Sex and Bacon (9 page)

The possibilities of chicken are endless: It’s like good old penis-in-vagina sex—there are a million ways to do it, from missionary to superfreaky, and all of them get the job done.

Feed yourself protein, then go out and fuck shit up. You’ll be surprised at how beautiful that makes you feel.

WHEN I WAS
working as a lingerie model at Butterscotch’s, I was often scheduled with a Chicago debutante who came to Seattle for the drugs. She smoked crack to keep her weight down and took Kcstasy in lieu of high-calorie cocktails when she went out. She was tall and whippet-thm, with concave shanks and a completely visible rib cage. She looked like an anatomical drawing of the skeletal system come to life. A few fetish-oriented customers loved her, but most preferred curvier models. Wlien she danced, she looked like a marionette being bounced on its own strings.

Bear this in mind: As physically wasted as my coworker was, even
she
wasn’t a size 0. When even a crack habit won’t make you as thin as a Hollywood starlet or a fashion model, it’s time to reevaluate the beauty standards that keep us literally starving ourselves to death.

Vegetables are tricky—I’ll admit it. They’ve always seemed like a lot of work to me, without the commensurate payoff. Making a cake from scratch is a lot of-work, too, but at the end of the process you have a whole cake, and cake is delicious!

But when you fix vegetables, all you get are . . . vegetables. And unless you’re a radical vegan, veggies aren’t much of a treat.

The thing that keeps me from veggie-love is, frankly, laziness. I think I have Food ADHD: I like food that’s ready for me when
I’m
ready for
d
—and if it’s delicious and fancy in some way that’s even better! If it’s brightly colored or makes noise or there are lit sparklers stuck in it, even better!
Ka-POW!
Vegetables, on the other hand, are as subtle and reserved as an Ingmar Bergman flick. For someone with a fairly aggressive internal sense of editing, there’s just not enough going on with vegetables to bother.

The whole process is laborious: First you have to pick them out, selecting the individual vegetable or vegetables you plan to serve later. There’s no uniformity—you have to look over each vegetable for freshness and lack of damage, and usually you end up putting a dozen back before you find one worthy specimen. Then you have to take them home, wash them, and, in some cases, peel them. You have to cut parts of them off. Then, finally, you cook and eat them. By that time I’m usually pretty sick of the vegetable in question, and I’ve usually ordered Domino’s and filled up on Cheesy Bread.

So what I’ve figured out with vegetables is that you have to act
fast
, before you give up and call for takeout. That’s why veggies like asparagus are good: They require very little processing to become edible and reasonably tasty—unlike, say, artichokes or spaghetti squash.

Broccoli’s another fast-acting veggie. So are green beans.

Just take the vegetables of your choice, wash them, and cut off their ends. Toss them into a metal steamer, and fit the steamer into a pot with a couple inches of boiling water in the bottom. Make sure the water level is
below
the bottom of the steamer: You’re steaming your veggies, not boiling them.

Put the lid on the pot and allow the water to continue boiling for about seven minutes. Check your vegetables by poking them with a fork. If the fork goes in with only a little resistance, your veggies are ready to eat. If not, close the lid and steam for a few more minutes.

Once your vegetables are steamed, put them on a plate and drizzle them with a little olive oil and some balsamic vinegar, or with the flavored vinegar of your choice (raspberry is a favorite of mine), or with lemon juice, or with whatever salad dressing you have on hand. A little salt and pepper will add flavor. You can stick sparklers in them if you want. They’re not quite
ka—
POWl
, but if you’re trying to get a little sleeker (and you’re not nursing a crack habit or an eating disorder), sometimes you have to pick vegetables over cake.

Luckily, not often.

LOSING WEIGHT SHOULDN’T
be a painful proposition:

Think
spa
not
labor camp
.

