This essay, like its predecessor, “What Pizza Taught Me about Women,” made its first appearance on a Milwaukee-based website known as Doctors of Za. My friend from college, Tyler, has since adopted the persona of T. Mario for Doctors of Za, whereas my alias is Jimbo Slice. Pseudonyms are pretentious gimmicks employed by writers, feeble ruses we construct to convince ourselves that we're not really doing this to bring fame to our real names.
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“Sink the Ship” is a decadent college drinking game in which two teams gather in a circle. They're matched with every other person in the group so that each player has a rival on both sides. Everyone takes turns pouring droplets of beer into a cup floating in the middle of the pitcher. The unfortunate soul who pours the
droplet(s) responsible for capsizing the cup, i.e. sinking the ship, must chug the contents of the pitcher along with his or her teammates. The pitcher must be passed to a teammate once the drinker's lips leave the spout of the glass pitcher. What this means is that the anchor of the team, depending on your teammates' penchant for consuming hops, may be forced to swallow up to half a pitcher of beer in a chug-obsessed frenzy.
I used to play “Sink the Ship” on a biweekly basis when I was a junior in college. It is astounding, scary, and whimsical—the damage we have the liberty to inflict on our livers without consequence of severe hangover, when we are 20 years old.
Before Doctors of Za's T. Mario ever adopted his alias, we went to college together. Shortly after he came of drinking age, he arranged a tag-team case race at his house. Members of the college newspaper staff (Jimbo Slice included) paired up and competed against each other. My partner and I got off to a strong start but wavered after an hour or so. We didn't end up winning the contest. But afterward, I was drunk enough to (accidentally) gulp a shot of 409 cleaning spray. I have long debated which is more puzzling: 1.) Why someone would fill a shot glass at a party with a liquid that, to the inebriated eye, could pass for a cherry bomb, or 2.) Why I decided it was prudent to send the mystery shot down the hatch in the first place. Thankfully, I didn't need to have my stomach pumped at the hospital. 20 minutes later my gag reflex, in tandem with a rejective stomach and a recoiling esophagus, evacuated all the foul chemicals in my system in a raging torrent of vomit.
All this is to say that I have partied, for good or ill. But long before the accounts of booze-induced debauchery that I have just described, my first memories of parties showcase pizza. In first grade, for example, the only type of party that could make my pink crayon tingle was one of the pizza variety. I could not say the two words, “Pizza Party,” without exclaiming them as I pumped my fist expectantly.
This brings us to yet another reason why pizza is the greatest food on the planet, and the topic of this essay, as well. Because pizza parties mark the genesis of our remembered party experiences, it is the catalyst for all the rowdy half-barrel bashes I was a part of in college. If you trace the dominoes of party antics from gulping a shot of 409 spray all the way back to the origin, the instigating domino was inhaling a triple-decker of Shakey's pepperoni pizza because my friend Al dared me to do it.
Now, before I progress any further, it's important to dismiss cake as the real catalyst of our partying instincts. Granted, it's true that, mostly because it's easier to chew, we are fed cake by our parents for our birthday parties before we mature to the pizza party stage, but the reasons why I'm not writing about cake are as follows.
First off, we can rarely remember the birthdays before our teeth became firm and sharp enough to eat pizza. The cake-boasting birthdays of toddler-hood are not a part of our conscious memory. Sure, we recall eating cake at parties in grade school, but not until after we scarfed down pizza for our main course. The relationship of pizza to cake has long been as out of whack as, say, a concert in 1975 that featured Led Zeppelin opening up for the Guess Who. In spite of the order in which they are experienced, no one with the possible exception of Lenny Kravitz is dumb enough to debate who the real headliner is.
Secondly, cake parties were about bonding with our parents and offering them jovial moments for the family photo album. The drive behind a pizza party in grade school, however, was to distance yourself from your parents, a trend that was followed ardently in high school, and with reduced intensity, in our twenties and thereafter. Pizza parties prompted our desire to carouse with friends rather than our parents in social gatherings. At pizza parties, our parents were embarrassing yet essential appendages responsible for providing us presents and quarters to plug into ticket-dispensing games like ski ball and Whack-a-mole, not to mention four-player arcade masterpieces such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Finally, at age 27, as a Wisconsinite with a penchant for brewed ale, beer has become for me an essential component of a party. The tastes of beer and cake are incompatible. When the two are combined, masochistically, the beer seems too bitter, while the cake tastes too sweet. But beer mingles exquisitely with greasy and salty foods like pizza. The absence of beer at a “party” has an enervating effect on the event. More likely than a party, if they're not serving beer at the gathering, you're at a PTA meeting. Or worse, a Christian Rock concert. Cake is not the instigating domino in the evolution of our party experiences.
