Five Pies for a Funeral

I come home and my parents see how dirtied I am. My mom literally gasps when she sees all that soot on my once tan crocs. A catastrophe, trully. And not one of them says a thing about my goatee, even though something has always been said about a spontaneous goatee.

Yesterday morning, while preparing the daily assortment of pizzas, Edwin mentions my developing beard and asks me if I've ever sported a goatee, and I tell him how my Mom (odio) Hates it, and he tells me I would look good with it. So I carve it out of my face the following morning.

According to Mary-Anne, two daily slices, garlic powder and oregano, I look 25 with the goat.

This morning, a woman on the phone actually tells me she needs five pies for a funeral by 11:45 AM and I find out from the man who picks them up at 11:50 AM that those pies are really for a party.



The Hunger hits hard today and I don't know it until it's too late, until after I drink a Yoo-Hoo with great abandon, triggering a nice stomach ache. The Hunger is the effect of being in front of food for long periods of time that you don't really want to consume--making you feel hungry when you're not, pitting logic against instinct.

Mama-Bird surprises me when I see she's brought a geriatric friend along, whose name I only need to hear once between their deliberating--Edna, and even though I've got the concentration of a hawk while taking down their orders, I still find them more complicated than probability. My scribblings, arrows pointing to meals and turning back on themselves thanks to indecision, all sloppy and doubly-so thanks to the carbon copy. I can't help but feel like I'm drawing a Sensosketch, to put it in Cranium terms. There's my endorsement, Hasbro, buncha bitches.

Lentil soups before the salads and sausage slices cut down the middle and fucking metal utensils. After watching Mama-Bird regurgitate an eggplant parm hero and tossed salad, it reaches a surreal climax when I pass her her second sausage slice, and I turn away and she calls for my attention using her quick accent

"Uh, yah gonna hate me, but there's a hair on my slice."

And I do hate her, but mostly I hate this moment, and I find myself upset because either the wind graced us with its serendipity or Mama-Bird/Edna planted it there.

I pick the hair off the slice and examine it closely, holding it up a few inches from my face and there's no oil on it, it's just a thin and short black hair, no longer than five inches. And nobody nearby has this type of hair.

And then the haggards depart, like Titans taking their leave of a battlefield, and Neris described in very vivid detail how he would strangle her to death, allowing her to have one good last breath in between the horror of it all, and then finishing it.

There's a calm that settles in after the dinner Rush, and we take our time cleaning up, serving a random slice here and there, but ultimately preparing to close shop, and even though nobody jinxes our divine break, the day ends violently, with such a torrential shit-storm of orders that it seems personal, a vendetta against the tired and miserable.

Moods are worsened by each ring of the telephone and each customer walking through the door, triggering the motion sensor
beep
someone's here
beep
turn around

"Give me an ice, pal"

Sure, what flavor.

* phone *

"Hey bud, two buffalo chicken slices"

Sure.

* phone *

"One pie, regular, to go, please"

Let me get a ticket.

"Don't burn those pies, Anthony."

Chande's eyes widen, more alert under his black baseball cap, a segue to his thick wavy hair.

I race between the kitchen and the counter and I watch Edwin seethe at the new orders and tap at his leg with the sharpest knife I've ever used.

But it's all over eventually, and then you just shut the radio off, then the lights. And it's another night.


Foreground: Alex, or "Chande," for the sound at the end of Alexander, and in the background baking, Neris.

Explaining Myself

I'm not sure what to write about at the moment, but it has been a few days and I can tell my blog fans are starting to grow mad with anticipation.

I feel it's high time to exploit the banner phrase of this blog: "Literacy is Key".

I saw that written once on a pamphlet I found at school, and I realized, being the sensitive Nancy I am about such things, that I had very mixed emotions about it. The pamphlet went on to talk about the importance of improving one's literacy through dedication and those other "Succeed" words. And this all lead to an idea I had acquired from browsing a Nietzsche work--something about how dangerous literacy was; how when everybody's given a chance at literacy, the world becomes more and more bogged down by a perennial "fungus". This "fungus" being bullshit, fluff, immaterial writing, does more to screen or hide away the important literature, the words meant to change human perspective and foment progression than those Nazi book burning bashes.

Now we can thank blogs for this accrual of fungus and continue writing fractals of insignificance...so is it key? Supposedly, according to the Summer Institute of Linguistics, Inc., 1 billion adults in this world are illiterate. That's 26 % percent of the world's population. Something's wrong.

In regards to my previous entry, Good Friday, as it turned out, is the busiest day of the year for Gino's and I had very little rest that day. I remember cutting four pies, boxing them, taking a minute break and cutting four more pies. No rest for the right wrist. We had all ovens going that day. We prepared bag upon bag of garlic knots. I treated myself to a zeppole and I asked a lady if I had any sugar on my face as she was handing me cash, and she looked at me, bug-eyed and asked if I was playing a joke on her.

Bobby was there on Friday.

I took this picture while Bobby was talking to me. I even had the timer on the camera so there was a little orange light flashing all the while. Here he is, hovering over the grandmas and grandpas, probably emphasizing a point about war or the god-damned bible.

And here's a woman every employee at the pizzeria loathes:



It has nothing to do with her corpulence but it seemingly has everything to do with
it as well. I positioned my camera right on top of the cash register for this shot. I've nicknamed her 'Mama-bird' for her strange eating habit and I also would've taken a video of her picking at her cheese calzone and regurgitating bits of ricotta onto her aluminum sheet, but I might have been caught.

The pizzeria employees don't like her because she continually accuses Gino's of over-charging her when she eats more than she can presumably account for. If I can remember correctly: one roni slice, one calzone, one chicken hero, and one pepsi, all cooked to a crisp, except for the pepsi.