You Are a Complete Disappointment

by Mike Edison

  3

  THE GREAT MEATBALL PIZZA INCIDENT

  In 1975, when I was eleven, pizza occupied a central role in my existence. Back then we had Nino’s, which was favored by some of the kids because it was only forty cents a slice, right next to my elementary school on Amboy Avenue. Ferraro’s up the street was fifty, and Tony’s had the chutzpah to charge seventy-five.

  Nino’s place was always dirty, with grease-stained signs drawn in shitty marker, advertising the two-slice-and-small-soda special and the price of garlic knots, and not even taped to the wall properly. Tony’s had a professional sign with clean plastic letters, and he knew how to twirl a pizza in the air, like some sort of pizza daredevil, and as you know by now, I am nothing if not a slave to the spectacle. Tony’s also used better cheese and had a nice thick red sauce. Ferraro’s was skimpy with the mozzarella and their sauce was thin. Any eleven-year-old could tell the difference, but considering the amount of pizza I ate, I thought I could stake my claim as a connoisseur: Nino’s sucked; Ferraro’s was obviously cutting corners, but passable if you only had fifty cents; and Tony’s was like the Evel Knievel of pizzas.

  The White Birch Inn, however, was the final frontier. It reeked of illicit sex and low-level crime—part of the extended demimonde of Routes 1 and 9, which ran together from Woodbridge up past the Rahway prison, through Linden, Elizabeth, and Newark, all the way to New York City. As far as I can remember, it was always a real piece of shit, pockmarked with as many axle-jarring incongruities as hot-sheet motels and failing businesses.

  As a little kid, the motels particularly fascinated me, what with their signs for water beds, in-room movies, and mirrored ceilings, with rates by the hour, night, or week. Some of them even had pools! And as far as I could tell, there were always vacancies. One day, I reckoned, maybe I’d get a room for a few hours and go swimming and watch some of the in-room movies on one of those water beds. It seemed like it would be a lot of fun.

  The White Birch was a low, white stucco building with a black roof—a real bunker of a cocktail lounge—and whenever we drove by it I was always equally fascinated and creeped out because I didn’t understand why anyone would go into such a dingy-looking place, especially in the middle of the day, when adults were supposed to be working. And yet the parking lot was always full. Clearly something was happening in there, and I could not wait until I was old enough to find out exactly what. So imagine my surprise when it was announced that we would be dining there, joining our Jewish neighbors, the Goldsteins, who swore by the White Birch’s thin-crust pizza.

  This was just about the most exciting news I had ever heard. First, one had to drive more than five minutes to get there (which seemed ridiculous because, in my experience, no one had ever gone out of their way for pizza). Second, up until then the only other real restaurant I had ever been in with my parents was the Jade Pagoda, a dimly lit Chinese restaurant with a dusty tiki décor. My parents would order lobster Cantonese, which was exotic without being threatening, and a cheap source of lobster. Never mind that it was covered in a white sauce flecked with green scallions and looked like something Linda Blair spat up in The Exorcist, back in the 1970s, suburban Jews loved that shit.

  The White Birch, however, was goyish. It was blue-collar and boozy. Up in front there was a bar lost in a gauzy haze of cigarette smoke, where guys with big collars and gold chains bought whiskey sours for the Big-Haired Ladies, with their eyes coyly darting from man to man beneath curtains of blue eye shadow. My parents had no business being there. They were strangers in a strange land. Cocktails were like kryptonite to sheltered Jews who lived in fear of gentile culture (to paraphrase Lenny Bruce: Wine is Jewish, cocktails are goyish), and it all helped create the ticklish sense of unease that was the catalyst for what is now generally referred to as “The Great Meatball Pizza Incident.”

  THE GOLDSTEINS, who lived down the street, were always friendly and fairly innocuous. They had two kids—one my age, who had kind of a square head, and another a few years younger who was chubby and had some sort of speech impediment. I have no idea how they first found themselves in the White Birch—I am guessing they had some progressive-leaning gentile friends who let them in on the secret—but apparently they had experienced the same epiphany that I was now having on my first visit: This was the best pizza, ever. Suddenly it was clear as day that Tony, Nino, and the Ferraro brothers weren’t much more than confidence men selling tired pie to naive children and provincial adults who had no idea of how good pizza could really be.

