Comradery

            I did a terrible thing the other night. I threw all caution to the wind—well, to the hurricane—and resigned any notions of health, restraint, or decency that I may have once held. And, believe it or not, I learned something through the experience: Life is about rebellion. It’s about standing up and doing what’s wrong because it feels oh so right.

It’s about cheddar turkey sausages and peanut butter. No, not side by side, carefully kept segregated on a plate. Together. This is a food affair. This is a sultry desecration of the holy sanctity of food rite. And it was amazing.

I started off by throwing two Johnsonville cheddar turkey sausages onto the Foreman until those wieners wore black cloaks of charcoal. We’re talking seconds away from being ash, people. Carcinogens? What about them? I sliced those two magnificent meat scepters into wheels, seeping processed yellow cream like treacly sap from a sugar maple. A glob of honey peanut butter garnished my plate. Reluctant, I scooped the thick paste up with my first sausage wheel and brought the blasphemous concoction to my lips. The first bite flooded me with a single idea: companionship. These foods were meant to be together.  The salty-sweet butter enveloped that spicy morsel like a goose, keeping her egg warm. My chewing folded the cheese and meat into the peanut dough, bringing two lost friends closer than they’d ever been.

The contrast nourished some feeling of comradery, a vague remembrance of a time when heavily spiced and salted foods sustained the mob, when eating was a commodity and stuffing meat into your gullet rang through your body more vibrantly than the church bells ever could. In this place, I’m one amongst so many. I mean nothing alone. It’s the men and women sitting beside me that give me breadth.

I once cried, a tipsy slob, at the edge of my brother’s bed. The watches claimed 2:00 a.m. A girl I’d loved had just screamed words that once meant damnation into my ears. He held my hand as I writhed in my lonesome pity, dwelling on a night three years before when I had spent the dark away with her sitting at the edge of a river, watching the moonlight flow in place. My brother, normally stoic and unamused, cried with me.