The days when Tom Waits made the best pizzas in San Diego
There is an undoubted kinship between Tom Waits’ music and Edward Hopper’s paintings. They are the great voyeurs of American life, lurking in the shadowy alleyways and purveying what they see in the jungle of civility. Making the best pizzas in San Diego might not seem like a pivotal step on the way to this artistic position, but Waits was able to observe far more than the optimal conditions for dough during his days at Napoleone’s.
Waits took up the job when he was only 14 years old. He was certainly very young, but it kept him off the streets, which was all the more pressing since his strange Spanish-teaching father, “a tough one, always an outsider”, had left in the night when he was only ten. Like father like son, Waits was also an outsider, but this moment drove him further afield. He was a self-professed “amateur juvenile delinquent” and a “rebel against the rebels”.
This meant that while others were swapping tokes over hippy records, Waits was scuffing his shoes, poring over the pages of the wayfaring beats like Jack Kerouac and other back-alley purveyors of prose. So, he dropped out of school and took up a job in Napoleone’s Pizza, where his only goal was to ensure that Ray Charles was playing on the jukebox. He wanted to be just like him, except for the blindness.
Suddenly, he was surrounded by great music, imbued with a sense of purpose, and able to view the wild happenings of San Diego’s city life with the clear eyes of something young enough to notice it all. This was such a pivotal time for him that he later recounted the events he was privy to in the brilliantly observational gem ‘Ghosts Of Saturday Night (After Hours At Napoleone’s Pizza House)’.
Speaking of his time there, the restaurant owner, Sal Crivello, explains: “He was shy at first, but I think that was just because he was young. He washed dishes, and then became a cook. He was an excellent worker. He made good pizzas”.
The pizzeria had been standing since 1958 when two brothers-in-law – Uncle Mike, a classically trained Opera singer from Capri, and Uncle Joe, a fisherman from Gloucester, Massachusetts – opened a family establishment that soon became a hang-out for drunken football fans stumbling out of games, nightshift workers, and after hour’s stompers thanks to its 4pm-4am opening hours.
Thankfully, Waits didn’t burn it to the ground in a daydream, and it still remains a bohemian hub of superb pizza, imbued with the aura of having helped shape the fascinating outlook of one of America’s finest artists. As Waits said himself about the beloved joint when introducing his musical ode to the pizzeria, “After I quitted (I was working on a Mobile station) and I was fifteen, I started working as a dishwasher and cook at a place called Napoleone’s Pizza House.“
He continues: “And, I worked there for years, for Joe Sardo and Sal Crivello, and eh it was a gas. Well, like every night about eh 4 o’clock in the morning all the white vinyl booted Go-Go dancers and all the sailors would come over about a quarter o’ four. And just about that time Joe would go out in front just to check out the traffic on the street.“
Before concluding with a vignette dripping with Waits’ own paintbrush: “You know, he would like leave his paper hat and he’d fold his apron and he would go out and stand in front of Napoleone’s’. Across the street from the Golden Barrel and Escalante’s Liquor and Mario’s Pizza. There a Shell station right on the corner, and a Westemer and a Club-29, and a Melody Club, Phil’s Porno and Iwo Jima Eddie’s tattoo parlor. And there’d be a cab out there combing the snake.”
