Three seasons out of the year, I don’t see my next-door neighbor Kim. Just traces of him—the trail of his cigarette, the sound of his Harley each morning at first light, and sometimes at night, the blue glow of his hot tub, which materializes out of the Wisconsin darkness like a ghostly window of sky. A quiet guy, he rarely appears at neighborhood gatherings—the winter solstice potluck, the Day of the Dead fete, the annual 37th birthday party of my neighbor Cherie, which inevitably turns into an all-night extravaganza of daiquiris and Sufi dancing and dogs dressed in little costumes. Kim is an auto mechanic, a stout, bearded man in his sixties who has lived in the same house since he was fifteen. Nine months out of twelve, he stores up his burly gusto for the one party he throws each year: his summer pig roast.
Kim is a summer lover. More than anyone in our neighborhood (affectionately referred to as “the massage ghetto,” for its surplus of body workers), he knows how to maximize his warm-weather pleasure. A few years back, he installed a beer tap next to his sliding screen-door so he could pour a cold one from his deck without having to leave his lawn chair. Before that, he installed a platform for his television across from the Jacuzzi, so he could watch the Packer games while submerged. On Sundays, his bearded face and pint glass are barely visible above the blue foam.
In downtown Madison, where the yards are narrow and the trees are thin, Kim is the ultimate urban outdoorsman, and nothing—not his deck, not his canoe, not his mysterious spelunking gear in the garage—showcases his talent for masterminding a bone fide summer blow-out like his pig roast. Three years running, it features a different porcine personality each time around with posters that precede the event, announcing the coming of “Willy the Pig” or “Harry the Hog” until a whole persona has evolved long before the poor thing arrives from pasture packed in ice.
Like many ritualistic events, there is an element of joyous crudeness to it, evident in the numerous drunken snapshots that have survived from past years, where Kim and his grown son Roger pose with The Pig Of The Year before it’s cooked. In the photographs, Kim and his son hold up drafts of Budweiser, huge grins slashed across their beards. The pig, propped up on cinder blocks with an apple in its mouth, always sports the latest summer fashion: sunglasses, fishing hat, Hawaiian shirt. During the last election year, I seem to remember an American flag poking up through a hoof.
It takes two full days to slow-roast the pig. The job demands sentries, timers, someone with the stamina to make it through a night shift. Every fifteen minutes, coals must be carefully laid under the pig’s sizzling body. The coals must be kept red hot, requiring careful watch over a set of hibachis stationed by Kim’s garage. The whole process involves beer and fire, beer and fire. Through this, the neighborhood spirit is revived.
On the day the pig arrives, our block comes alive with both curiosity and revulsion. My neighbor Dana saunters down in a muumuu, carrying her requisite cup of sakÈ, and stands against the fence across from the pig, imagining—despite her Jewish heritage—the forbidden taste of its sweetness. Behind her, the vegans gawk from their lawn, keen noses set to the west—What is that smell? Oh Gawd. And off they march in the opposite direction toward the grocery co-op, their vegan dog loping behind.
By late afternoon, a distinctly porcine smell begins to drift through my window screens. It’s a smell unlike any other that wafts through our neighborhood—a place that is downwind from a coal plant with four smoke stacks that breathe constant black wisps into us. The smell of pig is stronger than that smell or the pungent smell of the lake that off-gases three blocks over or the bus exhaust from the busy street two blocks the other direction. It’s sweet and smoky and utterly unlike the usual kitchen cross-breezes in our neighborhood, where tofu vindaloo and bulgur chili are de rigueur. It’s a smell that’s unavoidable as meat—big meat—and it penetrates everything. Leave your underwear drawer open during pig-roast weekend and all your bras will smell like jerky.
By nightfall, a crew has assembled on Kim’s dark deck and in the small patch of lawn opposite the roasting pit. Toddlers circle on tricycles. Adults lean on car hoods, bumming smokes—neighbors who aren’t even smokers but who want to participate in the burning. The whole affair is testament to the power of fire, our innate attraction to it, the strange sense of community it awakens.
