Extra sauce, p.1
Extra Sauce, page 1
The Dial Press
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Copyright © 2026 by Zahra Tangorra
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Contents
Dedication
Epigraph
Fire Everything
Extra Sauce
Recipe: My Favorite Marinara
Chicken Francese
Recipe: Chicken Francese
Spanakopita
Recipe: Spanakopita
Recipe: My Father’s Carrot Cake
A Joe’s Slice
Bouillabaisse
Fried Bucatini
Ricotta Ice Cream
Coffee Butter
Recipe: Coffee Butter
Tagliatelle
Recipe: The Brucie Tag
Recipe: Not My Grandfather’s Meatballs
John Tangorra’s Potato Salad
Recipe: Potato Salad
Pea Soup
Recipe: Pea Soup
Chocolate Mousse Pie
Recipe: Chocolate Mousse Pie
Alla Gricia
Tuscan White Beans
Recipe: Almost Tuscan Beans
Lazagna
Recipe: Zaza Lazagna
Spaghetti Marinara
Apple Strudel
Recipe: Apple Strudel
Acknowledgments
About the Author
_155902007_
Dearest Babes,
May there be fire in your hearts
and wind at your backs
Alla Nostra!
I have no idea where this will lead us,
but I have a definite feeling it will be
a place both wonderful and strange.
—Special Agent Dale Cooper,
Twin Peaks
Fire Everything
Cue Link Wray’s “Fire and Brimstone.”
There was the road, and then, in an instant, there was not.
Asphalt to air rearrangement, a seamless transition, with the exception of a few large thuds early on. I have often wished that I could have replayed this metamorphosis in slow motion, to have seen the exact moment when my face went from soft and supple to rigid with fear and, ultimately, smashed. To have seen all of us who were on this tour bus suspended in air, floating like amateur astronauts, untrained in the art of antigravity exploration and unbraced for impact.
It’s safe to say that my face looked like many other faces at the turn of the twenty-first century: my eyebrows were tweezed so thin that they made Greta Garbo look like Groucho Marx, the lids beneath caked in shimmery shades of white and brown shadow. It is safe to say that my tongue ring was visible if I was screaming, and that my Monroe piercing, and the box-dyed jet black hair that I had cut myself with a tiny pair of scissors meant for snipping thread, made it clear that I was flying off a cliff in the early aughts.
On December 3, 2006, I was twenty-two years old. My parents had known me for twenty-two years, and at that point neither of them liked me very much, and the feeling was mutual. My father and I had not spoken in over a year, a chilly quietness originating from me missing a visit to his house where he had planned to tell me he had cancer. I had canceled because there was a storm that dropped three feet of snow on our town and all of the roads were closed. At the time of the bus crash, I was still not aware that he had been diagnosed with multiple myeloma, or that he had had a stem cell transplant that nearly killed him. Upon hearing that I had narrowly escaped death, he would not call, instead sending a Get Well card from the drugstore simply signed —John. A card with no message sent in response to one’s child almost passing away tragically is cold, and signing it “John” in place of “Dad” is subzero. When it comes in the mail, I will make it soggy with my tears and then rip it up and throw it in the trash. John would hold a grudge like Kate Winslet at the end of Titanic, letting love sink to the silty, black ocean floor instead of just moving over a few inches.
The time between the first thump, indicating to us that the bus had gone off the road, and when I regained consciousness is mostly lost. I will never know what shapes my face made, how many times my body somersaulted before landing, or how beautiful and macabre we must have all looked for those strange few seconds, entangled with each other in the liminal space of the thirty-nine-and-a-half-foot bus as it soared off the arid Southern Californian cliffside. The tape restarts at what I imagine to be seconds after the crash. My body hurt in the way a body tends to when it is in shock, which is not at all. This is the calm before the storm, the smell of the first raindrops. I don’t remember when I felt pain. It must have been in the UC San Diego Hospital between the stops and starts of the morphine drip. I try to remember feeling pain in those early moments, but to feel pain I think you have to believe you are hurt, which I wouldn’t comprehend until my mother, Bobbie, arrived the next day. That was when I knew it was safe to be broken because she would make sure I got put back together; she may not have liked me very much at twenty-two, but she loved me, and that was the glue.
I lost time, I am not sure how much, but when I realized that I was still a part of the world, I was stuck underneath something, or rather someone, twice my size. I managed to slither out from under the man who was passed out on top of me, who thankfully also turned out to still be alive, with that elusive superhuman strength we hear of mothers using to lift cars when their child is trapped underneath. This strength is real. This strength is your will to live. It’s Uma smashing her fist through the casket in Kill Bill Volume 2 and pulling herself up through six feet of dirt for a breath of fresh air. It comes to us from a hidden spot deep within our animus, a powerful surge of adrenaline, divinity, or the third man even, depending on what texts you subscribe to, the voice that whispers into your soul: not yet.
