Sex and Bacon (24 page)

Five Stars in a Thai restaurant.

Hot peppers—the little, mean ones.

Chinese mustard.

Horseradish.

Haifa bottle of hot sauce dumped over your scrambled eggs first thing in the morning.

The venomous slow burn of an Indian curry.

The list is endless, but they’re all imperious divas that torment us with our own desire. They hurt us intimately, inside our bodies, and we simply can’t get enough of it. At first we appreciate the pain for being the harbinger of our pleasure. Soon we learn to love the pain itself,
for
itself. We love the chemicals it releases in our brains, and we love the way it makes us sweat. We love testing our own limits, competing against ourselves. When you start to notice the ecstatic expressions on the faces of the participants as the burn brings the rush, hot-chili-eating contests become pornographic. They’re gorging on pain right in front of us.

We truly are asking for it.

Spicy food makes masochists of us all.

1.
When you eat something that’s too hot, don’t reach for water. Reach for something bland and starchy, like plain rice or a small piece of bread—something that will absorb the heat instead of simply spreading it through your mouth more effectively. Think of a stove-top fire: The last thing you do is throw water on it. Just put a metal or glass mixing bowl over it. You have to throttle a grease fire, not drown it.

I’VE DINED ON A SLEW OF ROBUSTLY WEIRD ITEMS-INNARDS,
pig’s feet, deep-fried Mars Bars, and Mexican cake frosting made of equal parts granulated sugar, food coloring, and lard, notably. But what I won’t even try, what is completely nonnegotiable to me, is cheese.

Yes, cheese. Unforgivable for a
bonne Vivante
, I know. I should love it—it’s creamy, generally high in fat, and uniquely flavorful—all shared attributes of other foods I adore. It’s expensive. It’s a luxury. It’s a
treat
. People show off their fancy cheese knowledge the way others like to display their erudite taste in wine. In fact, I have a dear friend in San Francisco who’s writing an entire book on cheese, and it’s a testament to his talent that I look forward to reading his book despite its subject matter. I’ll read it, sure, but I won’t have any idea of the tastes and textures he’s describing. Because frankly cheese makes me puke.

With two exceptions. My cheese-phobia has an Italian food clause: I’ll eat mozzarella on pizza, and I’ll shake Kraft parmesan from the big green can in my refrigerator onto my spaghetti when I’m feeling daring. My suspicion is that if you cover
anything
with enough garlic and oregano, even cheese, it becomes magically delicious. I’d cheerfully devour a live rat if it were dredged in Italian-seasoned breadcrumbs and fried in olive oil with plenty of minced garlic.

But bleu, cheddar, cream, brie, swiss, feta? Gouda, chevre, fontina, cottage? Camembert, provolone, paneer, havarti, muenster, limburger? No—a thousand times no.
No
, as in I won’t even try it.
No
, as in I won’t eat a dish that contains even trace amounts. I’ll put a lot of things in my mouth, it’s true, but I draw the line at cheese. That’s a hard boundary, and I’m not afraid to safe-word.

In a lifetime of gleeful eating, I’ve only been cheese-raped twice. Once was a mistake, and the other occurred with only the best of intentions. These two incidents not only confirmed my cheese hatred but upped the ante, turning cheese from something I don’t eat by choice into something I cannot contemplate eating without breathing deliberately to avoid retching. The echo chamber of early trauma is a gift that keeps on giving, amplifying itself through memory.

The mistake occurred when I was nineteen years old. I was waiting tables in a small restaurant ten blocks from my childhood home. Each server could order a shift meal—anything we liked, as long as it didn’t include meat or fish or anything else deemed too expensive to be poured into our common trough as slop. For my shift meal, I was in the habit of requesting a green salad, which could be tossed with one of three dressings: balsamic vinaigrette, ranch, or bleu cheese. I always specified balsamic vinaigrette and begged for a few contraband strips of grilled chicken. Sometimes I got them, other times I didn’t—my access to protein depended on the cook’s mood. He usually added fat slices of preserved beets, though, which he knew I loved.

