Sex and Bacon (15 page)

“White dress, white everything, got it,” I said.

“One other thing,” the customer said. He shifted his considerable weight nervously. He was a very large man, but then, a lot of them were. This one was younger than most—I guessed he was only twenty-five or twenty-six.

Why don’t you have a girlfriend?
I wondered wearily for the billionth time. It was hard to understand why men chose to pay a stranger to dress up in lingerie and watch them jerk off when most of them could have actual girlfriends whom they could actually fuck. This one was fat, sure, but he didn’t smell bad—plenty of women would go out with him.

One other thing
. Maybe it was going to be something disgusting, explaining his lack of nonpaid female companionship. “Sure, Chief,” I said. “What might that be?”

“I, uh, want you to say something,” he said.

Dirty talk—was that his big secret? I was disappointed.

“Like, tell you how much I want to fuck that big hard cock of yours?” I was on autopilot. I could dirty-talk all day without taxing a single brain cell. It was just the same words, over and over again, mixed around. “Or maybe tell you all about the way I like to play with my hot, wet pussy? No problem, Chief.”

“N-no,” the customer stammered. He took a deep breath.

“I want you to tell me you love me.” He blushed. “You only have to do it once—when I’m, you know . . .”

Coming
, I mentally finished his sentence for him.
You only have
to do it once . . . when I’m coming
.

And there it was: a wedding scene, complete with a bewigged bride and a tender defloration.

I’d made a career out of doing pretty much anything for money, but what he’d just asked me to do was outrageous. Love, in a place like this? I’d done a lot of filthy things, but selling out poor little
I love you
was not going to be one of them.

I thought of the word
profane
.

“No,” I heard myself say. “I won’t do that for you.”

We stared at each other.

“I’ll wear white, and I’ll say anything else you want,” I said. “But I’m not gonna say that. No way.”

The customer grumbled, but he took the session with me anyway. He had to—he’d already paid for it. And I wore white, and screamed with pretend-orgasm while he dribbled into his own fist.

But neither of us said the word
love
to each other, as was only fitting in an ugly place where people go to mock everything
I love you
stands for.

WHEN I TELL
this story at readings, middle-class, college-educated audiences tend to shift around and glance at each other, disappointed and disbelieving, suspicious that I’m somehow trying to make fools of them.

The working girls I read to, on the other hand, nod knowingly. I look down from the podium into their faces and I see that they’re thinking of the words they could never be paid enough to say, too.

LOVE IS THE
one thing I’ve never lied about.
Will
never lie about. It’s too important.

With all the monstrous things we do to each other in this world and all the ways we try to turn each other into objects for purchase, I truly believe that the most revolutionary thing we can do right now is to love each other, and to insist upon genuine human connection. Sweetness and sincerity are no longer luxuries—they’re all we’ve got.

Well, that and the ability to shake our heads and laugh when the world gets too horrible to bear. If there’s anything I learned from my years in the sex industry, it’s that laughing is fighting back.

“SUGAR TOOTH” IS
a bittersweet tale about a sweet girl.

“Pumpkin Pie” describes my scientific approach to getting laid, while “Treat” outs me as a size queen.

“Baby Ruth Man” is the tale of a torrid affair between a man and his favorite candy bar.

“Agapae “ and “Trick “ are war stories.

THIS CHAPTER’S FOR
the dirty-sweet ones: the hos, the queers, the artists, the circus freaks, the poets, the drunks, the hurt ones, the angry ones, the crazy ones; the people who have kept me alive and lifted me up with love again and again; the ones who have laughed with me and fought by my side. Hot tramps, I love you so.

SUGAR TOOTH 1

I’VE BEEN THINKING ABOUT 6IRLS A LOT RECENTLY.
And sugar. I know there’s a sweet tooth, but is there actually a
girl tooth?
A specific craving living in the mouths and pussies of cunt-lovin’ women, kicking in after unspecified periods of de facto heterosexuality due to monogamous boy-girl commitment or unlucky circumstance?

