Sex Pizza

I confessed to my partner recently that, the last time we had sex, all I could think about was Ken’s Artisan Pizza. And the time before that, getting railed face down in a stack of pillows, my brain went directly to the miraculous chew and peerless char of a Ken’s Artisan Pizza.

Ken’s was voted among the top pizzerias in the world, beating out that little hole in the wall place I found in Florence the time I slept through dinner with my translators there due to jet lag. I awoke hungry, staggered out into the night, and found a small pizzeria hiding behind a bus stop. I waved my arms and threw down a twenty euro note and they gave me the most sensual pizza, a commingling of tomato, mozzarella, wheat, and basil that made me cry either because it tasted amazing or because I was exhausted and alone in a foreign country. Either way, a memorable pizza.

But, let’s be honest here: I have never thought about that legitimately Italian pizza while getting laid, ever. Why? Who is Ken? Why is his last name Forkish, like he’s kind of like a fork? Why does this local pizza crash into the synapses associated with pleasure to the point where when my partner lures me to the bed for another moment of sacred physical union, do I recall our single visit to Ken’s on a weeknight, where we sat at the bar and shared a margherita pizza and a salad? There was nothing particularly special about this outing except for the fact that the pizza really was a few steps above all other Portland pizzas and stood toe to toe with that one I’d had in Florence, the one that my brain does not remember while I’m in a state of sexual arousal.

Who is Ken? Ken is retired! Ken has published a few cookbooks! Ken wasn’t even there that night! The affable and competent staff of servers and pizzaioli should be praised for their skill and excellent customer service, but I don’t want to say that they are responsible for this association of food and sex. There is nothing erotic about the restaurant’s decor, which had a solidly Boomer/1980s vibe. They were playing Kansas’s “Dust in the Wind “on the stereo as customers crammed in to order $22 sex pizzas with friends and family.

Food and sex, now, if we were a proper country with a proper culture, we would not be shame-drenched about associating the best pizza you’ve had stateside with sex. We would be proudly stating that food and sex are actually best friends and we should all enjoy them with as much reverie and delight as we can consent to in this life.

I wonder why Ken named his pizzeria after himself. Why not some punchy, easy-to-understand Italian name like Pizzeria la Vita Bella or somesuch? Ken is a staid, midcentury man’s name, often affiliated with a certain doll and not pizza. Is it because he wanted his customers to picture him as a capable lover as well as the masterful chef behind this wicked sorcery pizza? Ken, regular Portland guy, not Antonio, he of the accent and the chest full of dark hair. If he can lure you with his banal, typical American bistro vibe and trick you into falling in love with his superlative pizza skills, well…that is some bravado! Some un-American bravado!

I think that’s why.

You’re welcome, Ken. And thank you. My partner now asks me afterwards if I thought about your pizza and the last few times, the answer has been no.

Guaranteed Bestsellers

In my capacity as a bookseller at a small, beloved indie bookstore, I am something of a minor-league kingmaker. Okay, a very tiny kingmaker! My kingdom is two spots on the Staff Favorite’s table, where, with a bit of hustle, I can move a good number of books to our customers each month. I am like Jerry Lundegaard in Fargo, only of books, only without the fraud and murder.

I don’t have time to write ALL OF THE NOVELS, so here are some ideas for novels that I think would really take off:

1. THE PATENT OFFICER’S MISTRESS. The Profession + Relationship to That Person formula is alive and well here. Set in 1902, a patent officer is working amid the high scandal of Edison’s punking down of Tesla. The real message here is that Thomas Edison was a fucking dick—however, the patent officer has a mistress, which keeps things spicy. A lot of hot sex amid boring paperwork and references to the early telephone. I don’t know what else to do with this. Grab this idea and run with it.

2. THE DIARRHEA DOO DOO SQUAD. A middle grade series in which snacks laden with e. coli are served to a fourth grade class, giving the kids not only diarrhea, but superpowers. A group of children vanquish bad guys with their weaponized bowel movements. Kids in the 8-11 age range will lose their minds over drawings of children blasting feces all over evil grown-ups and bullying peers. Seriously, this will make a million bucks.

3. THE UPPER EAST SIDE FUCK-UP. An easy way to sell a book is to say it’s a retelling of a famous novel. Right now, Oprah Pick Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano is successful because booksellers such as yours truly can say, “Oh! It’s a retelling of LITTLE WOMEN!” And everyone knows what you mean by that. So why hasn’t anyone done a retelling of Catcher in the Rye yet? Only instead of being set in 1951, it’s set on September 12, 2001, and the protagonist’s father is missing at the WTC. Neo-Holden is about to get kicked out of a hippie-ish boarding school in Vermont, and takes the train home to the UES and almost has sex with a former teacher and loses his money and cries over a dead swan and basically fucks up, just like Holden, except in a different historical moment. You can hear the money rolling in.

4. PRINCESS. At work today, we discussed the potential success of a novel told from the perspective of a bookshop cat like our own Molly. Molly, who lives a life of affection from randoms all day, every day. Who countenances strangers with great aplomb. Tell her story, only change her name to Princess of Princess’s Bookstore, a shabby shop in a seaside town run by an older lady with congestive heart failure and her failed poet nephew. A real banger, I say.

