SPAGHETTI MEMORIES

I didn't know there was a word for that, but apparently there is. Someone told me at a backyard party a few years ago. Let me paint that: dirty couch, dirtier hammock, two 30-racks, a time when tv was still at least a little relevant, a midnight discussion about drunchies. That one's always pretty good. You'll always get something unexpectedly good, like ranch on pizza, and something actually horrifying, like pickles and peanut butter. I confessed to ketchup and spaghetti. Nobody was particularly horrified, but I was. My drunk mouth was too quick for the web of my image.

Plain and simple, I'm a hypocrite. I'll bitch and moan that if you get the sauce from a jar, you're a hack. You've got to get the real tomatoes, or at least the whole peeled kind that come in the tin can with the red and yellow label. You know, the good stuff. You gotta put olives in it. Or poach it with red wine. Tortellini goes in soup. Orzo is for salads. You can't put a meat sauce on angel hair. You need ridges. You need farfalle, or rigatoni. And don't talk to me about penne lisce; it is a crime against God. I'm a man with hardline pasta opinions. I'm not Italian, but I lived in Brighton, and that's technically Brooklyn, so it counts.

But I'll go home, three in the morning, and make a pot of noodles. Capellini, if I'm too sad to stand in the kitchen. Four minute cook-time, baby. The depression can shut up for exactly that long. I'll drain it with the lid. I'll douse it with ketchup. No salt, no pepper, and, if times are tough, no cheese. I'll eat it in bed out of a little blue plastic bowl, dragging around the last few noodles in the bottom like it's white trash cici e pepe. There's something comforting, so comforting, about the most simple of simplest foods. Look, I cooked something. Look, I'm eating. That's pretty good. I'll stare at the tv until I fall asleep. I'll leave the fork in the bowl until morning. At three in the afternoon, maybe I'll put it in the sink. It's called sketti, apparently. I can't help it. It makes me feel okay.

9/15/2020

Adrian Belmes is a reasonably depressed Jewish-Ukrainian poet and book artist residing currently in San Diego. He is the Editor in Chief of Badlung Press.

even though i'm deeply Italian and it is unheard of for me to dislike any kind of pasta i had a very abrupt break with spaghetti and similar when i was a little kid and something about the way it looked/smelled this one single time at my grandparents' house made me feel grossed out by it for years even though my grandparents are good at cooking. i was just a weird kid with sensory issues.

bonus: spaghetti specifically is a thing i feel real anxious dread still about eating because my parents would constantly tell me how gross and disgusting i am when i eat it. i still feel like the biggest slob on earth even though multiple people have watched me eat and never been weirded out.

Tune in for more ways I've broken with my heritage

7/30/2020

Kat Giordano is a poet and massive millennial crybaby who lives in New Jersey. She co-edits Philosophical Idiot and has had work published in Maudlin House, CLASH Media, Soft Cartel and the Cincinnati Review. Her debut full-length poetry collection, "The Poet Confronts Bukowski’s Ghost", is available now.

I eat too fast. I'm often loading up my fork with a mouth full of food before I've started chewing the last. As I chew I open my mouth and I mix up all that chewed food with the new stuff. It means I can eat more. I can endlessly eat if I do it fast enough. I remember being in a restaurant with my dad. We were sat outside. We were sitting together and we were eating spaghetti. They had added seafood and tomato to the spaghetti. I had to go slowly to avoid clam shell splitting under my teeth and cutting into my gums. I was eating this big ball of wrapped up spaghetti and it was red and warm and I bit down through the soft spaghetti. I bit straight into a shell. It hurt. I went to yell with my mouth all full and warm and I choked. I tried to breath and I was choking then I sneezed. There was a violent mess of red and fish and bleeding gums and two lines of unthawed spaghetti hanging from my nose.

5/27/2020

Giacomo can only eat spaghetti when it's gluten free.

We used to eat a lot of spaghetti because it was cheap. I think at several points growing up I hated it, because of the frequency it was consumed. I liked to pour a ton of that dusty parmesan, you know, the kind in a can, onto it and stir it all up. I'd pick the olives out, if my dad put olives in it. Now I like olives. Now I like spaghetti again. Meat balls or bust, though, am I right?

Meat balls on bread, meat ball subs. Spaghetti and meat ball sandwiches. Garlic bread.

