Thursday, November 24, 2011

Meat last April


Two nights ago we had a barbeque and mashed garlic and onion and salt and pepper and blue cheese into beef we got at Staff of Life, and it dripped fat and ecstasy onto those coals like lust, that burger I put between my lips was as delicious as meals on empty stomachs, like eating a leftover Zoccoli sandwich with pesto breaded chicken dipped in avocado salad dressing at 12 in the afternoon after a night of lust (not love), food never tastes better than after sex, when your ravenous and tired and empty because you’ve spent it all on brown eyes and long legs and a man who doesn’t talk much, that sandwich was the best I had had in a while, sitting there on the back porch in the sun, tearing into that pesto chicken like I was some half starved kid from the bottom of the world, and wasn’t I back from the bottom of the world? As hungry as a black bear, that meat tasted goddamn good, better than the night before. 

Meat tastes the best when you’ve been waiting for it for a while, when you’ve smelled it and looked at it and it’s edged into your subconscious like dreams do, there’s no point eating a piece of meat when you haven’t the appetite for it. I don’t understand people who do things they don’t want to, when it’s there in front of them and they take it because they figure, hell, why not. Me, I eat meat I want, I want real bad, and there’s usually never a time when I don’t know I want something. Sometimes, though, meat tastes so good, I can’t help eating it, even when I’m as full as a pregnant lady and got my zipper unzipped and that food coma is coming strong, I keep eating, can’t stop. I guess that’s a good indication when the meat is real tasty, no halting my appetite. 

I love my meat spicy, with sass, with enough depth to make me wonder where it came from and how it was cut. Isn’t that funny the way that works? Eating something you don’t really know at all, eating a piece of meat whose history is obscured and veiled and all you really know about it is what you see and smell and taste in front of you. There’s so much I don’t know about my food, about what I eat, and I wonder how much better it would taste. I imagine it would taste better. Like tasting someone you’ve known for a long time for the first time, having that history in that touch, knowing that person’s quirks and mannerisms and the way they look when they wake up in the morning, that look in their eye when they’re stressed and can’t imagine the next day, that first taste of them, wouldn’t that be wonderful. I imagine that’s what real good love is, knowing that person’s history, the sauce flavoring their meat, so when you taste them, you taste the pastures they’ve walked through, the trucks they’ve ridden, the crushing blows that have swept them out of their path and made them feel dead. 

I want to taste meat that’s ready for me to taste it, that wants my teeth and my tongue and my eyes watching me devour, I want my meat to scream, yes, this is it, you are exactly the person I want eating me.

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