Working in the local pizzeria as a teen,
I held the speed record for making
an extra-large-super-deluxe pizza.
To roll the dough,
put on all the cheese and fixings,
and to get it in the oven –
56 seconds –
eight seconds faster than K.K. two years earlier.
It wasn’t a pretty pizza, but the owner, A.C. said
it tasted fine and he would have been happy to sell it.
But that pizza was for the staff once the restaurant
closed at one o’clock in the morning.
A.C. would often let us drink a beer
after work on the weekends.
It had to be a Black Label beer, though,
since A.C. only had one customer who liked it,
but he still had to buy the beer by the
case of twenty-four from the distributer.
We ate our pizza, drank our beer,
and the cooks flirted with the servers –
we called them waitresses back then –
and every once in a while,
if the mood was just right,
a waitress would let you kiss her in the cloakroom
or hold her hand under the table.
Cooks would play games sometimes with the delivery guys.
Once, a driver demanded I make him a pizza sub for his break.
He had a crappy attitude and
I didn’t like how he asked me,
so I toasted him a pizza sub,
but with only jalapeños covered in cheese.
He didn’t look too happy when he took a bite of it,
and I snickered behind the kitchen window watching him,
but he ended up eating the whole thing and
I still made him pay for it,
albeit with the staff discount.
He was a lot less belligerent afterward.
One new driver, my buddy B.D.,
picked up a pizza for his first delivery,
and without thinking, turned the box and
started carrying it out like a library book.
A.C. turned red, but held his anger,
and I took the pizza,
saw that the toppings had all drooped to one side,
spread them back out again,
and sent B.D. on his way,
coaching him on how to carry a freakin’ pizza box properly
and reminding him that I was the one
who recommended him for the job and that
he probably was going to be fired on his first day at work.
But A.C. didn’t fire him
because B.D. was one of the best soccer players
in northern Ontario
and a lot of us who got hired by A.C.
also played on his men’s league team.
Although we were all still just teens,
we managed to win the
North Bay men’s league championship cup,
which A.C. proudly displayed in his restaurant.
He would bring it down from the shelf sometimes after work
and he would get that dreamy look of remembrance in his eyes,
and we knew that was a good thing
because it meant he would offer us a second Black Label
while he regaled us with his soccer stories.
