The Bad Slice

Right now I'm taking a quick break. I'm printing up a headshot of the Dufflebag for tomorrow when we head to Rhode Island where he's going to audition for a show on a kid's television network.

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I had one of the top five worst pieces of pizza in my life today at the Papa Gino's in Lexington. I'm so broke, and to shell out the five bucks for dogfood killed my spirit.

When I say it tasted like cardboard, I'm not saying it in the usual, metaphorical sense. It tasted, strongly, of actual cardboard. I am lucky I didn't break a tooth on the crust. Its saving grace was that it was small -- hardly enough food for a child. Despite it causing my ears to go numb from tasting so horribly, I managed to get it all down, since I was hungry and hadn't eaten anything all day other than a few slices of dry bread for breakfast. It was either that or eat nothing.

It was the type of pizza that is so bad, you wonder if there shouldn't be laws passed that prevent such horrible food from being served. It went beyond industrial pizza. At some point, someone in the chain at that restaurant should have had a flicker of guilt and thought: we can't possibly serve this to a paying customer.

But I give the world too much credit. I'd rather have them robbing me of my five bucks than, say, a grandmother. And I could only assume some sort of sociopath cooked and served and overheated that wretched slice, instead of hacking the neighbor into bits. It could only have been either someone deprived of all moral agency through slavery or someone without any moral sense at all who quickly slipped it into the "to go" and handed it to me, hoping I'd be long gone before I'd opened it and discovered I'd been served a lesson in roadside hucksterism.

Rotten. Rotten. Rotten.

The only local pizzas that have come close to being as bad were served to me in Nashua, at a little place behind Home Depot (it must have been shut down -- if it's still open, there truly is no order to the universe) and at the Pizza Pizzazz in Pepperrel, MA (where, aside from my pie being horrible food, they also got my order screwed up. I waited so long for it -- noting the whispering, it seems something went wrong the first time -- I didn't want to wait another twenty minutes.)

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To a hungry man, a bad slice transcends the laziness and cynicism that must have produced it.

The bad slice is a shot to the gut. It's a curb stomp. It's a direct hit on your nuts with a slapshot.

It's a rigged shellgame.

And I fell for it. Sucker!