I owe an apology to a man named Dennis. For eleven years, Dennis brought pizza to my door — through sleet, through playoff traffic, through the Halloween when he parked three blocks out and walked the gauntlet of sugared children with two larges held above his head like evidence. I tipped him twenty percent and complained, privately, about the tilt of the box. Dennis, wherever you are: the cheese always slid to one side because of me. I ordered a second topping on a Friday. I knew what the roads were.
The end came by app, the way most things do now. Two pizzas on a Saturday in June: forty-eight minutes, sixty-one dollars, and a receipt that itemized a delivery fee, a service fee, and a third fee whose job, as far as I could tell, was to coordinate the first two. I stood in my kitchen reading it the way you read a lease. Then I walked out to the patio and measured a corner of it with a tape, and my wife, watching from the doorway, correctly said nothing.
The learning curve is on fire
The oven arrived on a pallet. It is shaped like an observatory and reaches nine hundred degrees, a number I now say the way other men say horsepower figures. At nine hundred degrees, a pizza cooks in about ninety seconds. This is not a convenience so much as a personality test. There is no adjusting mid-flight. You build, you launch, you live with it.
The first weekend produced what my son called carbon frisbees. Three of them, in succession, each welded to the peel at the moment of launch because I had not yet learned the physics of semolina, which functions as a bearing surface and, used correctly, is the difference between a pizza and a regret. The dog ate one of the failures and looked at me afterward with what I can only describe as reduced expectations.
Then, on the second Sunday, one came out right. Leopard-spotted at the rim, blistered, the basil gone glossy, the whole thing done before the oven timer on my phone had anything to say. Ninety seconds is faster than the app can even list its fees. I stood there holding it and understood that Dennis and I were finished, and that it was not his fault, and that I would never be able to explain any of this at a normal volume.
The farm system
Nobody warns you that the oven is the cheap part. The real operation moves indoors, into clear plastic tubs, where balls of dough now proof in rows on the second shelf of my refrigerator like a farm system. They are started on Thursday for a Friday game. I know their hydration percentage. I will not tell you what it is, because I have learned what happens to a dinner party when I do — a specific quiet settles over the table, the quiet of people deciding to love you anyway.
At nine hundred degrees, there is no time to doubt yourself.
The launch remains the evening’s only jeopardy, and I have come to treasure it the way I treasure the sear on a steak: the one step that still needs a human being with functioning nerve. Peel angle low, one committed shove, no second thoughts. Guests gather for it now. Somebody always gasps. It is the most athletic thing I do all week, and it takes under a second.
Friday, institutionalized
Friday night is now an institution with its own liturgy. Neighbors appear around seven, holding wine and toppings of varying legality. The kids order margaritas — the pizza, to be clear — and eat them standing up at the counter like traders. I make ten or twelve pies over two hours and the marginal cost of each one is roughly the price of a tank of flour. The app, I am told, still exists. It sends me notifications sometimes, offers and apologies, the way an old gym does.
An honest accounting, since this magazine insists on one: I have become a man who owns an infrared thermometer and aims it at a dome while nodding. I have opinions about flour brands that I express with my hands. And once a month I produce a pizza so bad, so suddenly and completely cratered, that it keeps me humble in a way religion never quite managed.
Dennis, if you’re reading this: it was never about you.
