FIRST MEAL THE LAST

There's a writerly predisposition to one's first meal of the day. Agee and Kerouac spilt much ink on eggs fried and smothered in catsup amongst heaps of homefries, stacks of griddlecakes drowned in molasses, coffee bottomless and tarblack. McCarthy's inner Hemingway found solitude and sustenance in tortillas, eggs, beans. Hemingway a little hair of the dog that bit him. More often than not, the folk that cook up or eat up said foodstuffs are featured in major, though silent roles. Agee's and Kerouac's begreased nighthawks like the first four Tom Waits records animated, rumpled suits, cigarette breath, a pint of rotgut on the lips. There is McCarthy's senorita slattern and cockeyed bowling menudo for saddle sore lot. Red broth studded with fleshen cowgut and piquant chiles, spoonfuls of pico de gallo setting over the oilslicked soup, its top sheened with fatty spectra like agate broke apart and revealed. Menecken had stout for breakfast. And a cigar. Paul Bear Bryant two onion sandwiches on whitebread, coffee, an aspirin. Kinky Friedman raresteak and eggs, two roomwarm Lone Star, and cowboy coffee silty with gritty grounds.

Oftentimes breakfast aint one's first meal. It's the last. The one to dam the drink. Settle the stomach. Over the pond the French suck up onion soup. Italians and their carbonara. The Brits and beans and meats and eggs and veg panwilted to submission, a glass of stout, cuppa tea. Recall a Grizzard column about some diner down south Georgia way, dining room bisected by galley kitchen, flypaper stripped the walls faux wood paneling, taxidermy decoration. Watched as two flies landed on his six sugared coffee and took a death dive. Watched them spin a circle nautilic under the wake of his stirring spoon. Listened to the cook hammer out his steak and the eggs schlupping pop in the pan of grease. The waitress, overdone in facepaint, smacking gum, smoking, refilling his flyfilled coffee, smiling, setting a styrofoam cup to his hand, two jiggers of the dog for a man still drunk and not yet hungover the long morning to come.