If only a girl tooth were as easy to satisfy as the desire for a cookie, a big gooey brownie, or a bowl of creamy rice pudding. If only we could acknowledge it for what it is—an irrational, periodic craving. A hormonal surge, perhaps. All I know is that suddenly beautiful women are
everywhere
. They are magic in their summer dresses, all pinned-up hair and long brown monkey arms. The heat slows and simmers every motion they make, concentrating every precious step and gesture into exquisite reduction. And my girl tooth throbs piteously despite the fact that I’m happy with my boyfriend and do not wish a change.

YOU CAN MAKE
a sugar scrub by blending equal parts white sugar and olive oil, scenting the resulting gritty paste with any essential oil you like. You can take your scrub into the shower and abrade every square inch of your skin, sloughing away all the old, dead cells—emerging brand-new, raw, tender, pink as steamed shrimp. The sugar crystals sand your rough edges away, but the olive oil stays on you like Vaseline on a burn, a protective slime-coat under which your poor, scraped skin repairs, desperately soft. The fragrance remains throughout your day, a persistent ghost living in the seams of your clothes and the folds of your skin—armpits, knees, inner elbows. You’d better like the scent you pick, or all day long you’ll be inhaling the aroma of something not quite right.

MY LAST GIRLFRIEND
was a bright-eyed Midwesterner, a high-altitude settler used to dry winters, power failures, and impassably snowy streets banked with dirty drifts of ice. She was defiantly short, wide-hipped, wide-mouthed, and generously busted, with a river of black hair flowing nearly to her waist and a collection of snow boots in six different colors. She was pure pioneer stock: a wood chopper, a -water carrier, a cow milker, a believer in bulk buyers’ clubs and Jiffy corn muffin mixes, a sock mender, a down-to-earth American woman. She had tiny grasping doll hands with pragmatically short nails. She had advanced degrees, achieved methodically, and a small business, developed shrewdly. She owned her own winter-tight residence, painted in interior jewel tones of red and purple, housing herself and her two sleek and pampered cats.

I met her on the Internet. Later, when my book tour took me to her big, square state, she collected me at the airport and—generously and without question—opened her home to me. Everything in her orbit was miniature, from her tiny car (plastered with political stickers) to the little wooden TV trays on which she ate her dinners. Everything she owned was perfectly scaled for her, and I felt like a long-legged interloper, continually crashing into her things and bruising my shins against low, sneaky tables. My feet practically hung off her bed. I towered over her—cartoonishly tattooed, bleached blond—my tropical coloration completely wrong for constant icy wind and single-digit temperature. I didn’t own a single pair of snow boots (though I brought two pairs of strappy heels that languished in my suitcase unworn, as if a Midwestern winter were a joke of questionable taste that could be called off at will).

When I held her and she laid her cheek against my heart I felt like some monstrous Frankenstein’s creation—simultaneously protective in my will and inadvertently destructive in the nature of my being. I borrowed her sable makeup brushes and gave them back stained. She cleaned them, reformed their tips, and laid them to dry on a soft washcloth. I broke her drinking glasses. She swept up the shards with a tiny, hand-size brush and a miniature dustpan. I was afraid to touch her expensive stereo and avoided her jewelry like Kryptonite.

She was so beautiful and tiny, there were times I was terrifled of touching her. I was afraid she’d turn out to be just as fragile as the other items I’d ruined.

SHE GRILLED ME
steak on her miniature balcony Hibachi, after matter-of-factly sweeping six inches of snow from its cover with her forearm. In her part of the country six inches of snow was nothing. I tried to explain that in Seattle, two inches of melting slush effectively shut the entire municipality down, closing bus routes and schools and inspiring much joyous hoarding of candles, bottled water, and liquor. She laughed uncertainly as she turned the oozing steaks over—were Washingtonians really that effete? I thought of the high heels I’d packed:
Yes
,
we were
.

