A Pineapple Pizza Coup

Originally published at Zac van Manen.com.

Pizza is as good as old food can get. Attested there in the dying days of the first millennium AD, it’s lasted as long as fresh new ingredients can be found to layer on top of a flat beard with sauce, then topping, then cheese, roughly. Of course tastes change but never has it been so vicious a staple as on the Hawai’ian islands.

Californians at that time, more Mexican than American, were close trading partners with the Hawai’ians courtesy of their line of sight. Then it was a volcanic island, singular, so nearby you could see what would become Hilo from San Francisco Bay. Sailing to it upon a steamship over the glassy ocean was a common winter retreat for the founding West Coast families whose wealth was now freeing them from the shackles of work and providing for them the need only to look good and feel good. Fresh fruits came both ways as did knowledge, entertainment, and the equipment to make new discoveries.?

Italic vagrants, looking to establish for themselves new lives as far west from the Old World as possible, made it from one coastline to another only to discover, in the near distance relatively speaking, another coastline altogether. They boarded the steamships too not always as passengers but often as crew and sometimes they stowed away, lithe, able to endure the few days it would take to get there in stillness and quiet and hunger. They knew the salt air and the island heat would revive in them the Mediterranean fires that had sparked them through their energetic youths.

It was on one of those steamships that Leonardo Esposito first cooked for the Hawai’ians a pizza and so began the condemnation of those people to the distant oceans closer to Japan than to what would become their Union.

Like everywhere, pizza on that aimless island became an enormous hit and Leonardo Esposito found himself quickly in demand but not rich. He was blessed with a fiery heart and the, “Yes chef,” passion for the cucina yet not the studio mind required for le quello commerciale. Instead he just made and made and made delicious food that circulated quickly through tropical society and quickly, disastrously, to the king.

At this time, the Hawai’ian monarch was not yet elected. He had not yet found it either within himself —?or within the more placid, more temperately satisfied, case of suntanned and casual aristocrats with which he was surrounded —?to take a stab at the divine right of kings. He was the first king back after the first queen. He was comfortable with it and the state of the throne was strong like palm trees but flexible like them too, liable for a shaping over time by the ocean winds eroding the sand at the roots, burdened by those climbing all over to reach up during the harvest and otherwise pay no attention. He was the kind to mix metaphors in speech both reported and direct.

He was looking too then for a way to build the cultural wealth of his realm against the tide of fresh new American entertainments. Saloons and early photographers and fledgling nickelodeon films compelling for the people when they came in out of the surf. Hula had returned already to the court after its long, banned absence. As king he liked too to venture out of his wooden beachside castle and into the flourishing markets within which you could find at that time the weird and wonderful before it became rote. There he discovered Leonardo’s pizza.

It came hot, fresh, oily, rich with flavours he knew of but which were new in their combination. He ate one slice right there beside Leonardo’s market stall facing the ocean westward towards the expansive sea sparse then for a long long way. What the empty king next saw far shortened such distance. A busy stall. The second busiest to Leonardo’s. And the king, only human and naive enough without challenge to believe to be truth some of his harmless fancies, should at least have been more curious about origins.

The pineapple stand was run by André Etienne, a Frenchman by lineage born into a Brazilian colony he was desperate to escape from a young age thanks to the fanciful stories of sailors who stopped at port and swore black and blue, drunk and sober, of the wealth unlimited beyond Magellan’s pass. Just fifteen, he snuck himself away on a ship westward in a crate of pineapples. He was determined to stay there beneath them all for as long as it would take. Instead of a forced march back to the iron virtues of his Catholic parents he would that death come first as he rotted in the sweltering heat. He was found that way nearly dead, nursed to life, and shackled with the vice that would become a blessing and again a curse of cultivating that wasted fruit in the dirt the ship’s botanist was storing in volumes he didn’t need just for science. Young, determined, and without another option, Etienne became a success. He stayed that way for thirty more years until he found himself that day before the Hawai’ian king slicing a pineapple in half down the middle, then into crescent slices, then again into haphazard pieces.

