Pete’s Pizza Calipers
Well, it all happened
like this. First Louie, that’s my
big brother’s second best friend from down the street, came down with it, then
Pete, the guy with the green nickname, came down with a really huge case of it,
and then it was all over. They
started coming down with it in droves, from as far away as Taos, from as close
to home as the home next door.
I suppose it would be
advisable for me to clear the air right about now, to make a clean breast of it,
so to speak. Either way, I say,
“Hey, why not?” (Notice how the
green three man has edged his way into the periphery. He’s the con man, Pete. That is, he is the one with the green
nickname. Green or three, it makes
no difference to him, just so long as Louie says so.)
And Louie had said so
on the day that it happened. “Do me
up,” said the bloated one. That is,
Louie the bloated one (a gastronomical condition... more on this later), said
that green or three shall, that’s the
word he used, shall be interchangeable when one is addressing or conferring with
Pete. “Pete the green one,” he
said, “or Pete the three man, it makes no difference to him, and it makes no
nevermind to me.” This he said
when only half-bloated. Pizza, it
was presumed. Ground beef was one
of his favorites in the business.
But now I’m getting ahead of myself.
“Do me and my
sister-in-law,” Louie the bloated one had insisted. His assistant looked on, aghast. Sister-in-law? he thought; isn’t she the
one who's married to my big brother?
No, no, the assistant reassured himself, it’s Louie’s sister-in-law. My big brother’s wife wouldn’t have a
thing to do with Louie. Especially
when he’s all-the-way bloated. But
he was only half-bloated when he mentioned what is now being referred to as the
"interchangeableness." That is, his
bloatedness had insisted upon his sister-in-law being done.
Which is where Pete
came into the picture. Pete, the
green one, three, had just begun to comprehend the violets in the window. “Get the picture,” Louie ordered, “and
one for my sister-in-law.”
“Get one of your sister-in-law, or one done to your sister-in-law?” Pete
asked. Louie, getting more bloated
by the minute, had had it happened right then, started calling Pete the three
man, the green man, the green three man, and more. What’s more, he said it made no
difference to him whether he was heretofore known as the three man or the green
man or anywhere in between. Then it
was his turn to order pizza.
“Just get the
picture,” Louie again asked, reaching for the phone.
Louie had had it
happened before, on earlier occasions that is, and he also had had it happened
before reaching for the phone. “Had
had it happened,” it’s been said, implies an inherent redundancy. Which is why Louie decided not to overdo
it, kindly asked Pete to fetch a picture of his sister-in-law, and then ordered
pizza.
By the time the pizza
came, Pete had returned with Louie’s sister-in-law. “What’s she doing here?” Louie asked,
somewhat surprised.
“OK, lady, let’s go,” Pete said, grabbing her elbow.
“Wait a minute, Pete,”
said Louie: “where’s your
camera?”
“Well, Louie, I
thought with your sister-in-law being who she is and all--”
“Small
world,” Louie the bloated one said to his sister-in-law, Jenny; “how’s your
husband? You wanna slice of
pizza?”
Louie’s sister-in-law,
Jenny, somewhat perplexed, although her nickname, Jenny the Velveteer, hardly
implies perplexity, declined a slice of pizza. It seems ground beef threw her off. This she said with not the least bit of
intolerance in her slippers. She
knew about the camera, and that’s why she was wearing her frilly ones. Pete, however, had left his camera back
at Jenny’s place, and her husband was due home any minute. “Pete,” Jenny the Velveteer said, “I
think you know best where your camera is, so here: take my keys, let yourself in, and hurry
back. You know how my husband
gets.”
“Camera,” Louie
reminded Pete on his way out the door.
“Now about those slippers,” Louie said when Pete was well away; “does my
brother know where you got them?”
“Oh, these?” asked
Jenny the Velveteer. “I’ve been
padding around in these for years.”
“Good,” said
Louie. “We wouldn’t want my brother
to have it up to here”--he saluted--“with any haute couture.”
And then Louie had had
it happened again.
Louie, my big
brother’s second best friend from down the street, didn’t always used to live
down the street. My big brother,
Sam, or Sam the Mudpuddle, the "wet one," whatever, said that Louie the bloated,
besmirched one used to live some distance away. On the south side, no less. Then came that jaded, gurgling, dreary
day when Louie moved to their street.
He had had it happened to him on that day and on many more to
follow. Then his brother married
Jenny. Their home had grown so cold
that winter that Jenny threw all her old velvet pictures into the
fireplace. Her husband, Thomas,
whose nickname was wont, immediately started referring to her as Jenny the Velveteer. Thomas did had had it up
to here himself--no need to salute--with the cold and threw in a couple of his
own velvet paintings. The embers
flared with disrespect.
