This had happened before. They had called me in for an emergency once before, but that was in Normal, and this was bigger. Much bigger.
There was a time when the city of Bloomington-Normal was broken up into two cities bumped up right next to each other. When my parents worked at Rocky Rococo’s in Milwaukee, they were so good at what they did that they were given a proposition. Move. Move to Bloomington and fix a troubled store there. Find the problem, and make the store prosper again. More money. More prestige, and when it was done, who knows what would come of their career? The couple that ran the stores as regional managers were older. They were looking for an out. This was Mumble and Rose’s chance to get to a place where they were making some real money, and they took the offer.
We were living in Bender’s territory at the time. Rose was not blind and she saw me hanging out with Billy Badass all the time. She knew that if I stayed in that neighborhood I would become a gangster. I had just failed sixth grade. I was looking at another year at 20th Street School, probably with Mr. Liechen. Rose was terrified Liechen would tell me he had begged her to let him pass me.
Milwaukee had been our home all my life, but things were getting touchy, and this might be the move we needed.
The move was paid for by Rocky’s. Mumble was given a big bonus to find us a comfortable home, and we packed up and off we went. I remember the trip there was miserable. The Caprice had a very reliable radiator. It would burn and smoke every time it was driven in any kind of hot weather. Well, the only way to get over that problem was to run the heat as you drive down the black asphalt and the sun beats down mercilessly.
So, with a car packed tight with kids, a big dog, and everything fragile you never want to put in a moving truck, we made our way through the state of Illinois in 100 degree weather.
When we got to the house, we freaked out. It was a nicer neighborhood than we had ever lived in before. It was a condo and everything was beautiful. We had a huge bathroom upstairs, a smaller one down. We had a living room with bay windows that looked out on a perfect sunset. We had a dishwasher that my mother would never let us use in case we got “lazy,” and our bedrooms were gorgeous.
The restaurant was a dog. They had a rat problem. They had a crew that was stealing the place blind. They had a manager who was clearly incompetent, and all of Mumble and Rose’s efforts, from printing coupons to buying radio spots, got them nowhere. Soon they had to admit that the place needed to be closed down, and they began the long process of stopping production, selling all the equipment, and tearing the Rocky’s out of the place.
But before they came to this conclusion came the Mud Volleyball tournament. It was hot. Much hotter weather than we ever got in Milwaukee. And there was no mud, but those throwing the tournament decided that they would build great big courts ringed with wood, fill them with dirt, and wet it all down the morning of. And by doing this, Bloomington had a tournament.
Mumble had heard it was coming up, and he wiggled his way into the process of planning it, with a promise of food for sale and soda. About two hundred people would be in attendance, and ten teams would play from morning until dusk. They estimated they would need about two hundred and fifty slices, sold separately, and countless sodas. This was on a weekend when business at the restaurant would be at its highest.
Massive undertaking, and they called in The Big Guns for the execution.
Which was me.
I made dough. Carried boxes of ingredients, and even made some of the pizza, though Mumble hated it because I was so slow. They decided to make trips with insulated proofers, filled with about sixteen shelves a piece, and a cooler filled with soda that went flat pretty fast.
Two hundred and fifty slices soon sold out, and they had a disaster on their hands. Well, neither of them had ever planned anything like this before, and they had a rushing emergency, where they called in every employee, even those on their days off, and they fought to make it all work.
In the end, they did make it work. They made a few thousand dollars and they were a hit. Rocky Rococo’s became a place people wanted to eat again, and I got ten dollars for fourteen hours’ worth of work.
I bought the tape cassette of Scorpions Greatest Hits. Though I had worked my ass off for very little pay, anyone who knows the Scorpions knows it was worth it.
Three years later, I’m 15, and I get called out of my room in St. Robert to see Key standing in the living room arguing with Mumble.
“We can do this, Mumble. I can do this. Give me control over the entire thing. I’ll take care of everything. It can be done.”
“You’re going to have to run all over Missouri to get ingredients. I don’t have even half of what you will need,” Mumble said.
“Done.”
“You’re going to need a manager at the store overseeing the prep.”
“No, I won’t,” Key said. “I was a manager at Dominos for two years in Dallas. It was a big volume store. I handled everything just fine.” Key ran his hands through his hair and shook his head. “I’m telling you, man, we need this.”
But I would soon find out that “we” didn’t need this. He did. Key was a delivery driver who had been grounded to phone bitch by Mumble for the last week. Key’s transmission had gone out and he had no money to fix it. Without being able to drive, he would not be able to raise the money to get back on the road and really earn. He was desperate.
