Sex and Bacon (17 page)

My Ojibwe beau obtained canned pumpkin puree for me at the local tribal commodities distribution center (so yes, in a staggeringly colonial move, I actually
stole food from Native Americans)
. He had been apprised of my project in advance and didn’t feel morally conflicted about the appropriation of pumpkin for his lily-white girlfriend—or maybe he was just thinking with his dick, anticipating a cinnamon-scented kitchen and a randy pie-romp. Either way, I figured I could reduce my karmic debt for the theft if I made sure that my beau ate most of the pie—that way, at least, most of the food would be going to its intended recipient.

I bought two frozen piecrusts for $1.99 on sale at Safeway. I had evaporated milk and all the spices I needed. I sent Beau to the store for eggs—“
jumbo
ones,” I specified. “Not the little puny ones.” I wanted the pumpkin custard to be rich and eggy, falling apart tenderly at the merest touch of a dessert fork.

For legal reasons I can’t give the recipe here: It’s the property of Philosophy, and I don’t want to get sued. But you can buy some of its Pumpkin Pie 3-m-l Shampoo, Conditioner, and Shower Gel for the recipe right there on the front of the bottle. I can report that I followed the recipe to the letter, refraining from doubling the spices the way I ordinarily do with any pumpkin pie recipe (though in the interest of full disclosure, I must note that I was unable to resist adding generous pinches of allspice and nutmeg). The recipe instructed me to cook the pie at 425 degrees for 40 minutes, or “until desired consistency is achieved.’ I like a firm pie myself, so I added twenty minutes to the cooking time.
⁴

And . . . ?

You know, Philosophy pumpkin pie is
okay
. It’s a perfectly decent, perfectly usable recipe for a dark, full-bodied pumpkin pie, thus answering my question about whether the text was simply for show, to sell a product, or actually meant as instructions for something you’d enjoy putting in your mouth for pleasure and sustenance. It works very well, actually.

And by
works
I mean that the shit got me laid like nobody’s business. I didn’t even have to touch up the lavender scent on my pillow after the first romp. (It was wedged under my ass, anyway.)

So thank you, Dr. Alan Hirsch. Thank you very much. Your search for pure scientific knowledge has given me the subliminal power of seduction I’ve always wanted—the olfactory tools to fight dirty in the pursuit of gettin’ dirty

1.
Women liked the odors of fresh cucumber and—get this —Good & Plenties, those gross cold-capsule-shaped licorice punishment candies favored by batty old ladies and movie theaters! No wonder men can’t figure us out!

2.
For women, I should really invest in some Good & Plenty—scented shower gel, the lack of which may explain my chronic inability to date women with any regularity—a mysterious gender inequality that certainly can’t be ascribed to my chronic, joyous use of the terms
cherry pie
and
hair pie
.

3.
And despite the fact that my favorite pies are, in fact,
cherry
and
hair
.

4.
A helpful hint I learned from Beau’s father, a consummate pie maker in his own right: Make a tinfoil ring to protect the crust of your pie from overbaking by laying your pie tin upside down on a sheet of foil. Cut a circle in the foil about an inch larger than the pin tin, then fold the cutout circle of foil in half and cut a smaller circle in its middle (about five inches in diameter or so). You now have an open circle of foil thatyou can press gently over the edges of your piecrust to keep it from getting too brown during extended baking. This method beats the pants off of my previous method of foiling, which involved strips of foil that chronically fell off and didn’t provide even crust coverage.

I ONCE WORKED AS A MODEL AT A RUN-DOWN LITTLE
establishment known as Butterscotch’s Live Lingerie Adult Tanning. It was a place where men went to masturbate in front of disaffected women who more or less hated them, or at the gentlest extreme, viewed them as giant toddlers requiring constant supervision to prevent them from contaminating our workplace with shit, sweat, come, and saliva. We ordered them to sit on towels and come into washcloths. We opened and shut all the doors to prevent their hands from coming into contact with the doorknobs. We kept Lysol and latex gloves handy and used them whenever a customer made physical contact with anything—the doors, the walls, the carpet, the toilet,
etc.
One model I knew kept a can of Lysol under the couch in her showroom in case a customer attempted to paw her with his baby-oil and pre-come-slicked hands as she posed for him.

