I resent and often hate being a woman, so why do I have to be a lesbian? I would not say no to personally watching select hockey players do weighted lunges in yoga pants. Dad already made oblique references to “your husband” this Christmas, while we watched John Wayne on TV boot Maureen O’Hara up the ass up and down the Irish countryside. I have the insidious feeling this is what my family is waiting for.
To get back to the food, Golden House was everything I wanted from it. Baddish but goodish coffee, thick fluffy pancakes I have yet to reproduce no matter how many times I google “The secret to fluffy pancakes???” Simple, savory meat selections and bulbous, buttery eggs. Everything is presented two by two and lends itself well to clumsy symbolism to be expressed in disorganized month-late essays. What brings it all together is that I can access all of this with two of my friends, which is always the best part of cooking and eating and drinking.
But I was disturbed by a missing link, and that link was this:
WHAT ABOUT THE TOAST?
I understand the pancake shoulders the starch burden in the 2–2–2–2, but here is my thing with toast — I order a breakfast item at a breakfast restaurant with eggs and animal proteins; there is a complimentary or included toast option within the price of the meal, which offers a choice of wheat or white or sourdough, and maybe a little plastic jelly hutch. I obliterate the animal proteins into small shreds (sausage patties work best for this). After doctoring the toast with equal parts butter and (blackberry!) spread, I bust the egg yolks (the eggs are always over easy) and layer the whites on top of the toast, before adding the animal protein product on top of the whites. In this way, I turn the plate into a platter of mini sweet and savory sandwiches. I do this at Bob Evans. I do this at Frisch’s Big Boy. I do this at Waffle House. I do this at IHOP. I could not do this at Golden House.
In the discomfort brought on by my interrupted breakfast routine, I go back to what I skated over at the beginning, which were two life events at the beginning of the November: My grandpa died, and my little brother got married.
My grandpa Bill, the grandpa of the same house in my DBZ/hot dog review, taught me how to make HIS toast. Grandpa Bill ate his bacon burnt to a crisp and his toast burnt in the pan, and here is what he showed me to do: you put a big pat of butter in a hot cast iron pan. You lay your piece of bread in the melted butter and skid it around with a fork, which you then use to flip the bread to burn the other side. This was his special fried bread recipe, and it was all I would make for myself that summer when I came over to swim in the pool, discreetly picking off bits of carbonized bacon from my grandparent’s leftover breakfast plates hanging out on the counter (I now know I was not sneaking — they left them out, knowing I would forage off their scraps). I set off the fire alarm more than once! This was brand fucking new to me! Fried bread, by yourself, in your own home! Grandpa, notoriously fond of babies and doter of me and my brothers, did not yell at me for setting off the fire alarm. Every time he saw me, he’d say “how’s my favorite granddaughter?” (I was his only granddaughter).
He passed away quickly on my brother’s wedding day, from complications of pneumonia and COPD. I’m extremely lucky — I only recently lost my paternal great grandmother and lost my two other great-grandmothers when I was old enough to still have memories of them. To be twenty-seven before losing your first grandparent is a blessing.
I pick up that it’s maudlin to be sad, but ghoulish to write off. To be a real adult, you must be the perfect mix of family pillar/saddened relative/oh-well-so-it-goes. You can’t get hooked up on how much he was looking forward to Joey’s wedding, how much he would have loved seeing his great-grandkids, how maybe he would have been around to see you publish your first book. But what am I supposed to do? The man taught me how to make toast! That last time I saw him in hospital, he winked at me because he didn’t have the strength to smile or talk! How do you measure-for-measure this kind of shitass, typical, inescapable circumstance of life?
There was a Christian thing happening at the beginning of this post and I think it’s hammering the point a little to say I was resigned to hearing the sermon. As much as we are adults in society, humans are called to be eternal children not just to God, but to the people who say they were called to be his shepherds (who are also God’s children, just a little less child than the rest of us — it’s real convenient like that). But we were all kids once, even God. One time when I was a kid in my grandparent’s swimming pool, grandpa Bill came right up behind me while I dog-paddled at the intersection of the shallow end and the deep end. He grabbed me up around the middle, gave a heave, and threw me straight up in the air; and I’ll tell you, I cleared the height of the gazebo, I cleared the height of the maple tree in grandma’s garden. I thought I’d snatch a bird right off the power line hanging over the backyard, and that’s when I got sucked right back into the pool.
For a while, it was fun to be small. The smaller you were, the higher you flew! Now I’m too big to be thrown, but too small square up with the things that threaten and shrink my soul. How do I cope? Hideous anger? Constantly tinkering with recipes? Support groups that get more insipid by the month?
Hey, whatever. I move to Chicago, I grow a plant, I buy a chaise. Come over sometime, I’ll fry up some bread.