“How are you going to run all over the state if you don’t have a car?” Rose said.
“I have a friend that will loan me his for a few days for a take on the tip.”
“How do you know they will tip?” Mumble said. “We might do all of this and you get stiffed.”
“The drill instructors promised me a ten-dollar tip per pizza. They said they would insist on it.” Mumble’s eyes went wide for a second. “How many pizzas are we talking about?”
“Eight hundred.”
“You have got to be kidding me,” Mumble said. “That has to be a lie. You are talking about making 8,000 dollars for one delivery to Post. It’s pretty far-fetched that they could insist on that sort of tip.”
“Guaranteed by the drill instructors. Done deal. If I get one penny less, I can go over their heads and they will get in trouble.”
“How do you know you can do that?” Rose said.
“That is a direct quote from them,” Key said. “This is a slam dunk.”
“What kind of pizza do they want? The order will be a nightmare to fill,” Rose said.
“Half Meat Lover, half Supreme.”
That is when I knew it was going to happen. Those were specialty pizzas. Which meant, they were about four dollars more a piece than any other pizza they made.
“What do you need to get it done?” Mumble asked.
Everyone turned to look at me.
“I need the Goof on the Roof,” Key said with a smile.
“Done,” I said.
“Done,” Mumble said. “What time do you want him ready tomorrow morning?”
“Five in the morning.”
“Done,” Mumble said.
Five, and I hate life, but I’m pretty excited. Key is one of my favorite people. I loved everything that came out of his mouth, and we hit the road to go to Bolivar Pizza Hut. It’s about a two-hour drive, but it is where he is going to get some extra dough. We hit the road and he hands me two cold sausage biscuits from McDonalds and a large Dr. Pepper.
The drive was amazing. We never turned on the radio. He wanted to hear my stories. I wanted to hear his. We loaded the car up with about sixteen bags of pan dough and off we went.
After Bolivar, we bounced around Springfield, hitting two or three stores, taking what we could and moving on.
Lebanon, we hit on the way home, and we grabbed two cases of mushrooms, a bag of onions, and a bag of green peppers.
From Rolla, we got six bags of sauce and eight boxes of cheese. From Columbia, we grabbed four more boxes of cheese, two more cases of mushrooms, and five bags of sausage and Italian sausage.
Getting it all in the cooler was impossible and we stood back, looking at what we had done and shaking our heads. This was just the beginning. We had been on the road for over fourteen hours, and that was just gathering supplies. The next day would be impossible.
I looked at the cooler, seeing that we could not even slip a credit card through the packing job, then I looked at Key.
“You’re going to be making 8,000 dollars on this, right?”
“Yep. I had to give some to Monkeywrench and Suzie Q. They are bringing the trucks, but yeah, for the most part, it is all mine. Fuck my transmission, I’m going to buy a brand new car.”
“Do I get a cut?” I said.
He looked at me for a long beat before he said, “Yeah. Of course, I wouldn’t cut you out. Sure, I’ll take care of you. Don’t you worry about that.
Home, and I eat like a horse. Key had bought me drinks all day, but not one hamburger or piece of pizza. He said he was trying to keep costs down, and did I have any money? I told him that I had none, and he had bitched about my parents leaving me empty when they knew I needed money for food.
Three plates of Rose’s pasta, and I drop into bed, asleep before I hit the door. I stumbled to bed asleep. I pulled off my clothing asleep. I was out, and my alarm clock had been set by my mother.
Four o’clock in the morning, and I’m up. Key is waiting, and he hands me a Dr. Pepper. He blows on his coffee as we head to Pizza Hut. When we get there, shit is insane.
We could make the dough. It would be pretty old by the time it got to the Fort, but that just meant it would be flat, not spoiled. But we could not prep any of the pizzas at all until they were ready to be taken out the door.
The dough creation was immense. You can fit three bags in the mixer, a massive steel bowl with an arm like a squared-off hook that spun everything. If you got the temp of the water wrong, it wouldn’t rise correctly. Now the big important stores had a heated water machine mounted to the wall by their mixer, and you had to push a button and the perfect temp came out.
Delivery didn’t have that. We were a high labor, low volume store most days, and it was expensive to keep us going. I was in charge of getting water and working the mixer, while Key made barrel after barrel of sauce. I pulled the dough from the bowl. The bowl was low to the ground and the wet dough with three bags weighed about forty pounds. It was like wrestling an armload of fat from the ground to the table, and the entire time it is slipping through your arms and fingers.
