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 a 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 a 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 on way when you slapped them into hamburger-sized pads or used your fingers to squish eggs and cracker crumbs and ketchup into meatloaves. So I used my fingers to lay the next series of bacon strips down, peeling them away from the main 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 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 hair 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.
Tomorrow: Part III
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