When I moved from Wisconsin to New York, more than ten years ago now, my new roommate analyzed my handshake. Kacey was a lesbian, a few years older than me. We were in graduate school together, and she quickly became known for this particular party trick. It was a way for her to flirt with women, to break the ice and talk about sex at house parties and bars filled with awkward writer types who were prone to standing against walls, clutching their sweating bottles of beer, and talking to no one. It worked a little like palm reading. Kacey would shake a person’s hand, then begin a careful analysis: deciphering the firmness of the shake, the grip of the fingers, the stretch of the arm—the various movements of the shaker’s hand and body, her eye contact, and a host of other bodily cues—and what it all meant about her personality, her sexuality, and ultimately, what kind of lover she’d be.

A few weeks into the semester, in late September, Kacey and I sat in our living room on a Saturday night, drinking beers, still getting to know one another. She was smart, gregarious, and very funny. She had a magnetic charm, and when she walked into a room, she commanded it. She was from the East Coast and had gone to an Ivy League school, and when I told her, shortly after we moved in together, that I’d gone to college at the University of Wisconsin—a fact about which I’d only ever been proud, it being the best school in my home state and having been the first in my family to finish college—she asked: “Is that a state school?”

She didn’t mean anything by it, I don’t think. But it was the first time I’d ever felt self-conscious about where I’d come from, a feeling that would become common in my new life on the coast. I was a small-town Midwesterner from a working-class family whose parents didn’t have college degrees, let alone master’s or PhDs, like so many people I would meet. Back home, I had felt smart, driven, and accomplished; in New York, I felt unremarkable at best and backwoods at worst. For the first time in my life, I felt the parameters of class and where I fit within them.

That night in our living room, after spending the first few weeks of school curiously watching Kacey do the handshake trick to other women in our program, I asked her to do it to me. I extended my arm and shook her hand. It was a midwestern handshake, a masculine handshake, firm and strong and succinct—the kind I had learned from my father. In the Midwest, you learn early to never trust anyone with a weak handshake.

Kacey held on to my hand for a few seconds, looking at me. Then she nodded, one side of her lips curling up into a grin.

“Meat and potatoes,” she said.

Kacey had an arsenal of words and phrases she returned to often in this game—titillating ones like dominant, submissive, versatile, or tops from the bottom—but I’d never heard this one before. It felt like an insult.

“What does that mean?” I said, snatching my hand away.

“Nothing bad,” she said with a laugh. “Just that there’s no pretense. You put it all out there.”

“So, what?” I said, unconvinced. “I’m like, vanilla or something?”

“No, no, no,” she said. “You’re a straight shooter, salt of the earth.”

This made some sense. This I’d been called before. But I still wasn’t satisfied. I couldn’t help but think Kacey was calling me the furthest thing from what I believed myself, and my sex life, to be: basic, boring, utterly normal.

“What you see,” she said, looking me in the eyes, “is what you get.”

*

The first time I got whipped, it didn’t feel euphoric. People who find pleasure in pain often liken it to a runner’s high: that late burst of endorphins, and then ecstasy, that carries you to the end of a long, painful act—when something that hurts suddenly becomes a swell of exhilaration, a full-body buzzing of joy.

It wasn’t like that for me. Not at first, anyway. At first, the pain was just pain. It hurt and kept hurting. It didn’t feel anything like pleasure. I gritted my teeth, tensed my muscles, flinched with every stroke of a whip, every smack of a cane, every dull thwack of a flog. My whole body braced itself against the electric shock of the violet wand. I resisted the pain. It didn’t turn me on. But I never used my safe word. I kept saying Yes.

*

When you grow up in the Midwest—or at least where I did, in the rural, mostly white, working-class Christian part—you grow up eating meat. In my house, and in most of the houses I knew, dinner consisted of two main ingredients: meat and potatoes. Dinner was pot roast and potatoes, pork chops and potatoes; it was chicken or turkey and mashed potatoes; it was barbecued ribs, hamburgers, hot dogs, and brats with potato salad. It was Friday-night fish fry—with fries or a baked potato. On take-out night, it was a burger and fries from A&W or Hardee’s, fried chicken and mashed potatoes from KFC. On special occasions, it was steak and a foil-wrapped potato on the grill.

Inside the six-foot freezer in our garage was a quarter cow—which we bought from my second cousin each Christmas—grown and slaughtered and sliced into various cuts, grounds, and rounds on the family farm just over the Illinois border. Every roast, rib eye, T-bone, and strip, each package of hamburger and chuck, was wrapped tightly in thick white paper, stacked neatly on each snowy shelf for my mother to linger over, select, extract, and eventually cook, for as far back as I can remember. And this is what fed our family.

The thing is, I hated meat. Unless it was slathered in gravy and buried beneath mashed potatoes, stirred into a thick sauce and poured over pasta, squashed thin between bready buns and smothered in ketchup, or folded inside the creamy contents of a casserole, slow-cooked chili, or stew, so tender that it was merely a suggestion—a conduit for whatever carbohydrate-loaded carriage, whatever glorious, gluttonous medleys of salt and starch I really enjoyed consuming—a big chunk of meat on my plate was enough to make my hungry heart sink. I rarely objected, though. Where I come from, you eat what you’re given and clean your plate. My parents had both been beaten for not finishing food—my father with a barber’s strap and my mother with a hairbrush—and while I wasn’t at risk of a beating, I had absorbed this understanding like salt to starch. So I chewed the proverbial fat, tearing into the flesh and choking down the gristle, pressing my fork into the tender flank of a bloody steak and trying my best not to think about the animal I was eating.