5. THE STORM. A novel can be nihilistic fantasy wish fulfillment, i.e. one person committing a string of horrible acts and evading accountability until it is finally served. THE STORM depicts an asshole named Amy who has been rejected from a prestigious writing program, so she plans to drive to Ohio to terrorize the program, and on her way, shakes down an ex for money, steals her cat, pisses all over the floor at Target, gets into a verbal altercation with the manager of a Jack-in-the-Box and ends up stealing a crate of frozen burger patties, cuts off his own big toe only to give it to another ex she’s terrorizing, onward and upward until a flotilla of police cruisers arrive to take her stank ass to jail. You fill in the rest. (UPDATED per feedback from Austin author Amy Gentry!)

6. THE WHOLE OF THE MOON. A dreamy, wistful ‘80s doomed romance named after the beloved Waterboys song! I can sell it to a certain demographic who beams like the sun whenever the words “whole of the moon” are spoken. Working-class Irish Catholic Southie guy poised to enter the priesthood falls in love with a Black waitress in 1984 and he basically goes around beating up people so he can marry her because, fucking A, love will triumph! He also starts a band and saves his best friend’s life and then marries his girl AND his family comes around! She thinks he’s a chump until about page 200 and tells him many times to go to seminary,. This may already be the plot of a movie with Ben Affleck.

25th Reunion Question

Dear Monique, age 22, unaware of the irrevocable irritant known as Google Forms,

Hello from 5/5/23. You will be absolutely chuffed to learn that you co-own an adorable house in Portland, Oregon with a man who is currently somewhere in San Francisco, unaware that you exist. I don’t think that you, as you are standing, forlorn and terrified, in the living room of Baldwin House, are at a place where you can understand what this man will mean to you someday. You’re still raw in the middle. That’s okay. On 5/5/23, you will eat for dinner asparagus and tofu in black pepper sauce, with rice made in one of the numerous Japanese rice cookers purchased by your first husband that you got in the divorce!

In the year you turn 41, not a great one for American politics, you will notice that you are growing an absolutely perfect white stripe along the left side of your hair line. You will grow it out. It is called a witch stripe, and not only does it make you look cool, it makes you feel special.

The hardest thing you will have to learn in the next twenty-five years is self-forgiveness. You will have a lot of opinions about forgiveness, but self-forgiveness? Is the most important forgiveness, because you, like everyone else, will fuck up. The question is, what are you going to do about it? The question often ends up being what is everyone else going to do about their own fuck-ups, and how you react to others will be a source of sorrow and self-discovery. You will kick off your forties both a bleary-eyed mess with a PTSD diagnosis and…voila! A published novelist! Unforch, kiddo, you bloom later than you want to. That is what it is.

When you’re 45, you’ll begin writing your magnum opus, a sine qua non of self-forgiveness, a novel in which a dying woman has exactly seven hours to explain herself, and so she does. As of right this minute, it’s with your agent, and you are bored and restless with the manuscript gone. The writing life is long as strange and largely disappointing, but you do the work, and that’s what’s important.

There are little picky details that I would love to impart to you about your future, but I don’t think they matter in the grand scheme. Such as: DO NOT GO TO LIBRARY SCHOOL! You are bad at being an archivist! That they took your money and handed you a degree is professional malpractice, but I have no idea who I would be today without my years in Austin. You have to go there so you can fully bake, gel, solidify, and become yourself. There are no two ways about this. This is also the only story I know, so you have to go with it, and again, these details don’t really matter!

Even though you divorced, your first marriage was not a failure! It had its moment, he zigged and you zagged, and that’s the short version of the story.

What came after, though…well, fuck, kiddo, Dark night of the soul. You learned a lot about yourself. And in deep middle age, you’re an abuse survivor, and are quite internally defined by that. C’est la vie. But you know what is going to hurt more than whatever those dumbass dudes in your future do to you? Shit, girl, you’re an abuse survivor in that photo, you just don’t know it yet, and that is what is going to chew at your heart and your ass when you are finally situated in your adorable house in Portland with the menschiest of mensches, frequently losing your mind over the strange difficulty of what it means to finally be loved and to finally be able to receive that love.

Your career? Not really your thing, babe. Let’s just say that the work that makes you happiest in this life isn’t anything Smith is going to hand you a medal for.

There was a time when I dearly missed Smith and being 22 and would have given anything to trade places with Monique of 5/2/98. I do not want that anymore at all. Northampton is beautiful, it is not going anywhere, but you will never live there again.

I wish someone would mentor you in dating, because that is an area where you are going to fall hard on your face pretty quickly. I wish that were a thing in our culture.

You do get everything you want, just not for a long time.

You are far more beautiful than you realize, and it is a damn shame that no one told you that until it was too late.

Forty-seven isn’t even old, really, but your body and mind will be so different in twenty-five years. You just have to wait to see. Words don’t do the best job describing it.

The narrow shoe market never improves.

Frozen yogurt has another moment in the late 2000s.

You are an indie kid forever.

Your first published novel is named after a Sebadoh lyric.

You never have kids.

You will look at this photo 25 years hence and wish you still had those glasses.

You live in Texas and Michigan and Vermont, and you do, under unfortunate historical circumstances, move back to California for a spell. But you are always on about Portland. It’s a thing. Give into it.

But you do love and love some more. You will be described as “spiritually advanced” and a genius by near-strangers. You will feel like a failure and an asshole more often than not. But you have friends. You have self-worth. You have what you need. You are incredibly fortunate, all things considered.

That’s all I’ve got.

Happy 25th anniversary of being so sad and scared.