Goof on the Roof was a Waynesville-St. Robert phenomenon. I’m not sure how many of you people remember this, you people who were there in ’89. It was in the paper, in the ads. There was commercial time bought from the radio station, KJPW. They played country, country & western, and me and Less always wished they would play a little bit of metal. They did play this though:
The Goof on the Roof. Pizza Hut Delivery will have a goof sitting on the roof of the building, this coming weekend, and they’ll be trapped up there until 800 pizzas are sold. So starting Friday at noon, start ordering Pizza Hut Delivery and free our goof from the roof.
See, Mumble worked at Pizza Hut Delivery. He was a manager. It was his store, and it was a dog. A dog is what they refer to a car with no giddy up and go. A store that just can’t take care of itself, can’t earn any money. It was going out of business before Mumble got there. First thing he did was triple the delivery area. He put up flyers everywhere with the new routes. Almost all of Fort Leonard Wood, from the St. Robert spur all the way to T Highway, deep in Waynesville, past the square. Almost all the way down Y Highway, back until there just was no civilization. And as far as Best Western at the end of Z Highway. It was an enormous delivery area. And it kept him afloat.
He hired a team of ruffians as drivers. I don’t wanna say ruffians. Let’s call them jackasses. I say that in the most loving way possible. This fleet of delivery drivers were obsessed with CBs, CB radios. They fought to get the most powerful CB possible. They talked to each other all night while they were delivering.
Sounds like just a fun way to spend a night, blazing around in your car, jawing on a CB. But it’s actually quite practical for a delivery unit. Driver A is delivering his fourth pizza. His fifth will take him further down the road, and he gets no answer at his fourth stop. He gets on the CB, asks if anybody is almost to the store, tells them the problem. They run into the store, Mumble calls the fourth drop. They were taking a nap, they didn’t hear the knock. On his way back from five, driver can drop off four. There’s a million different scenarios I can come up with to explain why having a fleet of delivery drivers communicating with each other makes your store unstoppable.
For the record, Baker had the most powerful of the antennas. When he keyed up, the roof of his car would vibrate. If he was in my life right now, he’d want me to say that. So Pizza Hut decides to have its yearly contest. They call it Great Week. And every Pizza Hut in the four surrounding states are competing for the prize. Whoever has the best sales that week, the manager gets $2000 cash. Well, we were incredibly poor. My family was insanely poor. The only reason my parents were putting food on the table was because of the charity of the church. So Mumble sits down with Rose and they set their minds to winning that prize money.
Ideas are tossed around, and none of them were tossed away. They would build out of two by two slabs of wood a jail, and for two quarters you could lock your friend in the jail for fifteen minutes.
“Do you think we could get ahold of a police uniform?” Rose said.
“I don’t know,” Mumble mumbled. “It’s pretty far-fetched to imagine that the police would donate a uniform.”
“No, no, I’m not talking about some kind of donation,” Rose said. “Just maybe we could find some kind of uniform for somebody to wear.”
“Think I might know of a store where we can get a skimpy lady police officer uniform,” Mumble said.
Rose smacked his arm. “Really Mumble, we’re Christians now. Get your head out of the gutter.”
I walked into the dining room. I was drying a dish. “No, there’s a costume store in Rolla,” I said. “I’m sure they have a police uniform that’s…” I looked down at my mom. She looked up at me with a shrewd eye. “…that’s, you know, Christian.”
And that’s how it started, I guess.
Every night, Great Week got bigger. First it was the fake jail, but it was a delivery unit. Not many people came to pick up their pizzas. Mumble had to draw a crowd to the entire strip mall. So he went and talked personally to each store and got them all involved. Every store would have a sale. Every store would open the doors wide that weekend. They’d put up signs.
To the left of the delivery store was a book store. They would make the third book of each trilogy 50% off if you bought the first two books. The cosmetology school to the left of them would be giving away one free hair cut an hour. And on it went. It quaked all the way through the entire strip mall. Everyone got involved. Even Lepard’s Shoes. And the owner of that shoe store was a bit obnoxious, but even he agreed. He would raffle off a pair of Air Jordans.