Across the street, the home-schooled teen buckles his bike helmet below his chin and rides off to dig through dumpsters without so much as a nod in our direction. His mother, sipping wine, says, “Meat has never passed his lips.” It’s hard to tell if the low tone of her voice comes from reverence or her own guilty pleasure.
On our street, where the masseuses are thick around us preaching good health and wholesome habits, food is political. The thought of going next door to borrow an egg or a cup of milk can set one in a quandary. Which house has gone lactose-free vegan? Is the yogi in the orange house fasting? While one person is getting off gluten, the next person is eating for O-negative. Diet, it seems, is as studied as the weather.
Just knowing that someone might have peered into your fridge while you were on vacation can feel more like a personal affront than if they’d gone through your bedside drawers. I hope they didn’t see the processed cheese singles in the meat drawer. Oh God, did I leave out the veal bratwurst?
Oscar Mayer, which is busy pumping hot dogs into trucks less than five miles away, has probably never sold a Lunchable to anyone on our street, except maybe to Kim. Most neighbors shop at the nearby natural foods co-op, including myself. In fact, the co-op was one of the selling points when the Realtor first showed me our little house. Hardwood floors and we’re only two blocks from an organic juice bar?!? Screw the gutted shower and the pentagrams in the basement, we’ll take it!!
Although I’m the first person to support fine things like sustainable agriculture and raw milk cheese, I also recognize that the crusade for a whole foods diet has become a class issue. It requires leisure time to cook with kamut. It flat out costs more to buy organic bananas. So, while I feel fortunate that I can buy Soysage around the corner, I secretly revel in the fact that my neighbor Kim roasts a pig each summer in what is basically my side yard. In this neighborhood, being a meat-and-potatoes man makes Kim the anomaly.
I grew up with barbecues and pig roasts in my home state of Iowa, as did my husband who was raised in southern Indiana—a place where the sight of a giant barrel-grill going down the highway was a sure sign of someone’s shotgun wedding. When we return to our respective homes to visit relatives, meat on the table is still a given, and the process of getting meat on the table usually justifies a party, some social interaction involving small talk and spatulas and malt grain beverages.
Meat may be murder, but it’s also Midwestern culture.
After sundown, when the pig is just beginning to spit after a full day on the coals, the guy who ritually does the night shift arrives: Kim’s close friend Tim, a hunchbacked Vietnam vet. Tim, who drives a cab, usually pulls up in a taxi, a cigarette dangling from his lip, a six-pack in his lap. When he turns the car off and steps out, he’ll head for the deck and pour himself a tall cold one from the tapper by the screen door, then settle in for his long night. Pacing and stoking. Pacing and stoking. The six-pack, he’ll tell you, is just back-up.
Tim’s presence is also evidence of what the pig roast symbolizes—not necessarily to me or to the other neighbors, but to two men who go way back as beer-guzzling, euchre-playing guys who found each other when they lost their wives. The pig roast is the way Kim and Tim stoke their friendship. It’s something they host together now, like a big family supper, Tim quietly smoking in a corner of the lawn while Kim serves up the beast.
I’ve seen marriages practically come to an end at the pig roast. One year, a husband and wife in their late forties—both long-time vegetarians—arrived together, poured themselves beers, and pulled up lawn chairs on opposite sides of the drive. They joined separate conversations, as any couple might, and made frequent trips to the card-table buffet where there was standard pig roast fare: vats of cole slaw, buckets of yellow potato salad, fruit cocktail studded with mini marshmallows. At some point, I noticed the vegetarian wife staring at her vegetarian husband. She fixated on him with a stony glare. Through the dusk, I squinted to see what he held in his hand, and by God, if it wasn’t a pork sandwich.
It’s hard to blame even the most devout vegetarian for sneaking a bite. There’s a strange attraction to big meat, especially when you’ve smelled it cooking for hours upon hours. As repulsive as it may seem, its slow-cooked haunches crackle and glisten, and no one can listen long to the moans of satisfied diners without trying just a little piece.
Kim serves his roast pig the way Midwesterners serve group meat: sandwiched between slabs of cheap white bread with a glurp of barbecue sauce. If doughy wads of sandwich don’t stick to the roof of your mouth, something’s amiss.
