Sex and Bacon (27 page)

• A handful of chopped onions.
  
• Salt to taste. “Salt to taste “ means a lot of salt if you’re a salt-hound like myself—just keep tasting and adding more until the beans seem right to you. You can use seasoning salt or kosher salt or sea salt or flavored salt of any kind. You can use soy sauce but don’t use the low-sodium kind, because the whole point of soy sauce is to increase the salinity of your beans. Salt gets a pretty bad rap these days and if you have massive hypertension you may -wish to avoid using a bunch of it, but salt is a reliable flavor enhancer that amps subtle taste up to a scrumptious 11, so do use some. Salt is my friend and I would like it to be yours, too.
  
• A glug of olive oil or a small chunk of butter or a spoonful of bacon fat. Not a lot—maybe a tablespoon’s worth, maybe a little more, maybe a little less—again, “to taste.” Fat helps to make your beans filling and satisfying to your palate.
  
• Some diced-up bell peppers. Red, yellow, green, purple, it doesn’t matter. They all have their charms. I just buy whatever’s on sale.
  
• A glug or two of vinegar—balsamic, red wine, apple cider, or whatever you have. Vinegar goes really well with fat—the two ingredients bring out the best in each other, setting each other off and creating a third savory flavor composed of the best elements of both. Think of fat as the daddy and vinegar as the mommy. They love each other so much they have a baby. And the baby tastes delicious!
  
• Ground black pepper or cayenne pepper, though if you’re using cayenne add it in small increments because a little of that goes a long, mouth-burning way
  
• Leftover chunks of cooked ham, bacon, chicken, or sausage. You know how I feel about sausage by now. You should really have it in your kitchen as a staple. If you don’t (or if God forbid, you’re a vegetarian) just forgo the meat and realize that vegetarian food will simply never be as tasty as nonvegetarian food, and that’s just the way it is. When us meat-eaters are dying of colon cancer and looking back on all the fine meaty meals we consumed in our lifetimes, you can interrupt our bacon-laced reveries and tell us you told us so. Until then, I’m buying family packs of chorizo and putting it into pretty much everything I cook that isn’t birthday cake.
  
• Spices. Oregano and cumin are nice. Maybe some chili powder. Or—and especially if you added sausage—try a little fennel.
  

Once you’ve got your bean-liquid adjusted and your stuff added, turn the heat down as low as it goes, cover the pot, and let your beans sit. The longer they sit, the more flavor emerges from the extra ingredients you added. Long, slow cooking also results in a smoother, creamier texture for your beans.

Now make a pot of rice. If you have a rice cooker, follow the instructions. If you don’t, dump two cups of rinsed white rice into a pot and add three cups of water, or chicken broth if you want to be fancy. Heat the pot on high until thewater boils. Let it boil for a minute or two, then turn the heat down as low as it goes, put the lid on, and set your timer for twenty-five minutes. Fluff it up with a fork and let it sit on the burner uncovered for a few minutes if it still seems a little wet. Sprinkle it with salt and pepper if you like, or leave it naked.

Take a big-ass bowl and put a bunch of rice in the bottom of it. Then use a ladle or a measuring cup to scoop up your beautiful black beans and deposit them over the rice. The black bean juice will soak down into the rice, giving it wonderful bean-flavor, and the beans will kind of sit on top looking scrumptious and half-mashed. If you didn’t add enough salt while the beans were stewing, sprinkle some on top of them now before you devour them (last chance!). Watch for bay leaves if you used them. Don’t accidentally eat one. They taste bitter and soapy—I know this because I’ve eaten my share, unfortunately.

You can make a black-beans-and-rice sundae if you want! Spoon salsa over the top like hot fudge, then add a few dollops of sour cream or plain whole-milk yogurt for the whipped cream. If you’re a pork-lovin’ fool like me, you can then crumble a handful of crisp bacon over the top of your sundae for crushed nuts. The jimmies, should you feel that no sundae can be complete without waxy little pellets of dye and food-grade wax, can be dried parsley flakes or freshly ground black pepper. The cherry on top’s up to you: an olive? A few strips of raw red pepper? Well, if you’re me, the cherry on top is probably a Louisiana hot link. But, you know, do what you think best.

