Sex and Bacon (29 page)

But to my astonishment the grocery bag contains the makings of a hearty breakfast for two: a dozen eggs, some bread, a pint of half-and-half. . . and a package of hickory-smoked, thick-cut bacon. The bacon sits between us on the kitchen table like a gun. It is the elephant in the room. Neither of us look at it.

I finally meet his gaze. It’s the scariest thing I’ve ever done in my life. His face is kind and open and sad. I have every inch of it memorized, but it’s still a revelation.

I love you
, I think. Then,
Can we please take care of each other?

ALL THE THINKING
I’ve been doing about Home, homemaking, family—nothing has prepared me for the realization that this really is my life, and it’s half-over, and it looks like I’m never going to be the cheery mom baking cookies in my own clean, spacious kitchen while my partner works and looks forward to coming home to a hot dinner. In reality, there are no children and I live in three small rooms by myself, and most months I have no idea how I’m going to pay the next month’s rent. I’ve crisscrossed the country a hundred times, like blown dandelion seed, staying on threadbare couches with wellmeaning strangers, washing quickly in public restrooms, hustling meals and cash and shelter with the pragmatic efficiency born of necessity. Nobody’s ever going to mistake me for a mother or a wife or the kind of person who buys furniture or owns the place I live. I’ve made a thousand grievous mistakes, broken hearts, and treated people unkindly when they deserved compassion. I was
a.fille de joie
and now I’m a writer, and either way, I’ve chosen to walk a path that’s both solitary and uncertain.

But Home is what you make of it, I guess. The best some of us can do is to camp out in rented rooms and make small, true alliances with each other. When we eat together—when we fuck each other—for those tiny moments, we’re not alone, and Home seems like something we can hold on to and keep forever. We can taste it, feel it on our skins and inside us; it lifts us up and gives us a reason to stay alive one more sad, lonely day. And that’s not what I wanted when I was a child dreaming of a home and a family of my own, but it’s going to have to be enough, because that’s all some of us get. And I’m grateful for every meal shared and every intimacy—every sweet, crazy burst of connection. If that’s all we get, then I will love every single moment I’m allotted, fiercely and with my whole dumb, hopeful heart.

I LOOK AT
the groceries spread out before me and consider the breakfast I’m going to make tomorrow morning. Bacon and eggs and many hot cups of coffee tempered with cream and sugar. Maybe blueberry pancakes. My mouth is watering. I can practically taste every bite, every sip, from the smoky crunch of crisp bacon to the sugarcane sweetness of the coffee. I’ll cook a leisurely meal after Beau and I wake up together. We’ll eat it and then maybe fuck again, and that ‘will be enough to keep my heart beating until the next tiny moment of grace.

And just for a moment, thinking about the meal I will cook for the person I love, I can almost touch and taste Home —I can almost
see
it, shimmering in the distance like a gorgeous, beckoning mirage.

It is the most beautiful thing I know.

AFTERWORD (CHERRY ON TOP)

I’VE BEEN WATCHING MY CARBS FOR THE PAST WEEK TO SLIM
down for my author’s photograph.

My first author’s pic was pretty hot (if you don’t notice the fact that in my hurry to smile pretty for the camera, I’d completely neglected to brush my hair), so now the stakes are high. The last thing I want is for haters to pick up my second book, flip to the back, and smile in disbelief and pity at my Dorian Gray—like transformation. So I’m watching my carbs and curbing my booze intake because it seems like the older I get, the more my face puffs up like an airbag the day after I overindulge.

I admit it: I’m vain. I’m pretty sure that most writers are, because if we weren’t, we wouldn’t detain you for three hundred pages, clutching your lapel and breathing-whiskey fumes into your face as we insist upon telling you our Very Important Stories. We grew up being encouraged to express ourselves by well meaning parents and a lifetime supply of gold stars from English teachers, and now as adults we blithely assume the right to hijack people’s attention. We spend our days contemplating the complexity of our own navels (and then painstakingly
documenting the process
of our own inward gaze), so you’ll have to excuse me for being a little concerned about my author’s picture.

Oh yeah—we also tend to be control freaks.

I guess if you’ve made it all the way to the Afterword you’ve probably spent a fair amount of time reading my book, and for that I sincerely thank you. Here are some things you should know about the book you just read:

1. My editress, Brooke Warner, is an immortal godlike superhero-creature of unerring instinct and endless patience. The good parts of this book are a direct result of her stunning ability to dissect vibrant text from unnecessary bloviation. (That’s right, I’m a bloviator. Where’s my telethon?) The sucky parts of this book are my fault, and represent the times I’ve sulkily scrawled STET in the margins of her perfectly reasonable edits.

Miss B., this book couldn’t have been written without you. You’re as much its mommy as I am. You’re the Good Mommy who makes school lunches and sews Halloween costumes from scratch, and I’m the Bad Mommy who naps in the middle of the day, has hangovers, and wears a Wonderbra to Parents’ Night. But as everyone knows, it takes two mommies to . . . well, I guess it doesn’t take two mommies. But if you’re lucky, you get two, and if you’re
really
lucky, one will be as sweet, practical, and tactful as Miss Warner.

2. This book could also not have been written without the love, support, financial assistance, and treats given to me by the people I am proud to call my friends, both online and meat-realm. You’ve fed me, entertained me, let me cry and snot all over your dry-clean-only shirts, and, most of all, you haven’t punched me in the face for my nonstop, single-minded focus on THE BOOK THE BOOK THE BOOK THE BOOK for the year it’s taken me to bust this out. I honestly can’t believe I still have friends. But I am so damn grateful that I do. Thank you for tolerating me, my dearly beloveds.

