by Pete Hautman
1 Pizza
2 Bacon and Olives
3 Potato Chips
4 Pulverized Cow
5 Half Dog
6 Burrito
7 Pickles
8 Gummy Worms
9 SooperSlider
10 Fritos
11 Possum
12 Cheerio
13 Peanut Butter and Banana
14 Extra Sausage and Cheese
15 Slim Jim
16 Mustard
17 Two Pizzas
18 Cabbage
19 SooperSack
20 Foam Rubber
21 Crust
22 Artichoke and Pepper
23 Yogurt
24 Cheerios
25 Pancakes
26 Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner
27 Veggie Pizza
28 Worm
29 Grilled Cheese
30 Waffles
31 Wontons
32 More Cheerios
33 Half-Baked
34 Ice Cream and Pepper
35 Pizza Bianca
36 Soggy Crust
37 Salmon
38 Slider
39 Vanilla
40 Onion Rings
41 Kraut and Beer
42 Water
43 Snow Cone
44 Go, David, Go
45 Fifty Slices
46 Ipecac
47 Chicken Soup
48 Halibut
49 Mal’s Job
A sixteen-inch pizza, fresh from the oven, is a thing of beauty.
Disks of pepperoni shimmer and glisten on a sea of molten mozzarella. Dark-red oregano-flecked sauce bubbles up through the cheese, surrounded by a hand-tossed, artfully charred crust.
“Well?” HeyMan says. It’s only two in the afternoon, and a five-o’clock shadow is already winning the battle for his face. Hayden Mankowski — that’s his real name — is the hairiest kid I know. He’s been shaving since he was ten.
I push my finger into the middle of the pizza. “Still too hot.” I lick my finger.
“You started,” he says.
“That doesn’t count.”
HeyMan looks at Cyn, who is folded into the booth across from us.
“Cyn? Does the finger-lick count?”
Cyn’s wrists are resting atop her knees, and she’s holding her phone about three inches from her nose. Her straight black hair hangs over her forehead and into her eyes. She looks like a smartphone with bangs. Her thumbs move, and her phone makes a faint whoosh. Cyn is obsessed with her new phone. She says she’s going the whole day communicating via text messages only. Verbal communication is so last millennium, she texted me this morning.
Cyn, HeyMan, and I are the Three Musketeers, even though we have no muskets, and Cyn is the only one who has actually read the book. We have been best friends since before HeyMan started shaving. Next fall we will all be starting high school together.
HeyMan checks his cell for her text.
“She says it doesn’t count,” he says after a moment. He lifts a slice of his sausage-and-mushroom. “Mine’s not that hot,” he says, taking a bite from the tip. I notice he follows it quickly with a gulp of Dew.
I shake my head and wait patiently for that magic moment when the sauce is not deadly hot but the cheese is still soft. A minute later, HeyMan takes another, more cautious bite.
“Seriously,” he says, swallowing. “It’s not.”
“Okay,” I say. “Time me.”
HeyMan puts down his slice and, with a greasy forefinger, pulls up the stopwatch function on his phone and touches the start button. “Go!”
I go.
It is not the best pizza ever. The cheese has turned rubbery and the crust in the middle is kind of gooey. I down the whole thing in four minutes and thirty-six seconds.
HeyMan groans, pulls out his wallet, and hands me a ten-dollar bill.
I grab the tenner with one hand and a slice of HeyMan’s sausage-and-mushroom pizza with the other, because I’m still kind of hungry.
“You’re a freak.” HeyMan puts away his wallet. “I don’t get how come you’re not, like, huge.”
“I have this metabolism,” I say.
“Yeah, a really freaky metabolism,” HeyMan says. “I bet you got a tapeworm a mile long.”
I laugh. My phone chirps.
I look at Cyn. Unfolded, she is as tall as me — five seven and a quarter — but folded, she is quite small. She is like one of those pop-up campers.
I check my phone.
“What?” I say.
I hardly see her thumbs move. Cyn Lee’s texting skills are superhuman.
My phone chirps.
I make a disgusted face. Cyn does not look directly at me, but her lips curve into a smile.
