When you first hear the old saw about never discussing sex, religion, or politics in polite company, you think to yourself, my God how dull. Your mother explains to you the reasoning behind the principle — that, when one of those topics comes up, it’s not really a “discussion” anymore, and “polite” doesn’t stick around long either — but it makes adulthood sound like waking death, an endless rusty chain of unpleasant-tasting beverages, intractable scratchy slip hems, stifling conversations about Jonathan Livingston Seagull and fondue and zoning, curdled breath, nose hair, onion dip from a packet, everything you have already vowed never to care about or to become because, although you have never tasted gin or a boy, although you know as little about the world’s actual workings as it is possible for a person with access to cable television to know, you have read Maugham and you have seen The Graduate six times, which makes you an authority on the regrettable triumph of manners over discourse, the empty strangling the worthy, so much so that you have written verse on the subject, including a penetratingly insightful comparison between yellowing plastic furniture slipcovers and the fake smiles of your parents’ friends. Obviously.

As so often happens, what you consider an unthinking adherence to convention on your mother’s part does not reveal itself as “wisdom” until later — your junior year of college, more precisely, when you find yourself slumped on a fusty futon in a friend of a friend’s room, staring dully at a Frisbee on the friend’s friend’s roommate’s lap. The Frisbee contains all the tools necessary for the rolling of a joint, a process already painstaking to the point of parody, and since you smoke pot not because you particularly enjoy it but to render your friends who do enjoy it comprehensible to you during nighttime hours, the inevitable and constant vapor-locking that precedes the main event is hardly a balm to your fundamentally fidgety nature. Further, it is received wisdom on your campus that the quality of a spliff has everything to do with the care taken in its crafting, and that an appropriately reverent attitude towards the project can in fact cancel out the hilariously high seed quotient of the “non-ja” you have all accustomed yourselves to smoking; said attitude generally manifests itself as a long list of rigid atmospheric compulsions involving lighting, snacks, and music — not necessarily in that order, and seldom checked off in a timely fashion due to the highly distractible nature of the participants. Today, the ritual has gotten derailed before it even begins by an argument over the existence of God; as if it’s not absurd enough that the dust-up started as a conversation about Phish bootlegs, every single stereotype about either undergraduate pretensions or stoner faux-fundity is also in play as the Frisbee sits, forgotten, in the roommate’s lap, a casualty of PHI 201: Intermediate Concepts. You do not believe God is a marketing tool. Nor do you believe that anyone else in the room cares what you believe about God. Everyone is now either angry or bored, and it is now too late to talk about movies or which professors wear hairpieces. Your mother’s point is made.

As time goes on, you come to realize that, while it is often sensible to avoid those three topics, the better to prevent bad feelings, it is often just as sensible to avoid other incendiary subjects about which your mother did not warn you. First on the list: pizza.

Pizza might not seem to rank alongside immigration policy or transubstantiation when it comes to dangerous conversational territory, but you have learned from painful experience to avoid venturing even the faintest secondhand opinion about the matter, lest you receive in response a faceful of angrily spluttered spittle. Or give one, to an innocent civilian who dared to defend that miscarriage of portable cuisine euphemistically known as “the Hawaiian.”

You think of yourself, rather grandly, as a pizza generalist. Pizza purism is, to your mind, silliness; time that others waste whining about bubbles in the crust, you spend eating instead, because in your view, pizza is a delivery system for cheese. For that reason, you fail to see the point of becoming offended by Domino’s, Pizza Hut, and their ilk, and you don’t have much to do with debates on the subject of stuffed crust and how it symbolizes everything that has gone awry with our once great, now fat, nation.

You do not think of yourself, grandly or otherwise, as a pizza hypocrite; this is, however, exactly what you are. The “I’m a woman of simple tastes — bread, cheese, sauce, that’s all I need” attitude you affect is exactly that, affected, because nothing can get you up onto an actual box that used to hold actual soap faster than the oxymoronic phrase “vegan pizza.” Bomb threats do not clear rooms as quickly as pointing you in the direction of soy cheese and giving you a push. Yes, you roll your eyes at those who spurn Sbarro’s, but who, pray tell, composed a thunderously caps-locked letter to the benighted imbecile responsible for Time Out New York‘s recent pizza cover story, a letter whose pretentious allusions included, but were not limited to: the mathematical principle of the golden mean as it relates to Stromboli’s proportions of grease to cheese to crust; the capital-R-Romantic concept of the sublime; the word “orchesis”; Pilgrim’s Progress; and various twinned figures from Greco-Roman mythology, in the service of a long-winded comparison between Stromboli and St. Mark’s Pizza? Correct: you. You did that, and you would do it again if you thought the heathens in charge at TONY HQ would apologize in print for ignoring Pizza 33.

You are made all the more insufferable when the subject turns to pizza by your customary preface: “I worked in a pizzeria, so.” The fact that you merely delivered the pies has not prevented you from becoming both a pizza snob and a reverse pizza snob, thereby ensuring that the only person who knows anything about pizza, anywhere, ever, is you. You decide which pizza quarrels merit attention and which do not; sausage-versus-hamburger is of zero interest to you, and you could not possibly care less about Chicago-versus-New-York, but on the subject of the canned mushroom, you will be heard, repeatedly and at Dickensian length, and when you rise to declare, “En conclusion,” in a French accent, it signals not the end of your rant but the boiling over of an entirely different pot of rage, this one directed at philistines who sully a white pie with meat toppings and wrapped up with a Khrushchevian pounding of the table with your shoe. You wear a size nine; your friends have not mentioned anything even rhyming with “canned mushrooms” in your presence since 1995.

You have on several occasions delivered this monologue through a mouthful of Stouffer’s. Your expertise has no time for shame, busy as it is directing total strangers as to the correct disbursement of oregano. You can microwave a piece of day-old pie, eat it with a knife and fork, and feel smug, but witnessing a slice of pepperoni getting Parmed at the shaker bar is like a dagger in your heart. “It isn’t even real Parmesan!” you Camille, clutching your chest. “And stop hogging the red pepper flakes!” Nothing can distract you from your torment except perhaps a slice piled high with chicken chunks, a variety you just do not understand — why not just get chicken for dinner, then? And yet the only thing you like better than an anchovy slice is bonding with others who like anchovy slices — the few, the proud, the secret society of salt addicts, like the Masons but with worse breath.

You have a strong and unassailable opinion on every aspect of pizza-iana — what to drink with it (not water, you clown!), how to dispose of excess grease (oy with the blotting…fold and drain, you lout!), whether Pizza Pizza is good (it’s delicious, you prig!), which crust substitute to use for homemade mini-pizzas (English muffins, you dolt!), and who can top Boboli (only you, pay attention!). Green pepper is not diced, sun-dried tomato is not acceptable, and picking off all the cheese to eat it first in the company of parents who belong to the Clean Plates Party is not recommended. You know these things as truths and you will not hear otherwise, and it is for this reason that you steer well clear of talking pizza, because in a “grandma pizza is the ninth wonder of the world” debate, there is a jackass, and whether it is you, arguing pro, or the unsuspecting spittle-ee who dared to take the con position, it is better not to find out.

December 11, 2006

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