If it’s not ten in the morning, have a cold beer along with your beans and rice. Like salt, beer is known to be a very effective flavor enhancer.

Remember that if your beans don’t come out as flavor-packed as you would like—in other words, if despite all the ingredients you’ve added and all the times you’ve taste-tested your beans as they cooked, adjusting the spices and salt accordingly, and your beans
still
seem bland to you—Tabasco sauce is your friend. Mellow green or classic red, chipotle or smoked, or whatever other sales gimmicks they can devise. It doesn’t matter—it’s up to you. But Tabasco sauce, and lots of it. There’s a reason all bachelors have bottles of it in their otherwise-empty refrigerators.

Tabasco sauce will also scour out your sinuses if you consume enough of it. And if you’re congested from off-and-on weeping, this can feel very, very good.

You’ll have leftovers for days, and if you wrap your cold black beans in a tortilla, you have a to-go meal. Take your homemade burrito to a park and eat it. You don’t have to talk to anyone or share your meal with the squirrels or do anything but scowl at pigeons and eat your delicious black bean burrito. Remember, this is life support.

You are winning.

HEARTBREAK 3:
COMFORT

HE CALLED THIS MORNING.

The phone sounded very loud and jangly in my empty apartment. It scared me. I realized my phone hadn’t rung in days, nor had I spoken to anyone except the checkers at the Safeway two blocks from my apartment. When I’d presented my Advantage card my voice had come out in a croak, and I’d had to clear my throat in order to be understood. Since that trip to the grocery store, though, my prepubescent boy’s voice hadn’t been a problem. I hadn’t spoken with anyone in four days.

When I heard his voice on the answering machine I dropped the carton of Ben & Jerry’s I was having for breakfast and scrambled for the handset.

Why can’t you just Love me?
I wanted to demand.
Why can’t you come home? Why can’t this be easy?

“I hope you’re well,” I said instead, sounding as stiff as a brand-new dress shirt, cardboard collar points still intact.
I miss you so much
is what I meant.
I can’t stop thinking of you. Everything in my apartment reminds me of you. I think I’m losing my fucking mind
.

“I’m fine,” he said. “I hope
you’re
well.” His voice sounded similarly starched, like he was reading from a script called
The Two Most Boring People in the World Have a Stilted Conversation
. This was madness.

I wanted to scream. We were Heckle and Jeckle, the two overly polite cartoon crows. If we kept waiting for the other one to go through the door-way first (“No, after
you!”)
,we were never going to get anywhere. And yet I couldn’t stop being courteous, speaking to my lover as if we hadn’t shared entire nights wrapped in each other’s bodies, glued together with sweat and come, sleeping only to wake and devour each other all over again.

Please love me the way you used to. I never stopped loving you
.

“Getting any painting done? ” I inquired.

“Some,” he said. “And how’s your writing going?”

Horrible. Fucking shitty. I can’t write. I hurt too bad to eat. Please come home
.

“Great!” I said. “Thanks for asking!”

“Glad to hear it,” he said.

I suddenly wondered if he was lying about his painting the way I was lying about my writing. Were his brushes dry or caked with crusted paint, tossed down in frustration? Was he being tortured by blank canvases the way I was being tortured by empty pages and false starts? Did he wake up every morning in dread of more wasted hours, more time in which his art was
not
being created?

Was he eating ice cream for breakfast and watching the
Flavor of Love
marathon on VH1?

Why were we lying to each other?

“Well,” I said.

“Nice to talk with you,” he said.

“Yes,” I agreed.
Last chance! Say something! Anything!

But instead we just said goodbye, replacing our respective handsets into their cradles softly, as if cautious not to offend.

