“There is no way you’re a real person”: The Pizza Behind the Quote
It was already a doozy of a Creative Writing class.
We had spent the past ten minutes attempting to workshop Luke’s story about a Humans versus Zombies Game he played, but we spent more time talking about military takeovers than about zombies. And now, we were about to get off track again, and technically it was my fault.
I brought up the pizza.
Luke had eaten some bad pizza for dinner the night the story took place. Luke had also styled his title so that it was green, white, and red, the colors of both the Italian flag and pizza. Naturally, I just had to bring it up during the workshop, just when we had gotten back to Luke’s story.
“I looked at the title,” I told the class, “and I was like, ‘That looks like an Italian flag,’ which makes me think of Margherita pizza, which makes me think of that bad pizza joint.”
The second I shut my mouth I realized what I had done. We were about to have a monster of a pizza discussion. I dropped out of the conversation, ears perked, prepared to savor every moment of the saucy debates to come.
Dr. Williams, as usual, set us up with a controversial statement. “As an aside, I don’t really ever understand when somebody says ‘bad pizza.’ I’ve never encountered a pizza that’s bad, ever ever.”
“There is such a thing,” Madeleine insisted.
And so it began.
But Dr. Williams continued like he had never heard her. “Even pizza that I’ve eaten out of a garbage can. Ever. Like, all pizza is good pizza to me.”
Shannon was on Madeleine’s side. “Okay, Little Caesar’s is pretty bad.”
“Little Caesar’s is really good!” Madeleine shot back. Okay, so maybe they weren’t on the same side.
Dr. Williams couldn’t agree. “See, I’ve never felt that before. I’m like, thank you so much for giving me back the will to live every time I eat pizza.”
“What about Pizza Hut?” Madeleine wanted to know.
Dr. Williams ignored Madeleine again. “My mother would make me an English Muffin, and put pasta sauce on it, and cheese, and I’d be like, thank you, Mom, for giving me the will to live back.”
“Now that’s better than Pizza Hut,” Madeleine tried again.
This time he took notice of her. “I love Pizza Hut! Are you complaining about the grease?”
Right on the nose. “That’s horrible!” exclaimed Madeleine.
“It’s wonderful!” Dr. Williams exclaimed back.
“If I wanted to drink grease, I’d get a cup!” Madeleine said, throwing her hands in the air in exasperation.
“Why would you drink grease out of a cup, when you can drink it out of a triangle given to you by the Pizza Hut?” At this point, I can’t tell if Dr. Williams believes what he’s saying, or if he’s just playing devil’s advocate.
Dr. Williams pointed aggressively at Caleb, who had his hand raised. “I would assert that people who think that bad pizza exists are the same kind of people who don’t stop and smell flowers as they walk on the sidewalk.”
Ouch.
“What a beautiful thing he just said,” Dr. Williams complimented Caleb for insulting half the class. “And it’s so true to what I believe about the world. Yeah, there are people who would make better flowers than people because at least they would produce oxygen and help us breathe better, and serve a purpose.” He laughed at his own joke, and clapped his hands once in delight.
Nathaniel decided he’d better stick in his two cents. “First of all, Pizza Hut is fantastic — ”
“Amen!” Dr. Williams applauded.
“No!” Madeleine yelled.
“It is the best pizza. You guys are wrong,” Nathaniel concluded.
“It’s so tasty!” Still playing devil’s advocate to Madeleine.
But Nathaniel wasn’t done arguing, either. “And I feel like there’s a generic type of pizza that’s part of the human experience, and it is what Luke has described. It doesn’t matter where you get it, it’s all the same, and I feel like almost everyone has an experience with it.”
I am almost proud of Nathaniel, trying to subtly steer us back to talking about Luke’s story, the whole reason we’re in class. I say almost, because all he accomplished is setting Dr. Williams off again.
“You call it bad?” Dr. Williams asked.
“It is not great, but I wouldn’t call it bad,” Nathaniel replied.
“I would call it — ” Dr. Williams paused to think of the opposite of “bad.” “All of it’s awesome, but it’s just a different volume for saying the word. So that pizza you described, is awesome. Pizza Joe’s, AWESOME! That’s how it is, but it’s all awesome.”