The king, with his pizza full and cut into Leonardo’s eight uneven slices, tried shape after shape after shape and found himself enamored with the surprise smattering of chunks ad-hoc. Having never seen pineapples elsewhere, having seen the gathered continental crowds excited before Andre’s stand —?misunderstanding that the novelty of the place was largely to do with its charismatic host than it was with the exclusive nativity of its produce —?and frankly having never left the kingdom to see if the fruit did in fact grow elsewhere, the king determined his first compulsive decree: this was to be the Hawai’ian. More local even than the people, he proclaimed. More native than the trees, than the sands, than the mountains with their caldera zits, the seas blue like crystal. More Hawai’ian even than he was.

How that rent the island.

The dish was a smash hit among the upper crust. It brought, for the first time, islanders together from high society and low to celebrate so fanciful an invention. Yet it left out the classes from lower- to upper-middle and, crucially, the upwardly mobile — whose enterprise, Leonardo’s and Etienne’s included, gave them more than anything the fundamental desire to experience only the best with their hard-earned. They’d not yet lost the satisfaction of the nicer things; trinkets accessible to them but not yet omnipresent so they remained rich with luster. For them, this new pineapple pizza mixed two kinds of foods in ways that defeated the higher highs of each alone: sweet on savoury. Pineapple better in those cocktails that Puerto Rican travellers had recently brought too to the island, better again as a single slice atop a patty in a burger — here imported by the Germans but perfected on its way across the continent by those who would soon call themselves exclusively American. The pizza itself delicious and the stable flavour innate to the cheese, meat, bread undermined by the surprise of the sweet burst of fruit. A handful of Chinese deckhands suggested instead it was sour. They shouldn’t have.

The island caught aflame with the passion of the pineapple pizza, served over dinner tables in private homes to uproar as half the family, it seemed, enjoyed the meal and the other half couldn’t stand it. Such wastage, chunks thrown aside, dogs growing obese as they ate every piece of detritus they could get their snouts on. Slamming doors, screaming children, homes divided into lines. Bedrooms swapped, offices moved, places of work segregated by simple preference. Traditionalists displeased with the king’s malleable nature, his unwillingness to take a stand about anything, were the kind to read books and to learn quickly that pineapple was not nearly as indigenous as they were. Elders remembering, in fact, its arrival but their waning minds were easy to dismiss. The dish became a roadblock to the people, something around which they wrapped themselves with fervor both good and bad.?

The king, insulated, first became aware of the public mood when it spilled — literally spilled — into the beach courtyard of his. The first emissary of the banning of the pizza approached on foot, their steps squeaking on the white sand, the waves soft behind them, and they plead their passionate case: to revoke the proclamation of the meal as an icon of the state. This was partly because the emissary was a United States agent looking to find ways to undermine local authority and depose the monarchy altogether but it was largely because his plans to do this slowly, softly, with subtlety — like with which he’d soon topple the Ottomans from the inside disguised beyond recognition —?had been accelerated too fast by his young wife and stubborn toddler siding against him and enjoying — as children do, he thought — the sweet flavour of the fruit on what was otherwise a workhouse staple meal from the Italian thassalocracies. The Venetians, the Genoese, he thought, would know best how to build island nations. And here was barely a territory, so loosely held together by an administration that didn’t even know that its humble food choices were the rumblings of agitation that would spill soon into the practice for the practice for the real show: a civil war here to precede the American and then the European Great War. This emissary would be present all throughout for what unfolded next:

His passionate appeal leaned on just the one story of a breaking family. The king, unmarried and unhappy about it but unwilling to choose from a stable of would-be brides for that same anxiety that plagued the decisions of his crown, wept as he listened. Crowds gathered as this emissary spoke with a voice louder than God’s, it seemed. In truth, he was projected by just the simple, newfangled trick of analogue wires beneath his bulky shawl transmitting his plea and broadcast about Honolulu by the earliest radio technologies. Never was there, they would say later in the newly built White House, a better American.

