Jim said that he was going to be naked for Pig Week. There was some concern amongst the women, especially Rachel, who had never seen a real naked man before, but we decided that if he wanted to be naked while he ate bacon, that was fine. And then we thought about it, eating bacon while naked, and it suddenly seemed like a really, really fine idea.
This was the seventh annual Pig Week for our group. It was me and Jim and Big Rig and Zamir and Becca and Rachel and and Kima. One Saturday, our junior year, we were eating barbecue at the Curly Tail and Becca said that she could eat nothing but pork for a week. And we said, "Shit, I could do that too." It wasn't hard to imagine. It was very easy to imagine. And so, that's what we did. And that's what we were still doing.
Monday was bacon. We had applewood-smoked, cob-smoked, hickory-smoked, maple-smoked, alder-smoked. We had jowl and shoulder bacon. We made a nest out of peppered bacon and then dropped it into a deep fryer. We rolled several strips of juniper bacon into a ball and fried those. When it was all finished, we had a bird's nest of bacon, filled with eggs of bacon, and we ate it until there was only a plate, and we wished we'd made a plate of bacon. We washed it down with bacon-infused bourbon. Jim went to his room to get some sweatpants because he said that he could feel the stirrings of a powerful erection.
On Tuesday we went to the mall, each of us cradling a six-pound half ham. We wrapped them in blankets and we would put a dollar in the massage chairs and sit back and let the chair do its thing while we tore off strips of ham. Zamir held the wrapped ham to his face and it looked like he was a nuzzling a fat baby. Kima's ham slipped out of her hands when we were on the escalator and it bounced all the way down to the first floor. She washed it off in the coin fountain and went on about the task of eating until she reached the bone.
Wednesday morning, we could feel the slight tremors of meat poisoning. We called it "The Tinge," and the only way to move past it was to eat more meat. There was a ribs competition two hours away and so we made the trip, a pinch of crumbled bacon resting in the pouch between our bottom lip and our gums. We spit into our hands and rubbed it behind our ears. At the contest, we put on our expertly doctored judge's badge and made a long, determined trip around the tents, listening patiently to the contestants explain their methods and theories, holding back our smiles because, by this point, we could not discern subtle flavors. We put something in our mouth and we called it meat.
Thursday, we took a break. It was a necessary decision because we awoke that morning lacking sight. We crawled across the floor of the living room in the house we had jointly rented for the week, searching for each other. We interlaced our greasy fingers and pulled each other into awkward embraces. We had heard stories about pork blindness, the way the nervous system rerouted whatever handled ocular activities in order to address the excess meat in the body. We used the opportunity to rub against each other, to slide things into other things, and Rachel said, "Why haven't we done this before?" We told her that the rest of us had, many times, every pig week, but we had snuck away while she was asleep because we didn't want to scare her. She started to grind against one of us and we wished that we had included her sooner, that it hadn't taken our collective, blindness-induced desire to do the things that made us so fucking happy. Friday, we woke up in a pile, our sight restored to us. There was initial concern about how to proceed, if we should fly quite so close to the sun on wings made of rendered pork fat. We decided to continue in small, controlled measures. We ate several bags of pork rinds, letting the roofs of our mouths shred, so many cracklings that our mouths leaked a tiny ribbon of blood. We fried some Spam, took cautious bites, waved our hands in front of our face, and found no change in our vision. By the end of the night, we held a chorizo in each fist, dancing to industrial metal, unafraid of our inevitable and horrible end, the way we forced ourselves to not die until we finally gave up.
Saturday, we received the pig. Big Rig had recently been in touch with an old friend who he had mutually masturbated for the entire four years of high school and then never spoke to again. The guy ran a pig farm now and he pulled up to our house in his truck, a pig, nearly split in half, wrapped in some old quilts, in the bed. We unloaded the pig, the smell of cooked fat soaking beneath our own skin.
We wore kitchen gloves and worked against the fat of the pig to pull hunks of perfectly cooked pork from the carcass. We ate and ate and ate and we knew that soon this would be over and we would return to our fucking boring-ass wives and husbands and children and we would jog and do embarrassing shit on complicated workout machinery and we would drink pomegranate juice and eat steel-cut oats and we would settle into the things you have to do so that the world doesn’t fall apart. But for now we buried our faces in the steaming pig, rubbing our cheeks and chins raw, gorging ourselves on the thing we forced ourselves to never refuse.