The Pizza Dude

Ohney Pepperoni. No Mushrooms

The Pizza Dude

Benjamin Trayne

Into the Mist

There is something unknown about the act of writing, at least, unknown to strange old me. Without trying to speak for anyone else, my mind must be slowed to a crippling degree, just to permit generation of words to write.

In so doing, one takes a step into a mental cloud bank, a visual nothingness. Cold droplets collect on my face and are warmed by my flesh before trickling down my neck. I ask myself why I’m doing this, I say it aloud but I can’t hear a thing. Words can’t propagate in the mist. They must be recorded, this way.

Surely one is either sane or one is not. Is that right?

Which am I?

Are there overlaps between sanity and insanity? Between true reality, and fiction?

Does anyone know the answers to these questions?

That’s why I am here, in the mist. It is definitely why I am here.

And I’ve always known.

As I slow my thoughts to the obligatory near-stall, strange non-words leap forth, here in the mist. You might not believe me, I know. Chock-o Gueverra. Panoplius oblivion. Porifically speaking it’s an edificial mind-mush.

Slower. Pull it down. In the mist, anything can happen. And does. Reality melds with the story that unfolds until I am unsure it was not reality, and yet, just perhaps, it is. That issue started when I was a small child. I slowly awakened in my bed and found myself in deeper grief than I had imagined was possible. I was deeply chilled, the covers pulled up around my head, and I was crying.

I knew my grief was for the family dog, and I had no idea why. A month later he was dead, and it was not an illness that would take him from us.

Flash-forward to 2001. I am driving on the country road that passes by my home, my wife is in the passenger-side front seat, my children are arrayed in the back. I can clearly see something above the treeline ahead that I know isn’t there. A now-familiar chill sweeps through my being. Moving from the top of my head, the wave of numbing cold reaches my toes.

Shit.

I’ve just watched a huge, silvery, very low-flying, westbound passenger jet cleave the sky above the pines. There is no airfield anywhere nearby and surely, it’s headed for a crash. This has happened before, and I just hate it. I address my wife by name and I tell her what I’ve just seen. She knows, and nods. “What was it about?”“Damned if I know.”One week later, nine-eleven happened. Did the markings on that aircraft match those of Flight 93?

Yes.

Somewhere between these two events, I met a girl while we were both college students. She had nothing to do with, and knew nothing of my apparent off-handed, intermittent brushes with the metaphysical. She, however, is responsible for the strange non-words that have infected my brain.Every fucking one of them.

I don’t know why I loved her.

I don’t.

******************

The Pizza Dude

Order a twelve-dollar pizza, get a bonus adventure and some sage advice. Not a bad deal. Of course, that's if you don't consider the price of fear, or count the cost of replacing a rather expensive alarm clock. But the clock was my fault, I should have slept on it first. Not on the alarm clock. Beside it. Sleeping was just what I was afraid to do, for a while.

It was just another busy evening, with the vacuuming very obviously overdue, dirty dishes piled up in the sink and the cat sprawled across the top of my big old CRT computer monitor. Priorities first, that's the way it is. The only things that really seem to matter are those that I have to transfer from my head into my writing. When I die, my mind will be wherever I've gone. The words will surely remain. Somewhere.

But, from time to time, everyone has to eat. I hadn't shopped in a while. I hate shopping, even for food - even though going for groceries is easier than hunting and gathering, or raising and killing chickens, and growing and canning fruits and veggies. Been there, done that. I did have a twenty in my wallet and my phone still worked, so this time, I ordered a pizza. I gave my address, and the guy on the other end of the line said, “Where??”- but he took my order.

During the wait, I went back to work on my current piece in progress, which hadn't been titled yet. Titles just happen, but sometimes, not right away.

Roughly forty-five minutes later, through the open window I heard a whining buzz from the sewing-machine-sized engine of a tiny car, as it clawed its way up the hill and into my gravel driveway. The driveway arcs though woodland and into my back yard from a narrow, tree-lined country road.

