I used to have a routine where I’d go to Angeno’s a few times a week and eat pizza and read a book. This had its hayday in the mid-nineties, when I played a lot of basketball and worked out like a man possessed and could afford (both fiscally and physically) to eat a lot more pizza. Since then the practice has fallen off drastically, partly because I can’t play basketball and must work out only like a normal person, partly because as it turns out very few places in the world lend themselves to hunkering down for a while by yourself and reading a book and eating pizza.
I live in Minneapolis again, and over the last month or so I’ve found myself re-instantiating the custom, not purposefully at first, but increasingly so as time passed. It helped that I was reading Neal Stephenson’s “Anathem” which is, all told, probably the best science fiction novel I’ve read since … I don’t even know. Maybe in ten years. Maybe ever. I might have more to say about that another time.
Anyway, so I started going to Angeno’s in Maple Grove on Sunday afternoons. I am a creature of habit, at least when it comes to pizza, so when the waitress would come up with the menu I’d wave it away and say: I’ll have a large deep-dish sausage pepperoni no bits. It came out in a single exhalation, like the congregation response to some standard bit of church oratory. I hadn’t said it in a while but some things you don’t forget.
This went okay at first, but last week the waitress looked at me sort of confused and said: “Bits?” Bits is the Angeno’s term for these chunks of crushed tomato. If you eat real Chicago-style the sauce usually has bits, but you don’t find them much in other kinds of pizza. I’d learned long ago that I prefer the pizza without bits. The “no bits” is a part of the ordering mantra that I don’t even have to think about.
So in response to her query I said: “tomato chunks” and explained what I just explained to you. And she said that they didn’t use bits anymore, and that I could omit the “no bits” part in the future. “Oh,” I said. “Okay.” And that was that, until the next week, when I went back, and it was a different waitress, and I placed the usual order except this time I didn’t say “no bits” and I hunkered down to read Anathem.
Two minutes later the waitress came back to my table, looking confused. “Did you want bits on that?” she said. “No,” I said. “Why do you ask?” “The cook told me to ask,” she said. “Who’s cooking?” I said. “Ken,” she said. As it turned out, the waitress from the week before had been wrong, Angeno’s _does_ in fact still put bits on the pizza, and if you don’t want them you _do_, in fact, need to specify. So we cleared that up, and I went back to my book.
The reason I’m telling you this is because Ken, who I know only as the red-headed guy, knows what I order. He knows because he’s been seeing me come in and order it for fifteen years now — first at Zachary Square, now in Maple Grove proper. Fifteen fucking years, coming to the same place, ordering the same thing. I’ve given a lot of thought to passing time — a LOT of thought — but for some reason thinking about it in these terms feels way different than any other formulation. Fifteen fucking years, longer than some of my relatives have been alive, I’ve been sitting in Angeno’s by myself and eating this same god damn pizza and reading a god damn book.
And in all that time – in fifteen years of seeing each other – all Ken knows about me is that I’m the guy who reads a book and orders a large deep dish sausage pepperoni no bits, and all I know about him is that his name is Ken and he has red hair and he cooks the pizza just right. All this long experience and familiarity and that’s what it boils down to. Whatever else I am, and whatever else he is, that’s all we know of each other. And this makes me terribly sad, not because I really want to change it — because I could if I wanted, I’m sure — but BECAUSE I don’t want to change it. Because this is who I am, the guy who behaves this way, and this is where I live, a world where behaving this way is normal.