Remember at this time the proximity of the island saw tourists come and go as they do now, taking even less time through the air than then when they crossed the shallow and thin seas without a time difference on arrival. That summer, those coming home brought back with them a surplus of pineapples that began then to infect the fledgling continental communities. The influence of the pizza a virus. Corrupting homes and job sites here too on the mainland.

Catching like the cold along the overland trails through the desert where came the real trouble for the federal administration as pineapples in the Wild West fell from pizza slices during drunk arguments and what would have otherwise been replaceable bread and sauce and meat instead became fresh fruit falling to the dust. What followed was gunpowder and blood and chaos from west coast to east and the conflagration caught even the government’s dining room ablaze. Then the President became truly the modern monarch as she commanded the settling of the pineapple pizza issue. In those days communication was as fast a person could travel, largely, especially west as the first telegraph cables only just found their way to the bottom of the Atlantic in the east. Pineapple pizza was forbidden to discuss over the wire.

The President’s appointed messenger, one Bridgitte Marchent, took the long overland routes on foot and by horse but eschewed the comfort of a carriage for fear of the ease with which she could find herself tempted in the presence of the evil meal for its convenience. In three months — record time — she made the cross from Washington to the island, a virgin to “the Hawaiian” , and when she boarded the steamship in San Francisco she had a feeling already that the black smoke rising from its volcano vented frustration and not an imminent erupting.

She was right.

Upon disembarking she found the settlements, the marketplaces, the streets, the homes, guttered and shuttered and dark even in the early afternoon with the bright sun high and hot and stinging at her skin. A small security force accompanying her carried their rifles forward as they walked to the king’s palace to subject peace. About them they were sure the palms were bare of coconuts and swaying without the wind. At the sandy palace instead of the aimless king she found that American emissary, the Yankee George, atop the throne and surrounded too by arms. About Bridgitte and her man enclosed the Hawai’ian rebellion, the population pro-pineapple pizza with their lips stained yellow and red with juice and sauce and fat bellies from the carbohydrates and injuries from endless fighting.?

This pretender George had come to the king the year before pleading a ceasefire and instead he’d waged through negotiations a usurper’s war. He’d collapsed the island further into bloodshed, emptying the upstart cities into the rainforests. Beside the Yankee stood George’s own emissary, a Hawai’ian that was frankly ambivalent about pineapple on pizza but passionate mostly about power and finding ways to operate in the shadows like the oil-black engine beneath a gleaming hood adorned by a chrome jaguar. This was not a metaphor that made sense to anyone present until many years later in Britain, that much greater island.

Bridgitte relayed the President’s demands. Yankee George agreed with the words but the flank of bristling guns about her and her men gave her pause. Instead, she commanded her men to fire first. Their skin clean, fresh, their sweat clear and uncoloured and not smelling of fruit and sugar and aimless, pointless, loss. The makeshift army around them buckled as quickly as the state had before and the court surrendered by the third unmatched volley even as the less cowardly prepared to return fire. Bridgitte condemned the Yankee to iron chains and a return to the mainland and assumed his place atop the government. George’s emissary remained, some connection to the locals, and he became Bridgitte’s. Removed from the towering shadow of the interloper, he stood straighter, taller, more confident. Fresh administrator Bridgitte considered him rather handsome. And surely, even if deployed to now to ends untoward, he seemed capable.

That’s indeed what he became, as Yankee George was escorted back across the country during the Hawai’ian Reconstruction and presented to the President who sent him with the last of her executive orders to Istanbul that was Constantinople. While Bridgitte turned the island back into a paradise her boss lost her election largely by the blame of the unrest of the waning national diet. Peace resumed slowly across the Americas with the same fervor it had begun, export of the pineapple capped, André Etienne again bound for Brazil rich now and a new name stolen from someone he’d deliberately killed under the legal and social cover of violence. Leonardo Esposito was forcibly retired and sworn, protected similarly by sudden wealth, and sworn by contract never again to bake another dough.?

