Hand tossed pizza, please.
Hiding out at Alpine Pizza
“Hey Bentley! Tell us the pizza story,” my friend asked. ‘The one about your hand.”
I smiled quietly, looking down at my hands. Luckily, I have all ten fingers. Although some are crooked and misshaped if you look close enough. Because I talk with my hands, people immediately see my unfortunate left pinky, broken and forever crooked from trying to catch a baseball in 6th grade. My dear friends see scars from the chemo needles that spent hours in my hands for a good part of 2009 and 2010. Others might notice the bent and scarred fingers on my right hand from a three-day hospital stay in 1989 due to the aforementioned pizza story.
These are my hands. 10 fingers, six relatively straight. Looking at them, you might wonder “what the hell happened to him?” They look old and tired, like they’ve been though some shit. Like me.
I smile because I’ve told the pizza story for laughs these past 35 years. I don’t tell them how serious it was or that my mom was so scared, she got a friend of a friend of friend to fly her to Flagstaff to see me. Or how I could’ve lost my hand.
But my friends don’t want to hear that story, they want THE PIZZA STORY, so I oblige.
Flagstaff was the perfect college town for me, far from my home in Tucson, but still close enough to feel connected. I was learning independence and accountability, but not always in the best ways. High school was easy - show up occasionally and get A’s and B’s. But college - not so much. Professors don’t care if you don’t come to class, that’s an easy F for them.
It was 1989 and I worked at Alpine Pizza. Established in 1973, Alpine Pizza felt like it had been around forever, nestled in a 100-year old building in downtown Flagstaff. An eclectic mix of crunchy-granola hippies, fraternity and sorority kids, NAU professors and locals frequented the joint. Wooden booths bore the inked and scratched signatures and scars from the ghosts of patrons past.
I started out as a delivery driver, bringing pies to hungry college kids. This was a great college job - free food and beer. What could be better? Well, I’ll tell you. Along with the pizza gig, I also worked as the afternoon host at KNAU-NPR. A job that was not only fun, but it came with a free daily ski pass to Snow Bowl. Combine the free skiing with the free pizza and beer and I was basically living like a king. A king!
Like any pizza joint, there was an eclectic cast of characters working there. Henry was cooking that day. He was 30 but looked 60. Slight of frame with stringy hair and a trucker hat. Henry had spent time in prison for getting roped into a drug deal gone bad. It involved M-16s, cartels and the FBI in the forests of northern California. Henry spent most of his time high or drunk, usually both. He always seemed to be glancing nervously side-to-side, like the Feds might show up any moment and throw him in cuffs.
There were two girls working the front order desk, taking orders and pouring beers into mason jars. Like me, they were college kids making a few bucks. In the late ‘80s of Flagstaff, those embracing the hippy lifestyle were called crunchies or granolas. One the girls had embraced the look with full on Birkenstocks, wool socks, a flowery dress and crystals. The other had the same style, but gladly went back to her BMW and country club life each summer.
We liked working there because beer and pizza was free or relatively cheap for us. Pizzas ‘exploded’ in the oven for our friends; order a 9” cheese pizza and it came out a 16” large with everything. If we got tired of eating pizza, we’d trade with the Chinese restaurant down the street. On top of all this it was a cool place to hang out in downtown Flagstaff.
It’s early September and a few hours into the evening shift. I’m rolling dough into round globes to go through the automatic dough roller. I knew how to hand-toss dough into pizza skins, but when we’re going through 150 pies a night, an automatic roller is key.
I’m not really paying attention, rolling and squishing dough balls is mindless. Roll the dough through the machine, then use the lever to change the width of the rollers smaller and smaller until you have a perfectly round pizza skin. On a busy night, I could get 4-5 pizza skins rolling through the machine at a time. Catch a pizza skin on the way out, while simultaneously pushing a ball into the machine. My hands and fingers worked a delicate dance around the rollers, catching dough and throwing flour as I move the rollers closer and farther apart as needed. But like I said, I’m not paying super close attention. Then suddenly, one misstep and the rollers grabbed the tips of my fingers. I try to pull them out but no luck. The rollers are relentless. I watch as the drums roll right over my right hand. Fuck! I reached behind the roller to unplug it. Why didn’t I use the lever to raise the drums? I don’t know. My hand is fucked up. I can see the bleach white bones peering out from the split wounds. It didn’t cut my hand so much as crush it.