  The White Birch pie was clearly playing in a different league. Somehow they had fallen upon the perfect sauce-to-cheese ratio—less of both than either Tony or Nino used, but more than the cheapskates at Ferraro’s—and the result was to those greasy slabs what the ballet was to Black Sabbath: elevated. The crust was crispy and so light that it probably couldn’t have sustained too much more sauce and cheese than what the geniuses at the White Birch had proportioned, anyway. This was the first time I had realized that the crust wasn’t just a delivery system for toppings—it was actually maybe even the most important part of the trip—and that revelation in and of itself made me look at the world differently. It was like the first time you looked in a microscope in grade school and saw things on a cellular level, or read Horton Hears a Who! and got the idea that things weren’t always what they seemed, that below the surface there was a lot more going on than what met the eye. I thought I could eat one hundred slices. Everyone, it seemed, agreed, and at first there was much happy munching.

  Initially we ordered one large pie for us, and the Goldsteins ordered their own. We each had our own proprietary pitcher of root beer.

  One of the many things my parents never really understood was family-style eating. Even at the Chinese place, apart from the pupu platter (which they ordered for two, even though we were five, and there was always a row over who was going to get the sparerib and who was going to get stuck with the shrimp toast, whatever that was), everyone ordered their own entrées, which I suspect was mostly to keep the kids away from their precious lobster Cantonese, which we weren’t allowed to order because it was deemed too expensive for children to eat.

  Our dinners at home weren’t exactly celebrations, either. My mother clearly did not relish cooking for the family—generally the hallmark of a proud Jewish mom. The whole thing was just a major pain in the ass that involved a lot of yelling, and she never strayed too far from a horrendous rotation that was anchored in Shake ’n Bake® chicken, frozen Empire® kosher turkey breast, “Chinese” chicken baked on a cookie sheet flooded with a jar of sweet-and-sour sauce and finished with an entire can of water chestnuts, and spaghetti and meatballs drowned with extra “Old World”-style sauce. Once a week, like clockwork, we ate rare London broil, which my father carpeted with salt and inhaled like a jet engine, only chewing sporadically and making sounds similar to what you would imagine a giant, meat-eating dinosaur made while eating a smaller, inferior dinosaur. Occasionally, if she forgot to shop and we had already sent out for pizza once that week, she would make pancakes out of the mix that sat on the pantry shelf like that picture of Dorian Gray, which is why I still hate breakfast for dinner and never eat eggs after brunch.

  Eventually, when my dad moved out, Mom pretty much gave up on cooking altogether, leaving us stacks of frozen pizzas, which was even worse than the stuff Nino was peddling. Fortunately, my friends took mercy on me, and I had family dinner with them and their parents a couple of times a week, which was a real eye-opener. They laughed. The parents listened to their children. They kidded one another. They talked about their days. It was as if they actually knew one another and were interested in one another’s lives. Sometimes they even liked the same music! It was usually the Beatles, but nonetheless, the entire concept was astonishing. Not once in my lifetime did I ever see my parents enjoy each other or their kids. No one ever asked me what I was reading, or if I had a girlfriend, or what we were learning in American History. Dinner was the sound of m
y father’s sloppy chewing, and the kids’ squabbling, and Mom begging through her teeth for everyone to please be nice.

  I don’t remember what we ordered on our pizza that night at the White Birch—probably nothing, given the anemic, utterly joyless gastronomic proclivities of my parents—but the Goldsteins ordered something that my overcooked brain had not even imagined possible: a meatball pizza.

  What was this wondrous fusion of all that was holy? Were there entire meatballs on the pizza? What kept them from rolling off? How did it work? The mind boggled. I had to know.

  And the Goldsteins were only too happy to share. In fact, they were delighted to initiate me into this brave new world where meatballs and pizzas lived in peace and harmony (it turned out that the meatballs were sliced and then laid on the pizza like pepperoni). But my father was having no part of it. Mrs. Goldstein, who shared her oldest son’s square-shaped head, passed me a slice of this miracle, but my dad brought his hand down to stop her. “NO,” he said, “Don’t eat that. We have our own.”

