004: Pizza J

Location: 967 Westminster St. Hours: Monday-Thursday 4pm-10pm | Friday 4pm-11pm | Saturday 12pm-11pm | Sunday 12pm-9pm Date of Visit: June 13, 2024.

This is Pizza J.

This is the spawn of Julian's, a few blocks away on Broadway, where every weekend people are gathered for brunch as you walk Saga down the sidewalk. Recently, you've been walking Saga to work in the morning, and the trashcan outside of Pizza J's is exceptionally placed to deposit the first poo bag of the day. When you a walk a dog, you become hyper aware of the presence (or lack) of public trash disposal. Julian's has no parking to speak of, and people sit in the bike lanes waiting for someone to leave a parking spot on the side of the road. On Westminster Street, Pizza J has an ample parking lot, despite Westminster having parking for days along both sides of the street. Sometimes you're nearly run over by people backing out. 

Pizza J is a pizza place, unabashedly. Like many pizza places, they have all sorts of things that aren't pizza, but typically the things that don't require pizza dough are inferior. Garlic knots: good. Chicken wings: disappointing. Thus always to pizza place chicken wings, you think. You need a pub that has a deep fryer that's been continuously running for a decade and lots of breading.

There is a dining section that occupies nearly half the building, but when you come in, it's a cramped counter space behind which you can see the oven, arcade and pinball machines cramping the area, meant to process outgoing orders as fast as possible. You've only ever been here before to pick up pizza, and now you're suddenly aware of the TVs in every corner that are playing The Lord of the Rings, and the flag of the fictional Minas Tirith hanging behind the register.

When you arrived, the waiter announces that they have a "walk-in of nine" and you can sense the complete lack of joy this generates in the staff. It's eight o'clock, and they close at nine. Of course, an hour is long enough to make pizzas—your brother-in-law is a professional pizza chef, you've seen him make them in under ten—and your group orders quickly, and the food comes just as quick. But your anxiety whispers that you are an accomplice to rudeness. Not helping matters is that you're three minutes away on foot from your apartment, and you're soaked in sweat from the early summer and having just run around in an arena being pelted with foam arrows, and you're thinking about how much better it would feel to have showered.

Your connection to this group is your friend, Quince, who runs trivia at the Point Tavern. Three of them, all friends of his, you know from that, as well. The rest are apparently acquaintances of your friend's friends. So you all know at least someone in common. You're vaguely amazed at the audacity of his friends, a couple, Ulysses and Ursula, who have convened this little gathering. Ursula in particular appears to simply collect acquaintances and draw a friendship out of them. You've been at it for months in your archery tag league and your knitting group, and making durable new friendship is proving more difficult than you'd imagined. Or you make it more difficult for yourself. You have managed one, at least, but no more. You've all come come from archery tag today, a Sunday, but not the league, which is Tuesday nights. Your new acquaintances tease you about being a professional player at this sport that most of them never heard of before today.

Archery tag was one of your first personal victories after Viola left you. It's one of the things that helped break your depression, in addition to Quince dragging you to trivia. You were looking for actual archery, hoping for an outdoor range, but Google suggested this instead, in a building that used to be the Wilbury Theater, but is no longer. Like the folks tonight, you had no idea what you were getting into, and the concept of the league intimidated you, but when you reached out, the owner told you to come by, and you did, and you've been there every Tuesday since without fail.

That first night you remember telling a welcoming stranger what had gotten you there, that you'd just been dumped. You'd skipped why, you don't say that, at that moment, you don't feel you can blame Viola for leaving, even though it caught you by surprise, that she never told you she was unhappy until the day she left. You don't know you would've gotten better if she'd stayed, that you'd be here tonight if she was still in your life. At the end of the league there's a potluck and you make sausage rolls, which aren't hard to make, but which feel good to have made when people are thrilled to eat them. They're the first thing you've really cooked for another person since Viola left you. 

Less popular was the six-pack of NA beer.

At Pizza J, you feel suddenly conspicuous in your sobriety. There's a brisk discussion about everyone joining a deal they offer where you split pizzas and pitchers of beer. Half the group goes for it, but you're given an out when Quince and others don't. They mercifully have near-beer with a name indistinguishable from most craft brews, but when you order it, the waiter returns to tell you they're out and offers you a Lagunitas IPNA instead. You say you would to dispose of the interaction as quickly as possible, and when it arrives, you're quickly reminded that you never loved Lagunitas when you were drinking, and it has hardly been improved now that the one ingredient justifying its consumption is gone.