Yet lingering: a bubbling passion still for pineapple pizza. No cost, it seemed then, too high for anybody even with cemeteries full and the once-then-again-loved buried in haste, marked but en masse. Tiffs drunk on okolehao became clashes became again bruning homes at the south-eastern side of what would become the main island once the landmass broke apart in its long western shift.?

Bridgitte and her emissary had become inebriated but not yet drunk on the power afforded them by Presidents gone and now focusing back at home according to the printed papers starting to circulate about the Union and the growing Confederacy. And they were not yet married. Together they tempered each other and so arose the first sensible governing choice in decades —?with the memory of the king barely upon their minds even over sex upon his driftwood throne and life daily in his palm palace which they’d cemented to the earth deep beneath the sand so it would never be, heretically, swept out to sea? — of holding the island’s first referendum.

Constitutionally it held no sway at all. It island itself, down in the fundament, required that the monarch to these decisions his seal but that had been lost with him and Yankee George was undiscoverable for information until he was killed in a misunderstanding on the Algerian border many years later. Officials shot at his automobile as it sped without purpose through the desert and within they uncovered reams upon reams of unpublished writing, some curious, some insightful, but much of it —?as with all writers —?simply unbearable. Still, it became The Ballad of the Yankee and it sold well and bought homes for his three bastard children scattered now across Eurasia. This money lasted just the one generation before it was in ways that were also lost in the records destroyed in the war that followed the Great War. Nevertheless: the de facto island queen and her vizier husband, Bridgitte now pregnant, delivered the vote that was just returned just about down the middle.

Counting the ballots came too to a head with vicious defenders of Yes and No, some of whom on both sides simply misread the question enough to roughly cancel each other out, and it took the raising of a neutral Californian guard to secure the palace and the result. That guard was not in fact as neutral as they would have been ideally but they recalled the recent destruction across the pond that gave rise to the necessary founding of the US Coast Guard and its military budget. From a population of 212,446 people — inflated by the 28% of Hawai’ians at that time prepared again to go to war for or against sweet on savoury by way of casting their ballot twice —?came a Yes vote in favour of its banning by a 4.7% margin. It was the No camp, the “Let us eat!” camp, who were more prepared to bear arms. They wept and gnashed teeth and demanded the signing of the referendum seal of the king.?

Bridgitte, of course, could do no such thing. Nor could, for reasons no one knew until they finally read The Ballad of the Yankee, the king.?

Such fury from the defeated! Fire and flames and bloodshed again, bested by the guard in a brutal flurry at the frond steps of the palace. These rebels, bloodied but not broken, retreated then into the rainforests to uphold as long as their could their arms and defences and to repurpose what had been the hovels of their enemies there on the brink of the almost defeat beforehand. Satisfied voters however made their way to the hollowed out cities where they built shortly after the first high rise on the island. Inside, ovens were banned. Nothing made that could cook a pizza whole here. The steamships stopped. The island, Bridgitte wrote in her first report after the referendum to both of the federal administrations north and south looking to make a claim to America, was untenable.

The two presidents, so rarely, agreed. Bridgitte and her emissary husband, with whom by now was very nearly a parent, retreated under dark for the mainland. By then protection from the Hawai’ian insanity had stoked the building of the Port of Los Angeles for defence. LA had been more of a church and some farms then than a city and from within the emerging industrial bowels of that port came the first west coast ironclads.?

It was agreed in secret, after dark, low to the water, just about invisible, that these war machines would sail out to the far sides of the island and begin to relieve both the United and Confederate States of this malaise altogether.

