July 28th 2019

A Pizza Shop in Oxford

This is a piece of short fiction I wrote in 2019.

I didn't know which way to look anymore when I looked up at the stars. It seemed like there was something I should have been looking for. I used to just look up, and whichever way I looked, that was right. Then it wasn't right. No way I looked was right, but I could tell some way was. You can imagine how that would get to a person.

It was a bad time for me to do a lot of thinking. The more I thought, the more thinking I would have to do. There was never any conclusion to any of it. I would go around in circles and end up back at the first thought I'd had and think So the beginning again. That sounds wry to me the way I hear it now, but believe me when I say, there was nothing wry about it. Thinking So the beginning again was just like my eye catching a mastiff storming me from across a short lawn. If it decided to bite me, what could I really do about it? Watch it happen, that's what.

I didn't know what was wrong with me. Figuring things out, I guessed. I was getting the sense that whatever was wrong, I wasn't going to fix it (or figure it out) until I left Illinois. That was one conclusion. I had gone around in a circle thinking about Ill-ee-noy and Ill-ah-noise and ended up thinking about all the ways people might say "Illinois" if they only ever read it and never heard someone say it, never heard someone say it in Chicago. A lot of people would say it Ill-ee-no-iss. You would have to be a real basket case to read "Illinois" in a book and say it Ill-ih-noy, the way that we actually say it.

Anyway, sometime between an Ill-ay-noise and an Ay-li-no-is (what?), I said to myself, I have to get out of here. That was a conclusion, and I had been starved for one of those. I would leave Chicago and go someplace else. Sell the car (a graduation present), buy a beater, and pocket the difference for food and gas. That was the plan, and it seemed to make sense. No one could say anything to me about selling the car because it was in my name. The money would be mine rightfully – the perfect crime – and I could spend it however I wanted to spend it. I would drive in cruise control as much as I could, and I would eat on the cheap. I felt like I had found a loophole in the system, even though it wasn't written anywhere that I had to work a job or have a home. Downgrade the car: simple as that.

Even if I hadn't been the way that I was, leaving Chicago would have been momentous. I had grown up in Gurnee. When the big mall opened there, it was a revelation: there was a whole world of people and money. I wanted to meet people, and I wanted to make money. I wanted to see the world. So, when I turned eighteen and my father said to me, "you have to find something to do because you can't bag groceries at the Piggly Wiggly forever," I went to Chicago.

Chicago was everything I wanted it to be at first. I bagged groceries at a Jewel-Osco, not a Piggly Wiggly, and I ate deep dish and hot dogs until I got sick. I could do all that, too. Who was going to tell me not to? On my days off, I saw matinee movies. Terminator 2 and Silence of the Lambs. I drank cheap beer. I dated a beautiful woman who was studying law at the University of Chicago. It was everything I wanted it to be, but then it wasn't. Chicago seemed closer and closer to the town that I'd fled until it didn't seem like the city I'd fled to at all.

On the day that I left Chicago – south toward Kentucky and not north toward Wisconsin – I thought about calling my father from a payphone. I didn't do it, though. I didn't tell my landlord that I was leaving, either. It seemed like the highway was a high tub water-slide, and it was summer, and I was wet, and I wanted to see what the splash was like below, so long as it wasn't Lake Michigan.

I drove for a long time. Because I didn't want my driving to be wandering, I would tell myself that I was going to drive from this place to that place, but when I got to that place, I would tell myself that I was going to drive to another place next. Then it got dark. I would sleep in my car until the sun got in my eyes, and then I would do.

Doing this place-that place-another place, I got to Houston, where I fell in love. Her name was Lauren. That was a few months of my life. I couldn't leave her, and she wasn't about to make me. Her parents were wealthy, and they paid her rent. You could say that they paid my rent too, but they didn't know it. She was the best nap that I ever had. We would nestle up against each other and sleep, which was better. Sweaty as it was in Houston, we would sleep skin-to-skin like that for hours. I never pushed her off, and as well as I can remember, she never pushed me off either. It was genuine sleep that we got, and I thought, If this is what sleep can be, I don't know what I've been doing all these years. It was that good, and we could talk too because we liked a lot of the same music. None of that means love, of course, but there was love there too.

I think that Lauren dreamed about marrying a cowboy or part of me was still on the highway – or both. That ran its course, and Lauren's parents never needed to kick me out of their downtown condo. I don't think they ever knew that I was there. Looking back, I think that was a good chunk of the fun that we had together – that and love.

