Sex and Bacon (22 page)

I HAVE A BAG OF FUN-SIZE REESE’S PEANUT BUTTER CUPS
in my cupboard. It’s nearly Halloween, so I’m allowed. I’m also allowed every other day of the year because I’m a grownup, and if I want to have ten fun-size pieces of candy for dinner I can. In that respect (and ignoring the twin bummers of paying rent and going to work), adulthood is every bit as fabulous as I thought it would be when I was a little girl, forced to eat well-balanced nutritious meals by my hippie parents. They meant well but didn’t realize their insistence on fruits, hole grains, and vegetables would result in a maturity spent dining on convenience store fare. Kvery time I bite into a Twinkle I am profoundly grateful that it is not a carrot stick, and I see no reason why a pack of Oberto Cocktail Pep can’t be just as nutritive as a boneless, skinless chicken breast. If you take a multivitamin with the pepperoni, what’s the difference, really?

Fun-size Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups are smaller now than they used to be when I was a child wistfully cruising the grocery store candy aisle in the weeks leading up to Halloween. Some howling demon at Hershey s decided that a smaller peanut butter cup would be more “fun.” I don’t get it: We’re fatter than ever. So why would we want a
smaller
peanut butter cup? Shouldn’t candy manufacturers be concentrating on making their products bigger, to supply our increasing sugar-jones? Or are the individual pieces of candy getting smaller with the understanding that their reduced size gives us tacit permission to eat many more pieces than we ordinarily would?

“Fun-size,” my big white ass. A Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup the size of a throw pillow—now
that
would be fun.

And best of all, I’m pretty sure one would be enough.

Fried Chicken Interlude: Chicken Bus

ON THE BUS COMING HOME FROM WORK ONE NIGHT,
a homeless man threw a piece of Dumpster chicken at me.

I hurled it back at him and the chicken hit him in the face, hard. It bounced into his lap, leaving a greasy smear on his pants before falling to the floor. The chicken looked like it might have been good about two days ago.

“What’s wrong with you, you rude motherfucker?” I snarled.

He smiled, his mouth full of mashed-up chicken and homeless spit.

“I’m a nigger!” he said.

Under the layers of worn-in grime on his face, he was as white as I was.

“No, you’re not!” I said, indignant. “You’re just a rude, homeless, chicken-throwing piece of shit!”

An actual black man was sitting across the aisle from me. I hoped he didn’t think I thought
nigger
was a normal word to say.

The homeless dude and I stared at each other.

“Get the fuck off this bus,” I said.

“This ain’t your bus, bitch,” the homeless man pointed out. He swallowed the chewed-up chicken-wad in one gulp. I saw the mass of old smelly chicken travel down his throat and disappear into the collar of his filthy overcoat.

“It’s my bus now, cocksucker,” I said, then mentally slapped my own forehead. That’s the thing about shit-talking: You have to back your words up and even fight for them no matter how dumb or improbable they are, so when you’re bumping chests with an opponent, you really have to watch what you say. Now I’d moved the point of contention from him pegging me with fried chicken—justified—to my claim of bus ownership—totally unjustified. I was willing to spar over my right not to be hit with rotten chicken, but backing up my hasty delineation of territory was going to be tricky.

The black guy got up briskly and moved a few seats away from us. I didn’t blame him. Now I was going to have to fight a homeless chicken-fingered lunatic for bus ownership because I said I owned it and I had to back myself. I didn’t relish the thought. I wished I’d stuck with the chicken as the issue, or maybe his use of the word
nigger
. Either one of those things would have been better than fighting over who was the ruler of the bus.

After a moment, the homeless man slung another piece of chicken toward the driver at the front of the bus. It was a more casual toss, like he was just checking out the idea of slinging chicken at someone other than me.

The driver pulled our bus—
my
bus—over. “Get off!” the driver ordered over the crackly bus speaker.

The homeless man crammed a slimy chicken breast into his mouth, carrying it sideways like a hunting dog retrieving a duck. He muttered around the piece of chicken, but I couldn’t understand what he was saying. A delicate string of drool worked its way around the chicken and touched the lapel of his overcoat. Finally he chucked a wing at the driver—more decisively this time, as if he’d made a decision and was sticking to it—and exited the bus through the back doors. The drivers aren’t supposed to open the back doors after 7:00 PM, but perhaps special circumstances like having chicken tossed at you call for amendments to the rules.

As I got off, I thanked the driver for throwing the homeless chicken-tossing dude off the bus.

“Yeah,” the driver said wearily. The whole front of the bus smelled like rotten chicken.

I wondered how much longer he had to drive.

On my way home, I stopped at KFC for a bucket of the Colonel’s Original Recipe. Gnawing on a drumstick at the bus stop, I glared defiantly at the people passing me on the sidewalk. I had ammunition, a getaway bus due in seven minutes, and two lemon-scented wet-wipes. The next person who threw anything at me, said the word
nigger
, or showed me a mouth full of chewed-up chow was getting it with both finger-lickin’ barrels.