It was a warm summer night. Why then was I suddenly, terribly chilled?

I pushed my keyboard back and walked to the back door, flipping the switch for the porch light. A pudgy older man, wearing a silly-looking pizza-franchise ball cap and an all-blue uniform, was working to get himself out of one of those tiny, under-powered “smart” cars. All I could really see at first was one foot on the driveway and his big blue butt poking out of the open door. I figured he was trying to hold onto the insulated pizza bag at the same time, obviously a bad idea. But eventually, he did extract himself, turned around, and while balancing my pizza on one arm and with the other, hitching up his pants and tugging his shirttails straight, he asked, “This is the Trayne place, right? I used the GPS.”

I nodded and stepped off the porch, reaching for my wallet. But I'd left it on the kitchen table when I checked for cash, so I held up one finger. “Right back.”

The old fellow stepped up to my back door while I recovered my billfold and emptied it with the removal of the twenty. I pushed the screen door open and handed it to him, and he started to make change. “Keep it,” I said, “It's a long way out here. Might not cover it, but it's what I have.”

So as the twenty went south, I realized he was looking over my shoulder into my kitchen. The kitchen happens to be where I write, in fact it's just about, where I live.

“Don't mind the mess,” I apologized.

“You're a writer, aren't you?”

The question took me completely by surprise. My computer screen was the only thing in sight that might have told him that, and it was twenty feet from his peering gaze.

“And you guessed that, how?” I queried.

“The pile of dishes. The cat. The aura, in this place. I can just feel it.”

“What, you're psychic?”

“Naw, I used to write too. It got to be too much for me.”

“So now you deliver pizza? Is that better?” I was thinking, he must not have been that good at it. In retrospect, that judgment might have been, just a tiny bit off.

“The tips make it worthwhile. A man's gotta eat. Making any money at your writing?”

“You're kidding, right?”

“Well, somebody does.”

That has to be true, but publishers are tough to crack. They've gone corporate, and the legitimate smaller publishers are, well, let's be honest, interspersed with at least an equal number of scam-artists. The latter don't mind at all taking your money in return for nothing.

“No, I still depend on a job. Like most who write, I'm just working at getting better.”

“Well,” the old man sniffed, smirked and hung his thumbs in his pants pockets, “Be careful what you wish for.”

“I'm game,” I answered, with interest. “Explain.”

The only way to describe what happened next, is that my visitor “explained” while doing a sort of a dance. I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it. At first he only gestured as he spoke, but then he started stepping forward and back, walking in circles and even some figure-eights, there on my porch. As he performed, above his ball-capped head, graying hair bushing out all around it, the moths of summer circled crazily around the exposed bulb of my back porch light. He would stop, nearly crouch and then look up at me as he described with increasing eloquence, the topics on which he'd written. And I could see that if the pizza wasn't cold after the forty-five minutes that had already passed, it would be before I got to it.

“...and I did my level best to drive the point home! Every time! My protagonists...” On and on he went, and as he spoke, the pudginess of the aging pizza dude seemed to disappear. Instead he was a dynamic force, two fists punching air with brisk uppercut-movements, strong arms behind it, as he killed his villain. Frankly I wouldn't have wanted to receive those punches, in the real.

As he at last began to slow down, I interjected, “So you obviously were really into it. Did you only quit because you weren't able to publish?”

Suddenly he was the pudgy pizza-dude once more. His feet, formerly arranged in a stance fit for a martial-arts frontal attack, moved together again. Duck-footed.

“Naww, I scared myself.”

I considered, I could always warm the pizza in the microwave.

“Okay, I'll bite. How so?”

“Well, my wife started it. My ex-wife. Alice. She told me I had to feel it, had to live it, that I needed to do more than to think of adjectives to describe what I was writing about. She made up this damnable term, like she was doing all the time, called “adjectivinal perfluity.”

I felt my insides do a little jump. I knew her! I knew she'd married an older man...I'd heard her use that make-believe term myself. There couldn't be two Alices like that! But I didn't want to change the subject, my curiosity had been aroused. So I simply coaxed him.