“What’s she saying?” HeyMan asks.
“She’s riffing on your tapeworm theme,” I say.
Cyn’s thumbs dance. I look at my phone, waiting with dread and curiosity for the text to arrive.
“Did you just look that up, or is it something you already knew?” I ask.
She just smiles. Of course she already knew. Cyn is a trivia monster.
“How long do they get in dogs?” I ask.
I asked about dogs because I have to give Arfie these chewy things every month just in case he has worms which he probably does because he eats rabbit turds in the backyard. Arfie is actually Mal’s dog, but I’m the one who has to take care of him. Mal can’t be trusted with taking-care-of-dog stuff.
More about Mal later.
I saw this guy on TV who eats all kinds of weird things like maggots and ostrich guts. I could never do that. In fact, I have a rather sophisticated palate. I like lobster and artichokes and stuff like that. When I’m hungry I can eat just about anything, but I draw the line at maggots. There are many things I will not eat. Sauerkraut and pickled pigs’ feet, for example. Or if HeyMan wanted to bet me ten dollars that I couldn’t eat a bunch of rabbit turds, he could keep his money.
Arfie, he’d take that bet in a heartbeat.
HeyMan and I are done eating, but Cyn is just getting started on her kid-size Veggie Deluxe. I think she must be making a point, because I’ve seen her eat a lot faster. She picks a mushroom from her pizza and eats it slowly, showing me how it’s done.
“You’re supposed to eat the whole thing, not pick it apart and take like an hour a slice,” I tell her. “The whole point of a pizza is that everything is all together.”
Cyn pretends to ignore me and takes the smallest possible nibble from her scrap of mushroom, just to bug me. She still has three-quarters of her pizza to go.
“Sonya Thomas would’ve downed that whole thing in about thirty seconds,” I say. Sonya Thomas, aka the Black Widow, is this 105-pound Korean-American woman who once ate five hundred and sixty-four oysters in eight minutes for the world record.
Cyn glares at me, her eyes narrowing. “I am not Sonya Thomas,” she says, verbally.
“You talked!” I say.
She glares harder.
“And I didn’t mean ’cause she’s Korean,” I say. “I meant ’cause she’s a girl.”
“You are an idiot.” She plucks a sliver of onion from her miniature pie and places it delicately on her tongue.
While we wait for Cyn to finish her pizza, HeyMan and I talk about a python-eating-a-goat video we saw on YouTube. Cyn is playing with her phone, ignoring us and taking a small bite every so often.
“A whole goat — that would be like eating twenty pizzas at once,” HeyMan says.
“Joey Chestnut could do it.” Joey Chestnut is the most famous eater in the world. He once ate seventy hot dogs in ten minutes.
“I thought you were a Jooky fan.”
“I am. Joey had the advantage that day. He’s like two hundred thirty pounds. Jooky’s only o
ne fifty, and he only got beat by half a dog.”
I saw it on YouTube. Jooky Garafalo downed sixty-nine and a half hot dogs in ten minutes. But what was weird was he was trying to beat Joey, and he couldn’t get that last half dog down. I mean, I couldn’t imagine not being able to eat half a hot dog no matter how full I was, especially if it was for the world record. But I guess that just makes it even more amazing because you just know that Jooky had to have taken it right to the absolute limit if he had to stop at sixty-nine and a half.
“Jooky’s got heart,” I say.
HeyMan’s phone chirps. I know it’s Cyn, because she’s got that little smile. HeyMan checks the message, smiles confusedly, and shows it to me.
“Shakespeare?” I guess.
“The Three Musketeers,” Cyn says. Verbally.
My name is the incredibly ordinary and common and boring David Alan Miller. No one knows how many other David Millers there are, but it’s got to be roughly equal to the population of Wyoming. I have never been to Wyoming the state, but I have been to Wyoming, Minnesota, and there are definitely enough David Millers to fill up that little town. When I turn eighteen, the first thing I’m going to do is change my name. I’ll still be David Miller, but it’ll be something like David Fuzzbucket Miller. I’ll call myself Fuzz. Or maybe Fuzzy. Alan was my grandfather’s name. He died when I was two. He owned a bar in Solon Springs, Wisconsin, but he sold it when he retired back in the eighties, which gives you some idea how old he was. My mom grew up in Solon Springs. She says she is never going back. She also says I got my metabolism from my dad’s side of the family. My dad is hyper. He is constantly doing stuff like crosscutting the grass or painting the house or patching the driveway. Dad likes things neat.
