Yumbert Y.
Yelp
Pizza pie. Pee-tsaa-pie: the pop of the lips beckoning a lash of the tongue, only to hiss and pop once more into one final, conceited gasp. Pizza, plain cheese pizza, this is a confession: I love you. But you hide! Oh my succulent /tranche/, you torment me. Your promise plagues my oppidan existence, lurking on every street corner like an idle strumpet, luring me with your cheap pies and deals such as the ones that include a sweet drink with purchase. Last summer one day in a moment of rapt hunger I obtained a slice of pizza with a single dollar and was returned a penny in change. A steal! One might proclaim. But the feeling I endured while eating this /avortement de merd/, this silly joke, was one that reminded me, in both flavor and sating quality, of having ingested a saltine cracker that a man, for whatever reason, had dipped in some water.
Another day, I remember, an expression of pain flitted across my face as I entered a tenebrous establishment, decorated, presumably, to approximate the ambience of a dirt farmer's johnny house, and observed a family of three patiently carving apart a titular pizza with knives and forks as if it were a sozzled toad. It flitted again as I became aware that Mama Celeste's tony cognate had been adorned with what could only be described as a pomaceous /crier au secours/, and had likely cost more than my annual subscription to /Entrevue/. Oh, how I was taken aback. Pizza, the fare of the everyman, the trumpet call of the Risorgimento! Being distributed and dissected as if leavened by Catullus himself.
/Donc/, I led a pizzaless life for some time. I haunted food courts and shopping malls, spitting casually at the patrons in the Sbarros and the Famous Famiglias, longing for a miracle, recalling with piercing fondness the better days in this erstwhile slice-lovers Elysium when a man with a taste for pizza could wander into any number of shops and expect a humble dedication to craft from its proprietor. No longer.
The miracle I hankered for did happen after all. Peregrinating the middle footpath of the Eastern Parkway one early spring noon, just east of the Botanic Gardens, where cherry blossoms would soon powder the varicose skies a cheekish rouge, I found myself on a byway, meandering as one does against the traffic which was coming in a southern direction. There, on an unassuming storefront marquee, I encountered a name and said it aloud in a golden whisper, as if having just fished it from the ruins of a hastily cleaved fortune cookie. "Brooklyn Pizza Crew," I exhaled, and with scant deliberation made my entrance, with the expectation of happening upon a support group buttressing individuals of a similar forlorn disposition as myself.
Instead, I was face to face with what could only be described as--dare I say it--a pizzeria. Without consideration, instinct took over, and before I could tame my senses I had acquired a slice of plain cheese pizza and was sitting, staring at it, in a tantric moment lasted for maybe no more than ten seconds, for as I bit into the slice, it was hot.
Like a famished dingo encountering a playful kitten, I entered, probably, a meditative state, thrown into a sustained moment of Proustian bliss by the juicy, salacious pizzaness of the experience. The cheese, sauce, and dough combusted between my teeth to create an oleaginous singularity of flavor so true to its form, so perfectly simple, so substantial without being too much (whatever that might mean in this context--loafish?) that quite by mistake I broke into a virtuous bel canto, bellowing at random from Donizetti's /L'Elisir d'Amore/. /Che più cercando io vo/! And then continued on the haphazard journey that one takes when gorging on immaculately seasoned fidelity.
To my delight, the soubrette of this comestible gambol was none other than the oft neglected denouement. The crust! A bready integument that whispered pleading hints of sourdough to its devourer between each tawny crunch. Contra the ignoble utility that the vastness of its insipid brethren has been relegated to, functioning, barely, as the jejune handle to a feebly tessellated shovel of ninety-nine-cent Trinacrian miscarriage, the crust on a plain cheese Brooklyn Pizza Crew pizza pie delivers a joyous /fin heureuse/. A yeasted digestif that, try as one may, can only be savored for so long, for we lovers of pizza are only human (only!) and any act of concupiscence must eventually suffer /la petit mort/.