“First I’d spray him in the eyes,” she explained. “Then I’d spray my skin to disinfect it.”

I admired her sensible attention to timing: first his eyes, then her skin. She’d be clean as a whistle before he recovered from his Country Fresh teargassing. Pre-come didn’t carry as many viruses as actual come—but any time you had a man handling his own cock, you had to worry about skin-shed nasties like herpes. We watched them and made sure that their hands only came into contact with the bottles of baby oil we provided, their washcloths, the towels they sat on, and their own bodies. Our worst nightmare was a customer exiting his room after his session unaccompanied, smearing come and lube and ass-juice onto every doorknob between his showroom and the street.

You’d think that in such a filthy environment none of us would eat. But you’d be wrong. We gobbled takeout food like lumberjacks, ordering Indian food and sushi and greasy American-style Chinese food swimming in sweet red pineapple sauce, then ran to the convenience store on the corner for junk food desserts like squashy, plastic-tasting MoonPies and sleeves of Lorna Doone shortbread cookies. We were hungry, and for the first time most of us were making enough to afford prepared food. It felt fancy. Our food arrived steaming hot in Styrofoam clamshells and little paper boxes accompanied by napkins and plastic cutlery, and we ate it in frantic gulps between seeing our customers, like pa-thologists casually lunching on sandwiches between autopsies. It -was a little gross at first, but eventually-we all learned to compartmentalize and could separate our disgust at watching a customer finger-fuck his own shit-encrusted asshole from our delight in the hot, delicious food waiting for us after our shows. We just sprayed some Lysol on the couch where Shit-Ass had been sitting, replaced the towel, washed our hands, and got over it.

We didn’t get fat from our constant feasting because our jobs required constant motion, posing and dancing in high heels. We ate a lot of cake, imported from the supermarket bakery down the street from Butterscotch’s. We ordered a lot of pizzas. One girl bought cans of frosting at the convenience store, which she’d eat with a spoon over the course of her shifts. She particularly liked the vanilla kind with rainbow sprinkles. We -were gluttons for salt, chocolate, and sugar. Someone was always just about to have her period, so we blamed contact PMS for our cravings.

Sometimes we even ate in shows. One customer liked to bring in Baby Ruth bars, which he enjoyed watching his model devour as he masturbated. “Slower,” he’d groan, yanking his own crank savagely. I learned to take my time—first deliberately unwrapping the candy bar, then sniffing and licking it, then finally taking tiny, hesitant, ladylike bites of the bar as he arched and unloaded into his-washcloth. He always brought Baby Ruths—never other kinds. He was always good for a $20 tip if you let the chocolate coating melt enough so that when you nuzzled it, you’d give yourself a big brown clown-mouth. Once, I took a bite and then playfully opened my mouth, allowing him to see the chunk of half-chewed candy on my tongue. He exploded in a fierce, bucking orgasm as I shut my mouth and swallowed. That time I got a $40 tip.

It was a long time before I caught on to Baby Ruth Man’s deal, and when I did, I kind of wished I hadn’t. But when you get down and dirty for pay you have to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the grotesque to do your job—and if you want to do your job well, a certain instinctive appreciation for filth will serve you well. Sitting in judgment rarely pays a working girl’s rent.

IT WAS FRIDAY
night and I was working with Lenore. We-were in the lounge, lazily ruining what remained of our extra-large pepperoni, sausage, and green pepper pizza by picking the toppings off and popping the cheese-covered meat morsels into our mouths. Nobody would want to eat the resulting slices of tomato-sauce-covered crust, but we didn’t care. We’d each made more than $100 and were feeling decadent. We’d throw the stripped slices away and buy another pizza when we wanted one.

