We are not these dudes.

Pizza sits alone in an unfuckwithable food category. Like a can cozey that says “A bad day of golfing is still better than a good day at work,” most people agree that even shitty pizza is still pretty good. So what happens when you take the power of pizza creation into your own feeble hands in service of trying to gross out your bro? Pizza vs. Pizza, in which two esteemed constables of pizza mastication, Dr. Tenderoni and Dr. Benji Mane, your two Madison correspondents, challenge each other to eat totes gross slices of the other’s creation at Roman Candle.

Tenderoni: Sorry for the long delay between our first Pizza vs. Pizza Challenge, and this, our second trip into Roman Candle’s worm hole of fucked up pizza toppings (Blue Cheese? More like Blue FuckYourself). I had a rough couple of months–I lost a pair of Stanley Cups on NHL 2009, I ripped a hole in my favorite Led Zeppelin T-shirt and I totally stubbed a toe that one time in January. It really sucked. Benji Mane apparently had a kid during that time, but he is not a woman, so I don’t understand how that could have worked. His new baby roommate is pretty cool though.

Anyways, Dr. Mane and myself agreed to finally get some meat involved in this Pizza vs. Pizza, because the variety of meats available at Roman Candle are pretty gnarly too. But the meat wasn’t my primary concern. I had an ace in the hole for this Pizza vs. Pizza challenge: Zucchini. Benji Mane reportedly hates the stuff the way baby Hitler hates juice. I figured even if I were to put normal stuff on there for him, he’d be all Hulk-style angry about the zucchini. And he was, even though I took it easy on him by choosing fresh mushrooms and oven-roasted chicken breast. He literally went, “Oh man, I hate zucchini. Waaaaahhh.”

Benji Mane: It’s true: my wife had a baby and that baby is my daughter. Now my life is forever changed and I can rarely get legally drunk anymore. True story: One of the first days we had her at home, she shit so hard that it flew out of her diaper and into her eye, and all over my face. I had to rush her to the bathroom to promptly clean the shit out of her eyes, making it possible for me keep the shit on my face for a full 10 minutes. If any of you don’t have kids yet, just think about this story the next time you’re about to nut all up in some lady guts. It’ll probably help you go for a little longer.

So the littlest Mane came along when Tenderoni and I once again descended into pizza hell via Roman Candle. I think the first time we did this feature we made some rule about no hot stuff on the slices, but I forgot, so that’s just what I did. Jalapenos, with all the seeds and juice, can totally body slam all other flavors near by. So I think it was a pretty clever mind game from Mane to make the slice look like a luscious Hawaiian treat with a little something extra; it looks fun, but it’s totally not. Like luring your enemy into a sweet-ass luau, only to jump from behind the tiki bar and punch him right in the dick.

Those jalapenos are no fucking joke.

Tenderoni: Benji Mane’s choice of jalapenos—which were so spicy my face hurt—and pineapples—which were so juicy that each bite yielded a cumshot of pineapple juice on my mouth’s hangy ball thing—was sinister indeed, but his choice of prosciutto crossed a line I had drawn in the sand. It crossed my religious practices to eat hog for breakfast, but I did it anyway, because it would have been a disservice most foul to the 13 people that will eventually read this for me to have quit so early.

(As a sidebar, here, before you think I’m making a too-easy Muslim/Jew joke, I’m really making an obtuse reference to Ice Cube’s “It Was a Good Day.” And no joke, I follow that song like scripture. In fact, just this morning I put an ass to sleep after going so deep, and I fucked around and got a triple double.)

But yeah, prosciutto was pretty okay, and pineapples aren’t all that bad, I guess. Though I will never get the idea of having fruit on a pizza that isn’t one of those piles of shit you buy at the grocery store for Fourth of July parties. At any rate, the other toppings didn’t matter, because those hot-as-the deepest pit of hell jalapenos dominated everything soundly. I even tried burying the jalapeños in a wad of crust, and pouring a shitload of marinara on them, but those jalapenos still ruined my shit. And I’m generally in favor of spicy food, but even the light number of jalapenos was too much for me.

This shit was so healthy, it actually had negative grease.

Benji Mane: You know what’s weird? My grandma used to make zucchini bread that was totally amazing and I would eat the shit out of it all the time. But the vegetable itself makes me barfy just writing about it. Even though it would be really uncomfortable, I would shove a zucchini right up my ass just so it would get shit all over it. If I was an inventor and zucchinis had faces, I’d invent a gun that shot knives just so I could shoot a zucchini in the face with a bunch of knives. I fucking hate zucchini. And because zucchini ran rampant on this slice, I hated it.

