Sex and Bacon (14 page)

“Okay let’s do it,” I said.

After a brief pause, we both seized our forks and speared our halves of the whale-blob. I put my blob into my mouth before I could change my mind.

The lye opened my sinuses immediately but oddly, as it changed from a fragrance to a taste, it mellowed. My mouth didn’t feel as if it were being cauterized by a household chemical the way I’d feared. Instead the lye turned gentle inside me, tasting sour and briny, almost like vinegar. It became
friendly
.

I chewed rapidly searching for the fish taste underneath the preservative. That couldn’t be
it
, could it? Not just the taste of the lye—there had to be something else! Otherwise why the big deal and all the fuss? I poked my tongue into the mass of whale flesh desperately.
Oh, please
—
don’t be a disappointment!

And all of a sudden it blossomed in my mouth—WHALE! Like fish but bigger! Like raw steak but so much more vast! A land mammal’s flesh tastes bloody and muddy from its earthy diet, and the seafood we catch with nets and traps tastes predictably fishy but this was entirely from the deep sea and tasted like nothing I’d ever known before. It was like eating every swimming, crawling creature in the ocean, inhaling krill through gritted teeth. It was like eating the ocean itself.

Hammer of the gods
.

The only way to explain the taste of whale is to multiply the taste and texture of raw shark exponentially, and if that definition’s a shade too close to tautology, I have to shrug helplessly and give up. But I ate my chunk of whale, and as I swallowed it I knew that I would never taste anything that
big
ever again. I wanted to hold it in my mouth forever so I’d never forget it. Whale-meat was verboten in America and my trip to Reykjavik had cost thousands of dollars—the odds of me returning to Iceland for a second mouthful were slim. I felt miserable. To live without whale! To never taste this again!

I glanced at my date, who-was already raising his glass of schnapps to his lips. So I raised mine in an ironic toast for our waiter’s benefit, and drank. The anise taste of the liquor obliterated the whale as promised, and I was crestfallen. It was over. I couldn’t bring it back.

“You
like
it?” Our waiter appeared by our table, an Icelandic genie summoned by the clink of our glasses against the table as we set them down. He smiled uncertainly, exposing uneven and yellowed teeth.
Like ivory
, I thought.

“I
really
liked it,” I said.

All of a sudden my eyes filled with tears.
No more whale
,
ever again
.

“I really liked it,” I said again. My date nodded, murmuring assent. Had he tasted the same thing I had? I had no idea how to ask. I’d just had a cosmic, LSD-like experience from eating an appetizer in a tiny Icelandic restaurant. If he’d experienced the same thing, there was no reason to slap inadequate words onto what had just happened. And if he hadn’t, no amount of explanation would suffice.

Our fancy Reykjavík dinner continued. Afterward, we returned to the apartment we’d rented for the week, and I thought that the really terrible thing about eating something so important and singular and special is that once you’ve done it, you know that pretty much everything else you consume will be
lesser than
.

Some things the Devil tempts you to eat, laughing, the way he handed the apple of knowledge to poor Eve. Sometimes it’s better not to know, so you can live in peaceful ignorance.

So eat and beware.

1.
A liver aside: I once had a friend who worked as a counselor for a local AIDS organization. Her job was to interview folks who’d made appointments to be tested in order to help them assess the elements of their lifestyle that put them at risk of contracting HIV. As a result, she had to ask a whole slew of questions about her clients’ personal sexual practices.

One of the questions she asked was, of course, “Do you engage in oral-anal contact? ” As follow-up to a “yes” answer, one young man volunteered that not only did he lick ass enthusiastically he also engaged in coprophagia—the practice of shit-eating. He wasn’t ashamed of himself and related this information matter-of-factly adding that he didn’t eat
everyone’s
shit—he avoided that kind of intimacy with casual bar pickups and tricks. He only ate the shit of people he really cared about.

Emboldened by his frankness, my friend asked him what shit tasted like.

“Liver,” he responded without hesitation. “It tastes a lot like liver.”

Which makes sense, the liver being a major player in excretory functioning. (The texture, he added, was similar to a coarsely milled country pâté.)

As a child, I dreaded the nights my dad would fry liver with onions, and I only ate it when I was forced to.

I’d always thought that liver tasted like shit.

Now it turns out that shit actually tastes like liver.

Fried Chicken Interlude: Chickening Out

I JUST MADE FOUR PIECES OF SOUTHERN FRIED CHICKEN.

I would have made more, but I only had four pieces of chicken, so I shrugged and heated up a pan of Crisco and rolled those four little pieces in batter and fried them till they were golden brown and crispy and spicy and
dee
licious. Now my house smells of frying grease, and I have two portions left over to eat “picnic-style” tomorrow.

It’s Saturday night and everyone’s out doing whatever it is people do on Saturday nights when they have money to blow on entertainment.