The buzzer went off, indicating a customer had entered our lobby. I was up, so I squinted at the closed-circuit monitor to attempt to discern the identity of the person taking up space in our front office. Was he a newbie or a regular? I couldn’t see. The cheap monitor was impossible and tended to display colors as their own photographic negatives. For instance, if you walked out wearing a black dress, it would appear pale gray. You couldn’t identify customers by their features, but often their body shape and the way they held themselves would offer clues. A man who came in confidently and sat right down was usually a repeat offender. A guy who stood nervously, hovering by the door, was usually new. It wasn’t rocket science. I mostly used the monitor to make sure that anyone entering in the lobby-wasn’t holding a chainsaw or any other visible weapon. Since my guy wasn’t, I slipped on my seven-inch platform heels and prepared to go meet him.

“Who is it?” asked Lenore, belching. I smelled green pepper all the way over on my side of the room.

“Gross!” I yelped, pulling my tits up and resettling them in their bra cups for maximum cleavage.

Lenore answered me by cutting a prim fart. She was a heart-stoppingly beautiful girl with silky black Bettie Page bangs, but once you got to know her you realized the bangs were a wig and that underneath her fragile loveliness Lenore had the comic sensibilities of a long-haul trucker. Long satin gloves hid her tattoos, and up close you could see the scars of piercings past in her nose, eyebrows, and chin.

“One of these days you’re going to shit your pants doing that,” I said. “I don’t know. I think he’s a regular. He’s just standing there.” I fluffed my own wig—my favorite red Cleopatra model, bought at the Halloween store for $22—and doused my exposed chest and neck with Vanilla Fantasy body spray. I squirted a puff of vanilla spray Lenore’s way. She squealed at the cold droplets that coated her skin with the nostril-curling scent of cotton candy.

I staggered down the hall, my feet acclimating to my shoes, and by the time I reached the lobby, I was making my way over the snagged, uneven shag carpet more or less smoothly. If you caught your heel in one of the bits of pulled-out shag, you’d fall over. We all learned to pick our feet up like show ponies when we had our work shoes on—taking a dive in front of a customer was embarrassing, and could be disgusting if they attempted to assist you up with their postsession semen-smeared paws. It was much better to stay upright and out of reach.

When I reached the locked door to the lobby, I paused. Did I still smell like a fat, sweaty Sicilian man’s garlicky armpit from the pizza, or was the vanilla spray heavy enough to cover my gustatory excess? We hadn’t even eaten the salad that had come with our pie—we’d just picked off the pepperoncini and the little diced chunks of salami, dunked them in the vinaigrette dressing, and eaten them with our fingers, completely ignoring the torn baby spinach leaves beneath. My own tongue tasted sour to me, furred with garlic and balsamic vinegar and meat grease.

Stepping into the lobby and getting my first real-life look at the customer, I smiled. It was Baby Ruth Man! And while I was already quite full from the pizza, a little dessert wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility. I had always liked Baby Ruths—the peanuts were a good foil for the spongy nougat, and they were chewy enough to last longer than an all-nougat fluff-bar like Three Musketeers. My smile became genuine. Baby Ruth Man had saved me a trip to the convenience store!

“Hi, darling,” I purred. “You ready for your show? “

Baby Ruth Man nodded, smiling. He handed me a small brown paper bag that I knew contained one king-size Baby Ruth bar and a dated receipt. We insisted upon the receipt to make sure the candy was freshly purchased and hadn’t just been sitting around Baby Ruth Man’s house getting fondled or licked in anticipation.

I reached into the bag and checked the receipt. He always bought his candy in different places, and it was fun to see where he’d made his latest buy. Today he’d shopped at the supermarket down the street where we bought our cake, meaning that in all likelihood, his visit was unplanned. When he schlepped his candy all the way from West Seattle and the receipt was time-stamped before 8:00 AM, we assumed he’d bought his Baby Ruth bar before work and spent his day in a pleasant erotic haze, imagining his model peeling the wrapper back and taking her first hesitant bite.