Think about simple food, served elegantly: one perfect pear, sliced and fanned on a bed of fresh greens; a handful of strawberries, cleaned and hulled, served chilled in your favorite tea cup; a steak, grilled or pan-fried to perfection, served with freshly ground sea salt.

The important thing is that you’re eating until you feel satisfied, and that everything you eat is delicious. Take walks through your local farmers market, buying the plumpest, juiciest-looking produce you can find. Have histrionic sex marathons with your partner, changing positions often. Drink lots of water, but make sure you’re having it restaurant-style, in a glass with ice and a straw and a slice of lemon.

Let your beautiful body find its own stasis.

Don’t
ever
starve yourself.

THERE’S NEVER ENOUGH BACON.

When you go to a restaurant and order breakfast you usually only receive three or four measly little strips bookended by far too much toast and a greasy mound of semiraw hash browns. Even ordering an additional side of bacon only makes six or eight strips, total. And these are strips the size of Band-Aids, carbonized into chalky blackened mouthfuls of bacon-flavored charcoal briquette! So not only do you not get enough bacon in restaurants, you generally don’t feel satisfied by the bacon you’re having. The whole thing’s disappointing. You might as well order the fruit and yogurt plate. It’s not like you’re going to feel good about your breakfast anyway.

I was sick of never getting enough quality bacon. So one day I decided to see how much bacon would be enough. I knew it was definitely more than four strips, and almost certainly more than eight. I knew the bacon would have to be good. I was pretty sure
enough
bacon would be a
lot
.

The thing was, I had the day off. Not much to do. I had a big unopened package of bacon in the refrigerator and a cast-iron skillet on my range-top, scrubbed out and seasoned with oil. It seemed like if Iwas ever going to find out how much bacon was enough, the only way to get at that knowledge would be to simply start frying strips of pork in my pan. To eat. And then to stop, once the crucial bacon quotient—the BO—had been achieved. It would be elegant, a simple Scientific Method two-step. I considered taking notes, then decided the note-taking would interfere with my experience of the project. I needed to be able to pay attention. The BO could be a subtle point, easily missed. I couldn’t afford to take that chance.

I started out with a cold pan on my stove-top. I laid five strips of bacon across the bottom of the pan, pushing them together with a fork, neat and flat, into broad pink-and-white pork ribbons. They were slightly too long for the pan, and their edges curled up on each side. I was mildly annoyed by the crimped edges—it didn’t look precise—but I used my fork to press the too long edges against the sides of the skillet, and they adhered with their own fat quite nicely. It would have to do.

I turned the burner on to medium-high. Actually, just past medium. There’s a certain bacon-friendly setting my hand knows better than my brain, because if I just kind of flick the knob in a certain way it goes to Perfect Bacon Temperature and my bacon cooks into delicious salty crusty strips of goodness. But if I overthink the temperature my pan ends up too hot or too cool. So with a twist of the wrist, loose and casual, in about three minutes the bacon started to creak as the brine in which it had been packed burned off against the hot cast iron.

About a minute after that I smelled it. The bacon smell. That rich, caramelized scent of sizzling salt-pork belly. That
unfair
smell. The one that tells you that a double order—bacon with your starch-heavy meal, plus another side of bacon—isn’t enough. The one that vegetarians shamefully make allowances for, asking for bacon in restaurants while maintaining pristinely meat-free homes.

Each strip’s fatty sections swelled and curled coyly in the pan, making seductive popping noises.
Shhhhhh
, the bacon whispered, promising discretion. I was hungry and excited, an ardent lover. Finally, enough bacon! I couldn’t wait for the first batch to finish.

I opened my cabinet and took out a dinner plate, which I lined with a double layer of paper towels. Then I speared each strip of bacon with my fork and laid them side by side on their paper towel bed. I finished by gently tucking another paper towel over the bacon strips, as if wishing them a good night’s rest and pleasant dreams. Grease-flowers blossomed as I pressed the towel down, careful as a mama seeing to her babies.

