Secret Ingredient of Your Meatlovers Pizza
My dear old workmate Kazza, she who was always proud to announce to all members of company staff which colour knickers she was wearing on any particular day, dropped in for a fleeting visit last week.
Upon entering our living room, she swiftly sunk herself into the couch. ‘I’m pooped,’ she sighed. ‘I was doing the overnight shift last night, haven’t had much sleep. Dead hungry too.’
Eagerly taking an opportunity to slot myself into the high-flying-city-gay template that my inner metal-loving bogan core constantly resists, I dramatically fanned out a collection of menus for local Thai takeaway restaurants. Kazza stared at me blankly in reply, knowing I was putting on an act.
‘Pizza Hut, mate?’ she suggested, wiggling her left eyebrow.
‘You don’t have to act all seductive with me,’ I protested, leaning back next to her. ‘I know you’ve always got at least two guys on the go, but I’m not a part of this.’
‘Fine,’ she retorted, and reduced herself to a toned-down moody pout. Her seductive skills were so refined, there was no doubt she’d been spelling ‘Super Supreme Meal Deal’ with her waggling eyebrow in Morse code.
Standing up, I began to reach for the phone before my wrist was slapped away painfully by Kazza. ‘Are we not all new millennium and digital and Microsoft and stuff?’ she placed her hands on her hips. ‘Internet pizza,’ she instructed, leading me to my computer.
‘Okay,’ I held up my hands. ‘I didn’t really want Thai, you know. I mostly prefer food that’s greasier than a male adult film star anyway.’
Ten minutes and a scorchingly confusing user interface later, we’d ordered our pizza. ‘It would’ve been quicker to order it over the p-’ I attempted to explain, but was swiftly stifled by Kazza’s smothering hand.
Seating ourselves back on the couch and conversing over what we’d been up to since we last met, my mobile phone began shrilling urgently. Excusing myself, I answered the phone.
‘Mate, I’m trying to deliver your pizza,’ a gravely voice barked down the phone. ‘Come out the front and get it,’ he ordered, punctuating his command by fumbling and stabbing at random buttons on his phone. After I recovered from the tri-toned aural assault, I reasoned that he was probably a big mother with fumbling thumbs not to be messed with.
With this in mind, Kazza and I scooted downstairs to the pavement outside. ‘This is a bit rude of him, isn’t it?’ Kazza nudged me, but I explained that he had big thumbs and could probably crush my entire quivering body with one of them. Searching the immediate area and craning our heads around urgently, we couldn’t see any pizza in sight.
‘Perhaps we should ring Pizza Hut back,’ Kazza suggested. I nodded and we retreated back to the apartment, gasping from all the running around.
On cue, my mobile phone began ringing again. Perhaps we’d missed him outside. Hesitantly, I answered the phone ensuring a buffer between my ear and receiver for fear of further thumb-fumbling on the pizza guy’s end.
‘Let me in MATE,’ he boomed. ‘I’m pressing your buzzer right now.’
‘No you’re not,’ I corrected. Kazza looked at me quizzically from her safehold in the couch - I shrugged in reply, only able to convey the conversation via limbs.
‘I’m telling you,’ Fumbly Thumbs continued in a louder voice, ‘I AM PRESSING YOUR BUZZER RIGHT NOW.’
‘Are you at xxxxxxxx Street?’ I checked. (No public broadcasts of my home address on here unless I’m single and in dire need of entertainment, chump).
‘FUCKING HELL, FUCK YOU!’ screamed my earpiece, and I praised myself on the forward thinking of my ear buffer implementation. Fumbly Thumbs then promptly hung up.
‘So?’ Kazza demanded, now so relaxed that her head had slouched low enough into the couch to symmetrically inspect her belly button. ‘I’m getting hungry.’
‘Well, I’m not sure where we stand at the moment,’ I admitted. ‘He said he was pressing our buzzer - which he couldn’t have been, because ours wasn’t buzzing - then he told me to engage in coitus. Which I didn’t really appreciate.’
‘What a fucking bore,’ Kazza waved her hand.
‘I think I’ll just cancel the pizza,’ I protested. ‘I shouldn’t really have to be sworn at and ordered to parade around on the street just to get a bite to eat, should I? Besides, he sounds like a real brute… I don’t think I want to see him face to face now, he’ll probably be pretty pissed off.’
‘You march on and challenge the system, man!’ Kazza applauded in a rather disappointingly hollow fashion. Turning my attention back to the phone and dialling the Pizza Hut number, I asked to be transferred to the manager of our local store.
