Pepperoni for Monica

“COVER YOUR EYES AND FACE.” The sign hanging over my working station doesn’t make any sense any more, and as Russ Smith wrote recently, no one remembers the novel coronavirus. It’s hard to believe it’s nearly four-and-a-half years since the lockdown of March 2020. Unprecedented in your lifetime (not mine—I’ve been around, I won’t say how many times “events” like this have occurred). First, no one cared about the pandemic anymore, then they didn’t even remember it. Do you remember when COVID-19 hit our shores at the end of the last decade of our acquaintance.

AGH! THIS IS TERRIBLE! …***???!!!%%%… Monica is BACK at the computer keyboard. The above is a feeble attempt by DA BOSS to imitate my writing style. Bitch how? I’m one and of the unique. You’ll never touch my realness or my rhythm. There’s nothing inside of you which is acquainted with the eternal or the everlasting. You speak of fates beyond the stars and planets without moons, but where are your cauldrons cast, and your ribbons cut? Here on Earth, with the tools and the fruits of our natural labor: stone, wood, meat. You kill and consume us so you may live and destroy yourselves. What use is being getting good at dying?

Da Boss could never write a paragraph as smooth as that. I mean, shit, I impressed myself. But I’m just mad. No, not mad—irritated. We’ve only got so many days in July and there’s been hardly any progress done on the actual assembly of the “breakdown” section. The screening for that has been pushed to October, so we have another month, but he wanted it done this month—he even wrote it on his little calendar with the monsters and comic book baddies. It’s just movies, meetings, and phone calls, along with rehearsals and shooting dates. Da Boss is writing some kind of “movie book” too, but I still don’t quite understand what he means. Is it a book, or is it a movie? “It’s a book about movies, Monica.”

Who the hell would want to read that?

Even more daunting was the stack of books on some guy named Stanley Kubrick that had just arrived. No, I’m kidding, I know his work, I just don’t like social message pictures—Judgment at Nuremberg is okay, whatever, but wow, boring. Anyway, I guess Da Boss is working on some short film script about this other guy… or something… I get so confused and I get bothered and I get myself all wound up—what else does he do besides write, record music, and make movies? “Watch them. And I read. Look over there.” It was a biography of Robert Aldrich. I told him I hated M*A*S*H. “Me too. Let’s go get an anchovy pizza.”

We went to Iggie’s and ate. I insisted on pepperoni. “But Monica, the opti—” I put a feather to his lips before he could say that awful word “optics” and resumed my education in etiquette on this still young man. I told him, firmly but kind, that all a lady wants is to be picked and treated like a princess, even if she’s your employee, and even if she is a hen, as I am. “As you are,” he said. We ate anchovy pizza and I relished every bite of that fat pig’s fried red skin.

—Follow Monica Quibbits on Twitter: @MonicaQuibbits