Bad Things Read Free

rather
    than bedraggled. Now that the sun was down the air had grown heavy,
    however, and I’d been glad to be waiting tables instead of hanging
    tough in front of the pizza oven, which is where I was now headed.
    The oven is a relatively new addition at the Pelican, just installed
    when I started there nine months ago. It had controversially replaced
    a prime block of seating where customers had been accustomed to sit-
    ting themselves in front of seafood for nearly thirty years, and I knew
    Ted still lost sleep trying to calculate whether the cost of a wood-
    fi red oven and the associated loss of twelve covers (multiplied by two
    or three sittings, on a good night) would soon, or ever, be outstripped
    by gains accruing from the fact you can sell a pizza to any child in
    America, whereas they can be notoriously picky with fi sh. His wife
    thought he’d got it wrong but she believed that about everything he
    did, so while he respected her opinion he wasn’t prepared to take it as
    the fi nal word. Ted is a decent guy but how he’s managed to stay afl oat
    in the restaurant business for so long is miraculous. A rambling shack
    overhanging the shallow and reedy water of a creek that wanders out
    to the sea—and tricked up inside with dusty nets, plastic buoys, and
    far more than one wooden representation of the seabird from which it
    takes its name—the Pelican has now bypassed fashion so conclusively
    as to become one of those places you go back to because you went
    there when you were a kid, or when the kids were young, or, well, just
    because you do. And, to be fair, the food is actually pretty good.
    I could have done the pizza math for Ted but it was not my place
    to do so. It wasn’t my place to make the damned things, either, but
    over the last fi ve months I’d sometimes wound up covering the sta-
    tion when Kyle, the offi cial thin-base supremo, didn’t make it in for
    the evening shift. Kyle is twenty-two and shacked up with Becki, the
    owner’s youngest daughter (of fi ve), a girl who went to a barely ac-
    credited college down in California to learn some strain of human-
    resources bullshit but dropped out so fast that she bounced. She
    B A D T H I N G S 11
    wound up back home not doing much except partying and smoking
    dope on the beach with a boyfriend who made pizza badly—the ac-
    tual dough being forged by one of the backroom Ecuadorians in the
    morning—and couldn’t even get his shit together to do that six nights a week. This drove Ted so insane that he couldn’t even think about it
    (much less address the problem practically), and so Kyle was basically
    a fi xture, regardless of how searching was his exploration of the outer
    limits of being a pointless good-looking prick.
    If he hadn’t shown up by the time someone wanted pizza then I’d
    do the dough spinning on his behalf, the other waitstaff picking up
    the slack on the fl oor. I didn’t mind. I’d found that I enjoyed smooth-
    ing the tomato sauce in meditative circles, judiciously adding mozza-
    rella and basil and chunks of pepperoni or crawfi sh or pesto chicken,
    then hefting the peel to slide them toward the wood fi re. I didn’t em-
    ulate Kyle’s policy of adding other ingredients at random—allegedly
    a form of “art” (which he’d studied for about a week, at a place where
    they’ll accept dogs if they bring the tuition fees), more likely a legacy
    of being stoned 24/7—but stuck to the toppings as described, and so
    the response from the tables tended to be positive. My pizzas were
    more circular than Kyle’s, too, but that wasn’t the point either. He
    was Kyle, the pizza guy. I was John, the waiter guy.
    Not even the waiter, in fact, just a waiter, among several. Indefi nite article man.
    And that’s all right by me.
    Wonderboy finally rolled up an hour later, delivered in an open top
    car that fi shtailed around the lot and then disappeared again in a
    cloud of dust. He went to the locker room to change, and