  “It’s fine,” said Mrs. Goldstein, who was soft-spoken and very sweet. “We have plenty, and we can always order another. You should try the meatball pie—it’s delicious.”

  “NO! We don’t eat other people’s food,” he barked at me. “That’s their pizza.” He was like some great, pissed-off god hurling thunderbolts down from Mount Olympus to terrorize the pizza-munching mortals, and the table froze. I suppose even the gods can be petty when they feel like it.

  Elton John was playing on the jukebox: “Bennie and the Jets”—still my very favorite of his hits. Details like that tend to be painted vividly when cast against the spectacle of a man screaming about a meatball pizza, and with such fury that my little brothers either are now on the verge of tears or have already begun to cry, and the younger, speech-impaired Goldstein is bleating something horrible.

  There was more yelling, my mother begging him to chill the fuck out: “It’s only a piece of pizza!” My father was fighting her all the way, screaming, “We don’t eat other people’s food! We can afford our own!”

  It was what you’d call a scene, and the worst fight I ever saw my parents get into in public. At home there was much worse, but this was just mortifying. The whole restaurant, including the Big-Haired Ladies and their pride of suitors at the bar, were all staring at us, and I’m sitting there, arm still outstretched to accept this piece of pizza, caught in the middle of the storm.

  I didn’t know what to do. The pizza was now in my hand, and the old man was screaming at me to give it back, and the Goldsteins were saying just take it. Mr. Goldstein, whose head was quite round in contrast with his wife and child’s, was encouraging calm. And what was I supposed to do: give back a piece of pizza after it was already in my hand? That seemed like the worse option, and not because I was rebelling or showing any adolescent impudence; I was just really embarrassed at the idea of passing a piece of meatball pie back and forth in some existential tug-of-war while the old man stood over us yelling. So I pulled my arm back reluctantly, and the slice of meatball pizza dropped into my plate.

  I guess at some point the yelling stopped, but by then I had been meditating on the slice of meatball pizza that had found its home in front of me and was no longer able to resist temptation. I let caution to the wind and took a bite, and let me tell you, it was all that I had ever imagined pizza could be.

  We’ve already discussed the cheese-to-sauce ratio and the subtlety of the infrastructure (namely the crust), but those fine, spicy meatball slices suggested that you could put anything on a pizza, and in the years to come I would try, inventing over fourteen thousand variations of the stoner-approved pizza bagel, all prepared in a toaster oven.

  At that moment I had no idea what precipitated the old man’s meltdown, but now I know that in the macro, he was losing control over my mother, who had become increasingly fed up with his bullying and his parsimony and otherwise pathological relationship with money. I’m certain that this no-pizza-sharing policy was driven by some pitiful, primal fear that he’d get stuck for an extra seventy-five cents for a cup of root beer quaffed by a Goldstein, or his part of the tip would be calculated inequitably because it did not reflect the exact inventory of pizza toppings eaten by his own spawn (not to mention his crappy table manners, which, given his uptight Boston upbringing, remained something of a mystery). And in the micro, this just wasn’t his kind of place: The people here were tacky, and worse, they had a fair shot at getting laid that night (I am sure that by now my mother was only sleeping in the same bed with him as a matter of convenience), and thus were winning at life despite what he must have perceived as their lousy New Jersey, Routes 1 and 9, cocktail-lounge pedigree. Besides everything else, he was still a snob, and judging the regulars at the White Birch Inn fueled his sense of superiority. All that, plus he obviously resented being shown up by a meatball pizza. That had to sting.

  Years later, after my parents were separated and at war over a divorce settlement—he really dragged Mom through the mud, making her appraise twenty-year-old wedding gifts so he could write them off against any alimony or child support he would eventually have to pay, even as he was making more and more money—he suggested that he take me and my brothers out to the White Birch to get some meatball pie. There was no mention of the incident, and I thought, Whoa, this was like the suburban Lexington and Concord—ground zero where a childhood that should have been like an episode of The Wonder Years turned into a bloody battlefield that left two families deeply scarred. Are you out of your mind, or just completely fucking tone-deaf?

