To me, a good pizza has to have the following things: cheese, tomato sauce, and a decent crust on it. I know a lot of people are going to get upset that I’ve taken such a strong stance. They’ll probably throw this post down in a rage, and tell other people at the bookstore not to purchase this content at any price. Should happen any second now. Okay, now that they’re gone, I can reveal that my secret goal is to own a bunch of Vespas and the easiest way to do that in a tax-deductible kind of way is to open a pizza delivery restaurant.
Now, the Italian government has all these laws about what they say is an “official pizza.” You have to have the right cheese-to-crust ratio, sauce made with the right tomatoes, the perfect kind of oil holding it all together. If you fuck up even one of these during their yearly inspection, you can’t say that your pizza is authentic. Worse yet is the fact that they then force you to trade in the Vespas for Taiwan Golden Bees, Kymco Fillys, Sym Red Devils, or something else that’s reliable but essentially soulless. Nobody at the taxman’s office would ever take me seriously as a pizza delivery business, and then I wouldn’t be able to expense all the gasoline and mileage I put on a fleet of $47 twice-dropped scooters.
So of course, once the regional pizza inspector Silvio dropped by, I could do one of two things. One option was to do everything by the book - hire talented chefs at slightly higher-than-normal expense to construct culinary perfection itself, and the other was to take the inspector for a ride. I made him hop on the back of the Vespa, threw a scarf over his eyes “for the cold,” and then ripped the throttle to pop a perfect twelve o’ clock wheelie off the loading dock of my “pizza restaurant” which even to a casual observer seemed to be more interested in buying Chinese turbocharger equipment off of eBay than it ever was in selling savoury pies. My hope was that he would be too scared to even think about eating after a few minutes of powersliding around the industrial district on the back of one of my rapid-delivery scoots.
We didn’t even get down the block before the real screaming started. “This is too fast, you asshole!” he yelled, and I recognized something in his voice that made me stop the bike dead. Silvio the pizza inspector was also Silvio the Vespa inspector. The bastard had been working two jobs to make ends meet, and he definitely did not approve of me jamming a twincharged 150cc Princess Auto GY6 clone into the plasma-cutter-notched frame of what used to be a perfectly pristine ‘72 Primavera atop knobby offroad tires. I had to act fast, or he would repo my entire fleet.
“It’s still more of a Vespa than the Goddamn Piaggios,” I said, and spat on the sidewalk. When I looked up, I knew my gambit had been successful. I had brought a tear to the eye of Silvio, who now saw me as a kindred spirit, just one who had become mildly tainted by my relentless pursuit of dollar-store internal combustion engines. He was so pleased, in fact, that he didn’t even notice we pulled up to a Pizza Hut when it came time for the pizza inspection.
