Friday, May 19, 2006

Eat Dessert First: PieMan Comes to Brunch

Sometimes I write things out to try to make a point.  Sometimes I’m just being snarky and looking for an easy laugh.  Sometimes I am commemorating a particularly pungent moment among my general stock of recollections; sometimes I suddenly imagine something – a glance, a retort – with such clarity that a whole world builds up instantly around it, and I can be its god if I write it out properly. 

And sometimes I write as an exercise in exorcism.  I write things out to get them out – an earwig tune or a vapid pop reference, or sometimes a moment of such excruciating reality that the experience of experiencing it seems to go on well beyond the actual event.  These moments reverberate in my experiential landscape, reappearing unbidden and unwelcome until they are depotentiated via transmission: by sharing, in rich, glorious detail, these overstuffed moments, I can “unpack” them – render them powerless, no longer able to haunt my idle moments.  At which point, I can finally move on with my life.  I can finally move on.

It is in this spirit that I share today the legend of PieMan.  I can’t call it a story because there really isn’t enough there to justify the use of so rich a word.  It was nothing more nor less than an encounter with a different side of human behavior, and it went something like this:

We used to have these monster brunches, back in the day.  We’d get over to the DogHouse around 11 am, a fairly standard bruncheoning hour.  And we were young, and many, and fabulously gluttonous.  We’d cruise heavily through all the normal brunching foods, and lots of them, and dishes would keep coming out as old ones were taken away, and eventually a huge sprawling lunch had taken over from brunch.  Lunch was consumed with cheerful determination, old plates being replaced again by new ones, until the sun was setting and we’d segued inexorably into a sort of rolling supper, on which we gorged until, by the end of the evening, we’d been there for 12 hours of non-stop feasting.  It was a punishing ordeal, yet the 20 or so of us kept it going on a semi-regular basis for quite a while, month after month. 

I think that things changed, though, when MaryAnn invited PieMan along.  He was one of those guys with really pink skin, which was so sensitive that he couldn’t go out in the sun.  Also, he had no hair – not even eyelashes, which looks a lot weirder than you might expect on bright pink skin.  His skin condition had killed all his follicles.  But the big thing about PieMan, the thing that got him an invitation to brunch with us, was that he had this thing about pies, and having women push his face into them.  He described himself as “pie-sexual.” MaryAnn had invited him to the brunch that afternoon so we could watch that being done to him.

As I recall, about three or four of the young women there that day stepped up to pie the PieMan.  He sat on a library chair in the center of a tarp laid out on the floor, and one at a time, the women came to him with a pie tin full of chocolate pudding topped with whipped cream.  He was dressed in a t-shirt and jeans, but the smooth lobster-red skin of his face and head seemed to glow radiantly in the murky depths of the DogHouse living room.  He sat patiently, smiling, still, and he asked the ladies to say something to him as they buried his face in a pan of sweet viscous goo. 

Kelly declined to participate in the main event, but did help with the cleanup and found herself suddenly presented with a pie pan full of shaving cream, adjacent to PieMan himself.  With a little encouragement, she smashed it into his face, without comment, and when she pulled it away he twisted his face into a googie or some such funny thing.  The point is, he made her laugh.  Afterwards, Andy P informed her that PieMan records all his public pie-ings, for more thorough appreciation at some future time and secluded place.  Apparently her laugh was especially gratifying to him.  I’ve heard that laugh, low and throaty.  I can see how he’d be glad to have a recording of her creaming his cranium and chortling that particular chortle. 

PieMan eventually told us, at some point, that the sexiest thing ever said to him at one of those fulsome pie-moments was the whispered breath of a single word.  “She said ‘pie,’” he told us, and raw arousal burned in his eyes, gleaming red in his red face.  No matter how much I ever enjoy anything, how much it moves me or reaches any hidden part of my libidinous topography, I will never look so intensely passionate as he did at that moment.  And frankly, I find that to be a great relief. 

Thus is the legend of PieMan.  May your weekend be full of sweets and giggles.  Just try to put down a tarp before things get out of hand.