Pizza man

I've worked for three different pizza shops in my life. My first Job was as a pizza delivery boy for Dominoes. My name tag read: "C. Manson." Nobody ever complained, unless their pizza was late.

I've made pizza, cooked it, cut it, sold it over the counter, delivered it, dropped it, stole it and threw it out at the end of the night. I know a little something about the pizza business.

When I worked at a pizza shop in the mall, we made the sauce in a big plastic bucket. After pouring in all the ingredients, we'd roll up our sleeves and stir it with our bare, hairy arms. All the way up to the armpit. We were actually trained to do this. When we were done, we'd use our other hand to slough off the sauce on our mixing arm back into the bucket.

Our boss, Angelo, encouraged us to use his office to have sex with any girls who were willing. He was the horniest man I have ever met. He told my friend Joe that, when he was younger, he fucked a rump roast. He actually bought a rump roast at the grocery store and checked into a motel with it. My question was: "What did he do with it when he was done?" I can only hope he left it on the bed.

I've had plenty of crazy pizza bosses. One was a coke head who used to line his office floor with pizza bags so he could crash during his shift. Another was a short, sweaty, stocky guy from Alabama whose enthusiasm for all things pizza bordered on psychosis. Another was an ex semi-pro pool player who used to have poker games in the back after we closed. One guy assured anyone who would listen that he had trained in special ops and knew all sorts of ways to kill a man. He had nicotine-stained teeth and awful, gamey breath.

Then there was the pudgy, buck-toothed galumph who used to give us daily updates about his new pet: a baby alligator that he kept in his bathtub. "It freaks my girlfriend out."

One day I asked him how his alligator was doing. "Ah, dude," he moaned, "You wanna buy an alligator?" It was getting bigger, he complained, and it kept him up all night with its 'barking.'

What did I know about any of these managers? I was seventeen: to me, they were adults.

Imagine a group of misfit drunks and potheads fishtailing around Syracuse, over lawns and curbs, through filthy, slushy side-streets, backing into parked cars, causing accidents and spraying shattered windshield glass all over West Genesee Street. That was our pizza delivery squad.

One delivery guy, Bob, was a 50-year old, 300-pound professional clown who looked scarier than John Wayne Gacy. He lived downtown, was a Mason, and drove a beat-to-shit Dodge Omni. Bob had a certain prisonyard authority about him. One time when he and I were washing pizza pans, Bob scowled at me and snapped: "Slow down, kid. You're fucking it up for the rest of us!"

Bob always had a little bit of coke on him. Once in a while, he'd leave a line of it on the sink in the employee bathroom and gesture to us with his head to go hit it.

At that same shop we had a manager and two assistant managers who would trade night shifts after the boss left. The assistant managers made less than the delivery guys. So they started to steal at night. Actually, we all started to steal. We'd type in a phone order, then delete it and write the information down on a piece of paper. Then we'd deliver the pizza, collect the money and split it with whichever assistant manager was working that night. Both the assistant managers' last names started with the letter '"R," so we called our little operation "R&R Pizza." We never got caught.

One night a drunk customer got all pissed off about something. I wasn't working that night. Apparently, he wanted to beat the shit out of this skinny, younger delivery guy we called Fergs. Fergs liked everybody. He wasn't really that bright, but he was gentle and friendly. I can't imagine what he did to make this drunk want to kill him, but the guy started chasing him around the parking lot and into the shop. Fergs ran into the back and the drunk started following him, only to be stopped in his tracks by Bob, the 300-pound clown. "You're gonna have to go through me!" he shouted, crossing his arms. From what I heard, the guy just sort of deflated and turned around and left.

I hung around the pizza business for too long. It was an easy gig and it paid better than a mall job. I delivered my last pizza when I was 24. A few years ago, I drove past the old pizza shop and discovered that it has since become a Chinese take-out joint. I wonder if there's still a skinny, faultering little line of coke, camouflaged on the white porcelain sink?