I.Me

I liked it some nights:
Windows down,
a light breeze wafted in,
stoplights swung in the rearview,
and I cruised under
a cloudless, endless sky.

Other times,
nothing could cover
the stink of pizza⁠—
a smell that
lingered,
like my life,
going nowhere,
stuck in traffic
in a suburban nowhere.

Once I ran a light,
screaming, punching the wheel.
Somebody called the manager,
said I was crazy,
should be taken off the road.
He relayed it like a good joke,
and went back to flipping dough.

II.Mark

With a mohawk mullet,
wraparound shades,
and a sour smell,
Mark liked to strut about,
thrust his hips, and proclaim:
“I’m gonna get me some skull tonight!”

After washing dishes,
he’d take a big butcher knife,
and jam it in the drain.

We delivered to a street called Butternut,
that he liked to call “Bustanut,”
and another called Tunacliffe
that always made him smile.

The day they fired Mark,
the manager called him a three-time loser.
Mark called the store from a customer’s phone
in front of their eight-year-old daughter,
yelling that he lost his keys,
and that the last time this happened,
someone died.

They sent me to help him find the keys
that were in his pocket all along.

We never knew what came of Mark.
We assumed he was an addict.
Some said he lived with his mother.
Others that he lived in his car.

III.Rick

A soft, big-bellied man,
with graying hair,
and moustache,
who wore a red sweater
with a store logo,
stained with oil,
and caked with dough.

He liked to lean in close
to point out a customer’s bra straps,
which he said looked tacky,
or to say that a Black woman could be sexy
if you thought of it as a tan.

Once he brought in flowers
for a high-school sophomore named Heidi.

But he was no Mark.
Not quite.
He worked his way to assistant manager⁠—
or “ass man,” as he liked to tell us⁠—
a position he kept
long after I left.

IV.Ray

“Around this time last year,”
he declared,
“A man fucked a turkey in a grocery store
and then put it back in the freezer.”

He mused,
“I wonder who wound up eating it.
I hope it was a woman!”

Ray was married, and
repaired his own truck
from junk-yard parts.
It seemed to work for him.

V.“Scoob”

They called him “Scoob,”
due to certain mannerisms
of speech and body
that reminded us of the dog
from the old cartoon.

Poor guy:
Even the strippers called him that,
when after a long night
I would visit them,
slinking from my stinking car,
marching in the cold
across cracked asphalt,
under streetlamps
and neon signs
for fun,
for company,
for oblivion.

I tipped dancers
with tips I’d earned,
and then charged them
on a card
when the cash ran out.

I don’t remember “Scoob”’s real name.

VI.Me

I’ve changed a lot since then:
I got a Ph. D. in English,
turned my dissertation into a book,
travelled all over the world,
and now work for a university.

Yet, some nights,
I dream that I still deliver pizzas,
and I’m still in school,
and I can’t get out of bed,
and I’m late for school,
and I’m late for work,
and the pizzas keep backing up,
and I’ll never get them all out.