We still needed a draw. Something to get people there. This is when the Goof on the Roof was born. Not really born. I guess you could say cloned. Because we’re in St. Robert now, and the Goof on the Roof was born in Milwaukee. It was in no way an original idea. In Milwaukee, one winter, the two hosts of a morning radio talk show went up on the roof of a car dealership and broadcast their show from there. Every hour someone would go check on them, because they were stuck up on that roof until X number of cars had been sold. Goofs on the Roof, they called it. And all of Milwaukee clamored about that promotion. They sold a record number of cars. Mumble and Rose admitted to me that year when we lived in Milwaukee, that if they had the money, they would have bought a car to “free the goofs.”
“Who are we gonna get to sit up on that roof?”
“I don’t know, Mumble. It’ll be July. Middle of the summer. Nobody’s gonna wanna be up there. Have you checked the roof itself?”
“Black tar with gravel.”
“See, a black roof, Mumble. Can we pay somebody to sit up there?”
Mumble looked at Rose and lifted an eyebrow. I was drying a dish again.
“I’ll do it,” I said.
They didn’t look up at me. They looked at each other.
This was before everything fell to shit. They had long ago stopped the charade of romance, but they were best friends at this point. They could count on each other. So their eyes swung to each other, then back up at me.
“You’d have to do it exactly how we said.” Rose.
“There couldn’t be any monkeyin’ around up there.” Mumble.
“You couldn’t have any friends up there with you.” Rose.
“I don’t even have any friends,” I said.
Rose’s face softened, and I could tell she was trying to think of a friend that I had. “Well what about Ring?”
“Yeah, me and him aren’t friends anymore.” I thought about seventh grade, and how he had tripped me to make himself look cool in front of the popular kids. We had never really gotten past that. “Me and Ring really don’t hang out anymore,” I said.
“Well, you have friends. Don’t be an idiot,” Rose said. “Anyway, none of them can come.”
“I’m not about to throw a party for you on my roof,” Mumble said.
I turned to go back into the kitchen. Dry dish, and I needed another wet one. “Nevermind,” I said.
“Oh, no, no, no, sweetheart,” Rose said as she stood. She wrapped an arm around me. “You wanna help the family. That’s good.” She side-eyed Mumble.
Mumble nodded. “Yep, it’s good that you wanna help the family. That’s honorable.”
I looked up from my hands. “Honorable?” I said.
“Yeah, honey,” Rose said. “It’s very honorable to want to help your family. If you wanna be the Goof on the Roof, for you, we’ll find a way to make it happen. We want you to be happy,” Rose said.
And Mumble did mumble something that time. But he had his head down, pencil in his hand, staring at a piece of paper. And he circled the words Goof on the Roof.
Well, they had to check with the city. Aunt Honey said she didn’t like the idea, and what if the roof collapsed. Mumble paid a building inspector to check the roof for stability, told the building inspector exactly what he was gonna do.
“Well,” the building inspector said, “I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”
“Well it’s pretty far-fetched,” Mumble said. “But…”
“But nothing. You put that kid up here alone at night, I’ll call DFS myself.”
I never saw the man. I don’t know what the building inspector looked like. But the way Mumble looked at Rose that night when he came home, I could tell the building inspector was big. The word brawny comes to mind.
“We can’t do it,” Mumble said. “That guy’s gonna rat us out, and even if he didn’t…”
“Tomorrow I’ll call DFS. I’ll run the idea by them and see what they think. See if there’s any way we can make this happen.”
Well, if you haven’t figured out, DFS means Department of Family Services. This is an army of social workers that will, without a doubt, rip a kid right out of their mother’s or father’s arms if that child is being endangered.
The next day Rose called, and she’s smooth. She’s got a hey there country voice, even though she spent most of her life in Milwaukee. She’s got a great laugh. And when she wants to, a beautiful pleasant face you want to make happy. Because you want to see that smile. She talked to DFS and they gave her the rules. It was very simple. There needed to be “facilities” so that I could relieve myself. There needed to be some kind of shelter, at the very least a tent that I could sleep in. And this was the kicker. There had to be an adult who slept overnight on that roof with me. DFS would not allow me to be left up there alone.
