Fiction: Huevos con Chorizo(a short story)

By Pat Hamilton

This Mexican egg specialty, originating, actually, with the Mayans roughly 7,200 years ago, offers not just ease of preparation, but magnificence of taste, especially if you’re a newbie young gringo or African-American or a Lufthansa flight attendant on a stopover at Billy’s house on your way to the Taj Mahal or some similarly exotic destination and Billy begs you to take him with you, to free him from the figurative and literal claws of his wife, Paula, who is trying to kill him, but very slowly, he avers.
    More on that later, perhaps, but now, don’t you hate it when you have a sentence with “not just” in it, like the opener of this story, which limits you to just one more fact, “but also magnificence,” when you have so much more to add about these greasy eggs and you’re just trying to avoid the actual, political topic of your story for a little while longer, so you put a whole small train of facts and opinions and downright lies onto it, to prove you’re in step with the zeitgeist of your erstwhile country?
    Anyway, forget those “ease of” and “magnificence of” with which I began this encomium of huevos con chorizo, for, believe me, if it’s not too late: the true royal nature of the red pig sausage lies in her grease: the abundant, shocking red ooze, the slightest barely noticeable feel as it trickles across your palm and hops over your wrist, thence practically to fly unobstructed all the way south to your elbow as you watch in horror or in fascination or you’re so absorbed in your first juicy bite and how delicious it tastes swaddled in its warm corn tortilla, spicy but not hot but savory and tasty in an altogether new and delightful way that you don’t even notice you’ve ruined the bright sleeves on your favorite white shirt forever, and the abuela who introduced you to the magic splendor of huevos con chorizo laughs, not only out of malice, but because she has verified, over and over again, that absolutamente everybody who tries the greasy oily chorizo for the first time ruins a favorite garment, and not only on the first time, but on many subsequent occasions, because the miracle of chorizo teaches one to lift up the celebratory joy of dripping red grease for once and to disdain the requirement of cleanliness and order.

So,  to begin

    So, to begin. You don’t even know how lucky you are to have been born in an epoch that sees chorizo in neat tubes in every grocery store in every spot on the globe, as well as in outdoor markets, unpackaged, in less inhibited nations and villages. I’m still trying to locate the name of the benevolent genius who brought the milagro sausage to everyone, but that honor is hotly contested, as you might well imagine, from Lima to Mérida, from Argentina to Caracas to Bogota and everywhere in between, and even some other places besides.
    And we need tortillas. Corn tortillas. Not flour. Period.
    And we need eggs. That’s all we need. The nasty, greasy, red, dripping sausage, some eggs, and a dozen or two tortillas de maiz.
    I hear some of you crying out that you refuse huevos con chorizo sin queso. Let me introduce you to some senior friends of mine. We all agree with you that cheese belongs with eggs like horniness belongs with July. Like gravy with anything. Like bacon and eggs, before bacon got so prohibitively expensive, as did eggs. Just don’t put the cheese in this one dish. You can bite a big chunk out of some cheese on the side. Or go ahead and put the cheese right into the eggs: you’re the boss. Who’s going to stop you, when you want cheese? What do I care, really? But you will come to agree with us and recognize the wisdom and honor of our ancient tradition, the simple purity of sin queso. A simple, sharp, white cheddar works well, though. If you must.
    A bone, as it were, of contention involves whether to soften your corn tortillas in the red mess sweated by the salchicha. Some swear by it; I oppose it. Rather vehemently. All I can say is try it for yourself and see how you like it.
    So Paula did attempt it, even without knowing the proper egg-to-sausage ratio, throwing a tube of chorizo onto the heat, breaking it up with a spatula, not discarding the oil, scrambling four eggs in a cup when the temperature reached the right height and throwing them onto the red-oil skillet, another one ready to receive tortillas, three at a time, flipping, flipping every few seconds in the grease from the other pan. She produced flawless tacos de huevos con chorizo for two on her very first try.
    And no red grease dripped onto her champagne peignoir, and so she began to hold forth: “Women are equal to men.”
    To which her husband replied, “Allow me, with utmost respect, to disagree.”
    There burst through from some unseen dimension a Paula heretofore unknown to Billy and even to herself, with a voice leaping an astonishing four or five octaves on a “What!?!” that defied description as either ejaculation or shriek.

