3rd
Spitting with Impunity Under a Red Roof
I turned nine in 1992 at an Arkansas Pizza Hut in a culture that practiced the pure worship of youth.
I recall the euphoria that takes hold when the pizzas outnumber the people, the swagger we knew we could get away with as the single most important demographic in a country ruled by rampant consumerism that had just bombed saDamn to celebrate the fact that without the Soviet Union it could do whatever the fuck it wanted. In a few years we’d have Gorbachev doing Pizza Hut commercials.
These fast-food palaces were like Neo-Liberalist Madrasahs. Our slack young faces screaming “Stuff your sorry crayons, here’s 15 dollars in birthday money dude. I want all the quarters that buys because for the next two hours your Turtles in Time machine is ours and my Pepsi is empty!”
I don’t remember seeing anyone else during these revels. I don’t remember a single conversation, or even a word. I cannot even confirm that we ever made it through a single birthday song, because, hey, we were up to our elbows in mozzarella grease and a party wasn’t a party if you didn’t get to laugh at your parents on their knees mopping up your spilled Pepsi.
In this sense, it was just like waking up after partying all night in Brooklyn. You remember going to this place, drinking that, then that place, and snorting this, but you’re lucky if you remember even one song you heard the entire time, let alone a single word you traded with that chick before you were fingering her in the taxi.
Pizza Hut was the exact same thing. It went like this. Get invited to your friend’s party at Pizza Hut. Think about nothing but this party for days. The second your friend’s mom pulls the minivan into the parking lot, throw the door open and be the first to jump out of the moving vehicle to see if you got the private party room or an extra long table. This would determine how close your parents would be to you when you were playing Turtles in Time.
Unwrap the crayons and break them, pop a balloon or two, fuck it. Pepsi chugging contest. Demand breadsticks. Demand salad bar (ranch dressing). Disappear (there’s only four joysticks on that thing, trust no one). Reappear for 5 to 7 slices of pizza depending on bread sticks.
The “7” here is my personal record and was nothing to brag about at the time.
Return to arcade. Return to table for Pepsi, cake and ice cream (stay for presents if it’s your own birthday party). Play more Turtles until you run out of money. Beg, whine, scream until you get more money.
It gets blurry here because, at this point, I was essentially high as balls. This was the moment when things would get a little darker and I’d need something heavier than simulated cartoon violence.
Time to steal peppermints and lob them at moving cars. Our Pizza Hut actually had a deck, and there was even a hole with a big oak tree growing up through it.
Standing on that deck with a handful of peppermints was like spitting into the abyss from a balcony of utter impunity.
There was absolutely nothing anyone was going to do to us. So many forlorn grandparents, defeated parents, acne-humbled waiters and younger kin utterly incapable of physical, or even verbal, retaliation.
We lobbed hundreds of peppermints up over the Pizza Hut in the direction of the highway, pelting everyone below, from the Grand Marquis to the Grand Prix to the Grand Caravan, relishing the sound each mint made as it shattered against the glass and metal. At some point we’d start throwing the mints at each other and the whole scene would descend into a wild centrifugal explosion of peppermint and imperial hubris.
Alone in the dark back seat of a car headed home, vowing silently to yourself that you will do exactly the same thing the next time, except better.
From such glorious impunity, righteous, fanatical belief and darker urges would evolve and, for some, prevail. Some of us became cops. Some found god, sports, politics, music, drugs (all of us). I rediscovered my parents progressivism, albeit belatedly and on different terms.
As a kid, my mom would drive us to school in a Volvo and I remember hearing Joni Mitchell’s “Pave paradise and put up a parking lot” daily. To think that we’ve gone from this Waldenian lament to waxing nostalgic about a single tree growing in a Pizza Hut parking lot is tragic, but it’s happened so quickly I barely even notice its significance.
In this age of “Combination Pizza Hut/Taco Bell,” what am I to make of a Pizza Hut that gave customers the option of dining al fresco in the gentile shade of an actual tree. It’s a mental cymbal ride. Peppermints shattering on pavement.
