The Great 28

by Nate Williams

“Race Time” by Karen Boissonneault-Gauthier

I decided it was time to get serious when Pepperoni Paul’s stopped offering a $500 prize for finishing the Great 28” Challenge, effectively putting me out of a job. I’d thought about getting serious many times before, of course — the time I couldn’t afford to pay for my own gas and had grandma come and fill up my tank; the time my card got declined when trying to buy a corn dog at Sonic; the time the collection agency threatened litigation because I figured the library would just let you keep the DVD if you held onto it for long enough — but the loss of the Great 28” unquestionably hit the hardest.

     That Friday, I was seated in my usual spot in the back corner of Pepperoni Paul’s, the same two-seater I’d sat in for at least 150 Fridays before, right underneath the portrait of Joe Pesci and just past all the spaghetti western posters. I sucked the coarse slurry of grease and cornmeal from my fingers and gestured for Naoki to come and verify that I had, in fact, completed the challenge according to the parameters set forth by the official Great 28” Guide:

• One person must finish the entire 28-inch pizza in under an hour without leaving the dining room.

• The pizza must have two meat toppings OR four vegetable toppings OR one meat and two veggies. (Algorithmically speaking, one meat = two vegetables.) 

• Every last bit of crust and topping must be eaten in order for the Great 28” to be considered finished.

• A $50 down payment must be made before the start of the challenge. If you finish the Great 28” according to the above rules, your $50 will be refunded AND you will receive a check for $500.

• Pizza juices — meat grease, olive oil, red sauce, etc. — cannot be dabbed, wiped up, or soaked up by napkin, paper towel, t-shirt, or any other absorbent material.

• Pepperoni Paul’s reserves the right to use your image and likeness in promotional materials in perpetuity.

     At that point, it was more or less a formality. Naoki and I both knew the job was done. It was hardly even a challenge for me at that point. Frankly, it had stopped being a challenge about two years prior. 151 Fridays in, it was more like a constant. A long-standing commitment, really. Still, he hurried over with the receipt, just like he always did to humor me.

     “Looks good,” he said, hastily slipping the receipt onto the table and turning to walk away after barely even looking at the work I’d done.

     “What’s this?” I said, grabbing the receipt with one hand and his arm with the other. “Where’s my fifty bucks?”

      “Look, David, there’s been a change, okay? And--”

     “What do you mean there’s been a change?” I laughed. “You’re in charge! Why are you saying it like you’re not the one who made the change?”

     Naoki and his family had moved to Missouri from Japan approximately 47 years before that Friday. His father did something with plastics for Monsanto, I was never exactly sure what, but I’m sure it was sinister. I once saw this Todd Haynes movie called Dark Waters that said we all have a bunch of these microplastics and other toxic stuff in us that will never go away because of the work those guys did. Granted, that movie was about DuPont, not Monsanto, but the work was probably all the same. Anyway, it made Naoki’s dad a ton of money, and when he died (supposedly from natural causes, but almost certainly from Monsanto causes), Naoki opened up Pepperoni Paul’s with his inheritance. Needless to say, there was no Italian guy named Paul back in the kitchen effortlessly tossing dough with his fists. Only an Italian-food-loving Japanese man named Naoki who was still trying to master the delicate art of the dough toss.

     “I can’t afford to keep doing this,” he said, pulling his arm from mine. I could have kept a hold on him if not for the remnants of grease that remained on my fingers. “Each new month manages to bring in fewer sales than the month before. I’m dying over here.”

     “Why couldn’t you have told me this before I sat down and publicly gorged myself?” I asked him, genuinely confused. He had completely blindsided me, waiting until I’d paid the $50 down payment and finished the thing before telling me he wasn’t going to hold up his end of the bargain.

     He shrugged. It upset me. He didn’t even have the courtesy to explain himself to me. I had always thought of Naoki as a good man, a kind man. All the recommendations I’d made to friends, all the free promo I’d done for him . . . In that moment, I wished I could have taken it all back.

     “What changed between last week and this week that has you changing your mind all of a sudden?” I asked.

     “I don’t know,” he said. “New year, I guess.”

     “Your New Year’s resolution was to take away my income?”

     “It’s not income. It’s a prize.”

     “The prize is my income.”

     “The prize is going to bankrupt me if I don’t stop it.”