THE MOST TEDIOUS
thing in the world is heartbreak. Not in the acute, not when it actually occurs—not in the moment when you hear a small dry
pop!
inside your rib cage and think of chicken bones and microwaved plates. That’s kind of exciting, if only because it’s so definitive—and if you’ve been around the block a time or two, you learn that that
pop!
means you’re pretty much fucked for the next couple of months. Clear your schedule, hold your calls, and make sure you’re current on your cable bill even if your gas bill has to wait, because Lord knows that late-night TV’s gonna feel like your only friend for a good long time. That’s what you get when your heart implodes. A lot goes on in that one tiny moment! If it weren’t so annihilating it would probably be a little beautiful, like a diamond cut into hundreds of perfect facets.

But heartbreak as a chronic condition is a long, slow trudge.

I, for one, am sick of it, no matter how many cartons of ice cream I allow myself to have for breakfast. I’m still losing weight, though I couldn’t care less about turning into the delicate tiny-boned creature who starred in my fantasies of romantic reprieve a month ago. My body’s on autopilot, rudderless without appetite, and no amount of ice cream seems to be making much difference—but as long as I’m eating something filling at least twice a day and kicking ass at the gym, I’m fine with that. I finished the last of my black beans two days ago. I’m farting cumin and Chubby Hubby.

Also, I’m fucking horny as hell. I’m my own ravenous demon-lover: I don’t care if my ass smells like a spice rack dipped in fudge and peanut butter. I can’t keep my hands off myself. My heart may be frozen, but my cunt didn’t get the memo. She’s red-hot and purring like a Detroit muscle car. I’ve worn out two packages of C batteries, killed my old faithful Slim-Line vibrator dead, and melted the finish off my brand-new Rabbit Pearl knock-off. I’m as insatiable as a porn star, except that I’m having real orgasms and my own are rarely pretty, more like grunting muscle spasms than photogenic bliss. /
want I want I want I want
, my body says. It won’t shut up. And it’s not like I have a normal job. I can drop everything and rape myself every ten minutes if I want to. I can stop in the middle of a sentence and return to it while I’m still breathing hard, my fingers slick on the plastic keyboard of my laptop, and nobody’s the wiser.

And even though I’m technically having a nice time, I suspect that part of my sudden surge of self-lovin’ is just me looking for a way to feel a little bit cared for, to make up for the fact that I’m no longer being touched and held at all. I am my own Wire Mother: a frame of metal covered in a thin towel, offering cold comfort. My joyless diddling is only solace projected through a scrim of eroticism. I know this, but I don’t know what else to do.

I don’t bother putting on high heels for myself. I’m an easy lover, though admittedly, I lack passion. I know all my own best moves by heart.

You may or may not have grown up eating Tuna Noodle Casserole. I didn’t. Some of my friends did, though, and now they either love it or hate it. There isn’t much ambivalence possible in a dish nearly synonymous with Mom and Home, whether or not your childhood actually included good memories of either thing.
¹
Tuna Noodle Casserole is classic comfort food and after a vicious breakup, you need all the comfort you can get.

There’re all kinds of ways to fancy this up, but I’m gonna give you the wham-bam version, and you can tart it up however you like.

First, boil and drain a package of pasta according to the directions on the bag or box—not the spaghetti kind though. Use rotini, elbow macaroni, the little sea-shell-shaped ones, bowties, or even flat
egg
noodles—basically anything bite-size and compact, not long and strandy. Rinse the cooked pasta with cold water. This gets the excess starch off your noodles so your casserole doesn’t get gluey. Set aside.
²

Now get a big-ass mixing bowl and dump in a can of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup. (Avoid the low-sodium/low-fat kind, of course—
yecch
. Taking away the salt and fat from a can of cream soup leaves what, chemicals and binding agents? Pass.) Fill the can halfway up with milk, and throw that into the bowl. Open and drain two or three cans of tuna, and use a fork to add those to the milk and soup in the bowl. Add about half a package of frozen peas. Use a spoon or fork to kind of mush everything together (and yes, at this point it
will
resemble a pile of frat-boy vomit—this changes, I promise, but if you’re cooking for a finicky eater it’s probably best to send him or her to the store on a fabricated mission right about now, lest your casserole languish uneaten later). Dump the drained, rinsed pasta into the mixing bowl and mix until the noodles are evenly coated with the soup/tuna/pea mixture.