Anndee Hochman, First Impressions / [written version]

My first encounter with eggs was not a happy one. I was somewhere between baby and toddler, still small enough to sit in a high chair and be fed by my grandfather, who babysat when my parents were at work. I’m not sure what possessed him the day he decided to stir a raw egg into my mashed potatoes. Maybe it was an Old World custom, or maybe he’d read somewhere that children needed more protein.

I remember the spoon coming toward me, heaped with mashed potatoes and dripping with gelatinous ribbons of yolk and white. I clamped my lips shut. My Pop-pop tried making a game of it—“Up, up in the air…and into the airport!”—but the airport was closed. Eventually he gave up, and I didn’t eat another egg for eighteen years.

Okay, that’s not entirely true. I ate eggs if they were an ingredient in, say, chocolate chip cookies, but the eggier the presentation—hard-boiled, soft-boiled, or the worst, sunny-side-up, with that quivering eyeball of yolk—the more I felt repulsed. It became a fact of my life, part of the story I told about myself. All my friends knew: Anndee doesn’t eat eggs.

And that’s how it remained until spring break of my junior year in college, when I found myself in a restaurant in West Hollywood, Florida, a restaurant my roommate, Max, had been raving about all week, a place that specialized in omelettes. In fact, the menu had an entire page of omelettes, all filled with ingredients I loved: spinach, artichoke hearts, sundried tomatoes.

Max had a plan. “You get the pancakes, I’ll order an omelette, you’ll taste a little bit of mine and I guarantee you’ll love it,” she said. Our food arrived. Max’s omelette looked like a giant yellow sleeping bag bundled around roasted mushrooms and oozing cheddar cheese. I put a sliver on my fork, closed my eyes and opened my mouth. It tasted salty and fluffy and earthy and…not bad.

“See, what’d I tell you?” Max said. But I couldn’t answer. I was thinking about the story I’d been telling for eighteen years. If I was wrong about eggs, what else didn’t I know about myself? What else had I been missing?

A year-and-a-half later—I’d graduated and was living in Washington, D.C.—my high school buddy, Adam, came to visit. Now “buddy” is really too small a word to describe what Adam and I were to each other. When we first met—he was in 11th grade and I was in 12th—I took one look and knew he was exactly the kind of guy I fell for repeatedly in high school. Big soulful eyes. Dark curly hair. Smart. A little neurotic. And…gay. Except no one was saying that out loud yet.

Adam and I talked on the phone for hours, went to plays and movies, signed cards to each other, “Je t’aime, te amo, I love you in every language.”

That December he came to visit, I hadn’t been living in D.C. long enough to really make friends or even know what people did for New Year’s Eve. But Adam had an idea: “Hey, this guy at school told me about a place we should go, called Tracks.”

“Okay.”

“It’s in Southeast, in some kind of old warehouse.”

“Yeah, okay.”

“It’s a gay bar.”

“Ohhh…kay.”

I’d never been to one before. When we got there, it was room after room of colorful lights and disco balls and pulsing music. Women dancing with women, men with men, people dancing in small groups and alone. And Adam, who had refused to dance at my senior prom, suddenly lit up. And…so did I.

I danced with strangers, with Adam, by myself, not caring what people thought. At one point, I shouted to Adam over a Madonna song, “Why do I feel so comfortable here?” He just shrugged. There was a champagne fountain, and people throwing Mardi Gras beads, and then at 5 in the morning, they brought out breakfast: huge platters of blueberry muffins, roasted potatoes and…omelettes.

I was starving. Adam watched me heap food on my plate. “Hey, since when do you eat eggs?” he said. But I couldn’t answer. I was filling up on something I hadn’t known I was hungry for, the stuff of a new story, really tasting it for the first time.