Each massive wet batch had to be cut into 16-ounce pieces and rolled into balls with the corners under. This took the normal person about ten minutes. A trained experienced dough maker can feel 16 ounces with a single hand before it is tossed on the weight. But I was not that until the end of the day.
When the dough was in balls, it was run through the press. I was not supposed to be using either of these machines yet, because I was not yet 18, but I did it anyway and no one bitched about it.
Key is slicing green peppers in half and setting them on a small square machine on the wall. The green pepper is placed on a net of thin blades and a great weight comes down with force by the operator with a huge handle.
More dough for me and into the proofer. Thirty minutes, I think. I am pretty sure it took thirty minutes to rise the dough, and then off into the cooler it went. This was a problem. The cooler was already stacked, and they needed to cover every single bit of space possible. With a lot of the green peppers cut and in smaller barrels, it was manageable. Then, the onions.
This had to be done by hand. The pieces at that time were white onions diced by hand. It made the entire place a fume-filled nightmare, and Key did it for about five minutes, then gave me the job.
Thirty minutes of peeling, slicing, and dicing onions with tears streaming down my face and Key yelling at me about taking as long as I was.
Now that day was a Saturday, the busiest day of the week for the delivery store, so on top of making the dough for the big delivery, I had to make the dough and prep for that afternoon.
All in all, I think I made about twenty-nine bags of dough. That’s 1,160 pounds of dough, which is 1,160 balls of dough, and 1,160 pans that needed to be washed when they were done. At some point, Key had to leave to go do something and he locked the door behind me. I was alone, watering eyes, and getting good at weighing 16 ounces by myself.
We had to wait. We were to deliver the pizza at four in the evening, so cooking could not start until about two.
We rolled the proofers onto the pickup trucks and filled them as fast as we could. Each shelf in the proofer could hold two large pizzas front-to-back, and if you stacked them, then you could get four pizzas on a shelf. There were about sixteen shelves.
That’s math I am not ready to do. I just did all that dough math, and I’m about done with numbers right now. So, let’s just say a lot. It’s a lot of proofers for an eight-hundred pizza run.
Then out came Mumble. “I called and I was able to sell some soda, too. I got about two hundred sodas sold, so you will need to come back and get those when you are done.”
Key was in a pick-up truck he had borrowed. Monkeywrench in his, and Suzie Q in hers. The proofers were strapped down very precisely, and they all jumped into their trucks. They were about to run off when Suzie looked at Key and honked.
“You are taking this kid on this run, asshole!” she snapped.
“Oh, yeah, Jesse, sure, get in. You earned it.”
He didn’t speak to me the entire way there. We had to go slow or the proofers would fly off, no matter how much tying had been done.
When we got there, we were allowed in the gate that closed off the recruits from the outside world, and we got to the field.
Two hundred recruits were standing in line and a whistle was blown.
They all rushed the trucks in perfect formation. They grabbed pizza, thanked Key, and rushed off. When they all had their pizza on rolling carts, they lined back up again, and they reached in their pockets as one, and pulled out cash.
Key walked the line and they thanked him and stuffed cash in his hand.
Suzie Q and Monkeywrench were already gone to get soda. Mumble had to borrow cups and lids from Business, but he didn’t ask for straws. He figured he could get away without.
Drill instructor made Key count the money, and said that if he came up one nickel short, that his recruits would have to crawl back to their bunks that night.
It was all there.
Key didn’t give me my cut, he had Mumble do it. Key disappeared before the soda was all handed out by Monkeywrench and Suzie Q. They each were left two hundred dollars. Mumble took me outside, and walked me to the car where Rose waited to drive me home.
“Is Key going to give me my cut tomorrow?” I said.
“No, he gave it to me, and Monkeywrench and Suzie Q tossed in a little, too.” Mumble could not look me in the eye when he handed me my thirty dollars.
“Ten from each?”
“Yeah.”
When Key came by to show me the car he bought, my mother told him I didn’t want to see it. Key worked at Mumble’s store for about two more weeks, but everyone had been told about the cut he had left for me, and he had no friends left in that store when he quit and drove back to Dallas.
The Big Guns had made the biggest delivery in St. Robert history possible.
I bought a few cassettes.
I can’t remember what they were.
I think you all know it wasn’t worth it.
For more about the series Reality of the Unreal Mind, visit Amazon.
Jesse Teller 
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