“And?”

“So I did. I started to allow myself to live my stories, and after a while, it worked! One morning I awakened to find that everything was different. Oddly, Alice had moved out a year before that, but I didn't stop thinking about what she'd told me. And she was right. Damn her!”

“Spill it. What was different?”

“Well, I woke up before the alarm clock sounded. I don't keep a nightlight on, and the bedroom was darkened. But...the light of the moon in an early-autumn sky seemed to illuminate everything, softly yet thoroughly, through translucent-white curtains that undulated in a nascent night breeze, such that every shadow raced for oblivion. The sandy brown hillocks formed by my own reclining body beneath my shabby wool blanket, delivered my first flash of strange non-reality. My vision zoomed. Between the hillocks there appeared a circle of ivory-topped covered wagons, now in afternoon sun, with panicked, running forms inside the circle, while hundreds of war-painted Indians on horseback streamed in waves from the hills on either side! Surely the would-be settlers were doomed! Quite suddenly I was a strong, painted brave with a tomahawk on my hip and a spear in my right hand, my left fist wrapped into a coarse, greasy horse's mane! All that I wanted to do was to kill the invaders and take as many scalps as I could, without mercy! The running horse's hooves pounded beneath me but I didn't feel the roughness, as the powerful beast merely rocked, forward and back, at that speed! Then, just as suddenly, I had become a small, terrified child, a little boy, crouching beside a wagon wheel, crying plaintively for my mother! I could actually feel the rounded coarseness of the wooden spokes on my tiny shoulder and arm! The first wave of Indians arrived so fast, they nearly collided with the wagons, and soon all of them were circling, whooping and ululating, and killing! Again I felt the horse responding to my leaning, the roughened shaft of the spear leaving my hand, and then, I was a defending adult on the ground and felt the point of that very spear, penetrating my chest! Such a searing blast of exquisite pain, I'd never imagined! I shook my head, smacked my cheeks and came back to the real, in a cold sweat!”

The pizza dude mopped his brow with a handkerchief and continued, his eyes blazing with emotion.

“Yet without moving, I then gazed through the window at the crisp, silver-white disc of moon, which would soon surrender its place in the heavens...to overpowering nuclear firelight that it was, for then, only reflecting. And without warning, I was on another planet. Far, far beyond the moon...I'd seen the stars accelerate past me as I traveled, without a spacecraft yet unaffected, through millions of light-years of frigid vacuum, at a blistering speed that only thought can achieve. I had no sense of landing, of my feet touching down on the surface. No, I had accelerated right past that, my body spiraled inward and through an atmosphere; I was almost instantaneously standing on the most beautiful planet in the entire, endless, unimaginably vast universe. It was at very least, another Eden, but there, only the grasses were green; the foliage on the trees and the shrubbery were a glistening, pure white, with golden rays of sunlight that danced through the leaves as if it were warm raindrops. It was, actually, indescribable, but at that moment, I seemed to be in possession of the perfect perceptions to describe. Then it began to come even more quickly than one could ever describe, as I turned to see what I was hearing, and beheld the vertical thunder of a mist-veiled, magically emerald-green waterfall, dropping through arcing rainbows, a thousand feet or more from a gray rocky plateau to God-knows-where, somewhere beyond a gleaming host of shimmering white treetops. I gasped. I couldn't breathe! Was this gorgeous planet without breathable air? I shook my head again, and gazed with complete incredulity at my bed covers. No! I did not want to return to the battle, returning to the planet would be alright, if only I could breathe! But of course, none of it was real.” The story-teller gasped for breath. “And that's why I say - I scared myself. I scared the living hell out of my...”

The pizza dude had obviously spoken in earnest and had worked himself into a tizzy, and now was nervously extracting a rumpled cigarette pack from his shirt pocket. He shook out a cigarette and stuck it between his lips. His hand visibly trembled as he raised a black butane lighter to it, and he took a puff.