One day the line cook, flustered by a flurry of unaccountable midafternoon lunch orders, delivered my special salad dressed with bleu cheese instead of vinaigrette. Had I realized his mistake, as hungry as I was, I would have simply thrown the salad out, chicken strips and all. But I was busy bringing drinks to new tables and I didn’t inspect my meal carefully, and on my way to a four-top with menus under my arm, I greedily shoveled a huge bite of salad into my mouth.

My first taste of bleu cheese was a revelation, like waking up and realizing that I’d died and gone straight to Hell. It was as if my salad had been tossed with chunks of thick black mildew harvested from damp window molding, or scrapings from a million fetid, bacterial armpits. It was like licking Satan’s taint, really getting my tongue into every unbelievably foul nook and cranny, lapping up every diabolical curd. It -was so bad I dropped the menus, spat the mouthful of chewed romame onto the floor, and started crying from the sheer shock of having something so terrible inside me so intimately. I remember the shocked expressions on the faces of my four-top. When I returned from the bathroom to clean up the nasty, chewed mess on the floor, they were gone.

That was my first and only experience with the kind of cheese that features deliberate veins of rot. And writing about it now, I have the uncontrollable urge to go brush my teeth. I swear I can smell the decay on my own breath even now.

Like a fast, rude hand up your skirt on a crowded bus, the bite of bleu-cheese-tainted salad was a hit-and-run assault. It was nobody’s fault, really, but thinking of it now, my stomach flutters in outraged revulsion. It’s “blue ” because it’s
rotten
, people. I don’t eat maggot-blown meat, either. Blue mold is Nature’s Mr. Yuk sticker: It tells us that the food in question is not fit to eat. There isn’t enough garlic in the world to change my mind on that.

TO EXPLAIN MY
second nonconsensual cheese contact, you’ll have to understand that my parents were very young when they had me, and that I grew up in an era when firmness was a central tenet of good parenting. To be unyielding was merely a way to extract cheerful compliance from your child. The experts who wrote best-selling books advised parents to state their demands, then enforce their authority without mercy. So it’s not that my childhood was particularly horrid—it’s that in the mid-’70s,
everyone’s
was, pretty much.

When I was very young—seven years old, at the most—my sweet Okie father decided that my diet was lacking in a specific dish he deemed nutritious and altogether necessary for my proper development: grilled cheese sandwiches. Ignoring my protests, he slathered a piece of whole wheat bread with mayonnaise, then melted cheddar into the bread. I remember the waxy rotten smell of the cheese filling the kitchen. I remember my horror and dismay. From babyhood I’d hated cheese—but despite my stated antipathy, my parents persisted in serving it to me. In retrospect, I realize that money was tight and the big five-pound logs of cheese my parents retrieved from the Food Giant were affordable protein, and that, again, they were doing the best they could with very little guidance. In 1978, nobody wanted to raise a picky child.

“Mmm,” said my dad. He quartered the piece of cheddared bread with his mayonnaise-smeared butter knife, leaving dollops of grease on the edges of each piece.

“I used to eat this as a boy” he said. “Sometimes ‘we’d melt tuna underneath.”

Some of the things he ate as a boy I liked—for instance, mixed together peanut butter and jelly applied to bread in such a manner so that each bite of sandwich contained equal portions of both instead of unincorporated lumps of salty peanut butter and too-sweet Welch’s Grape. I liked the cans of pork and beans he’d heat on the stove in a pot too, though I carefully removed the white strips of fat that occasionally polluted my portions. My father had explained that those wormy white ribbons were actually pork, but I’d never seen meat that slimy and pale before. It was better just to lay them on the side of my plate, like the fat my mother pulled off her bacon.

But cheese?
/Melted
cheese? I
hated
cheese —I always had.

The smell of the grilled cheese made my mouth water the way it did before I threw up. I couldn’t put it in my mouth. I felt weak with loathing. I shook my head decisively, pushing the plate away

“No,” I said.

