This post triggered by SuperSecretVault, so don’t tell anybody. Not to be confused with SuperSpecialQuestions. Oh wait, is there a SuperSecretAnswers.com? Maybe I should grab THAT.
When I was a young buck, having just migrated across Canada in a two-toned yellow Datsun 210, I got a delivery/driving job in a pizza place (Smitty’s Pizza of Kingston, proudly delivering sans-muffler and plus-BC-plates). Every day, around 6:30 or so, we’d make a pizza for dinner for ourselves. Every teenage boy’s dream: Paid to drive around army bases like a pizza-scented idiot.
When I’d been working there for about a week, I decided I wanted to try taking pizza out of the scorching-hot ovens, and suggested I do it with “our” pizza instead of a customer’s dinner. I managed to slide the big platter-on-a-stick under the molten cheese, and release it smoothly and gracefully to the counter-top. I watched the cheese continue to boil and heard my tummy gurgle with glee.
Since it was a large, I could slice it in eight, so I didn’t need the six-pronged guide thing, and grabbed the wheel-slicer and blasted it into classic New York triangles. The cheese ran into the cuts like butter.
Just before my stoner co-worker could raise his hand in front of my mouth, and as he was saying “Oh geez, dude, you don’t wanna put tha-” I took a bite of the pizza that had been in the industrial ovens a mere 20 seconds earlier.
The lights got brighter, the music slowed down, the windows bent out like soap bubbles, and both my hard and soft palettes (and, I’m pretty-sure, part of my mucus membrane) fused with the pizza. I could smell metal, and taste GSR, even though CSI Miami hadn’t been invented yet. The cook ran to the sink and soaked a paper towel in cold water, and folded it up a few times and then handed it to me, trying not to meet my watery gaze.
Thirty minutes later, the roof of my mouth was still bleeding.
Imagine what would happen if you tried to eat a steel pot scrubber. Fresh out of the toaster. With wasabi on it.
Bleeding? Good night Moon. That’s a way more harsh story than just a little hot coffee.
The Bohn Jurton-mobile/lil yella car!! – I remember bombing around the ‘wack in that thing…I still can’t believe it made it all the way to Kingston.
I love this part:
“The lights got brighter, the music slowed down, the windows bent out like soap bubbles . . . I could smell metal, and taste GSR . . .”