Rose chirped when she thanked them, ensured them that all of those requests could be met. Invited them to come and look at the set up. Invited them to at any point during the night come and check up on the Goof on the Roof to make sure they were safe.
“You know that it’s going to be, that this is happening in July. Correct?”
“Oh yeah,” Rose said.
“You know that the week you’re talking about doing this, it’s going to be over a hundred degrees, correct?”
“Yes, yes, and I was very concerned about that. But we’ll make sure that he has plenty to drink.”
“And sunscreen?”
“And sunscreen,” Rose said.
“And this is your child?” DFS said.
“A child that I love very much, yes. He is my light.”
“Okay,” DFS said. “Be prepared for us to come and check up on him at any time. He better be safe up there.”
“Oh he will be. He carries a knife with him everywhere he goes.”
“Is that so?” DFS said.
“Oh, it’s just a pocket knife. Nothing to be concerned with. No, he’s a good boy. Christian. He was baptized two weeks ago. Found the Lord. He’s a born again Christian.”
“With a knife?”
“For cutting apples and that kind of thing.”
“And he’ll be safe on the roof with an apple-cutting knife?”
“Well,” Rose said. “He’s, he’s from, he’s from inner city Milwaukee. Now that he’s a Christian, he cuts apples. But if backed in a corner…”
“Let me be perfectly clear, ma’am. There will be an adult with him on that roof. Apple cutting knife or no.”
“Of course. We know the rules. We’ll obey the laws. We’re Christians. We’re Christians now.”
“You’re Christians now. What were you before?”
“That life is behind us,” she said curt. “Doesn’t matter what we were before. Christ washed us in the blood.”
“Yes he did, ma’am.”
“Are you a Christian?” Rose said.
“Indeed I am, ma’am.”
“Well then you know.”
“Let me be clear. He needs facilities with toilet paper. He needs an adult sleeping with him at night. And he needs, send him up there with an apple,” the social worker from DFS said.
“It’ll be done. We obey the law. We love the law. We’re Christians.”
Let me tell you about my set up. I had a coffee can. This was back when they were big, probably a foot tall, nine inches across. A roll of toilet paper. These were my facilities. I ended up constipated from the constant pizza cheese. And when I peed, I peed off the back of the roof.
I had a bucket with a rope I could lower at any time, when a driver was going into the store. That’s what we called it. We always called it the store. The driver would come out with my very best friend in the entire world. It was a huge plastic mug with a lid and a straw. It was my very best friend in the world. And it drank what I drank. Dr. Pepper and nothing else. That’s what you need in the beating sun, a nice cold Dr. Pepper.
It was a tar roof. The gravel was pea gravel. I was supposed to take three changes of clothes. But I only ever wore one. I had a tent. It was pretty big, maybe a three-man tent. Mumble only wanted me in the tent when absolutely necessary. I was supposed to be out on the roof waving to the traffic on the Spur, waving to the people going onto the military base and off.
I had a bar stool. I set it up right next to the edge of the roof. The roof had a five foot tall lip topped with aluminum siding. From up there, I could see my domain. A sunken in strip mall, quite unpopular. An air of desperation to it. Here was where businesses came to die. Far away from Waynesville and the Big Boy Stores on Route 66. No business ever lasted here. It wasn’t even level with the street. So there I sat, on my bar stool throne, looking over the sunken, desperate, forgotten strip mall that I was about to make the busiest place in town.
Okay, I mentioned the jail cell, but there was more. For those of you who don’t live in Missouri, I’ll tell you. There is a collection of vintage car enthusiasts called the Cave State Cruisers. (Missouri’s called the Cave State. We have a lot of caves. I’ll Show You if you want me to.)
