Pizza Face

So Thomas Decoco was a 24-year-old middling crank addict when his pipe burst liquid fire and burned his face to resemble a pizza that’s slid out the box and is slipping down the side of whatever it sits atop. Tom was taken to the hospital in a shopping cart and had it not been mostly downhill, gravity-assisted, and loosely directed by amphetamine-fueled junkies, the surgeon didn’t think he’d have survived. He went under the knife and stayed in the ICU for almost six weeks for they let him go. Not literally, well literally, he survived yet lost his left ear and the new face they put on got sunk eyes that make it look like Decoco wearing a Holloweens mask of himself in some distressed state or like maybe quiet horror. While the docs cultivated T.D. a new ear he started growing his hair long and wore big hats (he tried growing a beard but it seemed his new face couldn’t grow much more than ugly). He slipped out the halfway house before they could attach the lab ear. He fled, his drug history and medical debt chasing him past the Midwest south into canyons and the greater plateaus of the dusty Southwest.

We didn’t hear nothing for three years and assumed he done himself in or got caught up with the wrong crowd again, then—this being a tight-knit locale and all—someone got word CoCo was shacked up with this woman in New Mexico and he’d gone and shaved his head and embraced his earless face and become a bit of a western states shaman because of the providence of this braless young woman in Navajo-patterned robes.

Now not one of us believed in this unlikely scenario and especially not when word come up north that Decoco’s misses was a real looker too—this wasn’t some crank skank transplant from downriver, she had a real pretty face and nice curves and was allegedly well-educated in the Ivy Leagues of them East Coast schools. None of the town-pump could figure what in the Sam Hill this smart woman was doing with Tom though a few of them IPA-drinkers suspected he was packing a nice pecker like Big D Lee who’d knocked up that prettyish nurse at the home years back despite Lee being in a chair and differently-abled and all. What I figured had happened was this was a classic codependency situation and the high-heeled misses from out East was hiding from her own personal growth by giving away all her energy towards trying to save some unsaveable man.

But the real story was that this kind, gentle soul from Connecticut was such a well-grounded individual that upon meeting Tom she was curious instead of repulsed and she asked about his wounds and surgery and past and they hit it off quite well cause Tom was lonely and not offended about talking about his injuries as he had been at other more defensive times in his life and his ability to open up about past trauma was a sort of turn-on for the pretty woman who had, for the majority of her dating life, fallen for the type of man unwilling to face personal deficits.

Well and but it seemed sober Tom was quite the mature person too who had figured out his life’s desires and defeats through a series of progressively treacherous missteps that ultimately made him a stronger individual with a more resilient character that could withstand the societal negativity towards a person with a melting pizza for a face. Tom’s lady sought a man like T.D. who was able to grow from injury rather than let it define him or leave it buried in a barely-covered earthen-hollow out back the home address for the children or family pet to find at a later inopportune date. In fact, most women desired a person able to deal with uncomfortable shit in a healthy way rather than drink, smoke, or fuck it away as men have done for generations and you and I continue to do today. No, men of the malt, it’s not pizza faces like Decoco we have to fear but ourselves, to fear, I fear. Maybe this is all a little clunky since I’ve been drinking since noon but the grand narrative resolution here is that T.D. recovered from not one but two personal traumas and it was only through those painful losses that he could learn to love himself and be prepared for the selfless love of his misses. Love is a burden. Love is a burden we carry or let carry us. That was Decoco’s scripture. He’s got little Bibles with his name inscribed at all the motels if you’re ever near Albuquerque. Restroom’s down the hall to the left. Have a good one, glad you liked the cheesy tots.