John Irving - Last Night In Twisted River

“I’m trying to distract myself from some asshole shipyard worker, who is sorely tempting me to cause him a little bodily harm,” Ketchum began.

“Just remember you’re an out-of-stater, Ketchum. The local authorities will take the side of the shipyard worker.”

“Christ, Cookie-do you know what it costs to move logs over water? I mean getting them from where you cut them to the mill-about fifteen fucking cents a cord! That’s all a river drive will cost you.”

The cook had heard this argument too many times. I could hang up , Tony Angel thought, but he stayed on the phone-perhaps out of pity for the shipyard worker.

“It’ll cost you six or seven dollars a cord to get logs to the mill over land!” Ketchum shouted. “Most roads in northern New England aren’t worth shit to begin with, and now there’ll be nothing but asshole truck drivers on them! You may think it’s already a world of accidents, Cookie, but imagine an overloaded logging truck tipping over and crushing a carload of skiers!”

Ketchum had been right; there’d been some terrible accidents involving logging trucks. In northern New England, it used to be that you could drive all over the place-according to Ketchum, only a moose or a drunken driver could kill you. Now the trucks were on the big roads and the little ones; the asshole truck drivers were everywhere.

“This asshole country!” Ketchum had bellowed into the phone. “It’ll always find a way to make something that was cheap expensive, and to take a bunch of jobs away from fellas in the process!”

There was an abrupt end to their conversation. In that bar in Bath, the sounds of an argument rose indistinctly; a violent scuffle ensued. No doubt somebody in the bar had objected to Ketchum defaming the entire country-in all likelihood, the aforementioned asshole shipyard worker. (“Some asshole patriot,” Ketchum later called the fella.)

THE COOK LIKED LISTENING to the radio when he started his pizza dough in the morning. Nunzi had taught him to always let a pizza dough rise twice; perhaps this was a silly habit, but he’d stuck to it. Paul Polcari, a superb pizza chef, had told Tony Angel that two rises were better than one, but that the second rise wasn’t absolutely necessary. In the cookhouse kitchen in Twisted River, the cook’s pizza dough had lacked one ingredient he now believed was essential.

Long ago, he’d said to those fat sawmill workers’ wives-Dot and May, those bad old broads-that he thought his crust could stand to be sweeter. Dot (the one who’d tricked him into feeling her up) said, “You’re crazy, Cookie-you make the best pizza crust I’ve ever eaten.”

“Maybe it needs honey,” the then Dominic Baciagalupo had told her. But it turned out that he was out of honey; he’d tried adding a little maple syrup instead. That was a bad idea-you could taste the maple. Then he’d forgotten about the honey idea until May reminded him. She’d bumped him, on purpose, with her big hip while handing him the honey jar.

The cook had never forgiven May for her remark about Injun Jane-when she’d said that Dot and herself weren’t “Injun enough” to satisfy him.

“Here, Cookie,” May had said. “It’s honey for your pizza dough.”

“I changed my mind about it,” he told her, but the only reason he hadn’t tried putting honey in his dough was that he didn’t want to give May the satisfaction.

It was in the kitchen at Vicino di Napoli where Paul Polcari first showed Tony Angel his pizza-dough recipe. In addition to the flour and water, and the yeast, Nunzi had always added a little olive oil to the dough-not more than a tablespoon or two, per pizza. Paul had shown the cook how to add an amount of honey about equal to the oil. The oil made the dough silky-you could bake the crust when it was thin, without its becoming too dry and brittle. The honey-as the cook himself had nearly discovered, back in Twisted River-made the crust a little sweet, but you never tasted the honey part.

Tony Angel rarely started a pizza dough without remembering how he’d almost invented the honey part of his recipe. The cook hadn’t thought of big Dot and even bigger May in years. He was fifty-nine that morning he thought of them in his Brattleboro kitchen. How old would those old bitches be? Tony Angel wondered; surely they’d be in their sixties. He remembered that May had a slew of grandchildren-some of them the same age as her children with her second husband.

Then the radio distracted Tony from his thoughts; he missed what he imagined as the Dominic in himself, and the radio reminded him of all he missed. It had been better back in Boston -both the radio station they’d listened to in Vicino di Napoli and the music. The music had been awful in the fifties, the cook thought, and then it got so unbelievably good in the sixties and seventies; now it was borderline awful again. He liked George Strait -“ Amarillo by Morning” and “You Look So Good in Love”-but this very day they’d played two Michael Jackson songs in a row (“Billie Jean” and “Beat It”). Tony Angel detested Michael Jackson. The cook believed it was beneath Paul McCartney to have done “The Girl Is Mine” with Jackson; they had played that song, too, earlier in the morning. Now it was Duran Duran on the radio-“Hungry Like the Wolf.”

The music really had been better in Boston, in the sixties. Even old Joe Polcari had sung along with Bob Dylan. Paul Polcari would bang on the pasta pot to “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” and in addition to The Rolling Stones and all the Dylan, there were Simon and Garfunkel and The Beatles. Tony imagined he could still hear how Carmella sang “The Sound of Silence;” they had danced together in the kitchen at Vicino di Napoli to “Eight Days a Week” and “Ticket to Ride” and “We Can Work It Out.” And don’t forget there’d been “ Penny Lane ” and “Strawberry Fields Forever.” The Beatles had changed everything.

The cook shut off the radio in his Brattleboro kitchen. He tried to sing “All You Need Is Love” to himself instead of listening to the radio, but neither Dominic Del Popolo, né Baciagalupo, nor Tony Angel had ever been able to sing, and it wasn’t long before that Beatles’ song began to resemble a song by The Doors (“Light My Fire”), which gave the cook a most unwelcome memory of his former daughter-in-law, Katie. She’d been a big fan of The Doors and The Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane. The cook kind of liked The Doors and The Dead, but Katie had done a Grace Slick impersonation that made it impossible for Tony Angel to like Jefferson Airplane-“Somebody to Love” and “White Rabbit,” especially.

He remembered that time, just before Daniel and his wife and the baby had left for Iowa, when Daniel brought Joe to Boston to stay with the cook and Carmella. Daniel and Katie were going to a Beatles concert at Shea Stadium in New York; someone in Katie’s la-di-da family had gotten her the tickets. It was August; over fifty thousand people had attended that concert. Carmella loved taking care of little Joe-he’d been a March baby, like his father, so the boy had been only five months old at the time-but both Katie and Daniel were drunk when they came to the North End to pick up their baby.

They must have been smashed when they left New York, and they’d driven drunk the whole way to Boston. Dominic would not let them take Joe. “You’re not driving back to New Hampshire with the baby-not in your condition,” the cook told his son.

That was when Katie did her sluttish swaying and singing -vamping her way through “Somebody to Love” and “White Rabbit.” Neither Carmella nor the cook could bear to look at Grace Slick after Katie’s lewd, provocative performance.