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The others called him Big Eddie with their rough tongues and smoky throats. Big Eddie wore a sleeveless shirt, his shoulders soaked in sweat and splattered in grease, his armpits dense with coarse black hairs that seemed ready to — “fittin’ to” — burst out like an untended garden. His arm muscles were massive and both fleshy and firm, and his thigh were as thick as trees. It seemed hardly sanitary for such a man to prepare victuals, but American barbecue tasted wrong if cooked by a clean man or any kind of woman… he got close enough to smell the stink of manhood coming from Big Eddie’s armpits. It was rutty and warm, fragrantly salty and stinking of strength. Sweat clung to Big Eddie’s biceps and his forehead, and his sleeveless shirt was plastered to his broad chest with grease and smoke and moisture… Greasy sweat and pork fat clung to his fingertips, and the touch awakened the scent of male emissions and lard, savory and salty and sweetly caramelized. The attar of Grand Édouard’s flowers filled the Cadillac.
But Big Eddie towered over Lem. He was well past six and a half feet tall, built like a horse had a baby with a truck. Big Eddie weren’t no kinda gangsta, he was a cook — he cooks the meat and the collard greens at this barbecue joint Hoppumslaw, which Lem done made acquaintanceship with on numerative occasions. Damn good sauce and cornbread there. Lem don’t fuck with the collard greens. He got a gravelly boulder-like voice, dull as a polished church-bell, like his lungs was fulla resigned thunder.
From Steel the Roughneck
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