The lost memory of a perfect McPizza

I don’t remember the last time I ate the pizza at McDonald's, I only know that I did, and I don’t know what’s worse, the lost memory or clinging to it. I know the notes of it, and how it lingered on the tongue. I can tell you that McPizza was salty and sweet, with perfectly melted cheese that tasted a little like an old ninja turtle fresh from 2 minutes in the microwave, all melted plastic and nostalgia. It had everything pizza has, cheese and toppings and a little crust held tightly in a grease-soaked cardboard box. I don’t think it was ever good, which is why it went away forever, but it existed for long enough to become the lost legend of a mythologized era. It’s gone now, like so many things, and all that remains are the stories we trade of a life that was once so real.

People of a certain vintage, by which I mean those in my age demographic, talk about McDonald's pizza with wistful nostalgia, the way some people talk about having seen Nirvana. These stories are always about seeing them in some shitty club, a grimy and dark venue that was once somewhere that isn’t anything anymore. A memory made better with the texture of its details, as if a story can be made better if it smells like old cigarettes and dirty floors. No one wants to recall a perfect moment of the past that turns to how well the AC maintained the air of a soulless amphitheatre. I believe we prefer to remember the heat and the sweat and the elbows pressed against each other because these memories paint a better picture of what we want from nostalgia. To remember the rough edges of our younger years because we were alive then, and the best stories are always about having survived long enough to recall the textured minutiae of our lost years.

It was never called McPizza, in the same way they’re not called McCheeseburgers because that is no way to live an honest life. Gimme a McCheeseburger and McFries, you would say as you watched the light of the soul dim in someone’s eyes, as they do the math on just how much minimum wage is worth this kind of shabby treatment. But we are adopting it as a nickname here because I have no desire to type McDonald's Pizza that many times. Introduced in the late 80s, McPizza was an attempt to create a dinner phenomenon at McDonald's the way they had claimed dominion over breakfast. Ronald McDonald as the conquering Alexander. A worn and weary man, looking out upon his kingdom and weeping at the lack of new land to conquer, hoping to find salvation at the dinner table.

McPizza started as a dish served to the table, with the candle and the ring and a platter it sat upon. You have to imagine that Pizza Hut was incensed that a local clown had so easily and so causally stolen their identity. It took very little time before the obvious pain-in-the-ass corners of this plan became sharp and jagged, and McPizza quickly became just another item delivered in a sweaty cardboard box, eager to become someone else’s problem.

I don’t remember the first time I had the personal sized McPizza, but that moment feels less important to me somehow. I don’t have a good memory of many firsts, but I try to hold on to what lasts I can as I get older. Lasts, those breathless and beautiful final moments of once beloved things, turned into precious commodities once blackout drinking strip-mined the caverns of my memory. It’s essential that something remains of all the years that are otherwise gone. I grew up before cell phones and ever-present cameras, and some days and people were just never captured. Some things are just stories without proof or alibi.

It’s true that I ordered and ate McPizza, always pepperoni, and it’s also true that I loved it. The same, I loved anything made of salty sweet promises. It was never my staple order — which was at the time 2 cheeseburgers without pickles, large fries, and an ice-heavy coke — but it was always a welcome diversion. Some days we would pile into a car running on a collective five bucks worth of gasoline and decide that it was pizza day, and with every perfect bite, I believed that every day should be, but that was maybe just the salt talking. All our tomorrows and the days that followed them, we would forget how much we had once loved pizza because we thought we had forever to return to it, and now some of the people I ate McPizza with are gone too.

There was a time when pizza was on the menu, backlit with vibrant fluorescents on the board that hovered over the heads of all who entered inside the McDonald's. There were options and value meals, and there were people to cook it. There were further people who were patient enough to wait with you to eat in shared comfort, as pizza took longer than anything else. Burgers and fries appear in swift seconds, but pizza took upwards of ten minutes, which is just as easily a lifetime. I don’t remember the last time I ate one, but I remember my friend Rob pulling his truck into the driveway, and yelling over the steady churn of its engine that he wanted to get McDonald's pizza, and that he knew I would get one if he did. I know the McPizza left this earth before he did, but not by much.

By the early 2000s, the experiment was over. Despite the steady presence of Howie Mandel in commercials for it, the dream of McPizza died and, like so many endings, it came unexpectedly. I don’t remember the last time I had one because it must have felt so unimportant at the time. It could have been any day without purpose. I had no reason to remember it until it was gone, and only now that I am older and sober, it dawns on me that its last day is gone.

I don’t remember the last words I spoke with Rob, who grew up kitty-corner to our house, who lent me comics and VHS copies of Mystery Science Theatre passed down by his brother. We played Sim City and Chrono Trigger on the Super Nintendo in his bedroom in the winter, and basketball on the hoop above his garage when the weather was warm. He became big and tall and strong just as his large frame always promised he would, and we became teenagers together, then young adults where we went down separate paths. I went to trade school, and he worked in the oil sands of Alberta, and now he is one of many crosses that tell their stories along the highway of death.

One day, the pizza and all things were gone, and in the years since I have wondered about all the missing pieces of their memories. It’s trivial maybe to put these two things together, but perhaps not. As friends, we ate and spent time in imperfect places, and this is how and where we built our memories. Not as pristine and ideal monuments to our shared time, but rather as something that smells and sweats a little to remind me of once being so young. We lived in such a small and isolated northern town that the simple luxury of fast food was enough to let us believe we were anywhere at all. Sometimes it was all we had, and sometimes that was enough. Not perfect, but satisfactory.

You can get still get the McPizza in Orlando, and so it is not fully gone, it simply retired in relative comfort. Maybe that’s hope enough, that someone out there is finding it and building memories around it. Maybe they’re better than me, or smarter rather, and taking photos of it and of the people they’re sharing a life with. Maybe they’re texting a photo of a half-eaten deluxe to a friend with a simple question mark, trusting that the other end knows this is an invitation for more. I hope that when they get older, they can share these stories together and recall being so impossibly young.

I don’t have that final day and all those final moments, and so all I can do is imagine them. Recall the taste of when it was all so real. The image that lingers in my head of a shitty cardboard box sitting on the dashboard of a truck, that bounced and shook as we drove from memory to memory together. All gone now, the end erased that leaves only the middle, but maybe that’s just the way of good things.