“She'll take your money but she won’t take your pizza”

I ordered too much pizza for an event at work -- a pie and a half too much, to be precise. I cleaned out the office refrigerator (contents: 3 half-empty bottles of soda, 1 bottle of Orangina, 2 hard-boiled eggs cuddled up in a small Tupperware, 1 jar of maraschino cherries, 1 Tupperware container containing festering left-over leftovers belonging to me, 1 unopened bottle of stir-fry sauce, 1 unopened can of refried beans) and then discovered it was not deep enough to hold a pizza box. I gave half a pie to an office down the hall, but that still left a whole pie untouched. With one black mark already painted on my vegan conscious for ordering it in the first place, I could not bring myself to toss an entire pie in to the garbage.

So, I decided to take the pie home with me and offer it to the first beggar who entered my subway car on the ride home. Glossing over the horrifying confidence with which I could assume that I would encounter a beggar, I will fast-forward to me, perched sideways on an A train seat with a giant pizza box dampening my thighs. I sat for a couple stops and then a woman came into the car asking, politely, for money. I offered her the pizza, she declined, and the two women next to me launched into a loud conversation about how the woman had turned down the free pie. Their tongue-clucking helped relive the momentary embarrassment of my rejected offer.

At Jay Street I hefted the wilting white box across the platform to wait for the F. I had to lean it against a pillar so my arms didn’t fall off. (Listen, respect your delivery guy: a whole large pizza is HEAVY.) When the F arrived there was a man sleeping on the corner seats, and I considered leaving the box there for him to discover when he woke but didn’t. I figured if no one who would want it got on this train, I could deposit it with one of the drunk guys who is inevitably sliding down a wall inside my home station.

Of course, of all days, this day the station was empty and me and the pizza were out of luck. After spending so much time with it in my arms, I had a version of Baby’s famous watermelon line from Dirty Dancing stuck in my head, and kept repeating to myself “I carried a pizza”. So, in a last-ditch effort to keep it out of the garbage can “I carried a pizza” to the bodega on our corner and gave it to the friendly round guy who works there who said he would give it to his super who he said would give it to his five kids. By this time the pizza was three hours old, which is very old in unrefrigerated pizza years, no? I was a little worried for the health of the children who would eventually eat it but I just ducked into the bodega to purchase some Bacos for tonight’s twice-baked potatoes and received a friendly greeting so I’m assuming the pizza did no damage. And since the Bacos I bought turned-out to have a January expiration date and I’m still planning on consuming them this evening, I’m hoping this is a fair assumption and there’s no cosmic scheme to punish me for poisoning the landlord’s offspring.

Watching Antonioni at the Sunshine

This weekend I had to run out of a movie theatre during the final piece in Eros, the just-released trilogy of “erotic shorts” because my laughter had become as uncontrollable as the wildest of libidos . Here’s a brief visualization exercise to help you understand what I was fleeing from.

Before we start, make yourself as comfortable as possible. You might want to loosen your necktie, take off your shoes or stretch out your legs. Feel free to recline if you prefer. Close your eyes. Imagine that you are in a movie theatre, in the dark, surrounded by your fellow citizens. Imagine that you are watching a movie. This is a movie that you paid ten dollars and fifty cents for and it is showing at a reputable independent movie house. Someone in a row close to you is eating popcorn. Take a deep breath. Now:

Picture breasts.

Picture breasts under a diaphanous shirt.

Picture the breasts under a diaphanous shirt on the body of a woman getting into a convertible.

Picture the convertible driving halfway down a road, stopping, reversing, and then driving down the road again.

Picture nymphs singing from a distance across water.

Keep picturing breasts.

Picture the breasts attached to a woman picking up a wine glass and rolling it onto the floor in a scene with virtually no other action or dialogue.

Picture a woman riding on a horse and lines like this:
--“Are you ready for my chaos?”
--“What kind of chaos?”
--“Total chaos.”

Picture bigger breasts.

Picture a man rakishly licking bigger breasts.

Picture a close-up of an ear cuff.

Picture a close-up of a toe ring.

Picture a man with an ear cuff bringing his mouth up to the foot of a woman with a toe ring.

Now, open your eyes.

Are you aroused? No? Well, are you shaking with not-so-silent laughter and crying? Are you feeling an urgent need to guffaw at top volume? Excellent. You have now successfully completed the visualization exercise: “Watching Antonioni at the Sunshine.”

At the sight of the mouth approaching toe ringI had to leave the theatre and gain composure in the hallway (I was so afraid that he was just going to suck it right off!). Of course I returned to take a seat in the back row just in time to see Juliet, my movie date, running up the theatre steps away from what she has dubbed “the twirling pussies”. I sense that no visualization exercise is necessary for a scene so accurately labeled, so I’ll spare you a description of it and of the naked improvised dancing on the seashore and the wild horses. If you have ten dollars and fifty cents burning a hole in your pocket, give it a horny seventh grade boy and go and watch some women with shirts on.

Musical Compost

Last week I was under an unfortunate sonic spell -- for several days I could not cleanse my mind of the lyrical line “fat man with a little jacket”. I didn’t know where it came from, or what came after it or before it, or if it was a song. I just knew that I had to sing it, to sing it all the time and often to accompany it with a little fifties-style soft-sole shuffle. I had to sing it when I woke up in the morning and at work. I had to sing it out loud through my mouth of toothpaste and I had to sing it in my head during sex. If I couldn’t sing it, I had to hum it. Whatever else was going on, I just had to sing about the fat man with the little jacket.

Eventually, Mark told me it was a Chris Farley line from the movie Black Sheep, a movie which I have never seen. These are the mysteries of the human existence.

My brain is a place of refuge for earworms, those snippets of song or sound that wriggle through the pathways of your mind and out through your mouth, and that no amount of mental pesticide can put an end to. I often spend weeks with these kinds of itinerant lyrics and melodies taking refuge in my head, crowding out the actual thoughts that rightfully reside there.

In addition to the top-40 hits and the TV jingles and the Christmas carols, for about two years now I’ve also been housing the word “Spanish”. Whenever I’m struggling to gather my thoughts, or to hone in on an idea that’s hovering on my mind’s outer edges, out it pops. “Stop a moment,” my brain might say to me, “there’s something you’re trying to remember. Something very important. Something you really need to know. Something like….SPANISH!” And then I’ll either remember that tomorrow is my very good friend Sam’s birthday and that I absolutely must call her, or I won’t and I’ll just be stuck with Spanish.

Does this make me sound crazy? Well consider this: when I was ten the song Tom’s Diner almost gave me a mental breakdown. For real. I don’t know how or why, but when we moved from New York to Hong Kong, I packed that song into some tiny, unsteady corner of my mind and brought it with me across the Pacific. My strongest memory of the first three months of my new life on a strange continent isn’t of the new food or new weather or new accents or new school or new house--it’s of the American song that tortured me.

Actually, it wasn’t even the whole song, it was just the first two stanzas of it, which were all I knew. Every unfilled minute of every hour of every day for those three months my brain would come to rest on those two stanzas, and it started to scare this shit out of me. My brothers learned that they could win any fight just by humming the song’s first line.

One day, like every earworm has so far, this one just one day shriveled up and died of its own accord and freed me! And, then, of course, there was room in my brain once more for new Canto-pop and the ad for Sincere shampoo, and, eventually, the fat man in the little jacket, who will surely be replaced by another insidious invertebrate soon enough. In the meantime, I am trying not to think about the worms regenerative powers and the spectre of Tom's Diner.