4/29/2020

Troy James Weaver lives in Kansas and likes spaghetti.

spaghetti's presence through absence, I guess:

in high school I only had a few bucks to spend on lunch each week, so I would make my friend take me to the Olive Garden where there was a waiter who would humor me. every day I would order a small salad or a soda, and then I would eat a basket full of those free breadsticks

my friend would order spaghetti sometimes. I probably ate some of her spaghetti. but mostly I ate basket after basket of breadsticks

do you know the breadsticks I'm talking about? they had/have like a faint dusting of parmesan cheese that comes in a can



oh god I was totally wrong about it being an Olive Garden—it was Fazoli’s! an OG knock-off.

I shoulda known -- I didn’t feel like family there

3/23/2020

Lindsay Lerman has no relevant biographical information to share. you can buy her first book from CLASH.

The best spaghetti I've ever had is back when I lived in Austin, Texas and I used to boil ramen noodles then put them in a big plastic cup and pour spaghetti sauce on them then garnish them with a little sprinkle from the flavor packet, then I would sit in the garage and eat my entree with a side of Marlboro lights. I still crave that meal all the time but I'm now a 38-year-old father of 2 and it seems irresponsible to indulge my self-destructive urges like I used to. But trust me, when the kids are old enough to leave the house, it's on.

3/10/2020

Joe Kamm is the creator of the Zero Point Fiction podcast, which is a blend of audio art, original music, interviews, essays, and reviews. He was raised in west Texas and now lives/works/creates in northeastern New Jersey.

When I was a kid I used to put blue-dyed spray butter on my spaghetti. Sometimes I would squirt the butter in my mouth. I was overweight as a child.

3/3/2020

Blake Middleton is the author of College Novel. He lives in Jacksonville.

I was 20 years old, maybe 21. Tinder was my primary source of socialization outside of my Bro-Group.
Tinder was easy. Emotionless. Drunk sex. Wake up hungover but satisfied. Satiated. Log on, do it again.
I'll tell you her name, Amanda. Her name was Amanda. She had short hair, like a bob almost, but stylish. She had long legs. Blue eyes. She liked bad horror movies. The thing is, Amanda didn't leave. We woke up and watched a movie. I made us breakfast while she watched my roommate play Xbox in the living room. We ate silently on the couch, sideways glances and smiles making the both of us giddy.
I rolled and lit and smoked a joint. I took a nap on her lap, her playing with my hair like a mother might her son. A gross comparison, but, wholesome nonetheless. I woke up and she got up to leave. I walked her out. She left. I deleted Tinder.
Amanda started coming by a lot. Staying the night. Whole weekends. Was I...dating? No. All we did was fuck and watch movies and I drank and smoked weed. Amanda was an anxious but fun woman. We had a good time holed up in my room.
One day, she says to me: "Cavin, you're going to make me dinner."
Or maybe I said: "Amanda, I'm going to make you dinner."
The point of this was "settling down."
It felt adult, like the right thing to do. I liked this girl a lot. I wanted… sanctuary.
I texted her, "I'll make you spaghetti, how does that sound?"
She texted back: "Sounds fine."
Dry. She was so dry, over text. "Over text" is something that people my age say often, probably, because most of our relationships, romantic or not, are defined by text voices. Dry communication.
"Would you want something else?"
"Ravioli."
So that Friday we went to the store. I spent a lot of money I didn't have to buy fancy cheeses and different fillings and a rolling pin. She already had the little ravioli dish thing.
I couldn't make the fucking dough. It was too thick. Or too thin. It wouldn't roll. I had never made dough before.
But, we still had the sausage and the tomato paste and basil. I could make… spaghetti.
We laughed, covered in flour. Tried to salvage the sausage and sauce. It was a beautiful failure. Wholesome, there's that word again, so wholesome. The spaghetti sauce turned out like shit. Just awful. Not bland, but, bad. The opposite of bland. Too much Bad flavor.
The ravioli was fucked and the spaghetti sauce was fucked and I felt defeated. I couldn't have a girlfriend, man. Fucking look at me. I can't even roll dough.
She laughed at me some more and we ordered pizza. Papa Johns, baby. Papa Johns. I made her order because I hate talking on the phone.
We fell asleep on the couch. We woke up, went to my room. Had sex. It was wonderful. Disaster turned Papa John's turned panting in the light of an early morning.
She went home a few hours later, thanking me for a pleasant night.
A few days later she texted me saying she had met her soulmate online. He lived in Arizona. She couldn't see me anymore because she had to save her money for a plane ticket to go visit him.
So there's my story. It's not about spaghetti. It's about the spaghetti that could have been.

