Sex and Bacon (23 page)

“Boundary Issues” reveals the one substance I -won’t put in my mouth.

“Loaves and Fishes” is a cheery little piece about the lighter side of chronic poverty.

And “Heartbreak” is about staying alive.

Pour yourself a glass of whiskey and let’s get down to business.

SOME FOODS ARE BAD FOR YOU. THEY WILL HURT YOU IF
you eat them, but you eat them anyway.

You know this when you’re little—the knowledge seeps into your bones, jacketed in more general parental warnings about Bad Dogs and Strangers In Cars Offering Rides.

Halloween candy can hurt you when it is offered—blatantly unwrapped, or with their plastic wrappings mysteriously loose —at the door of a house full of bleary-eyed hippies who don’t seem to understand that you’re in costume. To them, “Trick or Treat! ” means
Give me several small boxes of raisins that I will discard immediately upon returning borne
.

Apples—similarly shoved into pillowcases on Halloween night—are also very dangerous. They usually contain razor blades, placed there by fiends who joyfully anticipate the suffering of local legions of small children with slashed gums. If you receive an apple for Halloween you must take it to your local police precinct, where it will be x-rayed. This is for your safety.

If you’re lactose-intolerant, you’re probably familiar with searing self-recrimmation. You casually drink a glass of milk or have a bowl of ice cream, and an hour later you’re squatting on the toilet cradling your lower belly or—worse—passing painful, noxious clouds of gas that alienate you from even the most tolerant of your friends and coworkers, including the vegan ones accustomed to their own massive, fibrous vegi-farts.

The worst part is,
you know this
. It’s not the pain that wounds —it’s the knowledge that the pain could have been avoided, that you basically ushered Pain in, made it a drink, fluffed its pillows, and made it feel welcome. Your greed opened the door and Pain came in, swirling its cape like a vampire, baring pointed little teeth. It just had to be invited.

SOME FOODS AREN’T
even foods, but we eat them anyway. Then when we get sick from them, we wonder why-we even bothered to attempt to gain nourishment from something that was so clearly a bad idea. Splenda goes into this category. As does that supposed scientific breakthrough from a few years ago, low-calorie
fake fat
, made of microscopically tiny beads that loll on your tongue and give your poor, tricked mouth the sensation of luxury and rich, smooth abundance. Of course later in your GI tract the little fake-fat beads continue to slide and roll, resulting in wet, blatting farts and shit-stained pants.

Fake fat
, the industrial food conglomerates trumpeted—
the choice of a new generation!
(A generation that, presumably, smells suspiciously of liquid shit. No matter, though, as long as the shit is decorating the crotch and rear of fabulously skinny, size 6 jeans.)

Frankly, just eat the whole bag of normal chips. They may make you chunky if you eat them often, and they sure as hell won’t do your heart any favors, but at least chips made with regular fat won’t blow through the gutter of your intestines like wet mud an hour after you devour them, after guiltily licking the salt-crumbs from your fingers in an attempt to wring flavor out of desiccated potato-sheaves dipped in tiny beads of plastic.

Have the real ones. Really.

SOME FOODS WILL
hurt you, all right. Some can kill you.

We love consuming danger—putting it in our mouths, sucking on it, rolling it around on our tongues. There’s a reason sushi made with fugu is expensive, delectable, hard to find, exciting: Blowfish is riddled with poison, and only the most cunning chef can slip the poison away from the meat with the tip of his knife without the flesh becoming infected. Even so, fugu buzzes on the tongue, numbing the palate with tiny, homeopathic doses of death.

Supposedly—and I’ve never had any—but supposedly, fugu sushi is a rush. It gets you high. You eat it and become breathless and giggly. It feels good—the expense is worth it. It’s an experience like no other—the culinary equivalent of Russian roulette. Is your chef deft enough to have prepared your fish correctly? You can’t know until you eat it, and either live—your lips and tongue stinging with pleasure—or die, asphyxiating on the floor of a Japanese restaurant with paper chopstick wrappers in your hair.

All the risk of death makes the ecstasy of continuing to live that much more piquant. You leave the restaurant, safe and full of raw protein and
alive
, and it’s as if you’ve been given a second chance, directly from the hand of God. He kept you alive, didn’t He? All Appalachian Christian snake-handling/glass-eating cult members know that when you give your life to God, He can choose to keep you alive or not and if He does, it’s for a reason. The reason is, you’re righteous. It’s not luck. It’s glory.

Oh, and it’s illegal in the United States, so finding a chef willing to serve it to you is like doing a drug deal.

It is worth it. I’ve been assured of that by an adventurous friend curious enough about what it feels like to almost, nearly not quite die, to go through the laborious process of tracking fugu down. He paid for it with cash, just in case—like any other illegal transaction, like buying heroin or a woman’s body. And he ate it with rice and soy sauce, I imagine, and tiny green blobs of
wasabi
to enhance . . . whatever flavor fugu actually possesses. The flavor wasn’t notable enough to warrant mention, but my friend took almost half an hour to describe the details of the “buy” in salacious, chops-licking detail.

“Would you eat it again? ” I asked him. And, “Did it get you high?”

“Oh yeah, I’d totally eat it again! ” he said. And, “Oh yeah, I was fucking
flying
.”

We consume danger, and by eating it we conquer it, and it nourishes us. Death becomes life inside our bodies in a transubstantiation that is mystical, indescribable, exalting.