“I can’t believe you”

    “I can’t believe you, of all people, would say that!”
    “Say what, my precious bride? I haven’t gotten to my.”
    “There it is! You have always hung nicknames on me, names that infantilize.”
    “Yes, but you’ve called me baby, too, sometimes.”
    “Names that marginalize. Names that indicate possession, ownership.”
    “I see why you say these things,” he allowed, “and yet I maintain I used nicknames only ever to indicate my deep and ever-deepening affection.”
    She ignored his every softly spoken interjection into her tirade. He respected her holding of the floor to express herself, allowing the righteousness of her anger, admiring her deeply held belief, even though she repeated fairly standard arguments he’s heard before and didn’t care that he had not yet refuted any of them.
    The full-blown rant is coming. It arrives. She has turned away from his gaze, tilted her chin up, amplified her volume.
    “You profess yourself the great lover of women, fat and thin, tall and short, all manner of intellect or deficit thereof, and yet you don’t believe women are the equals of men?” Spinning on a heel back to face him so he can see steam building, her face ready to blow.
    “You’re doing fine,” he mumbled, knowing he’s not even there. “Go on.”
    “How could I have missed it for so long? Women are the nurses and the surgeons, givers of life and maintainers of it.”
    “Also a leading cause of death,” Billy thought but did not utter, allowing Paula to rave on.
    “Working a job or two on top of raising the kids and cooking for the family, doing all the shopping for food and clothes and shoes, cashing in her youth too soon, no more dancing, no more travel to Paris or Prague, no more feeling the arousal in some beautiful stranger who imagined himself the seducer.”
    “Shoes, yes,” smiled Billy, still invisible. “Marvelous!”
    She didn’t hear him. “Yet you think of us only as grateful vessels into which to shoot your semen.”
    “Whom. Into whom,” he whispered, especially softly, though not softly enough.
    “Fuck you, you antiquated, paternalistic, pervert caveman!”
    “But darling.”
    “I’m not your darling. Not anymore.”
    “Vixen! Fox! Dolly!”
    “Pig!”
    “Sow! Heifer! Bitch!”
    “Dog! I’m ’bout out of ’em.”
    “I merely wished to say, at the outset, that women are superior to men.”
    She struggled to recover from the entanglements of emotion long enough for him to add:
    “Not equal. You insult yourselves by wanting equality.”
    She said, “I knew that’s where you were going!”

“You  did not!”

    “You did not! You’re not that smart.”
    She hit him, as he’d hoped and expected, but he knew her heart wasn’t in it, for once, but when he saw her trying and failing to come up with a wounding, hateful comeback, he felt sadness for her and regret that he’d caused it, and decided to press on.
    “You did good, baby. My love, I mean. I haven’t seen you so fired up in forever.”
    “Patronizing,” she answered, with a defeated soul. “Is it too early for tequila?”
    He quartered three limes and got down two shot glasses and set them down on the table and returned to the kitchen for the Patron and some salt, eager to launch into his Summa Masculinitis, bubbling up at times in his brainpan since the 1970s but as yet unspoken, due to his fear of the superior intellect of women and his terror of being humiliated by them, in public or in private.
    They toasted a hearty Salud, smiling with both teeth and with somewhat teary eyes. Billy had almost decided to let Paula’s whole case stand as the last word, yet he carried on: “Men are still sexist pigs, and woman are still sex objects, and women are now openly sexist pigs, and the empowerment of women is a great and welcome advance, but they’re still golddiggers,” quickly holding up a forestalling palm when he read in her face the objection to his glaring generalization. “Of course, not all of them! Give me some credit, please. I refer, too sloppily, to the idea that, since those 1970s, women have become those neurosurgeons you mentioned, have become CEOs and made other inroads on the glass ceiling and taken their places in the government of these United States, and yet you can’t deny that there are those who set their sights on millionaires and billionaires, and I don’t blame them, as I harbor the same urge, myself. But I digress. To make a long story short.”

“Too late!”

