by Brad

April 18, 2007

THE MONKEYS MUST NEVER KNOW

Pretty girl keep growing up
Playing make-up wearing guitar
Growing old in a bar
You grow old in a bar

Like most red-blooded Americans, I like the pizza. It's good stuff. I
might not be able to drink beer and/or other forms of alcohol morning,
noon and night like I did during my first go at college, but I can eat
pizza for breakfast, lunch and dinner and live to tell the tale. Pizza
can do wrong by me. It is the ultimate food.

Around here, we have a respectable number of pizza establishments that we can choose to patronize. There are, of course, the usual
suspects--Papa John's, Domino's and a Pizza Hut (I think). However, Wendy and I usually choose between three pizza places that are locally owned and operated. We're not looking for medals, or anything; we're only doing our part to boost the town's economy. Two of these restaurants do great business, and there are some nights when we have to wait 30-40 minutes just for a takeout order. The third place we like to frequent never has any business, but it has the best pizza of the lot.

This joint, which advertises itself as the place "for the discriminating pizza lover," specializes in gourmet-style pizzas, in addition to the type of pizzas we all know and love. Maybe the word gourmet scares off this town of mostly blue-collar workers. The place is always deserted. When we ate there, Wendy and I usually had the place to ourselves. I once tried convincing Wendy that I had paid off the manager to reserve the joint just for us--a romantic gesture, Elvis Presley-style. But Wendy knows where I work and she knows how little I make. She didn't buy it. She also didn't accept the it's
the thought that counts defense either.

But we dined in solitude for the most part at this place. I can recall one time when a couple did come in a few minutes after us, and a Saturday afternoon when a family--mother, father, two-to-three children--entered just as we were leaving, but other than those two times, we had the whole dining area to ourselves. We always left the place filled up on great pizza, and with a tinge of sadness, believing this would be the last time we would be able to eat there. Since it never had any customers, we always figured the owner would be out of business before our next craving for pizza hit us.

To date, that hasn't occurred. The Open sign still burns in the window and the pizza is still great. However, we stopped eating in at the establishment. After a few visits to this mostly barren restaurant, Wendy and I became familiar faces to the owner. There were incidents where he would wander over from the kitchen area, sit down next to us and start chatting away. The owner was a nice enough person, don't get me wrong, and I can understand being bored and lonely for company, but really, show some respect toward the customers and give them their privacy.

After one such third-wheel moment, we had had enough and decided to do takeout with the business. I still had to interact with the owner because I always had to fetch the pizza. He was just as lonely (I think the Maytag repairman saw more action than this guy) and I would have to stand there and listen while he recounted his days since he last saw me.

I noticed during one of these one-sided conversations that the owner
had some physical and verbal tics, a possible indicator of Tourette's
syndrome. For a couple of minutes, I held out hope that he had the
extreme disorder of this disease and he would start involuntarily
uttering obscenities like an episode of Deadwood, as seen on the HBO. Your pizza's about ready, you shrimp-dick clam-fucker, or That will be $14.55, you scrotum-hugging pussy wipe. Sadly, that was not to be.

When it became obvious this pizza joint wasn't going to go out of business, Wendy and I developed theories on what was really going on at that place. Could the owner be some town pariah, ostracized by the community for some wrongdoing in his past? This was discounted because Wendy has quite a few spies embedded in this town and we would have been given all the background info we needed after our first visit to the place. Another popular suggestion is the owner is a trust-fund baby and he can stay in business as long as he desires. I'm not keen on this one because the owner strikes me as the type who would blow all his trust-fund money on something frivolous, like bidding on a dinner date with Jennifer Garner, TV's Alias. The most popular theory is the restaurant is some kind of front. We both like this idea, but we're not sure what it's a front for. Drugs is the front-runner (no pun intended) in this category, but is it drugs along the line of being mobbed-up, or is it drugs in the scenario featured in Showtime's Weeds?

As long as the pizza stays good, I don't care. The owner can go about doing whatever illegal activities he has going on in the back room. I will turn a blind eye. However, the minute he slacks off on the pizza, I will shut down his operation. No one messes up my pizza and lives to tell about it.

Write Brad at exit149@gmail.com

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