Street Pizza: Part II
I saved a woman’s life last weekend.
No, I didn’t rescue her from a fire or anything. Or save her from imminent stranger danger. But that’s not to say she wouldn’t have suffered had I not stepped in.
And also no, there wasn’t a threat of external bodily harm or grievous injury. And she wasn’t choking.
I was merely the instrument of getting her out of a bad situation. How?
She was about to eat some street pizza.
No, not like this story about how I threw a guy out while eating a personal pepperoni pizza I bought from a drive-up pizza cart vendor.
I’m talking about real street pizza.
Pizza that fell on the street.
Two women are walking up, each with a slice of pepperoni pizza atop a paper plate. It’s after our kitchen closed, so these two could come in with their slices and take a breather. No need to wolf it down before handing over the ID. They are also, I should note, the last two of a seven-member group. Pressure was mounting to get them inside the bar.
The first woman had her stuff mostly together. The phone was in one hand and pizza in the other. She had those wallet attachments on her phone case for easy access (that never really is), while the other friend was struggling to maintain holding a plate in one hand and the slice in the other.
Not in a drunk way — they were only ~1.75 sheets to the wind — but in a white-lady-in-an-infomercial-gettting-surprised-by-falling-Tupperware kind of way.
A rational human would have placed the pizza on the plate and used the free hand to dig out the wallet. That is not what happened. Instead of the hand-to-plate connection, she dropped the pizza from her hand to free it. Bold move, sacrificing the last few bites of pizza even though I was telling them to put it on an open patio table while they fish their cards out.
But she wasn’t done with the pizza. She went to pick it up. And not to throw it away.
Lou, a longtime regular whose bark and knack for trash talk is on the level with Kevin Garnett despite her being a third his size, was all in from the get go.
“Girl, that’s gross!
“People pee on there!”
“What the fuck are you doing, do you wanna die?”
“You really want to eat feet pizza?”
It went on.
As the street pizza inched closer to her face, I knew I had to step in and stop a human rights self-abuse scenario from going mission critical.
“If you eat the pizza you don’t get in.”
She took her eyes off the slice but still moved it closer to her mouth, as if her hand was operating independent from her brain.
“But … 5-sec-”
“NO! NO-SECOND RULE!”
Hepatitis A is the food one, Hep B is the sex one, and Hep C is the needle one, but had she taken that bite all three would be inside her liver jockeying for pole position at the Daytona 500 of death.
So, yeah. I saved her life.
