Memoir of a Pie Virgin

There are few times in life when you get to document the moment of your own demise, and then live to tell about it.

Last night, I decided I’d had enough of sitting in my cluttered and increasingly farby home office. It was time to walk the line; time to cross the trestle bridge by moonlight; time to break into Space Camp and pilot an overpriced orbital tin can beyond the stratosphere.

Of course, being that Space Camp and Lea Thompson circa 1988 were not immediately available for a married father of two last night, I decided to try something else.

Something addictive and potentially…Deadly.

In Portland, testing fate has a lot of possibilities. From all reports PDX is a region full of hippy-loving miscreants (“I love you man, especially for not knifing me”) – strip club frequenting, gateway drugging, zoobombing, nude cycling, apparently ironic cowboy hat wearing sun-starved liberals, just looking for a reason to question the existence of a higher power.

It is as if we are overrun with a brood of angry legless Gary Sineses strapped to the mast of a pirate-hunted wind-born supertanker cast adrift in a Perfect Storm screaming, “C’mon! Is that all ya got??? Really???” [Writer's note: I added the "really" part to bring the quote into current annoying pop culture vernacular. See how I did that?] (And yeah – supertankers all use sails. Look it up.)

I called up my degenerate friend @Yuetsu (zing!) and asked him, “Hey, you know about these things – what is the craziest thing I could possibly do on a Thursday night in PDX?”

“I’ve got an idea. Bring a belt, and prepare to have your mind Ba-LOWN. Oh, and, leave your ID at home.”

It’s GO Time

They say some do not survive. Others, it is said, after just one trip lose all awareness of their previously wholesome life, leaving behind a wake of sadness and destruction in a life devoted to the empty search to repeat the effect of your first experience. Still others, I’ve heard, actually cause their heartbeat to stop dead cold in a moment of complete mental and physical clarity, deciding that the pinnacle of life has been reached, like the hairdresser in Le mari de la coiffeuse who takes her own life in a moment of bliss (oops. Spoiler alert. Too late.).

I was drawn to it. This would be the moment that I prove to myself once and for all the sort of metal from which I am cast.

As we approached the drop spot, I asked my friend if there was some secret handshake or codeword to get the good stuff – you know, the chronic; some casual visual cue or Canadian native bird call; or whether I should just walk up nonchalant, mini-phone book of neatly folded bills hidden in my right hand pretending as if the mysterious dealer and I were old Harvard chums, good old Princeton lads, me with his…OH YES his lost keys in my palm, and he in exchange returning my…prized mini-footballs?

“Just order the frickin’ pie, pieboy.”

Yuetsu watched my approach, rubbing his hands together in sinister delight while making lewd remarks to passersby (although he always does that I think). There may have been a maniacal laugh and a tweet or two, but my memory is hazy.

With my back straight and clenched toes pointed forward, I mustered my sweaty-palmed courage and in a wavering tone ordered quickly and efficiently so as to go unnoticed.

“Blueberry please. And a lemonade, please, sir.” I sounded like a little girl.

The dark, steely Pie man, the Man O’ Pie, the Pieveyor himself, stood in his rusty iron cage of a cart, flames licking the ceiling behind him and his one good eye burning through my head (the other eye a chipped, oversized cats eye marble). He took my order gruffly while grinding the tip of his steel toed boots into the metal grate below him. As I stepped back from the window, he grunted, and then spoke.

“Hey you – Yeah you. C’mere. Yeah you, dough face. Closer. Closer, dammit. For God’s sake quit crying.”

The disgust was palpable.

With a black hair net over his cleanly shaved head and a shirt covered in profanities and unfamiliar combinations of animal silhouettes playing Twister, he lowered his head slowly out of the cart window, stopping only a few inches away from my tender ringing ears. Inhaling like an Idaho dust devil, he screamed at the top of his lungs violently into the side of my face, his spittle assaulting my jawbone, letting me know that a “white-ass pansy-boy like me” could “never deserve this creation!” He stood up slowly, raised his right hand to his own chin, closed his eyes, and cracked his neck just once.

In a low, guttural whisper he then said, “…but I will make an exception, this once, if you do EXACTLY as I say.”

This is my recollection. Either that, or he may have said, “Cool. 4 bucks please. Thanks for droppin’ by.” My memory fails. Pure adrenalin does that to the mind.

This, was living.

And this, dear reader, was pure and simple perfection: freshly made deep fried, crispy golden pillows of sumptuous, fluffy dough surrounding a warm, gooey, sweet or savory heart of delight. The blueberry was scrumptious. The Strawberry? Delectable. The pulled pork? Sinful.

Not unlike an igloo full of Eskimos at a Polar Bear reunion.

After eating my first one, and seeing God for the first time, I was convinced to have another, and I did. And I will live to do it again.

Epilogue

In the end, I emerged, victorious. Having been dubbed by @Yuetsu as the #WhiffiesVirgin and #PieVirgin on Twitter, the veil has been lifted. My blueberry has been popped. I went home, satisfied, full and basking in the contented afterglow of fried pie.

For the record, Whiffies, (@Whiffies) the food cart on the corner of 12th and Hawthorne in SE Portland, is incredibly good. I suspect that he simply must be adding illicit drugs to the dough to increase the addictive nature of these little 7 oz. nuggets of pleasure, but I can’t prove it. And I won’t try – I love them too much to spoil a good thing.

And ya know what? It is all I can think about today. I want it. I need it. And I’m going back to Whiffies tonight – and bringing friends. I’m addicted, and I don’t care. Last night I risked my life, and my limb(s), for what can only be called Pievana. In fact, several of the food carts on that ill-fated corner will suffer my patronage tonight.

If you’re curious and hungry for thrills there is a contest on Saturday night to see who shall take the title for the most pies eaten in an hour (Pie Champ 2.0 – It’s So ON). It will be glorious.

As Yuetsu said, “This corner? It’s like Carbo-Load Heaven.” Amen brutha.

P.S. Word on the street is the Silicon Florist himself, @Turoczy, has NOT paid a visit to the Whiffies cart. I’m officially a’ callin’ you out, Rick…

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