Forgive me if I’ve told you this before.
When I lived in Minneapolis, I lived in what is widely known there (called by me and me alone) as the pizza district. There was a Domino’s across the street. Next door to it, there was a Pizza Hut sports bar. Across a different street, there was a Davanni’s, which is a regional chain that’s kind of like Sbarro’s Minnesotan cousin (everything Sbarro is, but more towards the center).
The Pizza Hut was especially intriguing. It was, after all, a sports bar. There was karaoke there some nights. Every now and then, we’d convince others in the office to do a post-work happy hour there, and the bartender would take already-$3 Coors Lights and neglect to charge us for half of them, making them effectively $1.50 Coors Lights. One time, I went in there hoping to watch the NIT Quarterfinals and had to wait fifteen minutes for anyone to notice I was there, then spend another fifteen minutes arguing to the dude wandering around the kitchen that he could, in fact, pour me a draft beer.
It was my favorite place in Minneapolis.
Early in my time there, I trained for a marathon. It was, specifically, the Fargo Marathon, which is important because a big part of the reason I ran the marathon was that I wanted to weekend in Fargo, and it’s hard to convince friends (and family) to accompany you for a weekend in Fargo if there isn’t a specific occasion. It was a long play, and it was well worth it. Fargo is great. If you don’t find Fargo great you’re doing Fargo wrong. If you’re doing Fargo wrong, please reach out so I can help you do Fargo right. Fargo is important to me. We’re getting a puppy this year and naming it Fargo.
And so it was that on a Friday afternoon that first March, I snuck out of work early (i.e., walked straight out—hardly anybody worked Friday afternoons there, which is part of how this blog came to exist), went for a 17-mile run up through Northeast and St. Anthony, and came home starving. I was exhausted. I was a little swollen. I was supposed to meet some friends in Uptown a short while later to watch Wisconsin play Florida (fun fact: this was one of the last times I watched *that other* basketball tournament before starting the NIT blog). I went into the Pizza Hut hoping to eat a large cheese pizza, drink three Coors Lights, and watch some of the early games before Stubering (this was in the passenger phase of my life) on down to their apartment.
This was not to be the case.
The games were on, but they were behind the karaoke stage, and as I look back on it, I think karaoke was happening. On the other TV’s was The Godfather, muted, uncaptioned. I walked up to the bar anyway (Davanni’s doesn’t have any TV’s), and when I sat down, a profound question was asked to me by the bartender (not the usual one—this was the only time I saw this particular woman):
“Are you Maurice?”
I looked behind me. No one there.
“Nope,” I answered. “I’m Stu.”
“Ok.”
She took her hand off the bar’s phone’s mouthpiece.
“No ma’am, your husband isn’t here.”
And she walked away, hanging up a short while later.
I ordered my beer and my pizza, trying not to watch the wife-beating scene silently progressing on the three screens in front of me.
Eventually, I did get the pizza, and I got the beers, and I got down to Uptown, and Zak Showalter did the belt, and Wisconsin lost, and I kind of hobbled around even more dehydrated (lot of salt in pizza, I guess) and still a little disturbed by the silent film. But before I got the pizza, after I got the beer, while I was taking my first sip of Coors Light and wishing I’d just sat at a table and suffered through the karaoke, the bathroom door opened, and out stepped Maurice. Followed by a cloud of weed smoke.
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