Turning back to the grease-coated skillet, I used my fingers to lay five more strips down. I believe in touching bacon. I am a meat-toucher. Don’t get me wrong—I wouldn’t use raw meat to clean my countertops, and I wouldn’t lick uncooked pork or suck the drippings from those weird little sanitary napkin thingies they put under cut-up fryers in the Styrofoam trays to absorb the smelly chicken water. But I believe in touching meat—using my fingers to lay down bacon or dredge chunks of stew meat in flour. If meat were really that dangerous, wouldn’t we all be sick constantly from eating it? Frankly it seemed to me that supermarket mushrooms—raised in shit, then dumped out into trays to be pawed through by dozens of indifferently washed shoppers —-were likely filthier than nice, clean meat wrapped in butcher’s plastic and consistently refrigerated.

Or maybe I just liked touching meat. The cool slap of it and the soft meat-grease on my fingertips. The smell of it—feral, coppery, intimate, oily. The watery blood. The raw animal-meat-fiber striations of beef; smooth, shiny egg-yolky chicken breasts; even the little worms of raw ground beef were sensual in their own way when you slapped them into hamburger-size pads or used your fingers to squish eggs and cracker crumbs and ketchup into meat-loaves. So I used my fingers to lay the next series of bacon strips down, peeling them away from the mam block of candy-striped meat with my nails.

This time they began crackling and pushing up into little pork bumps and valleys immediately—the salty water hissing, the grease from the previous batch spattering slightly—and I felt pinpricks of hot oil on my hands and forearms. I welcomed the tiny splashes of pain. They didn’t hurt badly. I licked my wrist, cooling the burn there and tasting exquisite bacon essence in the drop of hot fat on my tongue. I rinsed my hands perfunctorily.

Turning to the nest of sleeping bacon on my counter, I cruelly plucked off their greasy paper towel coverlet. Incited to violence by the brief flutter of bacon fat I’d lapped from my own wrist, I crammed an entire strip of cooked bacon into my mouth. And another. And another. Standing, I gobbled bacon. Bits of browned pork fell from my lips to the floor. I was doing it! I was doing the experiment! I was finding the BQ!

I ate silently and rapidly until all five strips were gone. Then I used a licked finger to get the tiny fragments of bacon stuck to the paper towel, pressing my fingertips into the greasy bed and licking the particles from my own living, uncharred skin. It was so
good
.

I gazed lustfully at the bacon in the skillet, half-done and seductively disarrayed, dressed in the hot fat of the pan’s previous occupancy.

Using my fork, I speared each strip and flipped each one over, arranging them into a neat, straight chorus line of sizzling pork. I used the tines of my fork to press the white nodules of pig fat firmly against the hot iron interior of the pan. The rich, silky veins of fat snapped and seared brown as the pink meat of the bacon contracted and darkened similarly. It was beautiful, like watching a flower burst open in stop-motion cinematography. The aroma of bacon hung in the air maddeningly.

After a few minutes, I moved the second five strips of bacon from the skillet to the plate of paper towels. I didn’t bother covering them with another towel. This batch was a mite overdone. Besides, I didn’t think they’d last long enough to appreciate my solicitude. They lay on the plate naked and stacked against each other. And that
smell
. It was engorging, inciting. It was as if the first plate of bacon were merely an appetizer. The second was the entree. The meat of the matter, so to speak.

I carried the plate to the table. Sat. Gobbled bacon. The plate was empty before I settled into my chair. Winch was fine, because I really needed to start the third pan of bacon. I got up again and returned to the range, casually arranging another layer of paper towels on top of the first two grease-sodden ones.

I realized I felt happy—really happy. I hadn’t had enough bacon, not yet—but I was on the track of my BQ, and that felt good. And I still had more than half a package of raw bacon left. For that matter, I had another whole package in the freezer. It would be short work to defrost it under warm running water, if it came to that. I sang as I laid five more strips in the pan of lightly smoking oil.