“You’ll sit here,” said my young, terrified father.
No tolerance of picky eating
, insisted the TV experts.
Not even once!
“You’ll sit here until you eat it.”

We sat, my father and I, in a Norman Rock-well semblance of father-daughter compatibility, separated by a platter of impossible food. At seven, I didn’t have the words to tell my father that what he had given me was making me sick and that I could not eat it, and never would—so we sat in silence. I tried not to accidentally inhale the cheddar fumes. The minutes ticked by. My milk warmed to room temperature. I squirmed and whined, kicking my chair savagely.

After an hour my father had finished reading the newspaper, which he’d folded into neat rectangular quarters. “Take two bites,” my father said, finally. I shook my head, clamping my nose defiantly in the
Pee-ew!
gesture I’d learned from TV.

We stared at each other. Neither one of us even so much as glanced at the sandwich between us, though the smell of it persisted in nauseating me. My bottom was sore from sitting. The light had changed, too. It was dark outside—past my bedtime, I knew. My father had begun to frighten me. His stony face was unreadable. I missed my laughing, gentle father—who was this stranger?

“One bite,” the intruder said flatly, pressing his palms to the table. Clearly, it was his final offer.

Sadly, I considered my options. They were woefully few. If the thing masquerading as my father would not let me leave the table until I ate what it told me to eat, I would have to eat what it gave me. It didn’t matter if it was rat poison, iron filings, or a curl of dog shit from the parking strip in front of our house. I had to put it in my mouth and chew it, no matter how much it stank, no matter how nasty it looked. There were no alternatives I could see—to get my father back, I’d have to obey this stranger. My body was the battleground, and clearly, its well-being would have to be sacrificed.

I picked up one of the small, cold squares in front of me. My father-thing was suddenly, hopefully attentive. I felt a spike of hatred that came and went so quickly it was almost not there at all.
You’ll be dorry when I’m dead
, I thought.
You’ll cry and wuh you were
dead too
. I pictured myself lying still, hands gracefully folded, in a pretty white coffin. I would be poisoned by the horrible cheese sandwich in front of me, like Snow White with the apple.
She’d do
beautiful
, people would say.
What a tragedy. If only
.

By that time the cheese had cooled and become opaque with congealed cheese grease, and the smell wasn’t so sharp. I kept my teeth away from the mayonnaise. I knew that if that got on my lips or tongue I’d vomit until the Cheerios I’d had for breakfast last Saturday made a second appearance. I nibbled one corner of the quarter, wincing and trying not to inhale through my nose to avoid the garbage-y smell. I was Snow White, brave and doomed. I was being poisoned.

I heaved.
Don’t think about it
, I ordered myself.
Don’t breathe. One bite
—
he promised
.

Finally, the half-chewed wad of bread and greased cheese slid down my throat in one gluey mass. My poor father smiled in relief: The experts had been right. It had taken a long time, but I’d obeyed. My
picky eating
had been defeated.

I stared at him, pressing my lips together miserably.
Poisoned
. The rancid, oily texture, the sour taste, the stink of it, like old farts on the hot plastic seats of my father’s battered, orange VW Bug. I swallowed, then gagged.

Snakes of vomit shot out of my throat in ropes, pooling in my plate, soaking the rest of the hateful grilled cheese. I retched miserably as my father lunged for the roll of paper towels that hung under one kitchen cupboard, then emptied my stomach again down my own chest. The vomit felt warm and comforting in my lap. Encouraged by the heat, I released my bladder. Hot urine soothed my sore bottom then puddled beneath my chair. Surprised and embarrassed to have wet my big-girl pants like a baby, I burst into tears.

My father cleaned up. As he sopped up my urine with big wads of paper towels and emptied the vomit-drenched grilled cheese into the trash can under the kitchen sink, he wept too. We sobbed in tandem, though my tears were mostly relief to have lived through my poisoning. The stone-faced stranger was gone and the hateful sandwich had been vanquished.