A Place To Draw Blood Laughing

What’s the sexiest food on Earth? For you, I mean. It could be peaches, very inviting, temptingly fuzzy and with a convincing mockery of smooth, firm skin. It could be whiskey, which tips you over and pours your body like syrup. It could be syrup, for that matter. It could be pie, or ice cream, or salt. Smoked salmon. Cream.

One Friday May took me out to dinner at a restaurant called Cafeteria. It was almost aggressively delicious; as though all the food had been made specifically to convey the idea that yes, it tastes fucking amazing, and it doesn’t care who knows it. The meal started with cornmeal breaded calamari and ended with key lime pie. It was slightly disorienting, like entering another world. A semi-divine plane full of cheap, delicious, gourmet food.

I love food. I was a child who would eat for comfort; and spent many many years of my life growing puffy ’round the middle from big hunks of warm bread and butter. Now it’s bread and olive oil, something thick and drippy. I find taste fascinating, I love mixing unexpected ingredients together (with sometimes dubious results) and I will eat or not eat a food depending entirely upon its texture. I keep saying I’m a sensualist. I like good food because it makes my life feel that much more luxurious.

But despite all this, I don’t generally go in for food play. Beyond the occasional body shot or grasshopper mix at weird theatre parties full of weird theatre people, I have little experience. There were a couple times with whipped cream, but those sorts of evenings, for me, tend to devolve into food fights that result in getting creamed dairy products in my hair and on my wall.

And I have little inclination. I get how using a cute bottom as a table is fun; there’s objectification, there’s power exchange, there’s living art. But smearing things about my naughty bits and having someone go fishing is not on my agenda. It’s like caramel and lobster tails; they’re both fucking amazing but I’m not going to eat them together.

I came to the somewhat wobbly conclusion on that Friday night that although sex and food don’t mix, I know a food that simply screams sex. The conclusion was somewhat wobbly because it came at the tail end of two very large dirty martinis. I was twirling the toothpick around in my glass, trying to explain this to May, who would have laughed at me if he hadn’t been so distracted by the gleam of vodka on my lips. I had to write it down to remember what I was thinking:

Olives. God, write about olives. They’re the sexiest food on Earth.

By which I meant “most sensuous food on Earth,” but as I mentioned, martinis.

For this blog post you will need: a number of large green olives. Go scoot on out to a bodega or the corner store, and get some of those big, juicy ones that good bars put in fancy drinks. Don’t give me any of those measly, pre-pubescent black canned things. We need grown-up olives for this one. Go on, I’ll wait.

No, really. Go.

Welcome back.

The first thing I notice when I’m eating olives is the firmness. I lift them out of the little plastic tub, with thin, sharp juices running down my palm and wrist, and squeeze them slightly. They yield to my fingers like a tensed muscle. Before I bite into them I like to lick the brine from my fingers. I like to pop them in my mouth and suck them clean.

If my olive is pitted, then as I tumble it about in my mouth I will slide my tongue in and out of its little cavity, pressing in and feeling the olive expand from the penetration. If I’m being careful I will do this just a little, but usually I am not careful, and the body of the olive tears around the edges of the hole.

Slipping the olive back out of my mouth, I will sometimes poke it with my fingers, exploring that cavity and turning it over and over to see the variations of color. Green olives are an almost sickly color; that moist wet green that comes from lots of rain stirring up the muck of a garden.

Notice that an olive has skin. The skin itself, back in my mouth, is slippery. Break it, and the texture of the flesh inside is meaty, and slightly pebbled.

Of course, break an olive’s skin and the taste begins to assert itself. They make my mouth water and my tongue tingle. The salt of the brine becomes overpowered by the almost bitter taste of the fruit. Green olives are fermented, unlike their smaller black cousins, which makes them fierce.

And, like a good wine, if I part my lips and suck a bit of air through my mouth the taste expands down my throat and invades my sinuses.

I don’t chew my food into oblivion. I like to crush the fruit boldly, squeezing juices from it and tearing it to bits with relish. It’s often still bleeding juices out as I swallow. The taste lingers for minutes afterwards, and the brine sits in the corners of my mouth and stings.

And then I do it all again, until the container is empty and I remember myself.