In reference to my piece that was posted on Aiming Low recently, my sister commented on Facebook… something about all the pizza-ordering we did once, and that’s been jogging a memory in my brain for days now.
We are the worst.
One summer, I think when we were in our teens, we were ordering pizzas like they were going out of style. I’m serious. A sick amount.
I think I must have been around eighteen or nineteen, which would have made my sister fourteen-ish. I had a summer job at a small restaurant, and mostly worked nights, so we were home together during the day while my parents were away at work. Because I had tip money, I always had cash. I don’t remember my sister doing very much babysitting or anything, but I suspect she had some kind of money tree under her bed that she shook fairly reglarly, because she always had a fist full of bucks too. And though we could both cook some things, and make sammiches and stuff, we were ridiculously lazy (as all teens are) and therefore we opted for pizza. Easy, cheezy pizza. Of course we did. But we did it during the work-week every day.
Every. Day.
We ordered a small pepperoni, bacon and pineapple pizza around lunchtime. Every day. And we knew how long it would take to arrive, we knew exactly how much we would spend, and it was perfectly delicious every time we got one. And we did it every day. But we weren’t really keeping track of things – we were just doing what we did. Every day.
I totally remember the doughy crust and the tangy red sauce, and the saltiness of the crunchy bacon and the sweetness of the pineapple. Mmmm… And it wasn’t even particularly good pizza by pizza standards – nothing gourmet about this national chain – but those were fun days, and we spent a lot of our time taking and dreaming over afternoon pizza. We still have lots of times like those now, when we visit, (which isn’t nearly often enough, but we stay close) and we’re usually doing it over some kind of yummy food.
We ordered so often, that the operator recited my address back to me before I’d even tell him, and then would tell me my order before I asked him for it. Gaaaa! I was a bit horrified the first time that happened, actually. I mean, Yikes! They totally know us over here! We are LOSERS! But then, like anything else, I just got used to it. It became pretty convenient, really. It cut down on having to say everything to the operator, when clearly, he already knew… I’m so fucking lazy! Just bring pizza, okay? Gawd.
But then one day, towards the end of the summer, towards the end of our phone order, the guy says, “And since you’ve ordered fifty pizzas, we’re giving you a set of four frosted beer mugs!”
“Um, pardon me?!” I nearly choke on my own tongue.
“Yeah, you get a free gift. They’re beer mugs. They’re frosted.”
“Yes, but for what exactly?”
“Because you ordered fifty pizzas.”
“Really?” Oh. Dreadful. Day. No-no-no-no-no…
“Yeah. Since June.”
I’m pretty sure I nearly dropped the phone from the shame of it all. Holy shit. Oh my god. We are trash.
I thanked the guy and put the phone down, and I tell my sister we’re getting a set of four beer mugs because we’ve been super-gross pigs all summer, and now we’ll soon have the evidence to prove it in our kitchen cupboards. Oh god! What to do!!
As we ate our pizza, we tried to rationalize the whole situation, to see if there was something good in here. Was this awful? Or was… this awesome…?
“What if someone actually sees them in the house and wants to know why we would buy the mugs from that store. Do we have to confess that we won them?” This was my first concern. I mean my first concern after the notion of the fifty pizzas we ate. Over the summer. After that, I was just embarrassed to own them.
She said, “Well, we don’t have to say we won them…”
“But NIKI! WHY would they BE here then?! You see? We’re trapped.”
“So should we throw them away?” She took a sip of her drink. From her mug she was sipping on.
“Well,” I slurped from my own mug. “They’re perfectly good, really.”
“I know.”
“But NIKI! We CANNOT tell people we got them for FREE because we ordered FIFTY pizzas, THIS SUMMER, for Jesus sake. God!” I was seriously mortified.
She had a better idea.
“Well… what if someone asks, and we say it like, We fucking WON these for eating FIFTY pizzas this summer!!” And she let out a death roar, and whipped her devil-horns sign into the air. Which was exactly how we decided to spin the whole sordid idea to make ourselves look all awesome like that. Clever girl, my sib.
We started laughing our guts out at each other, shrieking and howling every time we remembered why we were laughing so hard… we snorted and rolled around on the floor until I had tears rolling. We killed ourselves over it for weeks…
But then, when sometime in the late fall they sent a pair of fake pearl earrings to our door, we did not anymore think it was so cool to be the daily douches ordering pizza. That made the whole thing officially embarrassing, and we completely cut down on our consumption after that. To maybe once a week. (Okay maybe twice a week.)
Okay, maybe we still ordered all the time, but we kept track of things after that, and s-p-a-c-e-d orders out so we wouldn’t have to contend with another free gift. And I’m pretty sure that worked.
Or else my renewed shame has forced me to block that out entirely.
So how do you like me now, Internets?
G.G.
