Perfect Pizza Storm.

On Thursdays I get to spend most of the day working on stuff for school (I have class tonight at 7pm) and so I spend a majority of Thursday's sitting here at my kitchen table where I do most of my writing and most of my schoolwork. These are relatively peaceful days and I open the blinds on my big window that looks out into the courtyard of my apartment building. The window faces north and the quality of light is usually quite nice. I also get to see all the comings and goings off all the randoms who live in my building. There is a weird mix of other college students, 20-somethings who are probably living on their own for the first time, some families, but also pensioners, and some straight up burn-outs. This ain’t exactly a middle class haven or anything, the rent is fairly low and so that attracts a certain type of renter. I love it here. I have never felt uncomfortable and while the building is old, the place has never felt dumpy to me, though my expectations are probably someone different. A couple months ago I was at a Christmas party thrown by some friends-of-friends and those friends-of-friends had just moved into a beautiful and GIANT house with like 5 bedrooms, they’d put in new tile and redone the kitchen and bathroom. It was a beautiful home in the style of a Pottery Barn catalogue and I couldn’t help but think, “It is a good thing these people don’t come visit me ever because my apartment has wine-stained carpet and some visible water damage. I don’t mind those things, but clearly what I value is different. My friends-of-friends don’t even have kids yet, but their house throbbed gently with the anticipation. That place was too big and I can’t even imagine the size of the mortgage. The place was big in that way that vastly exceeds need. And while we all get to choose how to live our lives, I shook my head a little bit while trying to locate a bathroom amongst the thicket of doors and bedrooms and garages and offices and hall closets. Who needs all this? I was asking myself.

I do not, but then I left a decent career to go back to school, to write, to learn how to teach and thereby guarantee a life of debt and poverty. But I’m happy and no amount of empty bedrooms can ever add up to that.

So I am having a nice and peaceful Thursday sitting here at my little table and watching the cast of the play “My Apartment Building” going about their lives. One thing that I’ve observed and which you might find interesting if you are a sociologist or cultural anthropologist (and aren’t we all, in a way, amateur sociologists or cultural anthropologists?) there is almost constantly a pizza deliveryman showing up. The socioeconomic mix of tenants here seems to have created a perfect storm of pizza. It is not yet noon and I have seen 3 different pizza guys show up. Who orders pizza in the morning? I think this is worthy of study.

Speaking of study, I need to get back to mine. All these fancy books aren’t going to read themselves.

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The Red Baron.

The Red Baron

by james bezerra

“Did you know,” Leslie asks as we lie naked in the bed, sweaty and passing an American Spirit back and forth between us, “that Red Baron Pizza was not named after the Red Baron, but by the Red Baron? He learned about pizza during the war and tried to make it back in Germany when he got home.”

I’m naked. She might not be, technically, her rumpled black panties still hanging around her thin and pale ankle — which clicks in a strange but soft way when she walks and which she swears doesn’t hurt and which she doesn’t even notice anymore — which  is dangling over the edge of the bed.

“Who was he again?” I ask because my brain is still fuck fuzzy, and that’s great because it had been awhile and so some of my higher brain functions have gone snowblind from the sensory overload of her wet skin on my skin and that kiwi smell in the tangles of her hair.

“He was that pilot. In World War I. Who shot all of those people down.”  

My brain starts to clear a little, like the sky over France on a cold spring morning a long time ago and Leslie puts the cigarette out and half curls across me and drapes one leg across my body and she nestles into me as though she loves me and there is something so very sweet about it and, yet, so odd, because it was just mini-minutes ago that she was the opposite of sweet; that she was salt in sweat and muscle and flesh and fold and grunt and teeth on my lips and twitch and slick and a little bit mean in the way her hips moved and I’d thought there in those moments, just before she came, that she might be able to break me.  Yet now her ear is pressed so delicately over my chest above my heart which is still thudding heavy and her small breasts are pressed so casually against my ribs. And so now it is so odd. The contradiction. Like the pretty blue cobalt sky clearing over the torn black scar of a French battlefield on a chilly but otherwise perfect spring day.

“I thought he died,“ I say. As I move my mind back into my own body and notice how sticky I am on my hips and thighs and while I let the tip of my finger trace up and back along the curved line of her spine.

“Oh I’m sure he did,” she says while wiggling her toes. “He’d be, like, a hundred and thirty years old now.”

“No, I thought that he was shot down or … no, he was shot be he landed his plane, I think. I don’t think he survived the war.”

Leslie’s whole body engages in a small shrug and her skin rubs her sweat into my sweat and I think about what we taste like together. I can tell, somehow, from the way her body slackens and her skin cools, in just the tiniest way, that she has closed her eyes and is drifting away from awake, “Maybe he didn’t.”

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