The second job I ever held was working in a pizza parlor downstairs from my home on Chambers street. For kicks here's a google satellite map of the location.


Now that's scary. You can see my roof. Broken hearted I wanted to jump off of it once.

Back to the story at hand. Downstairs from the loft I grew up in there was a pizza parlor. Back in the 80's during the video game explosion pizza parlors became a haven for those willing to part with their quarters. Being a teenager with a video game addiction I gladly spent a lot of time playing and eating pizza at this particular establishment. Somehow either this parlayed into a job or I spent so much time there they wound up putting me on the payroll. Typical of my life I would wind up in the most insane restaurant on the block. Here's how it broke down.

1 Italian
1 Italian/American
1 Puerto Rican ex-con
Me

That was the work force of Ciro's Pizza.

The Italian was a short Luigi type with a thick accent. He was insane but his wife was gorgeous.

The Italian American was a guy named Jack who was also a well known DJ in Brooklyn named Jumping Jack. Jack was a racist who hated his customers. If you've ever seen Do the Right Thing you can picture him as the living embodiment of John Tuturo's character. He used to argue with me as to why certain people were "niggers" and other people weren't. One time he sited a Run-DMC lyric "no curls/no braids!".

"You see. They're telling you that they're not niggers."

Last (and most least) there was Eddie. Eddie was just as nuts as the other two if not more. Eddie was a drug dealer who took a job working for the pizzeria in case he went to court. He imagined it would look better in front of the judge if he could show that he was a working man. Eddie was also what we would call today being on the "down low." Basically he was a gay man who didn't know or want to identify with being gay. I would actually have to classify him as bi but I think that's probably a technicality as I never saw him with a woman. Eddie used to have long running arguments with me about what was the difference between a man's mouth and a woman's mouth. Getting a blow job was getting a blow job. Looking back on it I now realize that he only had these conversations with me when we were alone. One time he got arrested for assault and wound up in Riker's Island for a week. When he got back he told me he walked around hard all the time because of all the sex that was going on there. Takes a special kind of person to get turned on by being in prison.

One day while working in the store with him alone he got very heated with his "a mouth is a mouth" argument. He closed up the shop and told me that we were both going to go downstairs. For some reason I followed him in to the basement where the pizza dough was stored. Not a word was spoken between us as he waited for something to happen. I stood there leaning against a table looking at the floor the whole time. Truly an awkward silence. After about 15 minutes of this Eddie finally spoke up.

"So, do you and your brother ever fuck around?"

I looked at him incredulously and said, "Hell no!"

Somehow satisfied with my answer he said, "OK. Let's get out of here."

I couldn't even look at pizza for a long time after that.