The Tale of The Endless Pizza Parlor
As chronicled by Orson Shakespeare McSeinfeld
ORSON SHAKESPEARE McSEINFELD
Somewhere, between strip mall and myth… there stands—still spinning—a place.
Maybe you glimpsed it in childhood.
Maybe only inside fevered memory.
Maybe on the fuzzy flicker of a forgotten CRT screen.
A pizza parlor.
But not just any parlor.
This one… never ended.
It wasn’t even supposed to be an eat-in anymore.
It was carryout.
But technically still had tables—
small Formica slabs, ringed with mismatched chairs…
remnants of long-gone dine-in glory.
Tables once hosting families, now cluttered with flyers, napkin dispensers…
traces of a concept learned, then abandoned.
It felt haunted—
a dining room with its people left behind.
And yet…
there was Skee-ball.
Ancient.
Rumbling.
Looping in a mechanical chant like a midway machine
abandoned when the carny left—for a smoke, or a cougar rendezvous—
While his kid skee-ed with wild abandon,
from the window…
to the wall.
That lane blazed bright.
Lit like prophecy.
Sang a warped hymn in every thunk.
No tickets. No prizes.
Just one child, pitching balls into oblivion,
pulling power from pure nostalgia.
Pizza appeared.
Unbidden.
Perfectly shaped.
Steaming.
Delivered by indifferent teens with names like Taco or Kaylee
faces glowing in the soft sodium light of concession stand mindlessness.
Animatronics stood lifeless in the corner.
A bear frozen mid-song.
A bird with one blinking eye.
A dog cast forever in clerical pose.
They hadn’t performed in years—
yet the hush of their music still echoed in the back rooms,
if you listened through your bones.
I followed rumors to find it.
A Chuck E. Cheese never franchised.
A ShowBiz trapped in Y2K.
A CeCe’s forgotten by time, waiting behind shuttered storefronts.
An old arcade token led me—
to a cul-de-sac near Des Moines.
There it stood, faintly lit, half-sunken in the parking lot.
Inside…
a child screamed in the ball pit.
A man slept.
A mother watched three different screens at once.
I realized: I’d found it.
The Endless Pizza Parlor.
I touched a booth once.
Closed my eyes.
And whispered:
“I remember.”
Then…
I woke in a CVS.
NyQuil sweat cooling on the back of my neck.
The ghost of pizza and arcades still lingering in my senses.
Somewhere—
that place still waits.
Box light waiting to flicker.
Pizza waiting to be delivered.
Children still throwing balls
just to see the lights dance again.
And play Skee-ball I did—again and again—
until dreams bent, the neon twisted, the memory cracked open.
Until I awoke in stuffy, NyQuil-fueled sweat,
nostalgia clinging to my pores.
It was time
for a Diet Squirt
and a Star Trek rerun
to anchor me back to reality.
And thus ends my pilgrimage… for now.