There was a 70s boat. That’s what they call them. A massive, red fading to pink, 70s car and a collection of implements. A dollar would get you ten swings. There was a bat, a sledgehammer, a crowbar, a couple of Phillips head screwdrivers. A maul that no one could pick up. And atop this monstrosity, the biggest, most obese driver that worked at Pizza Hut delivery, with a baseball cap on his head, adorned with two devil horns. A red shirt way too small for him, that his eye-like belly button peeked out from under. Massive black baggy shorts. And flip flops. Standing on the roof of the 70s boat, I think it was a Buick, with a bullhorn, screaming at everyone, calling to all the men, and daring them to pay their dollar and take their swings.
This big devil man came on to every woman who walked by, flirting, telling her to dare her man to make a dent in this car.
And that Saturday, that Saturday, it was, it was insane. That Saturday, everyone, everyone showed up. Now, both you and I know that not everyone showed up. But it felt like it. To the new kid in town, who had done one school year in Waynesville, and been humiliated every day. To the quiet boy trying to understand what Christianity was, while smiling and nodding about it to his mother. His mother growing in zeal. To the boy ignored by the Pizza Hut Delivery drivers that made up his entire life. When hundreds of people came to see what was happening to that boy, everyone showed up.
Church people came. I’m sure they prayed for me. There was a girl. She was the daughter of the bookstore owner. And she sat in her mother’s car with the window rolled down, talking up to me all weekend. She was in love with me by the end of the weekend.
I guess a part of me fell in love with her, too, because when I close my eyes, I can see her face perfectly. Pizza. I ate so much pizza. Drivers would come up on top of the roof and talk to me. And for just one weekend, I was the talk. I was the only thing happening in the Waynesville-St. Robert area. It was on this weekend that I said goodbye to Strawberry.
You might remember Strawberry. She was a preppy, not unpretty girl. She became infatuated with Servant when he carried her friend to the office after her friend fell. Strawberry was the seventh grade girl who got the greatest Valentine’s gift any girl ever had. A sad little Pound Puppy adorned with jewelry and smelling like her sad little boyfriend. That summer Strawberry’s father, who was a soldier, either had retired and was onto bigger and better, or had been restationed at a different fort.
So I guess I’m sitting on my bar stool, flirting with the girl sitting in the passenger seat of her mom’s car, and I hear a horn honk. I go to the edge of the roof and there she is. I’m always gonna see Strawberry in pink and white, so let’s say that’s what she was wearing. I’m always gonna see Strawberry in a high bound ponytail of strawberry blonde, so let’s say that’s what she was sporting. The far edge of the roof was a hill. Above that, a tiny strip mall. And parked there was Strawberry’s family pulling a U-Haul.
Servant walked to the edge of the roof. He had been given a number of strict rules, and one of them was no other child was allowed on the roof.
“You can’t come on here,” he said.
“I know. I know,” she responded. “I just wanted to say goodbye.”
“You wanted to say goodbye to the Goof on the Roof.” There was a tiny little knot of bitterness in the statement that Strawberry didn’t deserve.
“I wanted to say goodbye to my first love, maybe,” she said. She was so vulnerable.
“I’m sorry,” Servant said.
“You gotta stop apologizing for everything, Jesse.”
“So what do I say now?” Servant said. “Are you leaving?” He looked at the U-Haul trailer hitched onto the back of the family van. And he knew the answer, and he knew the question had been stupid.
“This is the last time you’ll see me,” she said. “You have to decide if I’m leaving or not.”
I stepped to the very edge of the roof. She stepped as close as she could.
“You can’t come on here. You can’t step onto the roof,” Servant said. But had he already said that before? He didn’t know.
“My dad said I couldn’t go on there anyway. I just wanted to say goodbye.”
In prison, wait, let me rephrase. In movies about prison, they’re always talking on a phone, staring at each other through the glass, and they’ll put their hands up, touch the same part of the glass as if they’re holding hands. I had seen prison movies, so that’s what I did. I held my palm out, splayed fingers. She did, too. And when our palms touched and our fingers interlaced, Servant felt himself give her something. Maybe the magic of a first love. Maybe everything true that he knew. Maybe everything about him except the apple-cutting knife and the cross.