    “Too late!” Paula squealed.
    Bill clinked her glass again for that one, and poured again for both, clinked again, and held forth.
    “It’s just that men still feel irresistible attraction to a pair of huge, adorable, appealing eyes filled with seeming love, and a woman’s smile at a man, because increasingly rare, signals to him a ‘Hello there,’ whether that’s what she intends or not, and a femur all day long with a meaty soft thigh all over it sends a laser beam straight to my dick, and bikinis send I don’t know how many signals in a microsecond to dudes all over the world to get to making babies and repopulating the Earth with babykind.”
    “Just pure, primal, caveman stuff.”
    And Adam and Eve, yes. Paradise. But.”
    “I can tell this is gonna be a big but.”
    “Since the 1970s of the previous millennium, we’ve been shamed for having dicks and for seeing women as sex objects, which I really don’t believe anybody ever saw them solely as. Speaking strictly from my own experience—”
    “Limited as it is.”
    “Severely so, yes. Thank you. I always saw women and girls as angels, not whores, when I was growing up, and I was always too reticent to declare my attraction, and I think most of my peers were, too, and the girls who were forward enough to declare their own wishes came along only later in my development, and even long after Gloria Steinem, girls and women showed mostly restraint and modesty, while we high-school and junior-high-school dudes never learned till much later that you felt the same levels of horny as we did.”
    “I love cock. We love cock!”
    “And yet you just shamed me, and your sisters have been shaming my brothers for a half-century for being pigs.”
    “And then we changed all the rules on you. Poor babies!”
    “Infantilization,” he moaned, reaching for the bottle. “And we still don’t have support groups or the willingness to share all the devastating trauma you’ve inflicted upon us. And by ‘you’ve,’ I mean you, Paula. Just you.”
    “But you’ve never been a pussy.”
    “There again! You hate that word when we use it, but you get to use it. Your empowerment.”
    “Is it my turn, yet?”
    “No. You had your turn. I got one more thing: Bitches call bitches bitches more than dudes call bitches bitches.”
    “How long have you been holding onto that one?”
    “But it’s true! Isn’t it?”

    “Be a deer and pour us another.”
    “Capital idea!” he said, and poured. “Go ahead and take your turn now, Honeybiscuit.”
    “Notice how that’s a command?” she said. “I will grant that you learned along the way somewhere that we can dress ‘like sluts’ without thereby begging you guys to rape us.”

“I did  learn  that”

    “I did learn that, and learned it truly, while still believing that some of you like to feel sexy just for yourselves dressed like that, and some of you love to turn a man on in that way. Again, it forces on us this relatively new necessity to put a full stop on a primal instinct.”
    She nodded, frowning after she’d downed her latest shot. “And I never minded being objectified. Well, that’s not true. I’m of two minds about it. Yes, a modern, liberated woman, or at least this one, still wants to feel sexy to men, attractive. Look at how much we spend on our hair, on our make-up, clothes, shoes, yoga, fitness. Why’s it so awful, then, that we want to feel appreciated for other qualities, as well?”
    “It’s like the ’70s never happened! I give up trying to figure out your half of the population. You must admit,” Billy said, “I always liked your mind, your wit, your compassion.”
    “I do. That’s the only reason I took up with you, after I’d lost hope of attracting a man.”
    “A certain elegance, a sophistication you used to have.”
    “Do we have any cranberry juice, asshole?”
    “And so generous with your boobs, you once were, and so easy.”
    “Yes, I was!”
    “Still are, no doubt, for all I know.” He chuckled, added, “We never listened when they said it all fades so fast.”
    “Mmm. Billy.”
    “Yes, love?”
    “Thank you for never making me have a baby.”
    “I never could make any money. Thank you for removing that burden offa me.” He poured himself another.
    “My Mom never talked to me about the birds and the bees.”
    “Nor did Pop talk to me. About that. It hurts me that you suffered because of the underestimation of men, their cruel attitudes, mindlessness and behaviors, and that I hadn’t put a whole lot of thought into not only that aspect of your life, but everything you managed to survive before we met.”

Copyright © 2022 by Pat Hamilton Pat Hamilton has written three novels, hundreds of songs, and a handful of book reviews for the papers. He taught College English for 30 years, which helps him blend popular and classic literature in his writing. As an Army brat, he traveled the USA and Europe before settling into the beauty of Tennessee, but the rock star he used to be still lives on inside him.