Bert finished a fine meal in a windowless room. No music played, and he ate as quickly as he could. It was scallops, marinated in apple vinegar for six hours in the fridge, then baked in a sauce of brown sugar with a touch of lemon pepper and brown sugar, wrapped in honey-smoked bacon. He ate it with a side of butter beans and a true Caesar salad, including the anchovies. He washed it and his shame down with Chateau le St. Vivienne. It tasted good, but only the vulgar ever spoke openly about the pleasantries of consumption. It really did taste good though.
The party was in six hours, and Bert assumed his body would cooperate as usual, but he’d bring laxatives just in case. He’d only ever had to use them twice in ten years at the kind of gathering he was awaiting tonight. He, like his compeers, had so thoroughly trained his digestive system that he could defecate on a count of 3-2-1 and a starting pistol.
He mused, as he washed his dishes, a well-conditioned disgust for them thrumming in his throat, about what Vanessa and Darby would bring for the share that night. Married and in love they may have been, but their offerings were poles apart. Vanessa was all about the color, and Darby was all about the texture. Both were competitive as Hell. They sought to outdo each other, and both loved a triumph over Bert. Bert was hard to defeat in this arena though. He’d mastered the fine art of piquancy, which to the true snob, went far beyond shade or solidity. It was a sign of more intense forethought and significant refinement, and his was a reputation for both. He was always invited to release parties because of this, but for him, every engagement was a masquerade ball. If they only knew.
The host of the evening’s release was one Bethany Chandler, a corpulent city council woman, more proud than she should have been for her station. She was the kind of woman who envisioned herself running for mayor, then governor, then president, who never considered that she was where she was because virtually no one gave a damn about who was elected to city council and who, should her absolute stupidity be revealed in an election of greater prescience, wouldn’t get out of the starting gate. Of course, her near-sociopathic yearning for increased popularity and no small amount of narcissistic personality disorder rendered her stupidly amenable to wasting vast sums of borrowed money on the best collective releasing facilities in the state, and even people who regarded her with the same feelings they held for preparing, masticating and digesting matter showed up to her parties.
“Seriously, he was outside the church … with a cheeseburger”. Darby’s face pinched with disgust at the utterance.
He sat beside Bert, perched upon a Plexiglas toilet, pushing a thick, artfully rippled log onto the receiving disk beneath his supernaturally Caucasian ass. All around the room, people tittered like gossipy high school cheerleaders, discussed politics like paid network pundits, commented upon each other’s evening wear like reporters outside the Oscars, uttered acceptable Milton Berle-esque jests to one another and seated themselves on one of the fifty such toilets in the ornately marbled room. Granite statues of ancient gods looked on mutely and blindly to all exchanges.
“And he was eating it”, asked Bert, hiding his great fascination of the behavior of the homeless man being described to him?
Vanessa, perched beside her husband, releasing a rainbow colored smear upon her receiving disk, bright and brilliant, she claimed, because of a combination of various herbal teas and licorices, looking like a Pollack painting added, “He wasn’t just eating it, he was devouring it. He took bites out of it, like a shark eating a baby seal. It was absolutely horrifying.”
Bert felt like a man who had a ring of lipstick around his penis, secreted beneath the lie of his pants at a gathering of fierce celibates, but the wave in the room was the wave in the room, and he surfed far too well.
“That’s disgusting. You called the police, I hope.”
Darby’s metaphorical testicles puffed like lungs inhaling fresh oxygen. “I did more than that. I throttled that sick bastard. He was eating food, in front of our church, in front of my wife, in front of our children.”
“I called the police”, chimed Vanessa, ascending as the calmer party.
With all of the inappropriate sympathies welling up in his chest, Bert asked, “Did the police trouble you at all over a physical altercation with the man?”
“Of course not, Bertie my boy. He was a homeless wastrel, and he was eating … EATING PUBLICLY, in front of a church! They’d have patted me on the back if they could have. No. They gave me no hassle at all. I’d performed a service, you ask me.”
“What’s this city coming to”, bemoaned Vanessa, “When people take their digestion out into the open?”
And then the redundancy of thought and expression would follow, as it had at every release gathering Bert had ever been to. The filth of society reveled in eating, would do everything they could to make their consumption societally accepted, would corrupt children with their chewing, their swallowing, their open-mouthed sickness, their perversion. Many of the more fundamental in the crowd offered up their theories that public consumers, mostly homeless, mentally ill or otherwise deviant, were being given too much sympathy and that there seemed a conspiracy among subversive sinners to make public eating acceptable and to, ultimately, bring down civilization as people had come to know it. Everyone had been part of the same conversation before. Bert wondered, was he the only one tired of it?
And on it went.
Then, after everyone had released, there was the artistic critiquing.
“Vanessa, yours features all of the colors of the rainbow, my dear, and why does it sparkle so?”
“I employed the use of cake glitter.”
“A triumph, Vanessa. You’ve outdone yourself.”
“It looks like rebar, Darby. I could build houses with stuff that sturdy. How did you accomplish this?”
“Ironically, smoothies.”
“Smoothies?”
“What goes in soft can come out hard.”
“This looks like it must have been an agonizing release.”
“Art. True art, is suffering, friends.”
“And what have we received this night from Bert?”
He was popular. Everyone gathered around the toilet, like children who’d made a wish, trying to spot their spent quarters at the bottom of a well.
“Is that curry?”
“No, it’s not curry.”
“There’s a sweetness to it. Yams?”
“No.”
“Honey?”
“Now you’re getting closer.”
After a time, Bert explained his meal, like Sherlock Holmes telling Inspector Lestrade how he’d deduced a great mystery, and they applauded him as ever, braying sheep to a disenchanted shepherd. He counted the seconds until he could politely excuse himself.
___
Hours later, he sat naked on the edge of a bed at the Home Away From Home Suites across from a girl who called herself Pleasure. Her ad online said she was fetish friendly and boasted in all caps, “ANYTHING GOES”. He’d gotten comfortable, as she had asked him to, and she was massaging his scrotum.
“So what do you want to do?”
“I brought my bag.”
“A costume”, she giggled, “Toys?”
“Not really, no”, he answered.
He opened the gym bag and removed from it plastic ware containing whipped cream and strawberries. Pleasure recoiled with crippling apprehension.
“What the fuck is this shit, man?”
Bert’s eyes filled with steel resolve. His voice was as steady as the East Australian Current.
“I want you to feed me these strawberries. Dip them in the whipped cream, and feed them to me.”
Pleasure’s face became gaunt.
“You’re a sick mother fucker, man. I ain’t doin’ no fuckin’ consumption shit. You some kinda mothufucking pervert is what you are. I ain’t down with that shit.”
Other women had been equally shocked at the proposition, but Bert knew that the world was peopled with whores, and the only difference between one whore and the next was the price.
“I have 500 more for you if you do it.”
“500”, Pleasure scoffed indignantly, “No fuckin’ way! It’s some sick shit you be askin’ me to do for you.”
Bert waited.
“800”, she offered back.
“650”, Bert bargained.
“700. No less, man.”
“Done.” Bert smiled.
Bert handed her the food. As she dipped the first strawberry into the whipped cream and raised it to his eager lips, she threw up a bit in her mouth. He bit into the fruit with the zest of a boy with a BB gun shooting at a bird in a nest, chewing slowly and dramatically.
“You’re one sick son of a bitch, man”, Pleasure whispered, grabbing strawberry number two.
”If only they knew”, thought Bert. “If only they knew.”