Requiem for a Pizza

The thing about drinking a lot is it gives you lots of stories. Sure, it also gives you cancer of the bowel, liver damage and bankruptcy but as you lie dying in your public hospital room you will surely have a lot of stories to tell. Here is one of mine that I was reminded of today.


The happened a few years ago when I was living in a little cottage house in Adelaide with my good mate Cam.

The house was in the south-west corner of the Adelaide city square. There were about a dozen pubs within walking distance and a bottle shop at the end of the alley out the back gate so we were in prime drinking territory. As you can image, we did not squander our fortune and were known to wet our whistles more than most.

The following took place somewhere between 1am and 4am on what was probably a Saturday night. We had been sinking piss for hours at one of the local public houses, as was the tradition of the time, and had either run out of money or hit the wall and decided to head home. On the walk back to the shack the topic of delicious pizza came up. Specifically how we should definitely order some as soon as we opened the door.

The problems with ordering pizza at 1am are twofold; there are only a few places that will deliver it, and it takes about an hour to arrive. There are two basic instincts that drive a drunken man’s brain at 1am, the first is food, and the second is sleep. Well, actually there are three but since the two of us were alone the third was obviously not an option. So basically it works like this, if the inebriated man does not find delicious pizza has materialised in front of him quickly, he will fall asleep. This had proven quite a problem for the Cam-Sam household.

My housemate had developed the habit of calling for pizza in the early hours of the morning then succumbing to his tiredness and falling asleep. This had the pleasant consequence of saving him $30 in the morning, but the unpleasant consequence of leaving the delivery guy banging in futility on the door at two in the morning and subsequently getting the household banned from the pizza house. This had happen on a few occasions recently and the thought of a complete ban from all establishments pizza must have shocked me enough that I vowed that it would not happen this night.

In the end, Cam ordered the pizza and fell asleep. This left me holding the bag, or at least the $30 in fives and coin. What to do? I was so tired but the thought of being blacklisted by our beloved San Giorgio’s was too much for me to go to bed. No, I must stay up for one hour. So I devised a plan.

As with many plans made at 1am on a gut full of Cooper’s Pale Ale this was a poor one. My plan was to sit by the door so that when the pizza guy arrived, if I had somehow fallen asleep then his knocking on the door would wake me. As I grabbed a pillow to soften the tiled floor and propped myself up besides the door I thought I had it all worked out. Wait an hour, pay pizza man, eat pizza, sleep. Simple.

...

I was woken some time later by an ambulance officer grabbing me by the shoulders and shaking me. As I open my bleary eyes I saw that behind him was another ambo and a policeman. A quick look around my surroundings confirmed that I was still in the hallway where I sat down, but it seemed that an Emergency Services squad had decided to conduct their yearly exercises there as well.

Behind the cop stood an equally bleary eyed Cam, freshly emerged from his nearby bedroom and wondering, quite understandably, what the fuck was going on. The ambo who didn’t have hold of me was looking urgently at Cam and shouting the phrase “What has he had?” over and over. I’ve woken up in some strange predicaments over the years but this was by far the strangest.

It seems my efforts to stay awake had not lasted as long as I had guessed and it looks like I had fallen asleep immediately. To get more comfortable I must have laid down a bit. This would have all been nobody’s business but that particular house had a frosted glass door at the front. To this day I blame that fucking door.

The sequence went like this; Pizza man comes to the door, sees me lying in a strange position in the hallway and not responding to his knocks and yells. Pizza man calls the cops. Cop shows up and sees an obvious drug overdose and call an ambulance. Ambos come while the cop jumps the back fence to get into the house. Ambo shakes me awake while the other one interrogates Cam about how much smack I’ve had.

In the end the situation worked out ok. The pizza man was still there after they woke me up so after I had explained everything to the cops and medicos I asked him how much the pizza was, paid for it and offered everyone a slice. There were no takers but no one was too angry. The pizza man was relieved I was ok and we thanked him for doing the right thing in trying to save someone’s life, the ambos were just glad they didn’t have to deal with another messy overdose and I think the cop just thought it was funny.

I woke up the next morning thinking I had had the strangest dream, but the empty pizza box never lies.