Betamod

I had some money in my pocket for the first time in a while, $175. Wow.

I hadn’t eaten all day and I wanted something to trigger a mechanism in my brain that would soothe me, make me feel that every thing was going to be ok, take me back to a state of child like abandon, if even for a few minutes.

Pizza and soda. It has it all. The pizza has white flour in the dough, the sugar in the tomato sauce, the chemicals in the chewy cheese-like-substance all topped off with a cornicopia of nastiness and random animal parts, devilish pepperoni slices. And when you’re eating a dish as brain tingling as pizza, you must wash that down with America’s favorite beverage, the sweet, sticky, sugar and caffeine laden Cola.

I went to a relatively new type of pizza place, one where the pizza is already cooked for you, you just come in, pay $5, and get your fix. It’s a pizza crack house. But you can’t get high there, you have to eat your pizza elsewhere.  So, somehow this place is able to sell pizzas for $5. That’s cheaper than greens. Some how, a pizza with all these ingredients, is cheaper than a box of good greens. Armed with this information, I KNOW the pizza is some sort of great tasting, yet terrible poison. I KNOW that when pizza, hamburgers and soda are cheaper than a salad, something is wrong. Right now I don’t care, I just want the damn pizza and soda. So, I walk up to the register and order a pepperoni pizza and a two liter of cola. The transaction was so simple: cash money handed right on over for a deliciously poisonous experience. I was told it would take three minutes for my pizza but it would be extra fresh, content with this I sit down to wait.

There was only two other customers in the place, a hoosier (St. Louis style, not Indiana) lady and her teenaged son. They both looked pale, unhealthy and unhappy. They were addicts. Addicted to this poison and others just like it. Now, I’m not trying to convey the idea that I’m any better than them, after all, I’m here for the pizza too. But, I know that I’m about to ingest poison. I know that each wonderfully greasy bite, chased down with that drugged up liquid candy, can eventually suck all the life out of me and kill me. Still, I’m here, waiting on my pizza.

The hoosier lady isn’t happy at all. Her son asks her to ask if they are hiring.

“Why should I!?” she snarls, “You want a job, you ask!”

Her son shrank back a little bit in his dingy stained white T-Shirt, a little dingier than mine.

As I’m waiting, I realize 3 minutes have come and gone and people are filing in. This crack house is not running as smoothly as one would have hoped. A blond haired teenaged girl comes in after an old couple. Two young guys come barging in looking for a phone in order or something. A muscle head jock comes in with one of the most beautiful black women I have ever seen. I am ashamed to be sitting in the same room as her in my only-slightly-less-dingy-than-the-hoosier-kid’s white T-shirt, waiting on poison.

The hoosier lady suddenly remembers that her pizzas must be sliced into 16 slices, not 8. I assume this is so she can take small hits of pizza and stay high all day. The shift manager is flabbergasted. Instead of  simply slicing her 8 slice pizzas into 16 slice pizzas, he instead opts to make all of her pizzas over again.  Needless to say, she was furious. Within seconds she had her cell phone out, and she was calling the main office to complain while she was waiting for her poison. (Just the thought of her telling some hapless fool on the phone about how she is upset that her poison was taking too long made me smile.) She then began complaining loudly, whilst announcing to the throng of pizza seekers that “This is some Bull Shit.” and “I got corporate on my phone right now!”. The crowd begins to buzz, agitated and ignited by this grease addict.

As someone who knows what it’s like to be what’s considered by mainstream America as “a fucking loser”, I had worked plenty of dead end boneheaded jobs just like this one. I could see the problem, it was so god damn obvious. The problem is: THE FUCKING LARGE PIZZA ONLY COSTS FIVE FUCKING DOLLARS! Now this makes no sense when at the grocery store next door a single apple costs $1.05. There is no way that pizza can be good. There is no way they can sell the pizza at that price and stay in business unless the pizza is chemically enhanced to trick your mind into liking the taste of this poisonous garbage and you pay the lowliest of workers (basically children) the bare minimum to run the place, and you hope and pray that the addicts that are your customers are just numb and apathetic enough to let you get away with it in this community. So yeah, this place is making a fortune, no doubt.

The addicts are getting angry, the hoosier lady is demanding the shift leader lose his job over the way her pizza is sliced, the crack house is falling apart.

Fed up with this nonsense I stop the cashier from taking the next order and begin to manage him myself. In less than two minutes I solved 75% of their immediate issues. The addicts were leaving smiling and laughing because the guy in the second most dingy shirt had stood up and ran that crack house like it was his, if for two minutes, and shit got done.

But alas, even as I, the crack house hero, was leaving, the hoosier lady was still on her phone complaining. The lowly under trained teenagers are still somehow making it through their shifts, the addicts will be back for more. And even as I type this, chewing my pizza and drinking my soda, knowing how wrong it, everything, is I know that I haven’t shaken my addiction either.

I’ll be back.

Follow up: That Pizza made me sick, real sick.

ZIP FILE