I like to eat it unadorned, standing up, without a plate. Instead of a napkin, I like to wipe my greasy hands in the grass. Don’t ask me why. In an urban setting, it’s the closest I can get to camping, the same way that for Kim, roasting a pig in his tiny patch of yard is maybe the closest he can get to hunting or trapping. In this way, we are joined.
Most years, the pig roast has an ugly ending. Maybe that’s the nature of a pig roast— it illuminates both the best and worst parts of civilization, a combination of reverence and cruelty. Usually, there is a drunken brawl, which isn’t all that unusual on our street. Despite being the city’s politically correct epicenter, there have been recent stabbings, police chases, muggings, drug raids. Suffice it to say that the pig roast draws in all kinds, including the local biker gang, the CC Riders. I know the meat is about to fall off the bone when I hear the sound of their Harleys.
The worst brawl came after Pig Roast II, year of “Willy,” I believe. I awoke late in the night to the sound of women shrieking in the street. Got up and peered out the bedroom window, where I could see Kim’s deck, the hot tub full of pale bodies and blue light. In the drive, surrounded by burning torches, were two women, one of whom I recognized as my neighbor Renata from her motorized wheel chair. The other woman was Anne, a very poised black woman from the end of the block. Now, in some neighborhoods, people go to war over lawn care and unmindful pets, but in this neighborhood fights tend to get existential. Renata and Anne were arguing about the origins of slavery.
“Go home,” I heard Kim holler from the tub. “Party’s over, the food’s all gone.”
“Your people sold my people!” Anne kept insisting.
“I—am—the—liberator!” I heard Renata cry, not like a battle cry, but like a pressure valve releasing. Renata was not just tipsy, she was feeling utterly at one with the world despite the polarized feel of the neighborhood at that moment -- made all the more spooky by the floating bodies, the burning torches. The two women kept their accusations going all the way down the block until their voices trailed off, the hum of Renata’s motorized cart gradually blending in with the crickets.
That night I sat up in bed and stared at the ceiling fan’s dim blur, waiting for the din next door to die down and thinking how strange it was to be at the apex of so many clashing cultures, how politicized our lives are, and how rarely so many kinds of people—meat eaters and non-meat eaters, academics and Harley riders, blacks and whites, Christians and Jews—sit down on the same curb to share a meal. To me, that’s the best kind of neighborhood, a genuine melting pot. A true neighborhood bash should involve dialogue, darkness, something slow-roasted that leads to an unleashing of energies. It takes a certain kind of host to pull that off, someone fearless and without enmity, someone willing to put forth a sacrifice.
Last summer, I left the neighborhood. Kim moved out before I did -- quit his day job, bought a biker bar in a small town not far from Madison. I also left to make a career change, and though it’s been mostly positive, I still wake up in my apartment just outside Philadelphia and wonder where I am. I don’t know anyone who eats Soysage here, and I never hear the sound of a Harley. As for body workers and yogis, they’re completely priced out of this neighborhood.
Out my front window, I see a neatly arranged world, full of wide yards and primroses, mossy roofs and neatly swept drives. Predictable. Exclusive. I suppose in Kim’s world, everything’s coming up beer and Harley’s -- predicable, too, in its own way. Some might even argue exclusive. Although Kim and I have lost touch, I feel a missing there. I long for the nights leading up to the pig roast, for the sight of the hot tub winking on outside my window, for Tim stepping out of his car—even for the inevitable friction between certain neighbors.
During the pig roast, there was a mood in the air I have never found anywhere else. A feeling of impropriety vs. propriety. A feeling of political vs. personal. These tensions taught us to be tolerant neighbors, taught us to explore the unknown, and turned our homes into more than just boxes with flickering front windows. I suspect the mood I picked up on the night of pig roast is the same mood that’s palpable right before a border crossing, when people who do not belong somewhere are about to set out for a new country. What they feel is, I’m guessing, a mix, of brazenness and breathlessness, of their very ethos brushing against a chasm. And the only way to make it is to venture forth wholeheartedly and with unabashed hunger.