From her I learned the word
frizzante
, a term more ordinarily applied to sparkling wine, but in this case describing the slight sizzle on the tongue you experience when you eat fresh tomatoes that have almost, but not quite, gone bad. Before they rot they turn to sugar, and the gas released during their transformation into garbage gives their flesh an astonishing, transient depth of flavor, redolent of saltwater and smoky honey. I devoured her homemade bruschetta, and it was as if I’d never eaten a tomato before in my life, only pale-orange mealy-textured supermarket proxies. I was speechlessly grateful: Whatever we didn’t finish that night would have to be thrown away.

And later that evening with my tongue between her thighs, I thought again of the quicksilver intoxication
frizzante
, and the frenzy of consumption such a rare sensation inspires.

GIRLS LOVE SWEET
things, for the most part, and I romanced her the best I could, padding around her unfamiliar kitchen in pajama pants and a borrowed pair of woolly socks. Her culinary staples were bewilderingly different from mine: She didn’t own molasses or cornmeal, but she had three different kinds of olive oil and five bottles of flavored vinegar. We compromised, giggling, and made salads.

A blizzard shut the city down for several days, but we were in no danger of running out of food: She had a dry-goods larder full of food put by for just such occasions. Room-temperature champagne left on her balcony for a quarter of an hour returned to us almost frozen, like the watery slush most Seattleites call
snow
. We drank it as her cats circulated, arching and flexing, excited by the big lacy flakes that blew into her living room from outside.

IF YOU HAVE
a long afternoon of nothing but time, and youwant to make treats for a beautiful girl, try making faux chocolate truffles.

You will need a saucepan, a heatproof bowl, a couple bags of chocolate chips (semisweet, milk, white, even peanut butter! —whatever you have on hand), some whipping cream, and any booze or flavored liqueur you like.

Fill the saucepan about halfway with water and heat the water to boiling. Turn the heat down so that the water is simmering, and put the heatproof bowl on top of the saucepan. It should be big enough so that the bowl kind of sits on top of the pan; ideally, the bottom of the bowl will be just
above
the simmering -water, not submerged in it. You’re jerry-rigging a double-boiler, ‘which is a fancy piece of specialized kitchen equipment that’s basically just a bowl over a saucepan.

Pour one bag of chocolate chips into the bowl and allow them to melt. This will take a long time, but you’ll know they’re melting when they get shiny and your kitchen starts smelling like a giant Hershey’s bar. You can stir them with a clean, dry metal spoon to hasten the melting, but be very careful not to get any water droplets or detritus into the melting chocolate. Chocolate, by nature, is temperamental—treat her like a lady and she’ll make you feel like a million bucks, but disrespect her by getting her wet or stirring her with a dirty spoon and she’ll form sullen, gritty lumps that are impossible to melt (or sweet-talk) away

Once your chips have melted into one molten chocolate mass, stir stir stir. You’re
tempering
the chocolate—exposing it to air, allowing it to breathe like wine. Professional chocolatiers sometimes have pieces of equipment specifically for tempering that look like the embodiment of premenstrual fantasy: Rivers of warm chocolate—gallons and gallons of it—spill into chocolate lagoons, circulating lazily at a steady temperature. Chocolatiers know that chocolate can’t be rushed, can’t be pushed.

So stir gently until your chocolate is glossy, then remove the bowl from the top of the saucepan. Add a few tablespoons of whipping cream slowly, stirring constantly until the chocolate and cream kind of puff up together, like nougat or marshmallow. Be sparing—remember, you can always pour in more cream but you can’t take it away once it’s been added. At this point, you can add a few drops of vanilla or a splash of liqueur: Grand Marnier, Kahlua, Baileys Irish Cream—even peppermint schnapps can be nice, if you like York Peppermint Patties (and who doesn’t?).