From The Pizza Chronicles


Pizza dough is a strange substance. As well as its various culinary and mathematic (don't ask) properties, it also has some peculiar metaphysical abilities. It straddles the line between real and unreal; lie and truth. Flour, water, oil, yeast. Simple enough, I am sure. But science has yet much to learn. Yay, they may never fully understand the fearsome power stored within.

The pizza manufacturing and distribution industry has its ups and downs, like anything else. But our ups are overflowing and desperate, and our downs are stressfully barren. Demand is held firmly in the random sway of unpredictable social factors and quantum physics. If it starts raining, 57,142 residents of Canton Township all recite in harmonic unison: "I'm going to call Marco's Pizza on Ford Road and deliver me some pizza!" Or, if the quark actually is spinning in the other direction: "I feel strangely compelled to feed my own damn self tonight, rather than bother Jim and his Marco's Pizza brethren and sistren." Suffice to say, one can never know just how hectic or dismal a night is going to be. I don't know how they all got my name either.

We had one of the dismal ones a few days ago. The rain started to fall and there was no observer so the top quark had a positive spin which made everyone not call for a pizza. It was also then that the terrible raw power of pizza dough forever altered my life and everything I believe in (well, it was weird anyway.)

With no repetitive, monotonous tasks shackling it, my brain searched for something to do or a shiny object to fixate upon. Erica (Little Miss Catharsis) and Ian the Donkey Boy were puttering around the front of the store. I loitered by the cut table, marveling at a point of light glittering on a spoon, when an idea struck me.

I grabbed a small glob of raw pizza dough and kneaded it into a fluid mass. Slowly, a form appeared. Two cylinders. Four cylinders. A sphere. An arm. A rectangle. Two legs. A head. A... pizza dough homunculus? Yes, before me lay a man, perhaps three inches tall, of simple pizza dough. He was prostrate on the table, innocent and unsuspecting. Enemy of none, protector of small children, lost dogs, truth, justice, and wayward pizza delivery drivers. I smiled down on him, and he beamed with cartoonish good cheer. He never saw the fork coming.

I glanced quickly to the left and right before plunging the plastic flatware deep into his chest. It jutted out of him grotesquely, thrusting into the air it mocked him as he lay --pinned. I dribbled some pizza sauce around the wound and beside the broken body. The scene was complete. A man lay dead, oozing pizza sauce and a plastic fork from his quadruple wound. I slinked to the back to watch the reaction of my coworkers. Ian was first.

Against all natural law, the phone rang. Ian diligently coded the order and proceeded to the cut table. He froze in mid-stride. Blinked. Blinked again. Then, with furrowed brow: "What the fuck is this?" He pointed to the homunculus bleeding all over the table. Erica turned to look.

She touched her lip, half worried, half amused. "Oh my God..." She whispered.

"You know that had to be Jim," Ian said flatly, conveniently sidestepping the sticky issue of whether the pizza dough man was actually the physical manifestation of our collective pain; dropped pies, violently ill-mannered customers, getting stiffed on a delivery and then running out of gas in the middle of a major intersection. Maybe he was our crushed hopes, our shattered dreams, and our tortured souls made flesh. Maybe he was every indignity the pizza industry dishes out. Maybe the universe just gurgled him up, shaping him from our collective pain. Maybe.

"Yeah," Erica sighed. "It was Jim." Then: "That kid's such a psycho."

Right. I have a baby alien growing inside my skull, and sometimes it makes me do strange things. Pardon me.

In one unceremonious gesture, Erica tossed him in the garbage. He crumpled with my spirit. He came only to help humanity. How could she be so callus?


Later that day --after I was accosted and mocked openly for my pizza dough voodoo doll-- business picked up and we got some deliveries. The sky still shivered and wept and, occasionally, shuddered with the stomp of distant thunder. But pizzas were moving, and I was out on the road with rain music.

Returning from some unmemorable run I came upon an occurrence that remains --to this day-- among the damnedest things I have ever seen: the Saran Wrap Dominatrix and her cellophane bondage slave.

Zooming up Cherry Hill, I was blissfully unaware of any strangeness lurking beyond. Chan Marshal strummed, and Exiguus whined and shook. Then I saw them. A few hundred feet ahead, sulking up the sidewalk, were two teenage girls. Perhaps 14 or 15, they walked side by side. As I peered, I began to notice something odd about one of them. The shorter one closer to me was covered in something. I slowed as I overtook them, and strained to see. The shorter girl was covered in Saran Wrap! It looped around her in thick ribbons, loosely covering her entire body. It drooped over her shoulders, and spiraled around her arms.

As I came up to them, the enveloped girl turned her head and looked at me. For an instant we made eye contact; she was expressionless. As I passed and saw them from the front I could see that the girl was bound by something else. A thin red rope --a wire or string-- tethered her. The taller girl held the other end like a leash, and it dangled loosely between them.

I looked back at them as I sped away. No excuses, no apologies, and no explanations. The Saran Wrap Dominatrix and her poor, poor cellophane bondage slave plodded on, unperturbed. When I got back to the store I related my bizarre encounter.

Shawn, the 18-year-old high school drop-out store manager said only: "How come I never see weird stuff like that when I drive?"

"I guess I don't really know," I said. "I already know the universe is out to get me, so maybe this is just a part of that sweeping process."

He grunted.


It didn't rain the next day. Erica woke up with the sun and found herself covered in blood. She blamed my voodoo dough ministrations, but I didn't confess to anything. I swear I am not making this up. As she tells the story, she snapped awake covered in a dry, flaking, red substance. Not at all unlike pizza sauce, ketchup, or blood whence sloshed on a sleeping girl and left to dry. Her bed, but mostly her, was covered in the stuff. She screamed --as anyone who wakes up covered in blood should-- and called a friend.

It just goes to show, pizza dough is a strange and powerful substance best not trifled with, and woe is she who moves against it.