The flavor of fugu—like the taste of gun oil on the barrel of the shotgun lodged against our palates, or the vinegar-and-brown-sugar scent of the black tar we slide into the soft bend of our inner elbows—the flavor is, of course, beside the point.

My friend was right in not mentioning it. It was beneath mention. The deliciousness of fugu doesn’t live in its flavor.

Or, maybe it would be more precise to say that the only important thing to mention about the flavor of fugu is that it tastes very, very dangerous. That I can know for sure, without even tasting it.

BEAU HAD A CANKER SORE, SO I LICKED MY FINGER AND
poked it into a box of baking soda. Then I pulled his lip down and patted the soda into his sore with my fingertip.

“How does it feel? ” I asked.

“It burns,” he winced. I resisted the sudden desire to suck on his lower lip. It was so full and juicy I wanted to squirt yellow mustard on it and bite into it like a Ball Park frank. I loved Beau’s mouth. I wanted it to feel better so he could put his mouth on my pussy again. It had been days and I was getting squirrelly.

“That’s okay. Just wait, and it’ll start feeling better,” I said. Baking soda is basic, in terms of pH—and canker sores are usually caused by too much acidity in the mouth. Putting baking soda on a canker sore helps neutralize the pH, so your mouth can heal. I added, “If you have a Coke, be sure to rinse your mouth out with water afterward. It’s acidic
and
sugary.”

Beau looked at me trustingly. He didn’t know that I’d just been fantasizing about forcing his face between my legs and making him suck me until I howled. And I didn’t really want to hurt him. It’s just that my desire was so honed, so sharp.

I gave him a single solicitous kiss on the cheek instead.

THERE’S A WHOLE
category of food that gives us the
Venus in Furs
treatment—it wounds us grievously, then it turns right around and makes us feel better than we ever knew we could feel. When it wants to, cruel food can be mind-blowingly savory, the kind of food you’d do just about anything to experience again. That’s when it’s not making us wish we’d never tasted it in the first place.

AN OLD BOYFRIEND
told me a story about wasabi—the pistachio-green horseradish paste served with pickled ginger in sushi restaurants. The first time he went out for sushi, he assumed the blob of green stuff on his plate was a smear of avocado.

Oh, cool
, he thought.
Fusion cuisine!
(This wasn’t his fault. He was from California.)

Accordingly, he scooped up the entire blob of wasabi and spread it across one piece of tuna
bosomaki
.

His friend thought he was joking. “Dude . . . do you know what that is? ”

“Of course I do,” said my ex-boyfriend, ever the culinary sophisticate. “It’s like guaca—” And then, of course, his mouth was exploding in a five-alarm Chicago fire of hot mustardy pain, and his eyes were squeezed shut and oozing tears, and his friend was both laughing and trying to give him his glass of water, which only made the burning feel worse.
¹

My ex got a whopping dose of gastronomic domination that day. His experience was humiliating and painful, and, what’s more, it seemed to come out of nowhere, like a run of bad luck. But afterward, the endorphm rush made him feel light-headed, a little silly. The cool fish felt exquisite on his hot, irritated tongue. The sushi he ate that day was a delectable revelation.

And like anyone else given the same treatment by the same Mistress, he came creeping back for more a few days later—shame-faced, hopeful, with his money clutched in his hand.

He went back to the same restaurant, alone. He ordered himself a platter of tuna and salmon and eel and shrimp, ignoring the smirking sushi chefs behind the tall counter in the back of the restaurant. When his order arrived (along with a glass of ice water pointedly delivered by the giggling waitress), he used the tip of his chopstick to apply a minute, DNA-evidence amount of wasabi to each bite, so sheer that it didn’t even look green atop his rice and fish.

But he knew it was there, and, better yet, he’d learned respect. He’d learned to play by the rules. He wasn’t in charge. The terms of the exchange were dictated to him. And, like a sudden slap in the face followed by a loving caress, the pain he sought was directly, inextricably connected to his pleasure.

He feasted, enthralled.

E.T.: THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL
made me cry like a little bitch, and it wasn’t because I didn’t know what was coming when those government men in the white zip-up suits showed up. No, I knew
exactly
what was going to go down. Did that stop me from whimpering into my Jujubes half an hour later when E.T. was pale and sick and wanting to go home? No, siree. When he poked his light-up finger at his heart during his big goodbye scene with Elliott and said “Ouch,” I bawled like I was getting my leg sawed off, even though even the littlest kids in the movie theater knew he was going to rig a way to go home from bicycle parts and an old record player. We all knew, and we all cried anyway

You can know exactly how something works, but that knowledge won’t make you immune from its effects. On the contrary: We tend to enjoy provoking ourselves into physical reaction, whether we’re jerking off to porn or paying to cry while E.T. flies home.

We’re crack-monkeys: Once we figure out how to manipulate our own feelings, we’ll hit the same button over and over again for the sheer joy of being able to create our own emotional reality.

Similarly once you figure out that the burn of wasabi is an inseparable part of your enjoyment of it, you start playing with that burn. Yearning for it. Seeing how much you can take. You plan for it, and in some cases, you budget for it. No price is too high for that kind of teetering ecstasy—being strung up between the poles of torment and tranquility between agony and bliss. A bland diet stultifies. Exquisitely keen sensation smacks us on the ass, wakes us up, resets our focus.