Peanut Butter and Bacon

 

Peanut Butter and Bacon

July 30^th, 2009

By Teak Kilmer

 

Hadn’t seen Michael since my wedding eight years ago and longer before that

We sat in his disordered writer’s hovel and talked

His heart and his soul were, however, in as fine a fettle as ever

and I knew that that, and memories, were why I was there

 

We had painful, despairing childhoods, tragedies and rebellious acts

strewn about like garbage in the streets

But we two half Irish boys became joined at the lip

and by the heart, and in our despite-it-alls

 

We shared blues and jazz and honky-tonk 

that in the 40s and 50s were both historic and new 

From “Ja Da” and Joe “Fingers” Carr, Bix Biederbeck 

and Josh White, Richie Havens, Joan Baez

 

Louis Armstrong in his underwear as we crashed his dressing room, 

the Village Gate and “Take Five”, Cafe Wha, Eddie Condon's Jazz club,

dancing with Nina Simone after her concert at Cornell University,

 gingerly sneaking into Mike’s older brother Rick's record collection

 

Rick is dead now, and has been for seeming eons

last seen smoking through a hole in his throat, I miss him and I hardly knew him, 

but he was upright and beautiful inside

and seeded us with music that had soul and meaning, passion and true stories

and damn little else there was that gave us a meal like that

 

But I remember forever a picnic one day filled me like that

a day full of warm summer when we were yet to be adolesced

our family was cottaged on the one side of Oquaga Lake

they on another on their sprawling, hilled-up-from-the lake

three season estate that was summa-cum-lauded

by a dark chocolate brown and lapis blue shuttered stateliness

of their version of a cottage

 

On that glorious taste bud orgasm midday, I lost my cholesterol virginity 

We were served so wondrously and regally by

Michael’s kind and loving and soon-to-die mother

We for those moments gathered hope and felt like

someone’s treasures. The blanket we spread on one end

of a grass laden, abandoned tennis court

while the unique seaweed pheromone aroma of that lake

ascended to meet our 'olfactories' at the junction of 

earth and grass, flowers and weeds and humidified everythings

as the plates and napkins and flatware

arrived to obstruct the traffic patterns of the picnic ants

 

But then the strike-dumb-deaf-and-blind moment came when

those warmer-than-summer peanut butter, bacon and white bread toast sandwiches 

indulged so my nostrils that all other sense lay stunned before it

 

The plates were put before our folded knees, and we were entreated to begin

There were snappings of the bark brown toast and pork belly muscle

and sinewy resistance of the oozing, syrupy fats and animated flavors

of grain and nutty legume and unction suckling and fondling

my senses until I thought I had found heaven

 

And I thank God that it was with Michael I have this memory

because he was and is the peanut butter and bacon pal of my life