Everything is awesome. Just some things are awesomer than others.
Kelsey jumped in. “I would argue that there probably is some types of pizza that are bad,” and here she turned around to glare at Caleb. “But just because someone thinks that there’s bad pizza does not mean that they don’t stop to smell the flowers. I literally did that this morning!”
“No, it does,” Dr. Williams objected. “It really does! I learned what he taught me today.” Dr. Williams gave Caleb a nod of affirmation.
Abram had a question. “As a person who only likes one type of pizza, at one place, because I hate all pizza except this one place by my house, what would your ideal pizza be?”
“Me?” Dr. Williams asked.
“Yes,” Madeleine said, looking forward to the answer.
Abram clarified. “If you had to eat one kind for the rest of your life, like the crust, the shape, the sauce…”
Little did Abram know that he had opened the floodgates of Dr. Williams’s unique and OCD mind. He mimed each action — stuffing cheese into his mouth and all — as he narrated.
“Dude. I can tell you really easily, because at the end of every spring semester, I get the ideal pizza. And it’s from Pizza Joe’s. I put on it olives — black olives — and mushrooms with cheese, that’s it. But the way I eat the pizza makes it heavenly. Have I told you this before? This is how you’re supposed to eat a pizza: with a fork, okay, and you take it and you scrape the skin off, all of the cheese, you peel it all off into a lump. You take that lump, and you eat it. First thing. Then you scrape off all the sauce from the bread, and then you eat that. Then, you take the tines of the fork, and gently lift the dough from the hard part of the crust off and you’re eating each little lump. And then you have this thin, cardboard piece of pizza bread, and you take that with a large glass of Pepsi-Cola, and you dip it into the glass so that it hisses — tssss — and then you drink the hissing mush until it’s gone. Every piece of pizza, I eat it that way. Do you know why? Because there are too many tastes in a slice of pizza for your mouth to handle and you need to dissect the thing and taste them one at a time, or you’ll be overwhelmed by flavor and miss most of it.”
Dr. Williams snapped once, capturing the brilliance of his monologue.
Hardly a second had passed, however, before Abram voiced his knockout blow to Dr. Williams’s triumph, his face a mask of disbelief. “There is no way you’re a real person.”
The class, which until now had been relatively quiet as we listened to this back-and-forth, now erupted in the kind of laughter to make the classes down the hall close their doors. Dr. Williams doubled over at his podium, laughing the loudest of all of us.
“Oh!” He finally managed to get out, reaching into his leather briefcase. You’ve earned the Blue Book.” Sure enough, the book he pulled out was bright blue, but otherwise unremarkable.
“Is that a quote book?” Grace asked.
“It is a life book,” he replied. “In this book I put all things that impact me.” He flipped it open to a page near the beginning.
“Seems like you’ve just started it,” Grace added to Abram’s knockout blow, and the class once again burst out laughing in agreement.
Chuckling, Dr. Williams acquiesced. “I haven’t had a lot of impact in my life.” He spoke the words to the quote as he wrote. “There’s… no… way… you… are… a real person. What’s the date today?”
“April 20th” a chorus of students answered.
“Woah! What?” Dr. Williams seemed shocked, likely because the semester had passed so quickly and was nearly over. There’s certainly no other reason.
“Yeah, it’s the 20th of April, 4/20,” the chorus confirmed.
Even after the climax of the pizza debate, Madeleine had to ask just one more thing. “Wait, so, how you just described this ideal pizza — you eat the cheese, and then the sauce, and the doughy part — have you ever had traditional Chicago Deep Dish pizza? ’Cause it’s basically a glob of cheese, and then a bunch of sauce, and then the crust. I feel like you would like it.”
Now Madeleine and Dr. Williams could be friends again, offering up pizza as a peace offering.
“I think you’re right,” Dr. Williams agreed. “I think that that sounds awesome! I totally want to try it.” He set the blue book back in his bag, and shuffled his papers into order again. “Alright, back to the story.”
And that is the story of how we “wasted” five minutes of class debating the merits of pizza. Though if you ask anyone in the class, they’ll tell you they learned more in that five minutes than in any other class they had that day.
100% guaranteed.
