Poor Little Guys

I just got back from Val Prieto's a while ago. We picked up his pig, cleaned it off, and got it marinating.

Val showed up at about 8:30, and we took off for Hialeah, where the matadero was located. A matadero is a slaughterhouse. We knew we were there when I spotted the "Lechon" sign. A lechon is a pig. I was greatly amused to see two cops parked underneath the sign, leaning on their cruisers. Val didn't seem to see the humor, but it was early.

Val said the cops were there to prevent Cubans from killing each other over cutting in the pig line. Apparently, in Castro's Cuba, you have to wait in line for three hours just to fart, so when Cubans get here, they'll do almost anything to avoid waiting their turn. I told Val I wondered what kind of bloodshed they had had in the past to know, for a fact, that two cruisers were required.

The matadero had a chain-link fence enclosing the loading and unloading area, and they had set up an outdoor table. Behind the table was a stack of boxes maybe ten feet wide and twenty feet long and six feet high. Each box contained a frozen hog, and folks were streaming in and out and loading their cars.

The boxes were about twenty inches on a side and a foot high. Except for Val's box. That sucker was five feet long. The pig's live weight was 127 pounds. They brought it out and jammed it in the bed of Val's Isuzu pickup.

After much cursing at stupid Miami drivers, Val dropped me back at my place, and I attended to the beans I had started making the night before. Glorious great northern beans. I had soaked them all night, and I put a country ham hock in with them and started them cooking on low heat, with a diced onion and a clove of garlic.

I took off for Val's, stopping at the store to pick up mojo and cilantro. I thought it would be a short errand, but a huge lesbian in men's monk-strap shoes and sweatpants was in front of me, and when she saw the candy bars in the impulse-buy rack, she bent over, facing away from me, and began pawing through them, trying to see how many she could clutch in her greedy mitts.

I couldn't take it. I turned away and pretended to be looking at a festive holiday Coke display.

Finally, she rose to her full height of seven or eight feet and dropped her loot on the conveyor. My ordeal was over. Or was it? No, she had to send the clerk for FOUR cartons of cancer sticks. Thanks, Janet Reno. Could have mentioned that while you were doing your bear-at-the-dump act on the chocolate turtles and Reese's cups.

The cigarettes arrived. I was in the clear, right? Wrong. Obviously you have never been in a grocery line behind a woman. A woman will INVARIABLY write a check. A woman will buy a single tampon and pay with a check. Women are insane. They will not get flu shots, they give their cars girls' names, and they absolutely refuse to get ATM cards, because they are positive the first time they use the card they'll be robbed, dragged behind the bushes at the bank, raped and sodomized for hours, and forced to watch professional sports. Hence the infuriating obsession with checks.

I would use an ATM card even if I were certain these things would happen to me once a year. That's what convenience means to me.

Grizzly Adams waited for the total, THEN took out her checkbook, held the pen between her hooves, and started writing.

In about a month, she waddled on her way, and I paid cash and followed about twenty seconds behind her.

I got to Val's, and we got to work on his homemade mojo. Sure, he uses the store stuff as a base. But he also juiced about 300,000 sour oranges by hand, while I minced several bulbs of garlic, diced an onion, and chopped cilantro. We ended up with two or three gallons of magnificent mojo. It was time to interrogate the pig.

We dragged the box across the yard to a low-hanging branch. Val's neighbor Pat had slung a nylon rope over the branch. At first he came out with half-inch polypropylene, but something about poly rubs Val the wrong way, so Pat went back into his shed and got the three-eighths-inch nylon.

If we had asked for platinum-plated titanium chain forged by dwarves, Pat would have had that, too. Everything in the universe is in that shed. Air tools. A compressor. The Lindbergh baby. The shed is actually larger inside than it is outside. You could stack the shed inside itself a hundred times. I'll bet if you went in that shed right now, in the back, you'd see a stack of ten sheds just like it. It's like something out of Borges.

Val ran the rope through the pig's hamstrings, I lifted, Val pulled, and the first thing you know, the pig is hanging by its feet like a really annoying prisoner at Gitmo. He blasted it thoroughly with the hose, I cut the rope, and the prisoner plummeted into my old man's 200-quart cooler, which Val borrowed for the occasion.

We carried the cooler to the patio and went to work with the mojo. First Val snapped the pig's ribs and split its backbone so he could open it flat like a shaving kit. Then we poured and stabbed and rubbed until we thought he had had enough. We left the pig on its back, filled with a pool of fragrant mojo.

I took off for the house, planning to go back later with my amazing bean soup and a pone of cornbread made with bacon grease. But it was not to be. At the door, the smell of smoke hit me. Damn that stove. I left it on 2, and in four hours, it boiled away three gallons of water and burned the beans until they resembled the layer of coal under western Pennsylvania.

I am so mad. Those beans were going to be orgasmically good. Thank God I have another ham hock in the freezer. The pot is on the back step, full of EZ-Off. I will make those beans my bitches no matter what it takes or how many innocent people have to die.

I still have to make two cheesecakes today, and tomorrow I have to top them and make a coconut flan.

Val seems caught up in the stress of entertaining. I'm trying to get him to relax and focus on the impending feasting and drunkenness. He has to pace himself, or by the time the pig is cooked, he'll be bombed on Budweiser and stuffed with chicharrones.

Tomorrow, the pig goes in the caja china, and the festivities begin. I hope your holiday feast is just as good. But it won't be.

All right, time to buy more beans. I am not putting up with this crap. Merry Christmas, pendejos.