Beyond the twisted burning metal and the man on top of me, I was also stuck beneath something else. Something with an unquantifiable metric that required a different type of strength to move. I was trapped beneath the belief that I was inherently no good and not worth loving.
When I spun off the edge of the canyon, I had been moving through the world in a chaotic gyration of indifference and a quiet desperation to belong. My parents had driven me over that particular cliff long ago, and while clawing my way up from it would take decades, it would begin in this moment, with the same snap of determination to survive. Not consciously, not an epiphany or a chat with God, more like a death or an earthquake that demands you grow around a new gash in your foundation. I was emotionally detached from my family, and myself, as I hung frozen in the sliver between life and death, facing the tribunal, waiting for the verdict. If I’d had the chance to act as my own counsel, I would have argued that despite my apathy toward my life at that exact moment, I did want my parents to know me for another twenty-two years, or at least ten, or until they liked me again. Until I knew how to truly like myself. Until I smelled New York City again on a freezing cold day, or felt prickling on my feet from stepping into a hot bubble bath. I fastened a strong grip around my life and pulled my way to safety, for the chance to fall a thousand more times. Not yet.
* * *
• • •
I found myself in this burning bus because I had gone on tour to sell merchandise for my dear friend Jeffrey Haynes (aka the rapper Mr. Lif), as he embarked on a national and world tour with Boots Riley and The Coup, as a twenty-two-year-old’s interpretation of finding herself, a first real attempt at adultness. I adored Jeffrey. I thought he was the kindest, most interesting person I had ever met, and although much of my hyperbolic thinking as a young woman turned out to be incorrect, this was an astute and wholeheartedly true opinion. He was and is a gentle, wonderfully nerdy, hilarious person who taught me to love the films of Charles Bronson, the perils of capitalism, and the value of living a life guided by feeding one’s inherent creativity. I could have never known as an eighteen-year-old kid that the night we met at The Cop Shop in Smithtown, Long Island, would hold perhaps the most life-altering interactions of my life thus far, but these fateful chapters are so often written in invisible ink. I loved and admired Jeffrey so much that when he asked me to come along on the tour, I quit my job as a display artist at Urban Outfitters immediately, never for a second imagining a world where I did not return. It may have been considered rebellion had anyone cared that I was going in the first place.
At the time of the accident, I had been on the tour for about five days, and I was attempting to ward off the impending melancholia with beer and cigarette smoke. On the flight to San Francisco to meet up with Jeffrey and the twelve others on the tour, I had taken a Xanax and drank three Bloody Marys, and when I got up with my giant winter coat still on to prowl the plane for a fourth, I was escorted back to my seat, belted in, and warned to stay put until everyone else was off of the aircraft. I left my driver’s license on the plane, in the seatback pocket next to the paper bag used for emergency vomiting, and had been desperately trying to have another one mailed to me in one of the many cities we were meant to be stopping in. My license would end up being mailed to Austin, Texas, where it would remain forever, as I was not going to make it to Austin, Texas, on this trip and have never been there since. Perhaps this was the source of my melancholy those first few days. Or maybe my brain was aware my soul had plans to break up with my body soon. Or it was the loneliness I felt. I missed my mother. I missed the cobalt blue water glasses in her kitchen cabinet, and the birthmark between her eyebrows. I missed how our hearts used to beat to the same rhythm before our relationship became a broken record. But every time she called to check in, I was standoffish, giving her only the bare minimum, even though what I really wanted to say was Come get me.
We had started the night at the House of Blues in San Diego, and Jeffrey and the tour manager had gotten into an argument about whether we should drive the six hours to Phoenix. Jeffrey said that he thought the bus driver looked tired, and suggested we stay parked and make the trip in the morning. The tour manager wanted to stay on schedule, so here we were, six of us watching Anchorman in the front of the tour bus, laughing and drinking beer, the other six listening to the recently released Clipse record Hell Hath No Fury. I had bought the DVD a week before we left, at the Tower Records in Union Square for ten dollars, which is even stronger affirmation that this was 2006 than the over-tweezed eyebrows.
There was a thud, and then another, and that quick and terrible feeling that electrifies you for a split second when you realize something awful and unstoppable is about to make head-on contact with your life. The DVD stopped, which stands out as the first sign something was wrong. Like the lights going out with the crack of a thunder clap. Change has happened.
