Chapter 6 - Toilet Pizza

I say that I "worked" at Michael's Magic, but in reality I had fewer real responsibilities than the activities director on the Love Boat. I jockeyed the register quite a bit, but the store wasn't the kind of place where the counter had to be manned at all times. In fact, for minor purchases of soda, bottled water, or snack-size chips you could just take what you wanted and leave change near the register. I would sometimes host weekly CCG tournaments, but I was often playing in them anyway, so all I had to do was keep a score sheet. Restocking was a little bit of Christmas every time the mail arrived, because I had first crack at all the new RPG supplements right out of the distributors' shipments. I took the trash out before closing: mainly aluminum cans, Taco Bell wrappers and pizza boxes, which nearest approximates the closest I ever approached to real work in the entire day, but otherwise I think I was there mainly to ensure that nobody brazenly stole anything.

There was one other thing I had to do to earn my keep, ostensibly on a weekly basis but really whenever Mike got annoyed with me: cleaning out the bathroom. I always called it "mucking out the stall" because after a hundred gamers nourished on little but Dr. Pepper and Taco Bell have spent a week collectively defiling the bathroom, the place was filthier than Jabba the Hutt's armpits. I won't claim that gamers are any more disgusting than any other group-- say, drunks, soccer hooligans, or rage-infected monkeys (but then, I'm being redundant)-- but I can tell you from years of cleaning up after them that gamers are a pack of odious swine one step up on the evolutionary ladder from picking their assholes in public.

I'm not sure where it comes from, this complete disregard for washroom cleanliness. Gamers tend to be rather fastidious, especially boardgamers. We like to organize our books on shelves, sort our collectible fantasy miniatures in plastic bins and tackle boxes, bag and board our comics, sort the pieces of our board games by color and function in tiny plastic bags that we have to make special trips to the craft store to find, and put thousands of collectible cards in individual protective sleeves., yet every time I cleaned that bathroom it was like the floor of a Chilean hospital for cholera patients. We boast of our superior hand-eye coordination granted by decades of videogames, yet hitting the water in a toilet bowl continues to be a deceptively hard task for some.

I admit that I'm being a little unfair. I'm not trying to put forward a stereotype that gamers are a particularly filthy bunch. It's probably no different from any other public building. I'm simply speaking for the vast majority of game store bathrooms I've visited: yikes. You imagine the bathroom nightmare, and short of cleaning up afterbirth, I've done it all. Every store has some jackass who loves to stuff entire rolls of toilet paper into the bowl and flush. People have sprayed piss all over the walls, sink, and mirror like their dick was an out-of-control fire hose. Someone smeared taco diarhhoea on the walls after only half-filling the toilet, trailing shit over the seat. Mike even installed a urinal once and someone left his piss foaming in it for two weeks before the plumbing was hooked up to it. You might think it was an honest mistake if you don't consider the garbage bag draped over it and large cardstock sign reading "OUT OF SERVICE."

Those were aberrations, though. No doubt the work of one, maybe two vandals with severe bowel problems and no compunctions about sharing them with the world. It's probably just a couple of dirty jerks making every other gamer look bad. But still, the general state of most game store bathrooms I've seen borders on atrocious. How someone can live over twenty years and still not grasp the accepted "poop goes in the water" rule of modern society is beyond me. Who uses a toilet and walks out without flushing? You know how repulsive it is to walk into a bathroom and find someone else's orange piss still foaming in the bowl? I don't care what you do at home, but when you go to a public building, the adage "if it's yellow, let it mellow" does not apply.

I'm not alone in thinking this. At one point, the major gaming convention in Milwaukee, Gen Con, decided to issue fliers to all of its guests reminding them how great it would be if they actually took a shower once in a while. The main reason for this is because Gen Con stands as one of the last great endurance trials for gamers: several days of unceasing gaming. Many gamers attempt to make the pilgrimage to Milwaukee at least once in their life and see if they can go the distance on naught but caffeine and Slim Jims, and if you don't have to sleep, you don't need to book a hotel room and all its attending hygienic facilities. You can imagine the kind of funk several hundred gamers who have been living out of the consuite for three days smells like.

This is the story of the toilet pizza. It is also not anywhere close to the scatological nightmare you might currently be imagining. It's still very, very weird, and it haunts me to this day. Even better, the ending of this story may very well stand out as the most evil thing I have ever done.

We were playing a D&D 3rd Edition game in the back room-- Mike's favored spot to game because he could watch the rest of the store without craning his neck around. Unfortunately, this meant we were right next to the bathroom so every time the door opened after someone dropped the kids off at the pool, we sat at the table retching until the poo-gas dissipated. Believe me, I wanted to move to the front of the store, but Mike had a favorite green table in the back and he wasn't moving it. So I pulled the collar of my t-shirt over my nose, commando-style, and soldiered on. Of course, now I'm smelling my own armpits, but better my Old Spice deodorant than Chanel "Number Two."

Anyway, my character, Smilin' Jack D'Arcy (a Bard/Fighter working on the Dread Pirate prestige class for no better reason than it sounded really cool) got stiffed with a Hold Person spell so I decided to stretch my legs a bit because the fight was going to take a while. My wanderings eventually led into the bathroom because when I'm at the gaming table I tend to drink Mountain Dew like Dean Martin pounds back martinis. Mountain Dew is a curious beverage with a taste that's rather hard to define other than "it tastes green." Which it is. It's also nearly undrinkable when it's not cold and rumored to cause sterility in men. Fits right into my plan.

I can only be grateful it hasn't yet turned my pee green.