“Gotta go. Enjoy your pizza.”

“Wait,” I cried, “That one incident was it? That was enough to make you stop writing?”

The pizza-dude had already turned and had taken a few steps toward the tiny automobile, but he stopped and turned back, his face now shrouded in darkness.

“I didn't tell you everything.”

“So, what?”

He took a deep drag on his cigarette, and exhaled slowly, after a moment. It put me in the mind of someone who was used to smoking something else.

“It was the grasses. And the alarm clock.”

“And?”

“While I was gasping for breath on the ‘Eden’ planet, I fell to the ground and gripped the grass with a clenched fist. I still had some of it in my hand, when I found myself back in my bed. I put it into a mason jar and capped it. It stayed green for most of a year. It isn't at all like any kind of grass I've ever seen. I'm telling you, it was as real as my own life. I might have died, in either of those places.”

The story had been interesting and I was convinced he wasn't dangerous, so I decided to let that one go. Maybe even, humor him. Anyway, who knows what's possible?

“Hey bud,” I said, “I actually know how you feel. Not that I've ever quite experienced that! But I tend to think I have a better mental picture of a certain giant Pleistocene bear than even those whose careers include studying them. I feel like I was there!”

The pizza dude had put his hands in his pockets, and seemed to be pushing a pebble around with the toe of a sneaker. For a few moments, he said nothing.

“Well...then there was the alarm clock.”

“What about it?”

“After the planet, while I was still trying to catch my breath, it went off.”

“What's strange about that?”

“Umm. It was howling at the moon.”

“Say what?”

“You heard me! At the moon!”

I stammered, “Wa...was it still an alarm clock?”

The pizza dude hadn't moved from his spot. “No. And, yes.”

This time we were both quiet for a bit. I spoke first.

“I apologize in advance, but I have to ask...do you do drugs?”

He turned again and took the last three steps to the smart-car. “Hell, no,” he cast back over his shoulder. “I don't even drink! Not sayin’ I ain’t crazy, though.”

Squirming back into the driver's seat, he closed the door with a hollow “tunk” and smiled with the cigarette still in his mouth. “Hey Ben,” he said, “Better stay away from Herman!”

I was so shocked that I couldn't answer. How in the world could he know about Herman?

“Your inner writer, you know? You should never talk to him. Sooner or later, he'll answer you back. For real.”

The little car began its buzz, and was soon bumping its way out of my driveway. I watched it go, all the way to the road. Then it disappeared, the two red points of the taillights trailing off into the darkness.

Crap. Only marriage had ever made me feel inadequate, before.

Alice!

I nearly stumbled as I re-entered my kitchen. Without really thinking about it, I checked the pizza and marveled that it was still warm. But I didn't disturb it at that point. Instead, I went upstairs and took a hard look at my alarm clock.

The pizza-dude had gotten to me. At that moment, I'd have done anything to avoid a similar experience.

I'd given up on electronic alarm clocks that die without warning, or that aren't loud enough to wake me. Radio stations in place of an alarm don't seem to affect me, and the cheap wind-up alarm clocks don't last long. So I'd gone to a jewelry store, and after finding out that they don't stock alarm clocks, I had the jeweler order one for me. For two hundred bucks, I had figured, it had better work for a while. It was a good clock.

But I carried that alarm clock out into the darkness behind my country home and whaled it as hard as I could, deep into the brushy woods.

That was nearly two weeks ago. It hasn't rained yet, but after a change of heart and a few searches, I still haven't found it. Most likely, a lucky black bear has it ticking on a shelf in some cave as he relaxes with his bear feet up, beside his fire. I'll just keep telling myself that.

I had no idea what I was gonna do about Herman. He's done a whole lot more than just answer me back. I also had no idea how the pizza-dude knew about him...unless; of course! He's read my writing! It couldn't be anything else. I'm not completely crazy, yet.

I breathed a sigh of relief.

My heart just wouldn't be in delivering pizzas.

******************

Copyright 2023 Benjamin Trayne