2/27/2020

Cavin Bryce Gonzalez is the founder of Back Patio Press. He has many regrets.

i try to think of my first spaghetti memory. i conjure a probably tv-tinged composite of a messy baby with sketties on its face and bib and plastic booster tray but i'm pretty sure that isn't me.

i remember strega nona, a children's book in which an old italian woman makes an ever expanding pot of spaghetti that swallows her house and town. i think mom read it to me. i ask internet and reacquaint myself with the particulars.

strega nona was a good witch and her helper, big anthony, started her magic pasta pot when she was off visiting with a friend. he wanted to prove to the disbelieving townspeople he wasn’t lying after he loose lipped the story of this regenerative font of noodles. so he got the pot going, but hadn’t thought as far as a kill switch. cue devastating torrent of pasta pasta pasta. screaming. strega nona came back just in time to stop the pastapocalypse with three magic kisses. as punishment for his hubris, she made big anthony eat the town out from under the spaghetti until his belly ached.

i come to learn this book was banned in some libraries for "depicting magic and witches in a positive light". my eyes roll like a poor meatball from on top of spaghetti and onto the floor.

2/24/2020

Tom Laplaige writes from New York where he cooks spaghetti and meatballs for his family and friends from time to time.

okay, so i'm 14? my mom and i live alone in PA, poverty, no dad she has 3 jobs, i have to have a job to help pay for living, and she's a big trash picker. we would go out on trash eve and look through the good stuff. we lived in a HUD duplex that had not been painted in at least 15 years, carpets, etc., older than that. she smokes two packs a day, so in addition to time, her smoke has stained everything. we strike it rich with two gallon cans of medium yellow indoor matte paint. they are half-full each, bit old, but once we stirred them, viable. we decide to paint the kitchen, which has been cracked and grey/smoke-stained for years. we spring for spackle and borrow two rollers from neighbors.

it takes us the weekend and it looks okay, feels brighter, feels good to be able to improve our surroundings a bit. (of course, she starts smoking immediately, as celebration.) we have dry spaghetti, wesson, and a jar of ragu in the cupboard. we have not-moldy shake cheese! celebration again! boil water with a little oil and salt so nothing clumps, dump in the spaghetti. wait! things are floating in the water. okay, okay. weevils or whatever. fine. we know how to get them out using dry paper towels and a spoon. i was excited to show her what i learned about 'al dente!' home ec or something, i guess. at 8 minutes, i fish a strand out of the pot and fling it against the wall. "if it sticks, it's done!" it stuck. i peeled it away, and the oil stain remained there until we moved four years later.

2/20/2020

Jennifer Greidus is the co-founder and editor of XRAY Literary Magazine. She lives in Phoenix, has no formal training in any field, and likes dogs.

Sadly spaghetti is slowly killing me. I think when I eat spaghetti I eat too much of it. Why do your favorite things kill you? I have tried edamame-based spaghetti, it's ok. But I need that pure spaghetti. I don't remember the first time I ate spaghetti but I remember going to a place called the Spaghetti Factory in Pittsburgh on a family trip. It was good. We went to a Pirates vs San Diego Padres double header after that. When I was younger I wanted to be a major league baseball player but then I ate too much spaghetti. I mean that was part of it. The failure to realize my dream had something to do with being lazy and eating too much spaghetti. I used to rewind the scene in Goodfellas — the prison dinner scene where they are cutting the garlic and preparing the meal. The first time I saw Goodfellas I went out and stole some cigarettes from Turkey Hill. Then me and my brother and stepbrothers bought cap guns and jumped out of bushes and surprised joggers and popped off the cap guns. Seems insane now. I jog now and would be pissed if that happened. It's crazy what you do when you're a kid. And it's weird that spaghetti is connected to mafia movies and murder. For a while, we got into stealing the little chrome tire caps from luxury cars and putting them on our bikes. One time we were on our way to visit our aunt and we were at the train station in Philly and we were gonna steal the caps from this BMW. It turned out to belong to the Philadelphia Phillies center fielder Lenny Dykstra. Later I saw him in the train station. I went up (I was like 12) and introduced myself and said I played baseball too and he interrupted me and asked how to find the 2 p.m. train from DC. I showed him how you look at the schedule. I was pretty surprised he couldn't figure it out. I remember hearing that Lenny Dystra never read books. But he got rich from stocks and a car wash scam I think. I think he's kind of fucked up now. Anyway making pasta is easy. And fun. I really like farfalle. I'm writing this at a conference about growing hemp. This guy keeps saying the name Hawaiian Haze and Bubba Kush. He said he named a lot of the plants. He seems pretty excited. I think it's easy to eat a lot of spaghetti. That's one of my problems I guess.

