It’s a busy day, which doesn’t mean it’s a coherent one. By the time I get hungry I’m thinking pizza, and my morning banana - not a euphemism - is still reclining, unimpressed, on the desk. And there it sits now, waiting (surely with pre-show jitters) to become my might-be-dinner-we’ll-see encounter in a few hours, because today the Pizza Call was a ravenous one and, as my friend Rudi says, not 2 B miss.
My pizza local from the office is a good one (a general likelihood of good pizza is one of the joys of living in New York). The Pizza Man who owns it is the sort of guy you expect to be behind the counter of a New York pizzeria: a bit seen-it-all, a bit now-what, a bit quick to judge, a bit detached, a bit friendly, and a bit exhausted. I favor late afternoon visits, so he’s often in a dull post-lunch larval state; working with the public in our fair Gotham calls for massive amounts of downtime.
It’s warm today, as it has been most days this year since winter began. He tells me that after the sweeping blizzards of last winter, his wife gave him a snow-blower as a present this year. Oops. We chuckle over that, and I notice that our background music is the Howard Jones What is Love. Which you just don’t hear every day, these days, especially in pizza places.
A few weeks back, same bat-time, same bat-place, same bat-pizza-guy, the tune was Vienna, by Ultravox, from back in 1980. “Is this Vienna?” I asked. “Ultravox? Midge Ure?”
He ducked his head and bobbed from the shoulders, as if for a moment he was starting to dance. He smiled the kind of smile you smile when it’s 30 years later and now you own a pizza parlor, and who knew back then that this was where we’d all be now? “I grew up on this stuff,” he said. “I grew up on this stuff.”
The image is gone
only you and I
This means nothing to me
This means nothing to me
Oh Vienna
Play on.