But what was going on with the rest of this slice? Oven baked chicken breast and fresh mushrooms? The only benefit to eating this healthy is maybe my beard will finally start to fill out. I’d go from looking like Jude Law in The Talented Mr. Ripley to Jude Law in Cold Mountain. Also, I’d be around to see my daughter graduate from high school. But that’s it! And a life without taste is a life worth suiciding the fuck out of. Still, what this slice lacked in flavor and making me happy, it made up for in smelling farty and making me regular.

Results: Draw Both competitors pussed out yet again, leaving the official record at 0-0-2.

Pizza sits alone in an unfuckwithable food category. Like a can cozey that says “A bad day of golfing is still better than a good day at work,” most people agree that even shitty pizza is still pretty good. So what happens when you take the power of pizza creation into your own feeble hands in service of trying to gross out your bro? Pizza vs. Pizza, in which two esteemed constables of pizza mastication, Dr. Tenderoni and Dr. Benji Mane, your two Madison correspondents, challenge each other to eat totes gross slices of the other’s creation at Roman Candle.

In this, the first edition of Pizza vs. Pizza, the rules had yet to be set. So hopefully in the future some stricter guidelines will be in place. Because for a couple of dudes who thought they could handle just about anything pizza-related, these seriously fucked-up slices straight ripped our chodes off and made us watch as they threw them through a plate-glass window.

Tenderoni: When Dr. Mane approached me with his idea of making totes fucked-up slices for each other at the refined and art deco Roman Candle (a joint located on Williamson St. in Madison that lets you create your own slice) I jumped at the opportunity. I have long savored making weird ass food/drink combos for my friends to eat, since it’s like waterboarding without the whole subjugating a people thing. So for this first go-round, I figured I’d bust Dr. Mane’s cherry by getting buck-nutty on the topping selections for his slice.

For Dr. Mane, I chose the anus-annihilating combo of walnuts (to add texture), Chipotle peppers (to add heartburn) and spinach (to add giant biceps). I reasoned that since Dr. Mane is like two years from getting AARP, he’d start crying as soon as he got one of those peppers in his grill, talking about how he’d need a Werther’s to wash them down. Then he’d be like, “Walnuts? Frown Face.”

Benji Mane: I’ve eaten some classy pizzas in my day. Pine nuts? Goat cheese? Shittake mushrooms? Sounds like my bread and butter. In fact, I bet bread and butter are the only two things I haven’t had on a pizza. So I was super confidant that my fancified palate was perfectly honed to handle the gourmet topping selection at Roman Candle, as well as conjure up a slice that would change Tenderoni’s gastrointestinal tract forever.

Going in, I had an ace in the hole; beets. After that, who gives a fuck what the other two topping were? I could have added tits and unicorns, and the beets would still have ruined that slice. But why take chances? Add garlic for pungency and add corn as a painful reminder that no matter what you do to it, it will still come out the other end looking exactly the same.

Tenderoni: It didn’t really dawn on me until we were giggling our asses off reading the menu, wondering aloud if we could ask for human on a pizza, that not only would Dr. Mane be subjected to crazy azz shit I concocted, he’d be able unleash some hell-fury on my colon, too. And holy shit, my colon just packed up my rectum and moved in with its sister. First off: Corn is not that bad on a pizza. It’s got virtually no profile, taste-wise, and its texture is similar to green peppers when put on top of cheese. And the garlic? Not so bad either, even though the cloves were overpowering and caused me to breath garlic (literal particles) for some time after finishing.

But beets on a pizza that isn’t related to The Office? The worst. Of all time. The beets were diced into cubes roughly a quarter the size of a standard craps dice, and they were big and wet just like [metaphor redacted due to fear of my mother reading this]. The beets also stained the cheese a Miami Vice pink, which should never appear on a foodstuff, unless that foodstuff is Philip Michael Thomas’s shirted corpse. Add to the fact that I have never, ever actually eaten beets in my entire life, eating the slice was like adding a foreign species into my lower intestinal jungle. I immediately had to wash it down with four grape-flavored Tums, which just added insult to injury, reminding of the time I spent on the purple serpent of a beets-topped pizza.

Benji Mane: Somewhere in the world, a pepper grows so hot that it will ignite your very soul if you even think about ingesting it. Professional torturers rub this pepper on a man’s genitals and he begs to be shot in the face. Compare the heat to having a laser refracted through a diamond and then having it strike you directly in the brain. But considering my soft American diet, that pepper might as well be the pussy-ass Chipotle.

Never one to tolerate massive amounts of heat, getting a slice that made my cheeks flush just sitting on the plate made me nervous. On top of that, the mushiness of those little baked devil dicks was offset by the icky crunch of the walnuts that Tenderoni so callously selected. Spinach is pretty gross, but compared to the red-hot buttfest tag team of the peppers and walnuts, it tasted like cotton candy. My apologies go out to the dude sitting next to us while I play-by-played this horrible eating experience.

Winner: Draw Neither competitor was able to finish their entire slice.