Pete burst through the
door. “Am I interrupting anything?”
he asked the flailing covers. Louie
and Jenny had been ripping the covers off of old National Geographic magazines,
and they were fanning the coals of a heated debate with them.
“Oh no, you’re not
interrupting anything other than a little research is all,” Louie said.
“Yes, Pete:
you're interrupting,” said Jenny. “Could you toss me my slippers on your way
out?”
“But I brought the
camera,” said Pete.
“He’s your friend,” said Jenny the Velveteer
to Louie the bloated one, “and he’s no authority on National Geographics, on
photography, on pizza, on any subject for that matter.”
“Can I help it if his
assistant,” said Louie, “is the best pizza maker in these parts?”
“But I thought you had
sworn off pizza,” questioned Jenny, reaching for her footwear. “And just who is
this assistant of his you keep mentioning?”
“He brings us pizza,
that’s who,” said Louie the bloated one, nearing the three-quarter mark of his
bloatedness.
“Hey, you’re getting
pizza scraps mixed in with the shepherds of Kenya,” said Jenny the
Velveteer.
Pete, the green one,
three he’s been called, pulled the lens cap from his camera and began dusting it
with impetuousness.
“You might try a
little elbow grease,” suggested Jenny the Velveteer, ankle-deep in one of her
slippers.
The backdrop thus
unfolded, Louie, besmirched, full from pizza, asked the green one to fold it
back up so that the photos of Jenny, Velveteer, would not only have Jenny in
them, but also include a folded-up backdrop in the background. “Mood,” said Louie, “think mood.”
Jenny was trying to
get the shoehorn out of her slipper.
“Here, try these,” offered Pete, three, fumbling among his lens cap, the
backdrop (a montage of daffodils, timothy grass, peat moss, sage and rose hips), and
some calipers that he thought might work better than the shoehorn Jenny the
Velveteer was maligning her slippers with.
Louie the bloated began thinking of ways to hint to Peter that he might
have left something on the back burner somewhere, his interest in National
Geographics notwithstanding.
Jenny could tell from measuring
with the calipers exactly how far away she was from being barefoot. “At least half-way,” she remarked, “but
I’m trying to go the other way.”
“Perhaps by now you’ve
worked up an appetite, Jenny, you Velveteer; care for a slice?” said Louie the
bloated one, palming a slice of pizza.
“Hey thanks, Louie,”
said Pete, reaching for the slice of Dr. Hook’s: he was emaciated.
“Not so fast,” said
Louie, cupping the slice meant for Jenny the Velveteer and pulling it back to
his breastplate with a chink.
“Really,” said
Jenny. “Well.”
“Maybe your abode is
on fire,” said Louie the bloated, besodded, careful one to Pete the green one,
“and maybe if you hurry back to it with an ax, or here, try the phone.”
“OK, I’ll try the
phone,” said Pete with indifference. “But why are you dressed like a
centurion?”
Louie’s real
obsession, not to be confused with his compulsion (his compulsion having more to
do with his being weaned off pig fat, and at too late of a stage in life… you
see, Louie the bloated one was currently being weaned from pig fat--or
bacon grease, if you’re to trust the vernacular--and had drizzled some on his
pizza)… excuse me, was his obsession, not his compulsion, rather, his obsession with Jenny’s something or
other. An inanimate object, it was
presumed. Although the pig grease
used to be animate, especially when the graduate student from Tyson Foods would tickle the spot just around
the horn from its little curly tail.
His obsession with Jenny the Velveteer’s inanimate yet very lively, oh,
Louie, the Velveteer’s friend, Thomas, the one who was wont, not on your life…
though Louie should know better about his own brother, and his own brother’s wife,
Jenny, and the probably inanimate thing that Louie was obsessed with about
her.
“Well, I was leaving,”
said Pete the three man, putting back the receiver, “but no one seems to be
answering the phone.”
“Gimme that thang,”
said Louie the put upon, reaching into the Dr. Hook’s pizza receptacle,
cultivating the receiver, wiping some tomato sauce from in between the little
holes that you listen into, or speak from, if you happen to be on the other end;
“and wasn’t your edifice on fire?”
“I don’t know,” said
Pete, three, green one. “I don’t think my phone’s out of order.”
“Why don’t you toddle
along and find out?” asked Louie, “or maybe you could phone the phone company
from here, or better yet: you could
phone them from the pay phone from down the street and to the left.”
“Isn’t that where your
assistant lives?” asked Pete the three.
“Actually,” said
Louie, “he lives across the street from that pay phone; here’s a buck.”