After doing my business, I flushed and began to head for the toilet when I noticed something wedged underneath the toilet bowl: a pizza box from the nearby Peter Piper Pizza. I would collect pizza boxes quite often from around the store because almost everyone choked down that godawful pizza every night. It was horrible stuff. Peter Piper is mainly a place for kids to have lame birthday parties and blow a few bucks on arcade games and skee-ball. It's certainly not known for its gourmet cuisine. Made from frozen, pre-packaged ingredients and slopped together by apathetic high-school students, it was bad even by take-out pizza standards; it was the kind of disgusting, limp pizza you couldn't pick up with your hands. Either you'd try to heft the slice with one hand, causing all the cheese to slough onto the plate leaving you with a reddish hunk of dough wrapped around your fist, or you'd try to pick it up with two hands, covering your fingers in grease and scalding cheese and try to mash this lump of lard and saturated fats into your mouth before your plate disintegrated. The grease was so plentiful it would form into standing orange pools on top of the pizza, soak through the "crust" (term used loosely because it had all the structural integrity of a tortilla) and even dissolve the cardboard box, leaving a moldering yellow stain on the white tables. We used to steal napkins and smother the pizza like a chemical spill, hoping to wick off the grease to make it slightly less-likely to cause us massive heartattacks before the age of thirty.

We ate it constantly. Every day we were there. Oh, we complained about it endlessly. It tasted like Super Mario wiped his ass on a plate. It was too expensive, and it was so unhealthy when we'd finished off the rubbery crusts we'd all felt like we'd done something unholy to ourselves we'd one day pay for later in our lives, and pay dearly. But every day I'd make the run and throw in an order for two large pepperoni, two large cheese. It's impossible to order anything else because any assembled group larger than three people can never agree on toppings, and then you're dealing with half-orders, weird allergies and aversions to sausage, and some sick fuckers even like to put pineapple on them. But nobody was willing to make the drive (or even the walk to the Taco Bell down the block) to go anywhere else, and nobody could ever remember the number to a better pizza place. Even when we could, there was always some asshole who cried out "Papa John's SUCKS" and ruin it for everyone else. Going anywhere else would also mean taking the orders of sixteen people, and seriously, fuck that noise.

It disturbed quite a bit when I pulled the box out from under the toilet and found it to be ponderously heavy, feeling a weight shift from within. I should have just run to the dumpster and thrown the box away and gone somewhere to use a blowtorch to sterilize my fist, but in some weird moment of Lovecraftian curiosity-- you don't really want to know, you just sorta have to know-- opened the box.

Inside lay a pizza. Pepperoni. Whole and intact. From under the toilet. It looked like it was made of wax, with a strange glossy film along the top tinted like rosé that must have been a thin lacquered layer of mozzarella oil. At a glance it actually looked...well, normal. It didn't look good by any stretch of the imagination, but it didn't really look like you'd expect a toilet pizza to look. There were no massive, rolling slopes of semi-sentient mold or nests of maggots, no stench of rotting cheese. The pizza was such an unnatural biological hazard that it held no nutritional value for vermin and was too toxic to serve as a host for mold. Instead it has just...hardened. It somehow looked stiff, as if I could pick it up in one contiguous disc and throw it. I had unearthed a perfectly-preserved pizza fossil.

I closed the box and found a receipt taped to the lid. The date marked the pizza as over a month old. How many times had I cleaned the bathroom and missed a large pepperoni pizza wedged vertically behind the toilet bowl? How many hairy naked gamer asses had the toilet pizza borne witness to? How many taco shit fumes had seeped into the cardboard, the very crust of this pizza?

I had so many questions, and I stood there with the toilet pizza in my hands turning the quandary over in my mind. This was, by far, the most Zen moment I had ever experienced. How had the pizza come to rest under a toilet? Who would ever take a whole pizza into the bathroom, and why? I like to imagine some guy bringing the pizza back to the store, sitting down at his game of Settlers of Catan and suddenly realizing that he had to use the bathroom. He looked around at the three other gamers, not trusting a single one of them alone with his pizza. "It's my pizza," he'd think, "I paid for it, and I'll be damned if the fuckstick who stole my Longest Road points is going to lay his filthy hands on a single solitary slice." So he tucks the box under his arm and heads into the bathoom as the other players watch him go in puzzlement.

From here my narrative gets a little cloudy. Maybe the person encountered some...straining difficulties and needed to use both hands to bear down on something, so he stuffed the pizza underneath himself before he realized what he was doing. Although I have no idea why someone who would bring a pizza into the bathroom would suddenly balk at taking the pizza back out of the bathroom. The Rubicon has been crossed, man. I just can't conceive of a single situation where the end conclusion is "I know, I'll store this pizza under the toilet."

Actually, come to think of it, I've been operating under the assumption that the person who put the pizza under the toilet did it for himself. Maybe that person did it to spite someone else. Same setup, only your opponent brings in the pizza and he just stole your Longest Road. He gets distracted by some obscure Jango Fett debate and you think "This'll fix his wagon. Your pizza is going under the fucking toilet. Teach you to drop the robber on my 8-forest, you dicktard..."

My god, I may have solved it. But I can never know for sure, and to the end of my days I will forever ponder the mystery of the toilet pizza, spinning the questions around in my head uselessly. Who? Why? And the most important question of all...

If I put this pizza out in the store, would anyone eat it?

I can only imagine the bouquet of flavors that flooded Nick's mouth the moment he took that first bite, but he knew something was wrong the moment that first fossilized morsel snapped off under his teeth like a stale graham cracker. I was never going to let the guy swallow it, but there was no fear of that. If he didn't already suspect something was wrong, the taste of Italian death in his mouth and my complete guffawing lack of a poker face sent him spewing back into the box declaring vendetta on my house. I suspect that one day he's going to be awaiting me in my bedroom with a roll of duct tape, a funnel, and decade-old avocado dip.

Still. Totally worth it.