For a while life was bleak. I thought about heading home to New Jersey, but Amy had just kicked off marriage number two and I wasn’t sure I could handle seeing her happy with some other guy; dealing with failure seemed easier three thousand miles away from the promise of my youth. In the anonymity of Southern California, I could embrace my failure, make it my friend, pour it a drink and let it spend the night. I had some money saved, but only enough for a few months and no real experience except in the theater, yet there was one thing at which I excelled.
I might have flopped as a playwright, but I was a master pizza chef, a virtuoso at turning dough, mozzarella, and spicy marinara into delicious works of art. My Uncle Dan had trained me well. We used only the best ingredients, everything fresh, always, including the homemade sauce that Uncle Dan would jar and sell to his favorite customers. I’d grown up in the kitchen, my after-school hours and summer vacations spent dishing dollar-slices to the hungry denizens of Holman Beach. Sometimes I’d get into a zone where the dough and I became one; I’d close my eyes and surrender to my other senses, the scent of cayenne and basil guiding my fingers, the fleshy push and pull of homemade dough driving me to late-night bursts of pizza mania. I could hit the perfect blend of sauce and cheese without even looking, and I could feel with my skin the exact moment when to slide the pie from the oven to keep the crust tender beneath its sheath of golden brown. Eve Ensler’s Vagina might have beaten my Midnight Chair, but had the judges tasted a slice of my Sicilian, the Obie would have been mine.
So when I finally quit writing, my life turned back to pizza. I lacked the cash to open my own place but found a struggling shop near the zoo in San Diego run by a pair of Vietnamese brothers who seemed to be avenging our bombing the shit out of their native country by serving pizza that tasted like Wonder Bread topped with ketchup and melted Velveeta cheese. I was only in town for the weekend visiting a friend, but my instincts told me I should get the hell out of L.A. and make a change. I emptied my bank account and bought 25% of the business, the brothers gladly turning over control of the kitchen. As a rule, you can’t get good pizza anywhere except New Jersey. There are some Brooklyn guys who will argue this to the death, sometimes literally, but the true pizza gourmand will always go Garden State, and this was my great advantage. Within three months, we were the hottest place in the city.
While most of the profits went to the brothers, I earned enough to get by and tried to lose whatever ambitions I’d had for a life in the theater. In a weird way making pizza was healing. I didn’t have to worry about plot, pacing, or character anymore; in the kitchen, I became Zen-like and precise. It was like being home again, almost—and then one day my future ex-wife Kristin stopped in to pick up twenty pies for an office wedding shower. Six months later we were married, the serious business of Starting Over ready to launch.
This is how life works, I thought. You have a dream; you fall short and then compromise, and if you’re lucky you scratch out a marginally comfortable existence with enough distractions to keep you from hating yourself. Wasn’t that how most people lived? All those high-five American dreams of loving your job and creating your Oprah-life were bullshit; everyone knew that. At least I enjoyed making pizza, and I was good at it, satisfied, mostly; yet I still snuck off to local theaters to watch dreadful productions of The Glass Menagerie and The Odd Couple, hiding in the dark like a priest at a strip club, praying for strength.
Yet overall things were okay; they were almost good, and then… they weren’t.
One day I came home early from work to catch a nap before the evening rush and found Kristin naked on the couch, perched on all fours while some pony-tailed plumber fucked her from behind, his tool belt and his pants pooled around his ankles, his cock deep inside my (soon-to-be-ex) wife. On the coffee table sat a pizza from Sal’s Famous, our top rival. (Sal was from Nevada. Really—why did he even try?) A pie from Sal’s Pizza seemed a worse betrayal than the dick in her ass. I suppose I knew the marriage was over even before I started flinging Sal’s crappy slices at the plumber’s hairy white butt, and for the next year and a half, until the lucky break of meeting Kelly, I spent most of my days alone—making pizza, staring into space, and writing a new play.
. . . . .
“Seriously, Donnie, I loved it.”
“That’s because you love me.”
“We don’t love you that much,” she said. “I’m not some teenager who thinks her boyfriend walks on water. If your play sucked, I might not tell you, but I wouldn’t say that it was great.”
“I’m happy you liked it,” I said, “but …it’s sub-par, trite…”
“Okay, whatever. I’m not Richard Frank from The New York Times.”
“Frank Rich.”
“I know who he is. And I find it interesting
