Yesterday my roommate challenged me to a creative write off. The plan was to write a thousand words on a topic of the other's choosing. He chose "bacon" for me. I chose "small nipples" for him. Since I am a baller, and at times some would even say a shot caller, I incorporated both topics. What follows is a story of a young man's growth into manhood and his love of bacon. (Full disclosure, I have been reading a lot of Flannery O'Connor.)
Why did these badges have to be sewn into the breasts of these uniforms? He felt the starchy hundred thread count embroidered hamburger badge scratch and scrape mercilessly against the sensitive skin rimming his nipples. His tiny tiny nipples. All his life he has felt forced to enclose them in cotton. All his life he has been compelled to cover his abnormally, some would even say freakishly, small areolas. The kids would laugh, he thought.
And now, at the death of his adolescence, his nipples were once again his downfall. Couldn’t they leave him alone even for one minute? He was at his job damnit. His job. The very place he went to be an adult. What kind of adult worried about small nipples? What kind of man worried about Charlie Bennett’s wired and braced mouth spitting barbed words through pimpled lips? Even in those same lips were connected to a slightly bearded neck, which touched a violently toned chest, which stemmed into a pubescent and sweat filled armpit, which was tethered by tensile arteries and veins to a squat stump-fingered hand that gracelessly caressed the divine labia of Anna Bobbitt. Stump, squat fingers which Charles Bennett later, and equally ungracefully, shoved under our young adult’s nose and allowed him to smell, to breathe deep, as verification of his hand’s sloppy conquest.
But that was prologue. Our small-nippled hero was now a man and, given this fact, Charles Bennett could take his country sausage shaped fingers and shove them directly into his warm plump ass thank you very much. Our hero had a job. As he thought this he briefly caught his own eye in the sparkling reflection cast off the officious spatula he held firmly in his grown ass hand. There he saw a man dressed for action. He was no longer willing to sit and stew in the face of other’s accomplishments. He was ready to act and contribute to society. His hands did more than mindlessly squirm in teenage orifices, they crafted, with care, high quality sandwiches and hamburgers at Will’s Best Burger. His equally adult chest bore the reputable establishment’s insignia with pride. An insignia that, unfortunately, showed no mercy to his kid’s meal sized nipples.
It always came back to his fucking nipples didn’t it? Always. His nipples and the lovely Anna Bobbitt, whose nipples were almost certainly of an adequate size. Often, and this was in his youth, that is to say his past and not his adult present, that is to say ancient fucking history, he would sit and listen to the repulsive Charlie Bennett’s war stories. Stories, which would always involve a trip to this very restaurant for french fries and cokes and ended with Bennett’s repulsive and trollish face thrust in between Bobbitt’s budding breasts. Most of these stories were fabrications. They had to be. In fact, Andy Wang had claimed to have been with Bennett the entire day in which of Bennett’s hideous tales supposedly took place. And regardless of how old and senile the life skills teacher Mr. Morrissey appeared to be, there was no way Bennett had the guts to squirm his snakish tongue into her mouth in the back row during seventh period. But there was the issue of that vaginal smell…
Vagina or no vagina, Bennett could still pucker right up and lay a clean one right on this contributing adult’s ass. This contributing adult was now receiving a fresh new order. One he’d yet to prepare in his one day of cooking experience. His new and pressing goal had nothing to do with Anna Bobbitt’s adequately sized nipples, but that deliciously salty smack of fried swine. Bacon. He watched his knowledgeable manager show him the subtleties of frying this fine meat. He watched the deft learned hand movements. He learned how to properly gauge when the strips were crispy, and yet not TOO crispy. Bacon was a finicky mistress. And now that his manager had completed his expose, it was now his turn to cook the bacon. To manage it to his whims. He promised to treat the fatty meat right.
He had, in his youth, also promised to treat that b-word of all b-words Anna Bobbitt right. He had promised to her, that day at the pool, to show compassion and be there, and to raise their future children to be respectful yet proud, courteous yet firm, wise but non-judgmental. He had promised her this, and she, as the tart she later proved to be, turned him down. He still remembers his approach. How he skillfully swam, using a technically proficient heads up freestyle stroke, up next to her in the pool. He remembers how her thirteen-year-old breasts perked gently in her yellow bikini. And he could see through the refraction of the waves how her waist thinned and then blossomed so acutely into her hips. He also remembers his brittle erection periscoping downward as a reverse shark fin, causing drag in his otherwise flawless stroke. “Hi” he said. “Hi” she said. And then he did it. He asked her to the fall formal, that season ending dance, where, if all went well, he would kiss her mid-slow dance. The cascading rhythms of Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time” serenading what was to be the most important moment of his life. This dance proposition was a symbolic offering of his young life to her. “I’m already going with Charlie. And also, did you know ever notice how small your nipples are?” Followed by that brief giggle. That giggle that played forever in his memory.
No, not forever. That was a relic of his adolescent life. That giggle was choked out by the sizzle of bacon in the pan. The smacking and cracking of grease and fat boiling off into the air in acrobatic flips and turns. This was the sound of his adulthood. His youth may have been sound tracked by the nefarious giggle of shame, but his adulthood had an entirely new sound: that sweet snap crackle pop of production. He breathed in that pungent bacon smell and was proud. A wellness grew in his chest and he identified it as pride. Yes, he thought this is living. And so what if his now grown nipples were small? Did that somehow make them sub-standard? And even if they were, what was a nipples purpose anyways? How did they contribute? His nipples seemed as useful to him as Anna Bobbitt. They were only meant to cause him discomfort. Well he was no longer ashamed. He had grown, even if his nipples had not since infancy. He looked down at his frying pork and became only surer of himself. With nothing to hide he removed, nay ripped his enshrouding shirt from his shoulders and bared his chest to the kitchen. He felt the oil bubble and pop out of the pan onto his naval, chest, and, yes, even his nipples. He wanted to roar. A considerably large chunk of oil leapt from the pan and burned to his chest. Anna Bobbitt’s face momentarily burned through his mind as more and more burning oil dumped onto his skin. It was unclear whether the sizzle came from the bacon or his outlandishly small nipples.