3. If you’re curious about what’s going on with me, you can read my online diary at
www.sarahkatherinelewis.com
. Never a fee, and worth every penny! Swing by and say howdy, especially if you have a good recipe to share or want to pay me a lot of money for my writing.

4. All right, I’m just going to do this. I don’t know where else to put this and I really want this recipe to be in my book, because it is
so absurdly good
. It is also very low-carb, if you plan to wear plastic pants in your author’s picture.

Cut up a few shallots and saute them in a tablespoon of butter or bacon fat in a big pot over medium-high heat until they’re soft, but not caramelized.

Add two 14-ounce cans of chicken stock and one 15-ounce can of pumpkin.
Do not
fuck up and use canned pumpkin pie mix instead. Seriously. Just the normal canned pumpkin is what you want here.

Add 1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper, 1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper, and 1/2 cup dry sherry. Bring the mixture to a boil, then reduce the heat to low, cover the pot, and simmer for half an hour.

After half an hour, remove the pot from the range and stick it in your fridge. Allow your soup to cool until it’s no hotter than lukewarm, then run it through your blender or food processor in batches until smooth (this doesn’t take long since everything should be all soft and cooked already—you’re just making sure the shallots are pureed into the rest of the pumpkin mixture so they’re not lumpy and weird and distracting in your mouth when you’re finally eating your soup).

Return the blended soup to its pot and add 1 cup of heavy whipping cream. Don’t be a baby and add milk instead in an effort to make this recipe low-fat, because the texture will be all wrong—you -want heavy whipping cream and nothing but. (Remember,
fat is your friend
. Cream just wants to be your buddy. Don’t snub cream—that’s mean. Reach out to cream. If you don’t, who will?)

Add a splash more sherry and a generous pinch of nutmeg. Add more pepper if you want a spicier soup. Add a little salt if you screwed up and bought the reduced-sodium chicken stock that looks so much like the regular kind (bastards).

Cover the pot and heat your soup on medium-low, stirring often. Don’t let it boil.

Serve garnished with crumbled bacon bits, of course. The maple-flavored kind gives a really nice autumnal flavor to this soup, but any bacon will do. If you don’t have any bacon, you can sprinkle a little nutmeg on top instead, but come on: Why wouldn’t you have bacon on hand? It’s a staple!

Eat and enjoy.

5. Finally I want to thank the ladies and gentlemen who’ve shared my bed, eaten my food, and put up with my crap: I didn’t deserve any of you, and I hope you know by now that you could’ve done a lot better. But thank you for gracing me with your time and affection anyway.

And if I’ve played fast and loose with chronology, quotations, and the details of particular events that you recall differently than I describe in this book, remember that all writers are crazy, drunken liars and you’re much better off dating someone with a 401k.

666. SLAYER RULES OK.

7. In all seriousness, a note about the sex industry: Dudes, don’t mess with porn. Don’t go to strip clubs, don’t rent dirty movies, and don’t jack off to nasty pics on the Internet. Don’t pay for domination, get lap dances, get “massages,” or rent women to watch you spank it. That shit will fuck you up—it’s addictive nonsense designed to wreck your chances of having loving relationships with real, live females and to make sure that you keep paying for the fake stuff.

Take the money you were going to spend on a month’s subscription to a corny adult website with the same tired images you’ve seen ten zillion times before and ask a smart, pretty girl out. I swear to you that hanging out with an actual female is much more fun than paying for the privilege of becoming just another john. Remember that the sex industry objectifies you just as much as it objectifies its performers. Unsubscribe!

8. Thank you again for reading my book. I hope it made you hungry, made you laugh, grossed you out, and got you hot.

SARAH KATHERINE LEWIS
is the author of
Indecent: How I Make It and Fake It as a Girl for Hire
and has contributed to several anthologies, including
Fucking Daphne: Mostly True Stories and Fictions
(Seal, 2008). A ten-year veteran of the adult industry in Seattle, Portland, and New Orleans, she now spends her time maintaining her website
www.sarahkatherinelewis.com
, writing, and playing with food in Seattle, Washington. An outspoken (and often outrageous) feminist activist, she works to promote global revolution and dreams of a world where all women feast like Vikings.

For more than thirty years, Seal Press has published groundbreaking books. By women. For women. Visit our website at
www.sealpress.com
and our blog at
www.sealpress.com/blog
.

Indecent: How I Make It and Fake It as a Girl for Hire by Sarah Katherine Lewis. $14.95, 1-58005-169-3. An insider reveals the gritty reality behind the alluring facade of the sex industry.

Dirty Sugar Cookies: Culinary Observations, Questionable
Taste
by Ayun Halliday. $14.95, 1-58005-150-2. Ayun Halliday is back with comical and unpredictable essays about her disastrous track record in the kitchen and her culinary observations.

Sexier Sex: Lessons from the Brave New Sexual
Frontier
by Regina Lynn. $14.95, 1-58005-231-2. A fun, provocative guide to discovering your sexuality and getting more pleasure from your sensual life.

Getting Off: A Woman’s Guide to Masturbation by Jamye Waxman, illustrations by Molly Crabapple. $15.95, 1-58005-219-3. Empowering and female-positive, this is a comprehensive guide for women on the history and mechanics of the oldest and most common sexual practice.