It gets really cold here in Vacaville, Iowa, and every winter we get these big cracks in the driveway. My dad is all about patching driveway cracks. You would think it was his skin that was cracking. So our driveway is covered with these black squiggles and the stuff gets soft in the summer so it’s no good trying to skateboard on it because the wheels stick in the patches and you could kill yourself in like one second. And it gets on Arfie’s paws, which he hates and tries to bite off.
Arfie will eat anything. Tar and rabbit turds are the least of it.
When I get home my mom is making — guess what — pizza! Not kidding. She buys these premade pizza crusts and slathers all kinds of stuff on top and pops it in the oven and calls it pizza. One time she used catsup instead of regular pizza sauce and I could tell right away, but this time she’s using canned pizza sauce, with Canadian bacon and green olives, which sounds gross but she’s made it before and it’s pretty good if you like salty pizza.
“I just ate an entire pepperoni pizza,” I say.
She looks at me and does this exaggerated shoulder sag, as if I’d dissed a dinner she’d been working on for hours. But I didn’t mean it that way; I was just saying it was like a coincidence.
“I didn’t say I wasn’t hungry,” I add.
That produces an eye roll, one notch above a shoulder sag.
“Where do you put it?” she asks.
That is what my dad calls a rhetorical question. I answer her anyway.
“I think I have cow stomachs,” I say. “Like, two stomachs?”
“That would explain so much.” My mother has what you call a dry sense of humor. A lot of the time I don’t even know when she is trying to be funny. “Your father called. He won’t be home for another couple of hours.”
When my dad is not patching the driveway or poisoning dandelions or caulking invisible cracks around the windows or trimming the bushes to within a millimeter of each other he sells commercial refrigeration units. It’s not very interesting so I won’t go into it. But he’s always driving back and forth to Des Moines, about an hour away from Vacaville.
I hear a car pull up. I look out the window. Bridgette and Derek. Bridgette is my older sister. She’s in college, but her school is only half an hour away, so she comes home for dinner once a week or so. She says it’s to make Mom happy. Derek is her idiot boyfriend. Both of them are so crazy for college that they take classes in the middle of summer, and both of them have jobs on campus — Bridgette works in the admissions office, and Derek is the caretaker for his fraternity house.
“The droids are here,” I say. I call them that because Derek reminds me of C-3PO from Star Wars if you can imagine Threepio with a ponytail, glasses, and skin. Fortunately, Bridgette doesn’t look like R2-D2, but she’s just as smart.
Mom slides the first pizza into the oven.
“Mal is in his room,” she says. I hadn’t asked about Mal, but Mom is big on pop-up news flashes. “Why don’t you check on him?”
Checking on Mal is a never-ending task. We are all about checking on Mal. We’ve been checking on him since he was born, and that was ten years ago.
Mal’s door is closed. I give it the special knock he likes — bip, bippity-bip-bip . . . bip-bip — and walk in. Mal is sitting cross-legged on his bed, rocking back and forth, staring happily at his Wall of Things. Mal is all about his Things. The wall at the end of his bed is covered with them. It is an impressive collection. If you like Things.
“Hey Mal,” I say.
Arfie, a brown furry puddle on the floor next to the bed, raises his shaggy head and looks up at me. Mal just keeps on rocking and staring at his Wall. Mal loves to rock. Mom calls it his “exercises.” He’s been doing it since he was a baby.
“Nice to see you, too,” I say.
I check his Wall to see if he’s added any new Things. It’s hard to tell. The Wall is so covered with Things there’s hardly any wall left to see.
“Is that a new feather?” I ask.
Mal nods, or maybe he’s just rocking more vigorously.