So they steamed across the wide bay and circled the bottom of the island in the shadow of the volcano as it roared again with fury and frustration and, this time, an imminent explosion. The ironclad crews disembarked under the deepest dark of the night and buried great hooks with mammoth chains into the earth beneath the sand and fixed to the foundations and began with steam engines to pull Hawai’i away from the Californian coast. Too consumed were the locals by fresh in-fighting. They were too busy to notice but for the lucky few who’d gotten wind of the plan by way of pamphlets from the rare trading ships willing to risk still making land and so retreated across the water east. They even rowed if they had to. In one case, someone began to swim. Mercifully rescued, they paid that back upon the continental Americas by rescuing the drowning from swimming pools in desert towns for the rest of their life before they eventually, at great age, succumbed to the destiny of water in their lungs. Were it not for pride there would be entries now in history books that began with P for Pineapple Exodus, the.

It was in the wrenching out to the Pacific, one-tenth of a nautical mile for every No vote cast in the fateful ballot, that the Hawai’ian islands broke apart. The fleet of ironclads were buffered irregularly and inequitably by the seas and their chains pulled different parts differently. Never though did they stop. The smaller islands came further, as you would expect, and the heavier main island was dragged by the largest of the flotillas with the most effort courtesy of the angry volcano in its midst. Even as they dragged it it was warm and red and hot and fiery with the early edge of an eruption.?

The story from the island — still one as far as the locals considered them — during the move goes that warfare with spears, rifles, swords, coconuts, fists, and words became simply so consuming no one noticed until one day the gathered hordes Yes and No assembled opposite each other to end it all there at the base of the growling mountain to which they still maintained a religious deference. As they went to draw blood, racing towards each other screaming in the charge across the pinkened sand, the mountain Kīlauea burst.

Orange and red and yellow flame tore into the sky as black smoke and ash covered the island the people fled it instead of each other, army mingling amongst army, survival overriding loyalty and taste, and the ironclads continued their pull until the lava reached molten the great chains and with acidic heat burned them away. The ships thundered then forward, throwing their crews right off. The ships towing the smaller, broken islands without eruptions upon them watched from crusted brass telescopes as their brethren came loose. Floodlight signals from sea level told ship after ship: return home. The unmelted chains were detached and the ironclads descended beneath the waves and returned finally after many weeks at sea as the first ships through Panama Canal to join the Battle of Hampton Roads.

When the volcano had settled and the islanders had calmed themselves and they looked out east to see the damage for the first time they realised their expulsion. What would have been skirmishes to the death instead became tired arguments and they found themselves all sitting on the cooled lava if they could, otherwise stunned by their breaking apart and away, on what had become quickly an archipelago. They dropped their weapons onto what would become fertile earth for farming and after years of fighting and months of hiding and weeks of killing and days of hiding from the melting fires realised they were hungry. They resolved, together, to eat anything. What they could not make, in the destruction, was a pizza. Ovens not built in the cities and the ovens constructed melted away. So began the Rereconstruction.

And the king? It had of course been the Yankee George and the poor king’s Judas, Bridgitte’s child’s father, who had taken him in the quiet dark night upon the water and killed him. They told the others of the aristocracy that he’d abandoned the island’s bloodlust for shame and bounced for elsewhere, anywhere, in Polynesia where they hoped no one would also go and try to find him. Of course there were those after the peace seeking purpose who went venturing after him. They found every populated island between Hawai’i and New Zealand in pursuit of him but of course found nothing. Instead, king Makoa the poorly named had been butchered and cast upon a circular raft of palm adorned with whole pineapple fruit and the pieces of him scattered about. To the birds from above, the raft was yellow in the sun and dotted with meat and fruit and sweet and savoury all over.

These birds did their best at the feast before the raft was capsized by waves that were a tsunami in a kamikaze wind in Japan and then the sharks, in their apolitical wisdomlessness, began a furious contest too about which we have no records except scars on the oldest specimens we still find.