“Hey, I could use one
of those,” said Jenny the Velveteer; “they remind me of Washington, the
state.”
Louie the bloated one,
feeling his pizza, holding the phone, had had it happened once more.
Jenny’s husband,
Thomas, wont, Louie’s brother, Sid’s brother too, and Mary and Sophia’s brother
too, if the truth be known, had met Jenny at a phone auction. He, Thomas, had bid just one crisp
dollar more than Jenny the Velveteer on a desk model, and, exasperated, they
decided to share the phone instead of her possibly settling for a lousy blue
wall job. Jenny always did prefer
desk types over the kind that sit on your wall, blue. So they moved in together. Pete came by to visit, but he could
phone ahead. Louie the bloated one
approved of the arrangement, although he didn’t usually always sometimes phone
ahead. Thomas, wont, ever mindful
of his and his wife's privacy, said to his brother, Louie, raised on pig fat,
that maybe he should "take a picture" if he couldn’t always phone ahead. That was months ago and, though it looked grim
at first, evidently a "seed" had been planted. And germinated.
“What are those for?”
asked Pete.
“Green
one,” said Louie the bloated one:
“weren’t you on your way to phone your home?”
“There,
it’s on,” said Jenny the velvety one, pointing at her slipper with the
calipers.
“Good
idea,” said Louie, rustling up the calipers from Jenny; “here, Pete, you can use
these calipers at the phone booth.”
“So that’s
where they got off to!” exclaimed Pete.
Then, in a deeper, shaming tone, he added: "Jenny. Now
you know you're not supposed to--"
“Just one
more,” Jenny interrupted, reclaiming the device so important for measuring those really
hard-to-measure round and tubular things.
“Where was
I?” asked Louie, immediately after he had had it happened, still holding the
phone, still feeling his pizza, but... only it was moments later. “Are you still
here?” he asked
the green one. “I thought you were on your way out.”
“Maybe I
oughtta take a picture first, Louie,” said Peter, “before I make that all important
call.”
“We yet have some preparations on that there backdrop, you see, green one,” said Louis, alluding to the one slipper that Jenny the Velveteer was pinching with Pete’s calipers.
“Oh, I see,” said Pete the three; “well don’t run off with my calipers, please, Jenny.”
“Don’t worry about me, Pete,” said Jenny the Velveteer. “You just hurry up and get back from whatever it is you have to hurry off to see about.”
"Yeah," coaxed Louie, bloated, "your calipers are safe here, but we might need another pizza."
"How would I know?" asked Pete.
"Well, maybe you could take a survey, Pete," said Louie, wiping some tomato sauce from his breastplate downward.
"How many--" Pete started.
"Out there, Pete," Louie broke in, pointing.
"I'll take that slice of pizza now, Louie," said Jenny, Thomas' wife. There was pizza everywhere momentarily.
"Suddenly," said Pete, "I feel as though I could use a slice myself."
"I probably shouldn't offer you one for the road," said Louie the besmirched, not-quite-all-the-way-weaned-from-pig-grease one, "but if it would get you away to all those other important duties you've simply been salivating at the chance to get away to, then maybe you can at least have a slice of this very inconsequential pizza."
"I'm out the door," said Pete.
"Wait, you forgot your pizza," said Louie the bloated one, pulling Pete's slice back out from the decrepit clutches of the photos of the Kenyan shepherds.
"Not hungry anymore, Louie," said Pete, his hand on the door handle. "Maybe Jenny wants to go to Washington, the state."
Pete had to check on a few things; Louie was full of pizza, and yet another one was on the way, his having had had to call the pizza people at the last minute; Jenny facilitated Pete forgetting his calipers, no easy task in and of itself; and Thomas, Jenny the Velveteer's husband, after not finding Jenny at his and Jenny's house, was well on his way over to his brother's home and without the customary--or in many cases the requisite--heads-up call, which would have been inopportune, inopportune to Jenny and Louie's photoplay.
The backdrop was set. The backdrop was neatly folded up again. There were no slippers in the room. They were in the other room. Thomas was en route. "Jenny," said Louie, patiently waiting for his second pizza to arrive, "Jenny, would you pass the dog cheese?"
"How's this for a change?" asked Jenny the Velveteer, protracting a cut-out of a non-Kenyan African nation.
"If that were a cut-out of any other African nation other than our beloved Kenya," said Louie, "then you would need scissors for the operation."
"What do these look like?" asked Jenny; "and I didn't know you had a pension for dog cheese."
"That's penchant," said Louie.
"Oh," said Jenny, "you're retired. Well that explains everything."