I guess you could say I'm a big pasta fan.
A spaghetti head.
Al dente tho. That's that shit. Meatballs. A good meatball c'mon.
For awhile I was dating a vegetarian and she cooked awesome vegetarian dinners but then she broke up with me.
I kept being a vegetarian for a while.
I ate these meatless meatballs and felt very zen
Also very depressed
Now eat meat meatballs
Still depressed but when i have a big plate of spaghetti with meatballs i do feel happy

The first dinner I ate with my wife was spaghetti. She came to visit me in LA. My apartment was in a section run by the 18th st. gang I guess. They were pretty nice to me tho. One time I saw a man get burned alive. I couldn't bring myself to run over and try to put the fire out. Other people did. I think about that and worry about the kind of person I am.
The spaghetti had shrimp in it.
We also went to an itailan restaurant in LA and both had spaghetti and sat side by side. It was a piano bar and very romantic.
Spaghetti is romantic.
Romantic things kill you.

2/14/2020

Mike Andrelczyk is the author of "The Iguana Green City & Other Poems" and "Dissolving." He probably just ate some spaghetti and meatballs.

as a student i worked at this concert venue along other students. all on a volunteer basis. i made posters and such, you know, work that isn't really work. i was in it for short hours, cheap beer and free concerts. once every semester we had to do some actual volunteer work around the venue. cleaning, lime plastering the walls, take old syringes out of the brick wall gaps, stuff like that. as a reward for spending a hungover sunday we always got a free dinner. very often it was spaghetti and mince. first come first serve. for some reason i was late to dinner, and what was left was just this big ball of overcooked spaghetti in the bottom of this enormous casserole. you could scoop it like ice cream. tepid, dry and savory ice cream. it wasn't life changing or anything. it's for sure a dish i would comment on the ‘mouthfeel' of if i ever was a judge on masterchef. telling the contestants that to check if it was done, they can just throw spaghetti at the kitchen cabinets.

2/11/2020

Christian Utigard. A professional. Writer of such classics as "thirties" and "employee at amoeba music." 28. Gemini.

I guess the only thing that comes to mind is it was my 21st birthday. my parents cooked me a chicken parm and linguine dinner that sunday after I had partied for 2 days straight. That sunday, I was exhausted and I had smoked some kind of synthetic pot at my friend’s house, not k2 but a milder form i think, and went home for the spaghetti dinner zonked out and zombie-like. I remember eating the pasta extremely careful and slow, head on one hand, and my mom had said something like “man you look exhausted. partied out, huh?” and I remember confusing the linguine for my lips like running off my face and I had to slurp them back up

2/7/2020

Nick Farriella is currently living and surviving in New Jersey. You can find his work on the internet.

I was gifted an olive garden gift card recently by a client
I’ve been having spaghetti lunch pronto every wednesday for the last month

a deeper spaghetti memory is that there used the be a place in Wichita called the Old Spaghetti Factory
went there as a treat as a kid
a bizzare place
here's a story about it
The glory of Spaghetti Mizithra and more details about Wichita’s Old Spaghetti Factory

imagine a haunted factory as an italian restaurant

actually the spaghetti place was called Spaghetti Works
that article gets into the confusion
So Old Spaghetti Factory, Spaghetti Works, and Spaghetti Warehouse are all three different things
Spaghetti Works being a local franchise of Spaghetti Warehouse

fucking memories man
this is some real Mandala effect shit

2/6/2020

Chance Dibben is a writer, photographer, and music-maker living in Lawrence, KS.