IV.
PAIN

MY DEAR FRIEND MARIA CAUTIONED ME ABOUT WRITING THIS BOOK.

“Writing a book about something you
were
—or something you
did
—is easy” she said, in the sweet North Carolina burr that tucks in the ends of words neatly but allows their vowels free, bewildering play. “That’s just
history
. But writing a book about something you
are
is hard, because that’s gonna keep changing.”

She’s a wise owl, that Maria. And oh man, was she right.

It turns out that writing about something you
are
is pretty much a losing proposition. The very process of documenting your current state of mind is guaranteed to change that state of mind, no matter how fast you scribble stuff down. When you go back and reread something that felt achingly true a week ago, more often than not you end up hating yourself because what was true then is not true now, and the conclusions you drew proudly at the time now seem worse than fatuous. You can edit, of course, but it’s not like your edits are going to pin down the truth any more effectively than your first draft did. Rewriting is just substituting a slightly more current edition of the truth, which—in another week—will be equally outdated.

Essentially you’re fucked from the git-go. You go into battle boldly, accompanied by a great deal of fanfare, waving a big white banner that reads TRUTH, like you’re the first person in the world brave enough to tell the real, true story of whatever it is you’re writing about—and by the end of your book your banner has turned to muddy ribbons that you’re constantly stumbling over and cursing, and at a certain point you make a deal with yourself that if you can just get the damn thing finished, you’ll never be dumb enough to charge into the fray again.

This is why writers are legendary drunks, by the way. We sit at home raking through our own shit for little knots of usable nutrition, which we pop back into our mouths and chew hopefully. We’re the filtration system for our own words. At the end of the process, all the tiny lumps of matter that survive end up being pruned and polished into a publishable manuscript by our editors, while-we strain to expel the sickening bloat of all the waste-words we’ve gobbled, wiping our poor asses raw with the shreds of our TRUTH banners. Writing a book is not an occupation that offers much dignity. It’s like shitting in county lockup: Everyone has to smell the curdled remains of what you ate the day before, and, if you’re lucky, they won’t shank you for it.

HALFWAY THROUGH THE
year it took me to write this book, I became severely depressed. I was broke, with no way to pay my rent or to buy groceries, and I was too sick to work. With no insurance, I was unable to afford hospitalization or close medical supervision, so I spent my days on the Internet, researching firearms. I called my friends in the medical field for advice on where to place the barrel of the gun. “It’s research for my book,” I told them, though I hadn’t written a word in months. I stopped showering—what was the point? Eventually, I stopped leaving the apartment. Garbage piled up and stank. I didn’t care.

My depression stopped this book cold.

Then, my laptop contracted a massive virus. My operating system had to be wiped clean and reinstalled. I lost thousands of MP3
_s
—nearly my entire song library. In a stroke of unbelievable luck, my notes for this book were salvaged by a data-retrieval specialist, as was the existing draft manuscript. Despite that, I began to exhibit all the posttraumatic stress syndromes I’d experienced after Hurricane Katrina: nightmares, insomnia, constant trembling, random public weeping, the whole anxiety suite. My body weight plummeted and my blood pressure shot up like a paper snake.

Then my partner and I broke up. Got back together. Broke up again.

My suicidal ideation got focused and specific. A Pacific Northwest girl to the core, I decided to pull a Kurt Cobam: I’d overdose on heroin, then blow my head off-with a shotgun. I didn’t plan on leaving a note—that was just more writing I couldn’t do, one more missed deadline.

I figured I’d wait until after the winter holidays so I didn’t ruin anyone’s Christmas.

SO, PAIN. I
know from pain. Most of this book was brought forth in pain, and at this point I think pain is just as much a part of the writing process as actually pushing the words out and smearing them around. I’ve never experienced childbirth, but it seems right to me that bringing forth new life should cause agony—otherwise, every simpleton would-write symphonies and we’d all have a dozen vanity babies to feed. At this point I think the purpose of the pain is transformative—it burns away the nonessential stuff, strips us bare, and forces us to give up the goods long after we’ve stopped caring about anything but finding a way to end our anguish.

My depression waned when I found a physician willing to see me for $10 a visit on an under-the-table sliding scale that probably saved my life. I started taking the medication she prescribed, and two weeks later I noticed that I was showering and leaving the house again. Now I take pills three times a day, and every time I do I am grateful to a physician who put healing above self-interest and to a therapist who held me tight and wouldn’t let me fall.

“FUGU” AND “WASABI”
are two short pieces about food as danger. I’m positive I’m not the only person who likes the occasional culinary belt across the mouth—sometimes you need your food to show you -who’s boss.