"It's only dog cheese," said Louie the bloated and yet waiting around on pins and needles for his second pizza to manifest itself at the door. Pete was due back any moment, the landlord knows why, but maybe if he grasped the little hint that both Thomas' wife and Thomas' brother had been dropping like cowbird calling cards, maybe he might not return until the backdrop for the photo session was completely prepared to satisfaction.
It took a while for Jenny the Velveteer and Louie the bloated to realize that since Pete the three had had taken to the streets, and with it his camera, and since their backdrop had been had it had had it had happened... needless to say, backdrop (something or other) folded up in front of the cut-outs of the Kenyan shepherds, that the calipers were working better than the shoehorn had had worked at getting the slipper off. "Jenny," said Louie tenderly the bloated, besmirched, waiting for the remnants of the scraps of their first pizza to transmogrify, and still waiting for the second pizza to appear, but not waiting for the likes of the green three one to re-appear, and not even knowing that he didn't want to know about his brother, Jenny's really really good friend, such a good friend, Thomas, wont they call him, not even knowing that he was waiting for that sibling to arrive, "Jenny, oh you velvety one, Jenny, oh won't you."
"You mean your brother?" asked her velvetness, listening for someone approaching the door.
"You mean your husband?" said Louie, noticing the calipers.
"He was due home eons ago," said Jenny the Velveteer, "but Pete--your friend--left behind his calipers."
"I was just contemplating that measuring device," said the besmirched one with an air of inquisitiveness. "Where do you think he's gotten off to?"
"Hadn't we ought to phone?" asked Jenny.
"We already did," said Louie, "and it should be here any--" he stopped to clear his throat, "and it should be here with its divine sauce, I should say, any minute."
"Well, we better not get any of its divine sauce on your friend's camera lens," said Jenny, "you know how your brother gets."
"Particular, is he?" asked Louie. "He didn't use to be."
"It's your camera's friend," said the Velveteer.
The backdrop had had unfolded itself a tad, and it was working its way over toward the phone. Already it had spread out the cut-outs of the Kenyan National Priests, their habits blowing in the rare Kenyan Wind Tunnels. Soon, the phone would ring, bringing the news that rather than Pete's place being on fire, their pizza had had had it: it couldn't take the heat in the pizza-making place and another one was, well, was, well... was well on its way as well. In its stead, that is.
So either that call or a little friendly or perhaps not-so-friendly, although brotherly, husbandly even, a little sibling-like or hubby-like visit would soon happen, however friendly. Which is to say a quick visit from the one who was wont to get a wee bit jealous of how photogenic a certain special someone in his life had had grown recently might happen. Either that call about the burnt pizza, which would had of had maybe a tiny heart attack like blustery feeling upon the bloated one, or his brother might drop by. Either way, either anything could happen. It was surely to be one or the other.
But if Pete--the besmirched one's friend--could be on his way back from wherever the landlord knows where he sent him, on some special mission... yes, if Pete could simply get to a phone from wherever it is that he is away from one, then Pete could call ahead and warn his friend and his friend's brother's sister-in-law's friend, Sam, Mudpuddle they'd call him, but not to his face, or Sam the "wet one," "you ol' Mudpuddle," they'd chide him... if Pete could phone ahead. But Pete, the green one, hardly ever phones ahead. That wouldn't stop him from just showing up on the front stoop like a gadfly in heat with the buzzards all around, making their practical rounds. If Pete could phone ahead, then he could warn one of his friends, Louie--we've already gone into his background--about the soon-to-arrive other friend of his, John's, his other friend's arrival, the arrival of Mudpuddle, then Louie and Jenny could iron out any further backdrops before his friend, Sam, arrives.
If he were to arrive.
But Pete might not phone ahead.
Either Pete could call, the burnt Dr. Hook's pizza people would stop by or call, some friend of the family might drop in, then there's wont, he won't stop by, even though he's wont to, or Sam the Mudpuddle might splash in, or Pete could forget that phones are there for a purpose and just bebop right in, or the mailcarrier might pop over for a cameo.
"Either way," said Louie to Jenny, "somebody's bound to jar Pete's camera at precisely the right moment, and there goes all our preparations, phhhht."
"Thanks, pal," said Jenny the Velveteer, wiping.
"Don't mind if I do," said the bloated one, getting up for the first time since the leaves turned out for the warming trend.
"I didn't hear the doorbell ring," questioned Jenny.
"That's because I don't have one," said Louie.
"You think someone's here," asked the velvety one.
"No, I'm just getting closer to the phone, that's all, you Velveteer," cried Louie.
"No, that was really... quite... one of the most influential, if not noteworthy, though certainly it was worthy of note," started Jenny.
"You don't have to thank me," said Louie.
"No, really," said Jenny.
"Please," Louie said.
"Well, um," Jenny became.