     I let out a sigh, the sheer force of which almost caused me to puke — this would have been an instant disqualification, though it wasn’t in the official guide. It was clear to me Naoki wasn’t going to budge. Still, I had every right to be upset. Even discounting the $500 I was owed, I had been cheated out of my $50 down payment.

     Naoki stood there saying nothing, and I sat there doing the same. I looked down at the receipt, feeling a melancholic pang in my chest that I subsequently understood to be heartburn. My last Great 28” had been eaten, though I had no reason to suspect such a farewell would be taking place when I woke up that morning. I stood up from my final meal at Naoki’s establishment, burped my final Pepperoni Paul’s burp, which stung of sausage and green peppers and onion, wiped my hands on the checkered tablecloth for the final time, and extended my left to give Naoki’s a final shake.

     “I’ll never forget the way you fed me over the years . . .” I said, giving his hand a good squeeze and a couple pumps. “. . . and I’ll never forget the way you fucked me today.”

     “Oh, David, come on,” he said, breaking free from my grip. “You and I both know you’ll be just fine. It was time to grow up anyway, don’t you think?”

     I had to walk away. I refused to listen to anything he had to say to me.

     “You were a brainiac back when I first met you!” he called after me. “A writer! A kid with a real future ahead of him!”

     “And now look at me,” I said, turning to face him from the door. “One hundred pounds heavier, fifty bucks poorer, and... a third thing that has to do with numbers, I’m sure of it. Probably twenty-five percent closer to congestive heart failure, or something along those lines. I don’t know. The point is, this is no way to treat your best customer, and the day you see me again is the day hell freezes over.”

     For emphasis, I flipped him off as I walked past the exterior of the restaurant and toward my car. It was somewhat unsettling because the reflective coating on the strip mall’s windows made it look like I was flipping off my reflection, but I had a gut feeling he saw me. Either that or the pizza had shifted in my stomach.

***

     I was back at Pepperoni Paul’s the next day, despite hell remaining unfrozen. I needed an income, and I believed if Naoki wasn’t going to pay me to eat, then the least he could do was pay me to do something else. What that something else was wasn’t clear to me, but I hoped an idea would come to me on the fly. That’s what famed filmmaker, musician, artist, and Cleveland Show voice actor David Lynch says to do in his book Catching the Big Fish: be receptive to ideas instead of trying to conjure them up. Let the fragments come to you. Like fishing.

     The place opened at 11 AM, which was still a tad bit early for me. I rolled out of bed around one and got to Pepperoni Paul’s around two. As per usual, there was no one inside but Naoki and the kid he paid to bus. His name was Augie, and he lived directly behind the strip. He couldn’t have been older than sixteen, maybe seventeen. It was funny to imagine that, one day, Augie had simply woken up and decided it was time to get a job, then walked straight out his front door and asked for a job at the first place he encountered.

     I walked through the front door with a confident stride, past the line of 25¢ candy and toy dispensers and the Love Guru pinball machine in the lobby and toward the main dining area. Augie saw me before I saw Naoki.

     “Mr. Takahashi, it’s David,” Augie shouted into the kitchen.

     “I figured as much,” Naoki called from the back. He shut off the sink, set down whatever metal tray or bowl he was cleaning with a clatter, and emerged from the swinging double doors. He wiped his hands on the front of his standard dress, a polo and khakis.

     “What gave me away?” I asked, crossing my arms and hoping my entrance had given off a distinctive air of self-assurance that he knew could only belong to me.

     “You forgot your wallet,” he said, reaching behind the hostess stand and holding up my weathered Fossil. I hadn’t even noticed I’d been without it, but I wasn’t going to let Naoki know that. That would have been a surefire way to get him to turn down my yet-to-be-caught fish of an idea.

     “Nice to see you keep people’s lost valuables out in the open like that,” I said, feigning offense. “Anyone could have taken that, you know.”

    “No one has been in here from the time you left yesterday to now,” Naoki said, handing me the wallet. “I told you: sales are way down. No one wants to eat at Pepperoni Paul’s anymore. Not since the documentary.”

     He was speaking in reference to Oscar-nominated director Rebecca Cammisa’s Atomic Homefront, which shined a light on the slight uranium problem in the area. As it turned out, the government had dumped a bunch of radioactive material all around the St. Louis area, with our zip code — and, more specifically, the neighborhood that Pepperoni Paul’s resided in — getting the worst of it back in the late ‘40s.