I am the girl who peed in her pants at school in eighth grade from laughing too hard and had to walk around all day in damp jeans because my mother refused to pick me up, and now I am the girl flying off a cliff in a tour bus, almost certainly peeing again, but it will all be too bloody for anyone to notice. This is happening to every version of me that I have ever been, and none of us are ready for it, but that doesn’t matter because chaos and gravity are not sentimental. There is nothing one can hold on to as a mortal being when the earth has plans to shake you loose. This is freedom, however unwelcome it may be.
I was weightless at this moment, moving from one piece to many, healthy to injured. A terrible but important lesson that we are no more meaningful to the universe than branches being snapped off a tree in a storm. But I did not wish to be a branch, I wished to be a living person, and so I tried to hold on to anything that I could wrap my bloody fingers around. Specifically, a Red Stripe bottle, which exploded in my right hand like a firecracker, shearing all of the skin off and rendering it from this point on my bad hand.
We were on Route 8 in El Centro, California, the same strip of road where a very famous movie star I would rendezvous with six years later at the bar of my restaurant Brucie will tell me he filmed a blockbuster about the Iraq war. My response will be to make googly eyes at him and say, What are the odds? The odds are quite slim, and yet, this coincidence will not result in a steamy love affair, and eventual marriage, as I had expected.
This was not how I had wished to experience the desert for the first time. I had pictured something with a slightly more spiritual, less gory texture to it. Four years earlier, on a class trip to San Diego, I had been desert adjacent, spending a week in a youth hostel alongside twentysomethings dropping acid and having sex in their bunk beds. One day we took a drive about thirty minutes out of town to observe some nature. It was dry and brown, but lacked the haunted expansiveness of the real desert. I flicked the butt of my Marlboro Light into some bramble, which would have most certainly started a forest fire had a local not jumped into the thorny tangle and retrieved it. He screamed in my face, telling me that I had no idea how fucking stupid and careless I was, and he was correct. I had to assume that this was Mother Nature’s way of seeking her revenge upon me, and who could blame her?
* * *
…
Today, December 3, my own mother is visiting her mother, my grandma Violet, in Boca Raton for her birthday. Violet, who lived through the Holocaust, while I won’t make it out of this stupid trip to California. She is eighty-six to my twenty-two, and had the bus driver closed his eyes to sleep for fifteen seconds instead of ten, I may have stayed twenty-two forever. I would have never seen Violet again. She would have never been at the friends and family party for Brucie where I shook up a bottle of champagne and sprayed it into the crowd to kick things off, accidentally soaking her with the majority of the contents. I wouldn’t have felt the thin, soft, spotted skin on her hands when I held them for the last time before she passed in 2012. I would not have the soul-satisfying career that I have now. I would not have smoked a blunt of chronic with Flava Flav, cooked for Parker Posey, or been violently electrocuted by a walk-in freezer. My mother would have had photos of me around the house with seven-day candles burning beneath them that would make her wince to look at. That was my daughter, she would have had to say. Was. Is. Was. Is. The seconds, the decisions, the micro universes between she is and she was, between alchemy and elegy, between dead and chef, are so liquidy, I’ve still not figured out how to keep them from slipping through the space between my fingers.
It has been scientifically proven that our brains reference collected memories from our lives before we die, thousands of profound moments condensed into one phrenetic epilogue. Why particular memories make the edit, I do not know, but I believe that they must be the ones that are so impossibly tender they can be filleted with a feather.
I do not recall a slideshow, but if I had, I’d have seen myself at age seven with Violet at the pool at her condo in Boca, sunburned nose, goggle marks, and pruney fingers. Showering off the chlorine in her elegant gray and white bathroom, under a stream of water so powerful it felt sharp. Getting lost in her walk-in closet, trying on her high heels and Chanel dresses. I’d have seen us later that day having cocktail hour, her drinking a scotch and soda, my mother tanned and perfect, standing on the balcony looking at the sun setting over the manatee-rich Intracoastal Waterway. Me shoveling shrimp cocktail and peanuts into my mouth with the voracity of someone who has been lost at sea for six months. I’d have seen my mother’s dark eyes illuminated in the moonlight as I snuck under the covers with her on the mattress she had propped against the open sliding glass balcony door of Violet’s apartment, listening to the silence and the crashing waves.
I’d have seen my father sitting on a bench in the Smith Haven Mall, waiting for me while I bought my biweekly Troll Doll from Spencer Gifts, smirking under his orange mustache. I’d see him awake in the middle of the night watching Star Trek reruns and eating puffed Cheetos, in the cottage he rented when my parents first split. I’d see his pea soup and his chocolate chip cookies, and my mother’s chicken strudel and chocolate mousse pie and the fabulous corn pudding with sharp cheddar cheese that she makes for Thanksgiving.