Her eyelids fluttered. The horn of the van honked. Servant said to her, “I cannot kiss you.”
They locked eyes for one more moment, and she took her hand back. She kissed her palm where my hand had just been. And that’s the last memory I have of Strawberry.
Maybe Servant turned away because he couldn’t watch her leave. Maybe Servant shifted away and her leaving didn’t matter enough to Shadow for him to remember. I don’t know what happened. But that’s when Strawberry left.
I still had a day and a half of the girl in the car in front of the bookstore. She was of the sass variety of women. Insult the man, act like you’re not interested in the man, don’t laugh at his jokes. But say just enough to keep him interested. She was that variety of woman. And to be honest, sometimes those women are fun to play with. But I knew that I was not going to get her phone number and call her later. She did ask for pizza for lunch, and I made Mumble give her some. She did ask for soda often, and I made Mumble give her some. I learned really early that Mumble would do just about anything I asked him to.
I was not only the interest of the three towns in the area, but also the mascot for the delivery drivers. They honked every time they left. Every time they came back, every one of them yelled up, “Do you need anything, Goof?” A couple of times they came up to visit with me. They were all committed to me. And for the rest of the time that they worked at that store, they would be.
I liked the nights. When the sun would go down in its violence, and the wind would kick up. I really enjoyed those times. I liked the times when my mom came to visit. She would, she would say a lot of things. None of them mean anything. Maybe she didn’t want me up there, maybe she did. Maybe the house was quieter while the son she was obsessed with was on a roof more than a mile away.
I remember her face. I remember, well, I guess I remember her face and nothing more. Encouragement was in those eyes. Worry. Longing. Maybe when she got back in the car she whispered a prayer. I remember her face.
And I remember the day the Goof was freed from the roof.
Okay, every night that weekend, when Mumble came up to sleep in my tent, he was furious. He was exhausted. He would come up at like two o’clock in the morning, three o’clock in the morning, and have to be down making dough at six. He was furious. He told me he didn’t want me sleeping here all morning. I had to be on my bar stool, waving to the traffic going onto Post. (Post is what we called Fort Leonard Wood.)
“They need to see you. You need to wave at them. The whole town is excited.”
But I didn’t. And truly, there was nothing he could do to force me. Because he knew that if I stepped off the roof and walked away, he was fucked. He had to keep the Goof happy. Dr. Peppers and supreme pizzas had been doing it for awhile, but there was nothing he could do if I told him I wanted to sleep until four in the afternoon (evening?). There was nothing he could do. For the first time in my life, I was the one in power. Because if I stepped off the roof, all I would have to do was call DFS, tell them that I didn’t think I could handle any more, and that my family was beating me because I had left. But I never did that. I never did that because the summer after my seventh grade year, I loved my family. I didn’t have friends showing me a different way. D wasn’t a thing yet. There was no Teddy. There was no Burg. My family was all I had.
But I remember hearing Mumble leave the tent before sunrise. And I remember laying on the tar and gravel roof with a wisp of vinyl tent floor beneath me, listening to the almost constant horns honking as the entire area drove past our sunken strip mall. And everyone going onto Post honked at the Goof on the Roof.
I don’t know her name. We’re gonna call her Pleasant. She was pale, blonde curls, deep blue eyes, and thick, just how I like them. She was maybe thirty years old, and she had a voice of pure gold. She wasn’t concerned with me at all. But she did work the phones at Pizza Hut Delivery. And she got complement after complement about how congenial she was. And her voice. It was spun gold, maybe Rumpelstiltskin lived in her throat, and I just didn’t know what to call him. I remember before my “roof days” calling the delivery store from my house, to talk to Mumble, and hearing her voice. Pleasant was magical. She was kind. She was golden. And when Rose and Mumble were planning the finale, it was all wrapped up in Pleasant.
