TreeHouseView

As a junior in high school, all I could think of was freedom. Freedom from what I thought of as the tyrannical rule of my mother-she was so strict that I felt like I might die, as dramatic teenagers often do. Yes, she was more strict than many parents, and probably less than some. I pushed back in minor ways that wouldn’t get me grounded for life, or shipped off to a convent, as she so often threatened. We weren’t Catholic.

One day in class, a senior girl I sat next to and was on friendly terms with named TJ said her job was hiring and I should apply. I quickly found out that it was a pizza place and they were looking for delivery drivers, and it was very close to home. Freedom! What could possibly be better than this? But when I presented the idea to my parents, my mother quickly shot it down, stating all kinds of nonsense reasons like safety. How would a girl keep herself safe after dark all by her little self driving around to strangers houses delivering pizzas?

Of course I lost my mind, and somehow pushed back hard enough that she either let me take the job or I went and told TJ that I wasn’t going to be allowed to be a delivery driver because my mother was a raging bitch, and maybe TJ somehow secured me a job making the pizzas instead, but I did eventually get a job with King Pizza.

And so did my best friend Jen, and my neighbor/sister Jill, and multiple other male friends who took the delivery driver slots. TJ wasn’t there much longer and I don’t remember why, but the rest of the staff was full of my cohorts from school and it was a glorious time that didn’t feel like work at all–just another extension of social hour with friends.

My BFF and I had the same shifts and it we couldn’t have written a better script for our first jobs Even when our boss, the owner Bruce, made us go through Pizza Sprints and be timed while making pizzas to ensure we could churn out pies like we were fully automatic, it only added to the entertainment value.

We had a supervisor named Bob, a college student who looked to be 35 but said he was like 23 and went to Gonzaga, who quickly became known as TowelBoy Bob because he spend an inopportune amount of time in the bathroom and would exit red-faced and sweaty with a towel slung over his shoulder, furtively eyeing the females who were on shift. He invited several of us out several times, offering alcohol and probably other things he thought might entice us to engage with him outside work. I never took him up on his offer.

Several times during the several months that I worked at King Pizza, weird things would occur. Phone calls from people “looking for” Bruce, shady-looking dudes stopping by the store “looking for” Bruce, odd little cardboard rolls in the dough that we never did find out about, and the eventual abrupt shutdown of the store. Bruce had been there less frequently after he had hired TowelBoy Bob, and we all knew something nefarious was going on, we just weren’t sure what. Several of us guessed some kind of drug trade, but who were we to stick our noses in something that didn’t concern us? We were too busy playing Dough Ball in the back and eating as many pizzas as we could get away with on shift.

Jen and I ran into Bruce years later as adults when she had her first child and were out to eat at a local Applebee’s. He was the manager on duty and while he greeted us like long-lost friends, he didn’t clue us in on what happened to the demise of King Pizza–and what a shame the loss was. The pizza was delicious!!