Eventually, I did pick up a payphone and call my father. I was somewhere in the desert of New Mexico. I couldn't find that big satellite field that's in all the movies. It had been more than two years since I left Chicago. I didn't think about that – what a difference all that time would make – and I hadn't prepared for the conversation we had. I told him that I was leaving Chicago, but to him, I wasn't leaving Chicago. Leaving Chicago was a long time ago. I had moved (Where was I these days?), and when I went back to Chicago, I wouldn't be "going back" but visiting.

I did visit. I went to the big mall in Gurnee, and I bought a deep dish for me and my father. He offered me a cheap beer. After a winter in Texas, I couldn't get over how bitter October was in Illinois. I even looked up that beautiful law student, but she said she had graduated. I saw a movie – Jurassic Park – and I stopped in at my old Piggly Wiggly to say hello to everyone I knew from before. I thought that I would let them see how much I had changed, but they didn't need to tell me that nothing had changed very much at all.

Chicago still wasn't everything I wanted it to be, and just like I didn't need any of the cashiers at the Piggly Wiggly to tell me I was the same person who had bagged their groceries, I didn't need to look up at the stars to know that I didn't know where to look. I could feel it without any of that.

Not that feeling it was going to prevent me from going around it in circles. I did that too. I was the same way that I had been, except that now I had exhausted a whole country trying to get to the bottom of it all. What I did next I couldn't be proud of. At the end of my visit, I stayed. I got a job at a pizza shop. I asked my old landlord if he had a room for me. Like that, I was back in Chicago.

For months I made pizzas and drank cheap beer, and I didn't think about what I'd done. I looked up the law student from U of Chicago, and she said she had moved on. I asked her how she managed to do that without leaving the city, but that confused her. It didn't mean anything to her. Why would it? I was in the middle of it, and even I wasn't sure what it meant.

Pizza started to make sense to me after some time. It was the rolling of the dough and the pouring of the sauce that seemed to draw something out of me. I figured that even if I couldn't have the stars, I could have that. I could make pizza. It got to be that I noticed details about the pizza, details that didn't mean anything to me before. I saw the way that the topping laid on the dough in the pan. There were spots in the oven that worked better than other spots; there were spots where the dough was non gratis. In the middle of dinner, I had to slow myself down. I couldn't worry about getting through a pizza and onto the next one. That was hard for me. In time it made sense, though, because I saw that after a pizza, there was just going to be more pizza.

One Saturday at the end of the night, the pizza shop's owner George Furman sat down at a booth near the front of the order line. When I turned off the oven and started to spray down the prep station, he started asking me some questions. He was asking me things that he should have known, like "What do you say when someone asks for an extra topping after the pizza's in the oven?" and "How much cheese is the right amount if someone says 'a good amount of cheese'?" I answered his questions, and then he looked around the pizza shop like he was sizing it up to see if he really wanted to eat there.

"You don't much like living in Chicago, do you?" he asked.

"No," I said. "I don't. But the pizza's not bad."

"What don't you like about living in Chicago?"

I said, "Everything but the pizza."

He said he knew that I had traveled, and he asked me to tell him about it. I told him about sleeping by the side of the road and looking up at the stars. I told him about Lauren too. I hadn't told anyone in Chicago about leaving Chicago, other than to say that I'd tried out a couple of other cities. I watched myself while I spoke; it was out-of-body. I was flowing, and something told me, Just don't get in the way. Something told me that the moment was important, and if I worried about getting it right, I'd mess it all up – but I'd better get it right. Just don't get in the way.

At the end of all that I had said, Mr. Furman asked me where people needed pizza outside of Chicago the most. I thought about this, and then I told him: there was a college town down south that seemed right. He nodded and thanked me, and then he left the shop. A week went by, and he called me at my apartment. He asked me if I could get a business loan of $25,000. I told him that I would try, so I did. Walking into the bank the next day, I thought that if they turned me down, I would call Lauren and try to sell her on selling her parents – but they didn't turn me down.

So that was how I came to own the franchise rights to the first deep-dish pizza shop in Oxford, Mississippi. I left Chicago again, this time employed – self-employed. I picked up Mr. Furman at the Tupelo Regional Airport, and we organized everything together. That's that, I thought.

I knew that all my life, whenever I opened the shop in the morning, I would wonder how I had gotten away with it all. How did I manage this? There was no reason that I should have been able to do what I did. A caper like this they should have splashed across the Tribune and the Sun-Times and locked me up with two life sentences to set a strong example for anyone who came after me. That wasn't what happened, though. I had gotten away with it. Can you believe that? Everything was right in spite of everything that had been wrong. It really happened. Every night I would make the pizza, would serve it, would lock the door at closing time, and would look up at the stars, and when I did that, I would know which way to look too. I had my own Chicago-style pizza shop in Oxford, and no one could take that away from me.

Billy Gardner McIntyre