Frankly, even if I had any buckage to spare, I wouldn’t spend it going out on Saturday night. All the amateur nightlife-loving forty-hour-a-week office-job people are out, and they’re usually drunk and frenetic and trying to mate with each other, and that whole thing just makes me want to hide. Somewhere down the street, a man in Dockers is buying drinks for a twenty-two-year-old administrative assistant all dressed up in brand-new super-lowride bootcut jeans and kitten heels and a spaghetti-strapped tank top so nipple-delineating that wearing it would get any local lap dancer arrested for soliciting. But what’s illegal in the privacy of an adult club is fine when worn on the street by a noncombatant, so Docker Man is getting an eyeful of tit for free, which is making him expansive with his credit card as he orders more liquor for his shivering, goose-pimpled date. It’s cold out, but she’s bravely soldiering on.

In addition to the major components of her Saturday night getup—the heels, the jeans, the sheer top—her accessories include carefully blown out highlighted hair, manicured nails, a store-bought tan, a tribal tattoo on her lower back, and—of course —her cell phone. Her going-out appearance took hours to refine, and that was just to get her presentable enough to get in the ring with all of the other expensively clad girls, her competitors. Four quickly gulped cosmos have girded her for engagement, but at her body weight, she’s swaying in her heels.

She feels desired and beautiful and brave. Docker Man seems nice. She’s not even that cold any longer, thanks to the heat of the liquor she drinks gratefully, when it is offered.

She’s having fun, and she’s a little drunky and tomorrow •when she wakes up in Docker Man’s Eastside bed she’ll snap her thong panties back on and try to tell herself that what she had the night beforewas exactly what she’d wanted. Fun. Sophisticated, girls’-night-out fun, culminating in a no-big-deal nostrings-attached Saturday night hookup. It’s all good—it doesn’t have to mean anything! The
Sex and the City
girls pick up men all the time, and they’re beautiful and rich and wear Prada and live in Manhattan!

Unfortunately this is Seattle, and it’s hard to afford Prada when you make administrative assistant wages. And in the light of day, Docker Man will look much older than she’d thought he was. There will be pictures of his kids on his bureau—both teenagers.

She’ll flee his condo and use her cell phone to call for a cab. The ride back to the city will cost her $60, and the cabdriver will stare at her nipples through her tank top all the way home.

Which is fine, I suppose—she’s old enough to make her own decisions. I spent my twenties getting fucked-up in clubs and going home with strangers myself, so it’s not like I’m some kind of wise old owl with the perfect moral to a sordid tale, or whatever. I just don’t want to watch it happen. That’s all. I don’t want to watch it. I’ve fucked my share of anonymous freaks, but I’ve never fucked any man with blow-dried hair and pleated business-casual khakis. I’m going to hang tight to that little bit of delusional superiority because tonight, all over Pioneer Square, hundreds of young women with professionally waxed vaginas are giving up the booty to hundreds of little office tin-pot dictators who are going to high-five their frat-brother friends in swinish congratulation on Monday morning. And the whole thing makes me completely unwilling to leave my house tonight, lest I inadvertently come across any Docker-wearing men in the company of tiny, sozzled, glitter-dusted office assistants and lose my mind contemplating the horrible predictability of the universe of Saturday night.

So I’m staying in tonight, trying to ignore the drunken mating calls outside my apartment. All the squaring off and pairing off and
your place or mineing
in the garb of freedom and excitement—oh, it makes me so tired. Casual sex is such a lie —there’s nothing liberating about it; no warmth, no closeness—and frankly, the sex usually sucks. So tonight I’ll bury my head under my pillows and pretend that all the kitten-heeled, manicured girls outside are turning down those last eagerly offered drinks and going home alone. It can’t hurt to stay in and pretend.

That, and I have a brand-new library book. And store-bought brownie bites. I’m going to eat two (or possibly three) and then I’m going to brush my teeth and put on my comfy sleepin’ panties and curl up for the night, to read my book in peace. After spending my twenties in the fray, I’m finally
hors de combat
. What sweet relief to have my bed to myself and know that my Sunday morning won’t begin with a long cab ride home.

Tomorrow is picnic-style chicken, Grandma. Tonight your granddaughter is safe and sound—alone in her own apartment, sober as a judge.

III.
SWEET

“I WANT YOU TO DRESS UP IN WHITE,” SAID THE CUSTOMER. “
All in white: white panties, white bra, white stockings. Do you have a white dress?”

Like a bride
, I thought.

“Uh huh,” I said. I’d already run his credit card through the machine, and now we were negotiating the specifics of the scene he was paying for. I did in fact have a white dress in my costume kit—it was a cheap and tatty satin slip that just barely covered my crotch. I wore it when I dressed up as a nurse, along with a little peaked cap perched at a fetching angle over my wig. The cap had an elastic chin strap, so it stayed on even when I was lying down or on all fours.

Nurse, bride, whatever.
I didn’t relish the idea of changing out of the black lingerie I was currently wearing. Why did they always want a complete-wardrobe overhaul?