Each year I participate in a challenge called NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. The challenge is simple; write a “novel” of 50,000 words in the thirty days of November. I perhaps have the longes “win” streak in the world, but no one else seems to be counting.
Many years I have posted my first burst of output here. So here we go. It is very different than anything I’ve written before for any purpose, so it will be an interesting experiment. I am shooting a bit toward the narrative voice of John Nichols in The Milagro Beanfield War, but that is in direct tension with the assertion I have made in the intro to keep this as close to non-fiction as possible. Also, that narrative voice is amazing but very difficult, and I may be simply unable to accomplish it.
Not really off to a great start on that account; this lacks any real flow. But there’s time!
There were three places one could get pizza in that town.
Los Alamos, New Mexico is a small town, high in the Jemez mountains, isolated from the rest of the world by twisting roads often in need of repair.
The roads have been upgraded since the time of this story; at one time the Lab needed a massive transformer and it was cheaper to rebuild the road, widening it, straightening some of its curves, even rebuilding a bridge across the Rio Grande in Española, than it was to construct a new transformer up on “the hill”.
Later, the road would get upgraded further, and an entire new highway built around Santa Fe, to accommodate the containers of nuclear waste being transported for safe storage far away.
The horseshoe curve is gone, and the pavement is better-maintained now. The guard rail has been beefed up after someone went over the edge mentally and then physically, surrendering to gravity and flying, for a moment, before landing in twisted metal at the base of the cliff.
Or was that one crazy or just a bad driver? Memory is fickle after forty years; time has a way of blurring one driving-off-a-cliff incident with another. The time a kid named (let’s say) Axel duct-taped his girlfriend up real good and drove them both off a different cliff nearby was definitely around that same year. In that case, happily, the cable stretched between posts along the top of the cliff was sufficient to slow the car enough that it did not go all the way to the bottom.
There was also a plane crash, roughly where the first over-the-cliff car incident had happened. A Cessna taking off in the thin air and something went wrong.
But in those times, it was down that road, across the Rio Grande, and on for several more miles before there was another place to buy a pizza. The 16,000 citizens of that scientific outpost in the wilderness really had just the three choices when it came to pizza.
First there was Pizza Hut. Tucked in a strip mall, dark inside, the pizza conveyor belt produced the same product as every other Pizza Hut, except since this was New Mexico they also offered green chile. To their credit they used Bueno brand chile, an improvement over the no. 10 cans of diced chiles used at the other two places. In every other way, the Pizza Hut lacked only the distinctive roof line to be exactly like the original in Topeka, Kansas.
Big Cheese Pizza was where the kids hung out. The quality of the pizza was questionable but good enough, and the joint was consistently filled with bored and twitchy high schoolers goosed on free soda refills and spiraling hormones, performing elaborate mating rituals around the formica-topped tables.
The Sysco truck that brought supplies to Big Cheese only had to move a hundred yards before stopping again to deliver the supplies to Tony’s Pizza. The Sysco salesman once said sotto voce that Tony’s consistently bought higher-grade ingredients than Big Cheese, particularly the cheese.
It was a small restaurant, with fourteen tables. In the middle of the room were four large picnic tables, made of hardwood and deeply lacquered. Around the perimeter were smaller tables, some for two, others for four. It had an open kitchen; patrons could watch as the cooks threw the pizza dough into the air, spinning it to stretch it before laying the dough on a well-floured paddle (the word “peele” had not reached that part of our nation yet). There were two ovens, one over the other, with stone surfaces, set to 500 degrees. A large spatula was wedged in the gap between the ovens for easy access to manipulate pizzas — or to burn your initials into your arm, if that’s the kind of thing you were into.
But we’ll get to Ake later.
The place was owned by a woman everyone just called Boss, and her husband Billy. Billy’s philosophy of life was that if you were going to be an alcoholic, it was much better to be a beer alcoholic; that way at least you would get more calories and some semblance of nutrition. Liquid bread, basically. He was slow and walked like his knees were bad and he sucked the smoke from cigarette after cigarette through the gap left by two missing front teeth. His laugh was rough but always ready, his gap-toothed smile a permanent fixture.
He wasn’t trusted in the kitchen, not around all those sharp objects, but he was excellent in the front of the house, greeting people, bringing drinks from the little station in the corner, telling terrible jokes, and generally just being Billy.
Boss was a slender woman, gray-haired with reading glasses hanging from a chain around her neck, her expression severe until you knew her well enough to read the kindness there. She was married to Billy, after all.
She was a hard worker, a heavy smoker, sensible about business. She would sit with the Sysco rep and reel off everything needed for the next week, straight from her head, and the restaurant never ran out of supplies.
This story doesn’t really involve Boss; simple competence is not terribly interesting. But if she had a weakness, it was in her hiring. This story is about her super-bike riding son in law, a big, crude heavy-smoking guy named Rock, his buddy Drew who also smoked heavily but preferred his motorcycles classic — his baby was a Triumph.
There was Ake, maybe 18 years old, who smoked a lot and wore black leather, heavy boots, and lots of metal, and drove a VW bus with a pop-up camper. DEATHBUS, Ake had meticulously scribed in bold black across the front part of the roof.
There are others who came and went — Crazy Bob, John Boy, Frank (who is surely dead by now), and others. You will meet them in good time. But right now the two other names you need to know are Jake and Joe, both college graduates with degrees that only qualified them for more college. Neither had any intention of doing anything like that. Neither of them smoked, either.
I should say, to close out this intro, that while your humble author was not present for all the events recounted here, they are reported with as much fidelity to the descriptions of those who were present as possible. While specific conversations are sometimes inventions, the events surrounding them are not. The Löwenbräu bottle really did fly through the air to land fifteen feet from where Frank stood, wobbly-kneed, staring blankly ahead. Twice.
Perhaps there will be enough in these pages to explain New Year’s Eve, 1986. But probably not.