Fuck cake. You're reading this because we love pizza.
The problem with the third dismissal of cake that I cited, that no beer = lame party, is that one could argue it makes me seem like a drunkard elitist, that I've been corrupted by intoxicants. Maybe it's just that I have a chemical predilection for pizza and beer and the parties that accompany them both.
Pizza is not by definition an intoxicant, but in a way, it's the first gateway drug we experience. Despite its wholesome reputation, the first little stumble on the slippery slope of partying is the pizza party. We're encouraged to consume not in moderation but in excess. If you scarf down five slices while your friend is still gnawing tentatively on his second slice, you become cooler than your friend. We learn that gluttony gives us reason to boast. Just as we brag about crushing six New Castles and three Irish car-bombs before sundown, when we are young we puff out our chests and garner high-fives from our buddies for devouring four pieces in less than ten minutes.
When I think back to the pizza party thrown at Shakey's restaurant to celebrate my 12th birthday party, it comes as no surprise that three-quarters of my pals who gathered began indulging in booze and marijuana the next year, when we entered junior high school. I was not among the 13-year-old drug-dabblers. Back then I lacked audacity and recklessness; I was sheepish and feared upsetting my parents. I did not advance on the path of party decadence until my senior year of high school. Consequently, I was mocked and then dismissed from that core group of friends.
From age five until twelve, I derided any kid my age who wanted nothing to do with pizza parties. These kids were fun-hating freaks to me, dour bores whose overbearing parents forbade video games, soft drinks, and greasy foods. But at age 13, when puberty hit, when popularity became a cutthroat proving ground, from the perspectives of my former friends, I had become like those excessively protected geeks who shunned pizza parties. I had been left behind because I didn't advance on the path of decadence.
And it's not that my rebellious ex-friends outgrew the appeal offered by pizza parties; they just preferred—no, demanded--to rip a joint of dirt weed and/ or pound a couple shots from an absent parent's liquor cabinet before riding their bikes to Shakey's to gorge on pizza and get their stoned minds blown playing Mortal Kombat II. Pizza still delivered satisfaction...but it was no longer enough to quell their partying impulses. They needed more. More risk, more excitement, a more substantial buzz. It was no longer cool to merely boast about one's pizza intake; the stakes were raised the day the snide hellions discovered sprouts of hair on their balls.
I can no longer get by on pizza parties as I could when I was 13. Nowadays I prefer to wash down slices of pizza with hearty sips of beer as opposed to cola, and 25% of the time I consume 'za, it's while I'm stoned on the reefer. It's inevitable for so many adults to seek intoxication from time-to-time, and I wonder if those years I spent shunning drugs represented not a noble battle for sobriety amidst temptation but rather a protracted case of arrested development. I was already hooked on partying; those exuberant birthday bashes at Shakey's provided proof of that. It just took me longer to ascend to the next level of fun-loving decadence.
Sometimes I think my insights tend to tarnish everything. If that's the case, then I'm grateful to be wrong now and then. Regardless, the next time I'm invited to a pizza party for children--and this is a rare occasion because I generally dislike spending time with kids—I will know of the dark undertones lurking beneath the surface of an ostensibly innocent gathering. I will envision all the youngsters as burnout adolescents, sneering impishly by the band-saw as they carve a rudimentary bong out of oak in shop class. I will envision beer in place of the cola in their cups as they chug with reckless thirst to alleviate their tongue burns. In place of their arcade tokens will be quarters, which will one day inevitably get bounced off the hard surface of the table into a foamy glass of Milwaukee's Best. My imagination will distort and subvert the seemingly wholesome event; everything will be different, transformed.
Except for the pizza. It will remain constant. Pizza is not by definition a mind-altering substance, but it alters our mind's perception of how to party: with parent-leery friends, in a calamitous setting, with insatiable greed that obliges us to boast. The party started with pizza; we just didn't fully realize it.