  There was one other thing that I learned when I put that first slice of meatball pie in my maw and masticated—something that would help me across the years, even more than the endless riffs on the pizza bagel: Life could be great, if you just let it be that. Pizza and root beer and “Bennie and the Jets”—how could you possibly improve on that? Simple pleasures ruled! Happiness may or may not be fleeting, but no matter, because there was a lot of it out there to grab on to, and if you were good you could hold on to it and share it with the people you loved, and all the money in the world couldn’t buy you better pizza or better root beer or better Elton John on the jukebox. This morsel of wisdom, as you can imagine, came in pretty handy years later.

  DID YOU EVER HEAR SOMEONE SAY that the weirdest shit always happens when you are stoned? Well, let me ask you this: Do you really think the world is a different place and that new things happen just because you got high? That seems like a fairly self-centered worldview. The point is, all you have to do is open up and let the universe happen to you. Tuning in is a lot more important than turning on. When I got that sorted, locks came flying off doors.

  I’ve come to believe that my parents were never truly happy because, simply, they never made happiness a goal. They had so many expectations that were never met that they became top-loaded with misery. They were angry all the time. They never learned how to let go and live in the moment. There they were with a table full of meatball pizza and root beer and three happy children, and they couldn’t even see it for the blessing it was. This was the first time that I realized their marriage was doomed.

  Listening to my folks yell and scream and stress and freak and fret and worry seemingly every second of their lives, it’s no wonder I was sent fleeing in the opposite direction. They watched every dime like carrion birds; I spent money like a sailor on leave. They lived in fear of carbohydrates, fear of cholesterol, fear of sugar, fear of salt, fear of fat, fear of liquor, fear of strippers jumping out of birthday cakes. They were suspicious of Mexican food and, most likely, Mexicans. Their lives were planned to the calorie. If eating was a chore, then what else? I have empirical proof that they had sex together at least twice, but beyond that I refuse to speculate.

  I know people who react with anger to every little hiccup in their day. Chinese food arrives cold, and holy shit! It’s a total fucking catastrophe. Me, I’m just amazed that I can pick up the phone or push a few buttons
and someone brings me an order of dumplings and some ribs. What, all of a sudden I’m the sultan of Brunei? What kind of marvelous world do we live in? If it comes cold, I just heat it up, and the next time I call someone else.

  Of course in every life there are going to be broken hearts, and deaths, and illness, and bumps and bruises, and every color of existential angst and depression. Relationships are hard. Life punches back. But that still doesn’t mean you get to be a prick.

  Every fall, at Yom Kippur, I atone for the sin of picking on someone who was maybe just not as quick as I was when I was about eleven years old. It was just once, and I knew it was wrong, but I took advantage of my sharp tongue and I hurt someone’s feelings. That was a long time ago, and to my knowledge caused no lasting harm, nor is even remembered by anyone besides me. I discussed this with a rabbi friend of mine, and he thought I was being ridiculous, that I really needed to forgive myself and move on.

  He was right, of course. And if there is going to be any forgiveness in this story, I should probably start with myself. Warm me up for when I get around to the old man.

  I’ve learned from my mistakes, which is really all it takes to forgive oneself for them. I am a much happier person than I used to be, and if there is one thing I am sure of, it is that kindness and compassion trump cruelty every time. Still, I hate the idea that there was ever a part of me that could be mean.

  4

  WELCOME TO THE SUMMER OF SUCK

  Later it became known as “the Summer of Suck,” the time that began with the old man dying after dressing me down through an oxygen mask, quickly followed by my artist-turned-lawyer girlfriend dumping me, my employer of six years—a major publisher of music books, where I served as a senior editor—letting me go unceremoniously, even as they asked me to stay on as a freelancer and continue to edit books (basically they wanted me to keep doing my job, but in a rough economy they had lost interest in paying me a regular salary and covering my health insurance), and my Hercules of a cat finally kicking the bucket after eighteen years of sleeping next to my head.