I was just guessing about the feather. There are so many feathers thumbtacked to his Wall there’s no way I could pick out a new one.
Most of Mal’s Things come from our fenced-in backyard, where he and Arfie hang out when the weather is nice. Dad keeps our yard immaculate, but Mal manages to find something almost every day. The rules are that every Thing has to be Mom-approved, and only then is he allowed to attach it to his Wall.
Things Mom will allow:
Leaves
Butterfly wings
Feathers
Flower petals
Things Mom will not allow:
Whole insects, living or dead
Rabbit turds
Worms
Mal is very good about following rules, once he accepts them. When he first started decorating his Wall he brought in everything from live slugs to used paper napkins. There were a few meltdowns. We had a talk about it, me and Mal and Bridgette and Mom and Dad — a family meeting, which as usual was mostly Mom and Dad talking, me half listening, Bridgette examining her fingernails, and Mal off in his own world, flapping his hands and avoiding our eyes. But Mom knows how to lay down the law with Mal, and after a while he got with the leaf/feather/flower/butterfly-wing program. Still, every so often he tries to sneak in some squirrel hair or a dead grasshopper.
“Time to eat, Mal,” I say. “Pizza.”
Mal stops rocking and tilts his head, listening. We can hear Bridgette and Derek talking downstairs. Mal frowns.
“No pizza for you?” I ask.
The rocking resumes.
“Okay,” I say, and I leave him to his exercises.
By the time I get back to the kitchen, Mom is putting the first pizza on the table.
“Mal isn’t hungry,” I say, but nobody looks at me. Bridgette is bragging about how she got a perfect score on some test. Bridgette is always getting perfect scores on tests. When she stops to take a breath, Derek informs my mother that in Italy, pizzas are made with water-buffalo mozzarella.
“Well, this is Kraft mozzarella,” my mother says.
“It’s all good,” Derek says, trying to be polite, but coming off like a know-it-all, as usual.
I mentioned earlier that Der
ek is an idiot. I don’t mean he is unintelligent. He gets straight A’s like Bridgette and he knows a lot of stuff, but he is too stupid to realize that nobody cares that pi has been calculated to umpteen digits or that fourteen American presidents have been left-handed or that Italians eat cheese made out of water-buffalo milk.
I grab a slice of pizza and say, “Four minutes and thirty-six seconds.”
Everybody looks at me.
“That’s how fast I ate a sixteen-inch pepperoni pizza today.”
Bridgette rolls her eyes, exactly like mom’s eye roll. Mom sighs and sags.
Derek is the only one who seems impressed. He says, “Seriously?”
“Yup. I won ten bucks.”
Derek thinks for a moment, then says, “Who paid for the pizza?”
“I did.”
“So you didn’t actually turn a profit.” Derek majors in business.
I shrug. “I got to eat the pizza.”
“Four minutes and . . . how many seconds?”
“Thirty-six.”
Derek takes a bite and chews thoughtfully.
“That’s pretty fast,” he says. “How fast can you eat that slice?”
I shove the slice in my mouth. One bite, two bites, three bites . . . and it’s gone.
Bridgette and my mom are staring at me with identical horrified expressions.
Bridgette says, “Wow, that’s disgusting even for you.”
Derek says, “Cool!”
My mom says, “David, if you’re going to eat like that, I’ll just feed you and Arfie out of the same bowl.”
“Sorry,” I say, but I’m not.
Mom closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. “Please let Mal know it’s time to come to the table.”
“I already did. He isn’t hungry.”
“Try again.” By which she means, Please leave for a moment so I don’t have to deal with you.
Mal is still not interested in coming to the table. He has acquired a large bag of potato chips and is happily sitting on his bed and chowing down, crumbs everywhere, with Arfie sitting at the foot of the bed, begging. Mal and Arfie have bonded over potato chips. It is one of the things Mal eats. The other things Mal eats are crisp-fried fish sticks, Ritz crackers, Cheerios, and pizza crust. Normally he would come down for pizza crust, but not when he has potato chips. Also, Mal does not care for Derek, who always talks to him in an extra-loud voice and smiles too much.
