I spent the first 30 years of my life rail thin and the last 15 in an educated losing battle with food. Then I ate what I wanted when I wanted. Today, I watch things skinnies eat in amazement. There is nothing that goes into my mouth or theirs that I don't have an approximate calorie, carb, protein and fat count spinning in my head.
Food is not pleasure but guilt, but it doesn't keep me from regularly breaking through the calorie count falsely justifying the pasta or cheese with the chocolate or cake I left on the plate.
During the year-and-a-half I lost and maintained the loss of 30 pounds I had no pizza. Not a slice.
The girls lived home then and the once-a-week, let's-get-delivery-and-not-heat-up-the-kitchen only occured in my absence.
Truth be told, it wasn't that hard. There was no pizza to speak of in the small Southern community where I lived, just the national coupon/delivery chains.
I told the tales of the Buffalo pizza of my youth to the girls until it achieved mythic proportions in my mind ( and rolled eyes from the girls). My maternal grandfather was dead for about 15 years before either of them were born, but he lived to them in my oft-repeated quote of his that any pizza but that from a particular neighborhood joint in his working class neighborhood was simply "tomato paste on cardboard."
Those pies weren't a meal, but a dramatic reward complete with ritual. The arrival of the box. with steam pouring from the little hole in the corner, was an event. It suspended the need for Nana's Fiestaware place settings as Grumpy ripped the box top into impromptu plates for the stringy-cheese-dripping triangles with the oven-crisped pepperoni pooled with greasy nectar. His "cardboard /tomato paste promouncement" always followed his first bite, stamping it with a guarentee that your own slice would be even better.
I assumed that rich people did this every night.
Flash forward to a return trip to Buffalo a few years back at my cousin Bernie's comfortable suburban home. Western New York is still a town dominated by Mom and Pop pizza shops and allegiances to your neighborhood favorites are not unlike those to the Bills -- lifelong and irrational. Bernie is my cousin on my father's side and had no contact with Grumpy or his neigborhood as he grew up, yet the pizza he served about 20 miles and lightyears away had the same name on the box. I forgave him using actual paper plates on the first bite. Right after I quoted Grumpy I was ready to raise a toast to suburban sprawl. It was nearly perfect and worth every calorie-excessive bite. But that was the 'burbs.
The challenge of living downtown is that we are not yet a neighborhood and have no neighborhood pizzeria. There are good slices served to business people during the day and an average spot a few blocks down. But when we bought the big sheet for Bernie's son and his teen-aged friends who were helping us move in, we quickly discovered the disadvantage of one bathroom and five people with mild food poisoning. We haven't been back.
Another pizzeria sent us a "welcome to the neighborhood" free coupon. It was nearly four miles to the shop, most of it through the area that appears regularly in the Police Blotter in the paper. The street signs were the same, but it bore no resemblance to the carefully tended working class Eastern European community I remembered. Everything reeked of poverty and anger. I could not picture Nana or Grumpy here.
It was hard to recognize the name of Grumpy's pizzeria in this setting, but there it was, on the same street but closer to us than the coupon place (which it turned out was adequate, but would not deliver downtown).
For several weeks I promised myself the reward of a real pizza from the very ovens that formed a 40-year unattainable standard. Their number wasn't in the phone book, but I was giddy with anticipation when T-Mobile recited it back. The man who took my order was not a bored teenager. I heard the voice of experience and art.
I prepared Charlie to be astounded and he was.
But it had nothing to do with the pie and everything to do with the dilapidated building in a very rough neighborhood. We went in together as a safety measure and found the place held together with aging boards and handwritten signs of warning and menu. On a 60-degree day, the young man on our side of the counter kept a large jacket hood up completely obscuring his face. The two old men behind the counter looked at him like they were used to it. They looked at us like they weren't.
I asked if they delivered downtown and they said they didn't deliver anywhere anymore. "We're just hanging on," the more gnarled one said and the other quickly sliced the pie in front of us with a large, worn knife and well-practiced motion.
I asked how long they had been in that location.
"1959" he said as he slid our pie out of the oven that tinged the pizza edges with black crusty grease.
There was no thought of calories or carbs as the smell filled the car on the way home. Charlie carried the wine up to the apartment. I had THE pizza.
I felt sorry for the woman who got in the elevator with us who wouldn't taste it, but I wasn't about to share.
I skipped the box-ripping ritual simply because I couldn't wait another second.
I closed my eyes, took a bite and it was ...
a lot like cardboard with tomato paste.
The neighborhood, the building and the recipe had fallen apart together.
Apparently it's time to diet again.
Copyright 2005 Judi Griggs