Friday, June 15, 2018

10 things you learn working as a Food Runner in a pizzeria


10 things you learn working as a Food Runner in a pizzeria

-You know how as you spend more and more time with something you are prone to losing your taste for that something as though the repeated contact between you and it leads to a greater loss of thermodynamic energy in your heart toward it as an entropy, a slow death, how it turns you cold? Well that never happens with pizza. If anything your affection grows, you start calling it baby names, you learn its nuances in shapes, moods, how to know when it’s your turn to do the dishes. We live together in a studio apartment and it doesn’t feel too small. It’s almost been a year.

-My boss, the manager at the pizzeria, found out I do stand-up comedy and now he thinks it’s funny to ask me if I’m going to kill myself, “Not yet” I tell him with a little less certainty each time. 

-Kids are being torn from their parents while slices of pizza are being torn from the whole by Father John Misty. He comes into my work at the pizzeria in a large, crisp, white button down shirt. He wears sunglasses with moody colored lenses. His friend is as handsome as he is, and they chat. Children are being torn from their parents. I was born on this side of the line, the last slice of pizza is grabbed on this side of the line. There are no easy answers. Father John Misty doesn’t say thank you for his pizza when I drop it on his table and I hate the President of the United States. The ignorant tribalism that buoys his power. But I dissociated from the zeal in which I hate him awhile ago. 

-Payless Shoes hurt your ankles and feet if you use them in ways they were never designed to be used, such as wearing them regularly to work.

-One night at the pizzeria I was telling my coworker about how my father died in my arms and how ten minutes after it happened a hummingbird flew into the house through the front door I had left open behind me but then the owner/chef of the pizzeria interrupted us and told me to get back to work because life in the city is about young money not old death. I shared this anecdote before on facebook but it is what I do. I try to tell the same stories over and over again until I don’t have to worry about them disappearing forever. So many memories hanging on by a thin thread these days, a lucky occurrence that draws them out of the depths of my forgetfulness and it’s too long to remember it all, so I tell these stories over and over again. All to be forgotten but I still tell them

-The manager at the pizzeria I work at is Argentinian but he goes out of his way to pronounce the Italian foods like and Italian in a mobster movie.  Prosciutto becomes Prrrrro-chuuuuu-toeeeeee-aaaa-mama-mia

-A mega successful film director comes into the pizzeria I work at almost every day and he orders the same thing every time, a marinara pizza, eggplant parmesan, and carafes full of red wine. I think is this it? Is this what I am working toward? The opportunity to dine alone like I always have but with more wine? I don’t want to be alone. I don’t want to be alone with goblets of wine. I don’t. I don’t.

-It’s this town where the pizzeria I work at is, I like to blame this town. We’re all a few slices short of a whole. In my worst moods I dream of worse relations with North Korea. In my worst moods, I think that a nuclear apocalypse wouldn’t be the worst thing if it took out all of humanity, only so that it was even. But that is only a brief flicker of thought from the powerlessness in being a single inconsequential person among a mass perversion of mankind and all its atrocities upon itself. It’s knowing love and fearing that all these systems mankind has in place are there to thwart love, and how exhausting it is to hold onto a belief in our time on this Earth. I don’t want a nuclear apocalypse, I want all the lovers in the world to live forever. 

-I am the prototypical build for a food runner in a pizzeria. I have long legs to stride across the restaurant, long arms to reach plates in and out of tables, and dead eyes so as not to disturb the customers from all the fun they’re having. You don’t want a Food Runner with a glow in his eyes, cuz then you wonder what he just did to your food. But dead eyes, dead eyes you can trust.

-You learn working in a pizzeria that the people you work with are mostly good. That the people you work with are all doomed cogs in a system that trades pennies for time and devalues our energy into a weak commodity meant to feed an impulse. I heard that it’s not fair to judge our pain in comparison to another’s pain because it is all relative, as though the system is only a facade for the down chemistry. I don’t know, I’ve starved a couple times for a couple days in my life and it’s easier to suffer with a little grease in my belly. I trudge up my steep hill late at night, up to our apartment, my final indignity I jokingly call it after circling my block and the surrounding ones for a parking spot. My tired bones, my eyes red with flour and dust, I am the pizza delivery guy, from kitchen to table and back and forth again, what I have learned is dispensable and gently disposed of as I close my eyes each night, in bed next to a lover I marvel at, smile with, laugh hysterically alongside of, discuss the day and how it rises and falls, how it changes, like a pizza pie-aaaaaaaaa!