‘Hi, I just ordered some pizza but I think I’d like to cancel it now,’ I explained to the man who answered the phone. ‘First the delivery guy rang us and told us to wait on the street for him to drop it off, but he never turned up. Then he just rang me and swore at me for no apparent reason.’
‘He swore at you?’ the manager responded with unconvincing faux-disbelief. ‘Well, that’s no good, is it?’
I pressed a few random numbers on my phone’s keypad. ‘Oh, sorry, I must have pressed the wrong button there’ I apologised with unconvincing faux-disbelief. ‘But we don’t want the pizza, we shouldn’t have to be sworn at and made to run around. So there.’
‘Fine, I’ve cancelled it,’ the manager cooed down at me.
‘Thanks,’ I replied, and hung up, as our buzzer suddenly hummed.
‘Oh my god, now he’s here!’ Kazza screamed. ‘Answer the buzzer!’
‘Fucking hell, no!’ I yelled back at her, panicking and wondering if I should answer the buzzer or not. Instead of holding the buzzer down for short one second intervals, the delivery guy had now decided to hold his meaty thumb down. The buzzer loudly emitted a continuous shriek.
‘You have to answer it, the neighbours will get pissed off!’ Kazza demanded, grabbing my arm and flinging it towards the buzzer handset.
Flinging my arm towards the handset, I knocked it from the receiver and filled the room with calming silence once more.
‘There,’ I said. ‘Hopefully his boss is ringing him right now to tell him the order has been cancelled. Look, I’ve got some pies in the freezer, we’ll have those for lunch.’
‘Okay,’ Kazza agreed, and pointed the remote control at the television. I duly placed the chilled pies into the microwave and commenced the cooking process and began thumbing through the newspaper.
A loud bleep announced lunch was ready, and I placed our pies on a plate. I had just entered the lounge room when an enormous pounding on our front door nearly broke the hinges down. Kazza turned to me, face suddenly white, mouthing ‘PIZZA MAN!’ at me.
As my mind concentrated on accelerating possibilities of how he could have entered the building, my eyes boggled as I realised he probably pretended he’d lost his keys and that he lived here. In my panic, I blindly tripped over our beanbag, sending our pies flying into a lounge cushion. With my head in the beanbag, I made a brave attempt to muffle the choking noises which were a result of my mouthful of vinyl from the beanbag. As I lay there quietly choking, as if interrupted in the midst of a rather climatic act of autoasphyxiation; I had to release an enormous whoop-like cough which boomed through the room.
Immediately, the pounding on the door resumed even harder. ‘IDIOT!’ Kazza mouthed at me, pounding my arm and causing me to cry out in pain.
‘HE KNOWS WE’RE IN HERE!’ I urgently worded to Kazza, rather pointlessly.
Attempting to raise the urgency a level higher, Kazza hissed ‘Your bedroom!’, although she forgot to lower her voice and the door began to creak in a rather worrying manner.
‘PIZZA!’ warned the voice outside our apartment, sounding ready to dissect us without the aid of anaesthetic.
Quaking in the bedroom and not daring to move for ten minutes after the pounding had stopped, Kazza thanked me for my accommodating company and elected to leave. I waved goodbye to her, then set about the task of cleaning up the flattened meat pies.
Scraping the remains into a plastic bag, I walked downstairs to the room which housed the rubbish skip. After disposing over it, I walked back up to our apartment again.
As I walked up the stairs, an angry-looking heavyset man with an absence of neck grunted at me. ‘G’day,’ he spoke lowly.
Slowly walking back upstairs, my eyes widened as I realised that he was the voice of Fumbly Thumbs, the Murderous Pizza Man. Almost shitting my pants, I realised I’d chosen a very smart time to dispose of my rubbish - exactly the same time he’d entered the apartment building again to pay me a visit! He was probably even more fired up after he’d spoken to his manager, no doubt he had been told off!
Now walking upstairs at double pace in case Fumbly Thumbs realised who I was and began following me, I padlocked our front door and quickly phoned Adam’s number.
Unable to control my adrenaline enough to explain the day’s events, I could only blurt, ‘I’m being stalked by a pizza delivery guy!’
Adam tittered down the phone. ‘Well, you know where my nunchuks are,’ he replied.
‘Don’t make fun of me!’ I argued. ‘You know I can’t do anything with those - I come off looking like I’m doing a very bad impression of Budgie the Little Helicopter.’
So I resolved that this was simply a sign that I urgently needed to obtain a full-time job quick smart. I needed to be out of the apartment during the day when Adam wasn’t home, in case Fumbly Thumbs paid me another little ‘visit’.
Furthermore, after all this; there’s no way I’ll eat Pizza Hut again. I no longer have any doubt in my mind what the mysterious fleshy substances in their Meatlovers pizzas are.