The Meat Lover’s Pizza

a collection of thoughts

The Meat Lover’s Pizza. What a joke. The Meat Lover’s Pizza is anything but if you stop and think about it. Better it be called The Glutton’s Pizza. They should call it The Glutton’s Pizza. That is what it is in fact. It’s a monstrosity of conflicting flavors and textures that any true lover of meat would eschew without a second consideration. A true meat lover would be aghast at even the thought of putting such a thing in their pizza hole. It’s an insult really; a shameless marketing ploy. Who ever came up with the idea did so for purely base motives. Profit. Profit. Money rules everything. I’m sure whoever it was got a raise, they probably got a pat on the back from The Man. I mean is there no appreciation any longer for nuance, for simplicity? Do we have to heap more and more shit on our pizzas to find meaning in our sad pedestrian lives? Let’s face it, Gluttony has become a badge of honor, an indicator of success. Look at me, I’ve made it! I’m a thoughtless pig shoveling the animal kingdom down my pizza hole. Jesus. Who was a vegetarian, by the way. Can we do better? If people would just stop and think about it. A true lover of meat appreciates the unique complexities and individual characteristics of the parts and pieces that we as a society label meat. We’ve spent centuries perfecting the art of slaughter. Without meat would we even have a civilization? We owe the animals themselves a little more respect than to just mash them all together and shove them down our pizza holes. A sausage pizza is a meat lover’s pizza; a pepperoni pizza is a meat lover’s pizza; a hamburger pizza is a meat lover’s pizza. Hell, even a bbq chicken pizza is a meat lover’s pizza. There, I said it. But this, this “Meat Lover’s Pizza” is a disgrace to meat. This is an abomination. It’s sick. Truly sick. Our society is diseased if this is the best we can do.

The expression on the young black woman’s face behind the counter at Papa John’s did not alter in the slightest during my tirade. She gestured at the pizza box sitting next to a jug of red soda on the counter between us.

“Do you want the pizza or not?”

I gave her my credit card. I signed my name on the receipt and under it scrawled GLUTTON. Then I took my Meat Lover’s Pizza and my two liter of Tahitian Treat and went out and got in my car. I pulled around behind the pizza shop and parked next to their dumpster, facing a field where it appeared a group of homeless people had set up camp. I wrestled with the two liter of soda until I was finally rewarded with the satisfying hiss of escaping gas; I put the bottle straight to my mouth and took a deep pull of Treat. The Treat, TT, Treat-treat, my companion since I was a toddler. Red water, mama had called it in my childhood. The childhood she let me squander watching Tennessee Tuxedo cartoons and The Guiding Light, eating microwave baked potatoes lacquered with mayonnaise and ketchup in a shadow room that had no access to natural light while she played cards in parlors of chance with tanned orange lizard ladies and bloated men with dandruff hair in cheap suits. My teeth were brown by the time I was ten. My pediatrician said I had the blood sugar of a Keebler Elf. Mama said he was a queer.

I opened the pizza box and confronted the steaming horror before me. Sausage piled on hamburger piled on pepperoni piled on ham piled on bacon piled on an oozing bed of processed cheese. A few flakes of dried parsley were scattered around as some kind of joke. I saw the grimace on my face in my rear view mirror as I brought a slice to my pizza hole and inserted. My tastebuds cried out. Surrender. Glutton, I admonished myself. As I methodically devoured my pie rueful bite by bite in between sips of TT I watched as two winos from the camp ganged up on a third and began raining fists down on him. A woman wrapped in a sleeping bag was staggering around screaming for help. She was loud. I could hear her even though my windows were rolled up. She saw me sitting in my car and she began to wave frantically in my direction. I chased down a chunk of sausage with red water. It appeared that possibly one of the attackers had a knife as I saw him poke something several times at his victim who in response fell to the ground, convulsed, then grew still. When the man turned and stabbed the woman in the neck I decided it was time for me to be on my way. I was sated, degraded but sated. Not much of the pizza remained. I rolled down my window and threw the box out. My Treat I stashed next to me on the passengers seat, my Treat-treat. One last look over my shoulder as I pulled away from the dumpster revealed the two assailants bending over the bodies of the man and woman, probably rummaging through their pockets. I drove back past the front of the Papa John’s, the counter girl was standing outside smoking a cigarette, I tooted my horn and waved. She did not reciprocate my friendly gesture. What the hell is wrong with people these days, I wondered to myself. I could feel an attack of indigestion coming on.