See Pleasant’s voice, she could get you to do anything. Evil or good, she could get you to do anything. And they decided she was going to be the one who answered the 800th call. She would be the one. Now everybody knew how many pizzas had been sold. Every day at noon, Mumble went to KJPW and announced how many pizzas had been sold, how many pizzas were left to be ordered. There was a sign, you might know the type. Directly under where the Goof sat on his throne of a bar stool, hung the store sign. It was changeable. Now I’m not talking about the digital signs we have today. I’m talking about each letter is on a thick piece of plastic. It’s stuck on a retractable, extractable stick with a suction cup on the end, that places the numbers, places the letters. They’re dying out, but if you look around, you’ll still see them. “Free the Goof on the Roof,” it said. “724 out of 800.” An hour later, “Free the Goof on the Roof,” it said. “762 out of 800.” And now, inexplicably, people from all over the Waynesville-St. Robert-Fort Leonard Wood area are driving into the sunken strip mall and gathering around the door to the Pizza Hut Delivery.
Five or six is no problem. Five or six is just loitering. Twelve, we have to start asking, “Hey, why are you down there?” When the number changed 790 out of 800, a crowd had gathered that was more than 70. All walks of life, all ages. All had come to see the freeing of the Goof on the Roof.
“This is Pizza Hut Delivery. How can we help you today?”
“I would like to order one pepperoni pan and one thin supreme. Hey, how’s the Goof doin’?”
Pleasant’s golden voice. “It’s funny you would ask that, ma’am. You are the 800th pizza. And when you picked up the phone today to order dinner for your family, you freed the Goof. Now, I have a very attractive, very speedy delivery driver that will rush your pizzas out to you and they will be there in less than a half an hour. Or, you are invited to come to the delivery store and meet the Goof, and you will be given a bag. The bag is full of donations from every store in this small little corner of the St. Robert Spur. We’d love to give you this care package. I hear there’s a romance novel, hair dye, and a coupon for a free pair of shoes. I’d hate for you to miss the gratitude of the Goof. Do you think you might be able to come pick up your pizzas? If you do, we can provide you with a coupon for two free pizzas of your choice in the future. Ma’am,” Pleasant said with the utmost patience, breathing gold across the phone lines, “Will you come and meet the Goof that you freed?”
I talked to Pleasant that night, after it was all over. And she said that the woman never even answered. She just hung up the phone. They made the pizzas and she showed up. What drivers were still at the store leaned on the horns of their cars when she pulled in. They keyed up the mics of their CBs, yelling out on different stations all over the state. “The Goof is being freed!” I’m told semis were blaring horns all over Missouri and beyond, who had been keeping up with the drama. I walked down the hill into the parking lot and into the crowd, and I felt bigger. This is between seventh and eighth grade, but I felt the same way I felt my senior year. There was a swagger this day, the same as the swagger I would have stick fighting three Degenerates at the same time with my back turned. There was a swagger this day the same as the day Tragedy of the Outcasts was critiqued in college. Here was the first taste of the confidence that might one day be. The crowd parted for me. I reached out my smelly arms. And I was looking at Ring’s mother. She gave me a hug. She was given a large bag of swag. And it was over.
I had severe sunburn on my arms, face, scalp.
I reeked so bad that my mother refused to have the windows up as she drove me home.
The coffee can was empty after three days of constipation.
When Mumble won the $2000 for the most spectacular Great Week that had ever been planned, the Regional Manager of Pizza Hut walked up to me, shook my hand, and said, “Thank you for what you’ve done for Pizza Hut. It will not be forgotten.” Years later, when I was in college, talking to the same Regional Manager, he remembered me. Pizza Hut had not forgotten.
After you have been trapped on a roof for three days in the burning sun, suffering from constipation and sunburn, waiting for three cities to free you from captivity. After you’ve hung out with all of your heroes, talked to a sassy, mean girl who was falling in love with you, and said goodbye to one of the most important love stories of your life, your great victory will be three tacos from Taco Bell. Because that’s all I wanted before Rose took me home, told me I was a good boy, thanked me, and sent me off to bed to lay in the dark and try to make sense of the madness, the joy, the Dr. Pepper, the Strawberry, and the endless pieces of pizza that had been the Goof on the Roof.
For more about the series Reality of the Unreal Mind, visit Amazon.
Jesse Teller 
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