By Avee Chaudhuri
After a few hours of drinking it was decided, mainly by Chatterjee, who was a diabetic and who routinely ignored the advice of doctors and refused to take his medication, that it would be another pizza night. “Pizza night! That’s what’s fucking up,” Chatterjee shouted at a group of passing school children. He had been on a self-prescribed diet for over a month, eating nothing except millet and goose liver.
“Say, what’s the pizza of the week?” Darryl asked our waiter when we were seated.
Our waiter leaned in and laughed. “You know, Joe’s actually in Italy this week, so we thought we’d have a little fun and do a Hawaiian Pizza. Joe hates Hawaiian Pizza.”
Joe was the owner of the pizza joint we would frequent whenever we drank too much and none of us had exact dinner plans. Joe kept a bottle of Fireball behind the bar, just for us.
Darryl and Monica firmly came down on the side of Hawaiian Pizza. I abstained. Chatterjee lost his goddamn mind.
“I won’t be party to treachery. One way or the other, I don’t give a damn about Hawaiian Pizza, but I won’t be a party to this humiliation.”
In fact, Chatterjee said he was drafting a letter on his phone he would send to Joe when he knew Joe was safe and back in the country:
Dear Joe,
While you were away they anointed Hawaiian Pizza the “Pizza of the Week.” They being not some anonymous cabal peddling the inane wisdom that “variety is the spice of life,” but your own kitchen staff, your own people engaged in high treason, man. I was appalled for you, remain appalled, and hope that this intelligence is actionable—with extreme prejudice. First I suggest you clean house, as it were. This will require shuttering the pizzeria for, what, at least three months while you train a new platoon of chefs and waiters. I believe this economic hardship to be worthwhile for your own personal well-being and to preserve the integrity of Joe’s Pizza, which by the virtue of operating as an LLC has become a beacon of hope for those of us who dream of one day hanging out our own shingle.
Warmly,
Prem Chatterjee
After Prem wrote the letter he ordered us shots of Fireball and we decided on a classic, tastefully garnished, Pizza Bianca.
A few weeks later, Darryl wanted to go to the racecourse because he was an animal lover.
“Have you ever seen a horse at full gallop?” Darryl pulled up the race calendar on his phone.
“No.”
“It’s like they’re flying.”
“Shut the fuck up, Darryl,” Monica said.
We decided to get some pizza to smooth things over. Joe double-timed it over when he saw us.
“I gotta thank you, Prem.” He had to catch his breath.
“I just couldn’t be a party to it, Joe.”
“That was the last straw. I tell you that was the last straw.” Joe was running his hands through his hair. He looked unkempt. He hadn’t shaved. Joe was what you would call an old-school restauranteur. Always dressed like some splendid groom, in cufflinks, in a waistcoat. Now he was wearing jeans and a hoodie and our eyes followed him anxiously to the open kitchen where he began an unsuccessful attempt to remove the ink sac from a cuttlefish.
It was only then that we noticed the kitchen was empty save for Joe, who was covered in ink. He’d opted for a mallet instead of a knife.
“Say, Joe. Where is everyone?” Monica said when she went behind the bar to grab the bottle of Fireball.
“Well, it’s like Prem said. I had to clean house. I had to take the fucking trash out. Right? Right?!” Joe started adding wood to the pizza oven, at an alarming rate. We discovered the next day while watching the five o’clock news that Joe had fired his entire kitchen staff and murdered Constantin, his head chef, burning his remains in the pizza oven. Constantin had been sleeping with Joe’s wife. It started out small, hand stuff in the walk-in, but had grown into a real relationship—weekends away, some lake house in the country—and she had become kinder to everyone, Joe included, so he had accepted the affair, but then to go ahead and make Hawaiian Pizza was too much for Joe. It was one betrayal too many.
Prem cleared his throat when the news hour ended, like he was about to say something.
“What?” I said.
“Well…” Prem started. “I cannot help but feel that we are responsible for this.”
“We!” Darryl said.
“Yeah, you wrote the goddamn note.”
“None of you stopped me! We were all drunk on the Fireball and did not think, could not think, about the consequences of our action. That’s what’s wrong with this world: people not minding their own business, imposing their own value system.”
“Jesus, Prem,” Monica said. “You’ve got to calm down. Joe would have found out eventually.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. But referring back to the letter: was it entirely necessary to frame the issue of Hawaiian Pizza as ‘high treason’? ‘Extreme prejudice’ is an unfortunate turn of phrase, knowing what happened to poor Constantin. Though perhaps twas the fate of all swarthy lovers.”
“Prem, you’re being too hard on yourself,” I said.
“Well someone has to be! I mean what the hell are we even doing?”
The question hung there for the rest of the evening. Monica called up her ex-husband, and arranged to meet him at the Home Depot. They would finish putting the new siding on their house. She said she would call us when they were done, that there’d be a party. I haven’t seen her since. Darryl nursed a light beer for several hours and then left to get kebabs. Chatterjee and I polished off a bottle of white wine but that was it. At the end of the night, Chatterjee shook my hand.
“Good luck,” I said.
“Yeah, you too.”
I can’t remember when we started to refer to ourselves as the Fireball Quartet. It was probably during that full out brawl in the Haymarket. Someone asked Chatterjee if he was a Muslim. Chatterjee, a proud Bengali Brahmin, answered: so what if he was, he had every right to be in that Irish bar leering at former collegiate volleyball players.
Avee Chaudhuri teaches Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is the chef/owner of The Sepoy’s Revenge, a restaurant he runs out of his office on campus (Andrews 320).