The stranger at archery tag was sympathetic to your heartbreak, that first night. She tells you, with all the kindness in the world, that at Far Shot, the axe bar in the Jewelry District, they sometimes have a night where you can post pictures of your ex and cathartically throw axes at their face. You don't say that the idea of throwing an axe at Viola's face appalls you; after all, you are a stranger in a strange land and would do well not to offend the local customs, certainly not upon first contact, any way. You are touched, though, at the intent behind the gesture, even if, no matter how much of your love curdles into anger, you'll never feel like Viola deserves to have an axe thrown at her face. 

There is a woman in Ursula's little group you keep glancing at, whom you've never met before tonight and will never meet again after. She keeps catching you looking, sometimes looking puzzled. There is a white zone in archery tag, where players are safe for a limited amount of time. In the league, the time is shorter. You miscounted, hit her by surprise, two seconds too early. You are sheepish when you explain after, that you try not to be an asshole, generally. She's gracious, shrugs it off. Later she'll tell you that she cheered when you won the free-for-all at the end of the game. She was introduced to you as the neighbor and friend of one of the men you recognize from trivia. You try to sort out their relationship in your head. Just neighbors? Just friends? It's been long enough from the breakup now that you're beginning to look again in that way, to see people as someone you could laugh with, you could cook for, you could carry into the bedroom. You've never really been great at knowing when things were all in your head or real, though, and you know you've let more opportunities than you should've go by. You've dodged a lot of arrows today, maybe one of them was Cupid's?

There's an old joke that bad pizza is just like bad sex; even when it's bad, it's good. This was a lot more poignant before you'd had enough bad sex in your life to know you'd skip it for pizza. Few things have felt more disappointing to you than sex that felt like your partner was performing some perfunctory task, like you were being patronized. They call it maintenance sex, and it is, you're led to believe, a necessary evil of the lasting relationship. You've been the deliverer just as much as the recipient, you know, but all the same, it isn't what you'd hope for when you sit down for a meal.

Pizza J's pizza, however, is not a pizza you eat without relish, that doesn't serve itself with enthusiasm. Even their names have a certain gusto. "Pretty Fly for a White Pie," needs no explanation; the "Rita" isn't a particularly imaginative name for the margherita (claimed to have been named for the first Queen of the newly unified Italy in 1880, tomato, mozzarella, and basil mimicking the red, white, and green of the Italian tricolor). Why a white pizza with ricotta, mozzarella, red peppers, onion, garlic...and potato...is named the "Tony Clifton," the name of Andy Kaufman's oafish lounge-lizard singer character, is known only by some advanced intelligence, it is well beyond your ken, but its obscure allusion delights you all the same. This is the magic of pizza, really. That it takes a number of disparate ingredients and arranges them on a plate of bread and you look at them all together and you see the flag of Italy, or something out of Hawai'i, or something only a meat lover could love. 

Or Tony Clifton, of all the people. You love the idea of Tony Clifton. Clifton's not an easy character to love, he's a bit of an asshole, frankly, which was Kaufman's whole bit, a comedian. But after Kaufman died, his friend Bob Zmuda continued portraying Clifton, keeping his actual identity secret, so that the character survived its creator. You like that, an idea that survives the demise of that which created it.

The sun finally sets, the checks are paid before closing even, the little band disperses. The woman you've been stealing glances at gives you a hug, and you instinctively apologize again for shooting her early, and she tells you it was her favorite moment of the night. You've learned, over the meal, that she's moving home to Chicagoland in two weeks. You've only learned her first name, and by the time you first draft this essay, which is not too longer after, you'll have forgotten it. And beyond all that, you have designed your life at the moment to be one where you must stay busy.

You asked Viola, as she was leaving you, if she wasn't scared of losing out on the feeling of being struck by lightning that you'd felt, that you knew she did, too. If she wasn't scared of being unable to find it again. She told you she was, but she was leaving anyway. 

You wonder about that rarity, that feeling that the stars aligned just so, in an irreplicable way, and how, walking home from Pizza J, thinking about an attractive stranger and how, perhaps, if the timing had been different...if the stars had aligned a different way. Like you've been running through an open field in a thunderstorm, trying to get struck by lightning, trying to get hit by Cupid's arrow, only to dodge it without thinking. 

You have begun to question fate, you have begun to question the idea of parsing out personal purpose. It's never been a novel thought, you know, but it strikes you that life is a series of coincidental events, arranged in a haphazard order, given meaning and sense only through context, chronology, and having lived them all together.

This is Pizza J.