PIZZA, PLEASE
Thing
is, you always have to wait hours for your meal. First, you have to wait for a waiter. It can take hours to
get their attention and often they will look right through you as if you’re invisible,
an empty wooden chair. You know better than to click your fingers. You try
smiles at first, raised eyebrows, come here gestures with your body, your arms,
your hands, your mouth (you mouth ‘come here, please’ and ‘I’m a hungry man, help
me, please’) and you even gesture with your nose, a little vague nostril crinkle
as if this were a universally understood language of restaurant etiquette. When
you finally get a waiter’s attention by shouting ‘I’m over here’ you have to wait
for them to bring you a menu. This can take hours. Then, when you finally have
the menu in your hands, you have to wait for the waiter to come back and take
your order from the menu. This can also take hours. And there is nothing worse
or more depressing than waiting hours to order food, time slows to a
melancholic mumble and you start to feel like you may never eat food again.
When the waiter deigns to return he tells you he can only take your drinks
order even though you know exactly what food you want to order. It’s a pizza
restaurant for Christ’s sake and you want to order pizza. When you tell him
this he looks at you as if you’re mad and says another waiter will come and
take your food order. ‘That’s the way we do things in restaurants, okay?’ When other
people in the restaurant stop glaring at you for daring to upset the staff,
‘they may pee in our coca cola now’, they stare towards the waiters like
malevolent wolves in a zoo might eye their keepers, half hating them for being
so slow but also pleading with anxious eyes and needy smiles for them to come near.
Why should you plead with them or even smile at them? It’s their fucking job to
come and serve you, and so you keep your back turned and wait. And you wait for
hours. Literally for hours! You see these other people have their order taken;
you even see some get their food. Pizzas! And they dive on them, tear at them,
like they’re hacking away at the doughy carcasses of fallen flat pack monkeys.
Sometimes they smile at you with bloody tomato paste around their lips to say ‘your
time may come soon, fucker’. Their smiles initially seem apologetic and
sympathetic, but you can’t help feeling they’re also triumphant. So you try not
to look at them but you can’t quite help it, each pizza slice being crammed between
their stupid lips causing bile to churn and then rise into your mouth. It
doesn’t help that you’re eating alone. Like a lone man without a child sitting
in a playground, you are an unwanted presence. It suddenly occurs to you that
it’s possible that you might die here: of starvation, of loneliness, of neglect.
You need to eat and you have a right to eat, god damn it! You’re not a bad
person, you’re not anything really, and you’re not doing anything wrong. You
feel a moral indignation, the sense of being left out of things taking over and
you turn quickly around to voice your need, your order! And as you do, the wine
waiter arrives and spills your bottle of wine over you. Damson notes, hints of
tobacco and bloody carnage all over your bloody head. You look like an extra in
Carrie. ‘Sorry, Sir,’ the waiter says. ‘I’ll get you another one.’ You’ve been
here ten hours, you’re completely soaked in wine and the waiter has gone before
you could say anything, probably never to return, and you still haven’t had
your food order taken. You get up and start walking. The other diners crouch
over their pizzas as if you’re about to steal them. But you have another idea
and soon you are running and then bounding towards the kitchen. The waiters
notice you. Four of them, fucking four of them! Where were they when you needed
them? They circle you but you’re too quick and you bang into the kitchen. The
chef hears you amidst the clamour and clatter of falling pans, and then sees
you in your bloody shirt and your bloody face and he reaches for his cleaver.
You duck but it’s the wrong thing to do and a swish of the blade meant for your
midriff takes your head clean off. Now you have their attention! In folklore there
is a minute when a severed head still lives and is able to communicate.
Sometimes with a blink or a reproachful curse but in your case with a formal
request in two sentences: ‘I would like a mushroom and pepper pizza. And I
would like it now.’ The pizza is brought to you and a slice is cut and slid
across the floor and into your mouth. It tastes delicious, miraculous even, but
not quite worth the wait.