I grab a dirty apron from the table to wrap my hand. It’s stained with pizza sauce, grease and dirty flour. Not the most hygienic wound treatment, but I’m not thinking straight in this moment, obviously.
I’m probably in shock. I rush around the table to Henry, looking for help. I show him my hand and he turns green. I thought he was going to throw up, but he looked at my hand, then at me and then promptly fainted to the floor.
My yelling, along with Henry crashing to the floor, must’ve been loud, because the two girls from the front rushed back into the kitchen. I hold up my apron-wrapped hand and yell, “I think I need to go to the hospital. Can one of you take me!?!?” The fake crunchy girl wants none of this and rushes back to the front, while the other girl says, “OK, but I don’t have a car.”
‘We can take mine,’ I said.
“I can’t drive a stick,’ she says hesitantly.
“I’ll teach you, let’s go.” I said, moving to the back door.
I don’t know we why didn’t we call 9-1-1. Did it even exist in Flagstaff in 1989? But we drive up the hill to the hospital, her driving and following my instructions, pressing and releasing the clutch as I shift with my left hand from the passenger seat.
At the hospital, I’m panicked as I rush into the emergency room asking someone, anyone to help me with my hand. The hospital staff springs into action finding me a bed and a shot of Demerol. Holy crap. Demerol. I’ve often said that if I wasn’t already married, I’d marry Demerol and be a happy man.
After the shot, everything changes. I am one happy dude, proud of my mangled pizza hand. I stroll through the emergency room asking people to look at my hand. “Hey! Hey look at my hand,” as I put it in their face. I am not only in shock, I AM HIGH.
My memory is pretty much a blur from there. I know I spent three days in the hospital with 78 stitches in my hand. The only thing I remember is how every nurse and doctor made a stop in my room to see ‘the pizza guy.’ My roommate Jimmy Shaw picked me up when I was discharged. He brought me a wooden hand roller.
One of the things my friends like about the pizza story is that crushing my right hand five days before my 22nd birthday meant one thing - my roommates and I were having a party. A big one. More than two hundred people showed up to celebrate, chugging cheap beer and Boonesfarm. We had one - and only one - rule: you could only drink with their left hand. We laughed and partied. My hand in a cast. My friends still talk about it to this day.
The other part my friends like about the pizza story is that for years, every time I’d go back to Flagstaff, I’d stop in at Alpine. Years would go by and I’d ask the kid taking orders about someone catching their hand in the roller. Every time I visited, the story got more wild. “Some guy lost his hand!” or “that dude lost his arm and almost died!” I’d smile and pause for a minute before quickly holding up my right hand with crooked fingers and say, ‘It was me!’ I’d ask them to call the owner and inevitably I’d get an open tab because the best part of this pizza job had always been the free pizza and beer.
Besides laughing at my ability to get free pizza for life, the ‘it was me’ line and wondering what ever happened to Henry, what I really think my friends like about this ‘scary’ story - is that it has a happy ending. Plus, there is free pizza and beer!
But the happy ending is different now, especially since Alpine Pizza closed in 2023 and the owner is in jail. Danny Rich was notorious for taking stacks of $20 bills from the till each night to support a coke habit. Since he’s in jail, I assume that habit, and the bad things that come with it, finally caught up with him. What’s different now is I realize that Alpine Pizza was a place to hide. Henry was hiding from his past, Danny was literally hiding from the cops and I was hiding from my responsibilities. School, running, family. Just ask my mom, professors and my cross-country coach. Not only was I hiding out, I now had the pizza roller as an excuse - to quit the team and quit going to class. I eventually got kicked out of school - although I did use the pizza roller excuse to get back in to NAU just one year later.
So yeah, there is more to the pizza story. Someday I’ll tell you that story.
People ask me if all these things I write will be a book someday. I’m not sure. Maybe, maybe not. I’m wrapping my brain around it. But maybe I’ll track down Henry and ask what he remembers about that night. Well, at least before he passed out.
Wow! Great writing. Great story.