     “I’ve eaten here for years, and nothing’s wrong with me,” I said. “You should’ve leaned into that angle in your ads instead of making me out to be some sort of gluttonous freak.”

     “What do you want, David?” Naoki asked, ignoring my suggestion.

   “I’m here to make a proposition,” I said, standing up straighter and doing my best to look professional. With the right posture and poise, I knew even my gym shorts and t-shirt could appear as sharp as a finely pressed suit.

     “We aren’t hiring,” Naoki said, unwilling to even hear what I had to say. “I can barely afford to keep Augie on as it is.”

     “Huh?” Augie said, slack-jawed.

     “Nothing, don’t worry about it,” Naoki assured him flatly. “Now go back to sweeping.” He did.

     “I could be standing here with the idea of a lifetime,” I argued, knowing full well that wasn’t the case. I kept rolling with it, though. “You could be missing out on the greatest offer this town has ever seen.” Mentally, I scoured the water for that elusive big fish.

     “Well, let’s hear it, then. But hurry up. I have to get a catering order out of the oven.”

     Ever since the documentary had turned people away from ever wanting to eat at Pepperoni Paul’s out of fear of ingesting any of the uranium allegedly in the water, Naoki had found some mild success running a catering company under a different name and address while still serving food from Pepperoni Paul’s. He called it Risotto’s, and he used his home address from the next town over.

     “Here’s the pitch: You hire me to—”

     “No,” he said, blankly.

     “Excuse me?”

     “No,” he repeated. “I won’t hire you.”

     “Why not?”

     “Because I know you won’t work.”

     “And how do you know that?”

     Naoki laughed way harder than he should have laughed. He was doing it for show, I could tell. He was performing, but for whom I had no idea. Surely not Augie, who was picking his nose and flicking the boogers into his little dust pile.

     “I’m struggling to see what exactly is so funny,” I said, deep down feeling relieved that he had cut me off so that I had more time to meditate on it like Lynch said to.

     “You were in here once a week, every week, three years straight, eating a pizza nearly two and a half feet in diameter for money instead of working a real job like the rest of us.”

     “Five hundred a week for an hour of work? Two thousand a month, twenty-four thousand a year? If you’re insinuating I’m lazy, I’m not. Ever heard of work smarter, not harder?”

     “‘Work’ being the keyword. Eating isn’t work. Now go, and take your wallet. I don’t want to hear any more from you.” He tossed me the wallet, which I failed to catch only because I wasn’t expecting him to throw it. If I had been anticipating it, I could have caught it with ease. I figured he intentionally tossed it when my guard was down to embarrass me in front of Augie. It bounced off my chest and hit the floor with a leathery slap. Naoki shook his head and went back to the kitchen. Augie went back to sweeping the same little boogery pile he’d been working on the whole time.

     “Your pizzas aren’t even that great!” I shouted. “I can taste the uranium!”

     Neither Naoki nor Augie paid me any attention. I leaned down and grabbed my wallet while they weren’t looking so as to preserve my pride. I brushed off the dust and crumbs that Augie had so carelessly missed and stuck it into my shorts pocket.

     “The day you see me again is the day pigs fly!” I yelled. “And I mean that this time!”

     “Yeah, sure, see you tomorrow,” Naoki called from the kitchen.

     I stormed out — right past the promotional pinball machine for director Marco Schnabel’s failed Mike Myers vehicle and the dusty old dispensers filled with candy that had morphed into enormous, melted clumps and toys that had long lost their bright, neon colors due to years of sun exposure — and flipped double birds as I walked past the exterior: one for Naoki and one for Augie.

Nate Williams is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. His work concerns the stranger side of life in the Midwest.

Karen Boissonneault-Gauthier is an Indigenous photographer and writer. Most recently she's been a cover artist for The Unmooring, Dyst, Synkroniciti, The Pine Cone Review, The Feeel Magazine, Arachne Press, Pretty Owl Poetry, Wild Musette, Existere Journal, Vine Leaves Literary Journal, Gigantic Sequins, Ottawa Arts Journal and many more. She’s been featured in Bracken, Vox Popular Media Arts Festival, Zoetic Press, New Feathers Anthology, Maintenant 15, Parliament Lit, Pure in Heart Stories and others. When she's not walking her Siberian Husky, she's also designing with Art of Where. See www.kcbgphoto.com to find out more.