Dr. Bird's Advice for Sad Poets by Evan Roskos Page B

with an old rag. All the other register people are girls. Derek says that most pizza shop owners hire teenage girls to run the register because they have a fetish for cute girls in T-shirts that smell like grease and wear their hair in ponytails.
    “It’s really one of the lesser-known fetishes,” he says with a laugh as we take out the garbage one night.
    “Are there websites?”
    “Probably. But they’re all in Italian so you’d have to look up ‘
adolescente pizza grasso ragazze
’ on Google.”
    “Seems like too much effort.”
    The job pays me under the table, a concept that had to be explained to me a couple of times. I can’t grasp the concept of an entire pizza place that officially pays no employees. Is the IRS that stupid?
    When I tasted the pizza I realized that they probably didn’t make enough money to attract any attention. How is it that in this day and age a pizza place can exist and make terrible pizza? Seriously, if you put ketchup on cardboard and barely melted some store-brand cheese you’ll be more satisfied because at least then you wouldn’t have dropped ten bucks.
    But what do I care, really? I need a hundred bucks a week for therapy sessions that my parents won’t pay for and won’t know about.
    Whitman would love this pizza shop. Everyone reeks of labor even though only two of the seven employees really work (I do not include myself in this list of workers, please note).
    Whitman would say something like:
     
    Look! The stained shirts,
    the hands that knead themselves into the dough, shaping a world
    from yeast and water and flour!
    These five young men standing by the hot oven sweat
    the sweat of generations,
    the recipes, the love, the burdens!
     
    He did not write this, but narrating the world like Walt Whitman makes me smile. Even when it comes out sounding homoerotic.
    As I’m Whitmanizing and wiping down an orange booth, the doorbell tinkles and in walks Beth with three other girls I recognize but immediately ignore.
    “Hey!” I say. I haven’t told her I’ve become Pizza Boy, but what does it matter? Do I even have a chance to win her away from her boyfriend? Can girls get over the smell of grease?
    “I didn’t know you worked here,” she says, and her friends furrow their brows (I’ve stopped ignoring them since they’re clearly judging me).
    “I need a little cash.” I want to tell her why. She’ll understand, or at least tell me she understands. But confessing the need for mental health services in a pizza shop in front of three judgmental girls and my boss seems ill-advised.
    Beth and her friends move to sit at the booth I’ve just wiped down, but I shoo them into one that isn’t damp. (Of course, the booth-cleaning rag gets rinsed out maybe three times a day, so the other booths, while dry, are probably dirtier.)
    They order a pizza and I hang out behind the counter looking busy. I want to talk to Beth but not to her friends. They smile secret smiles. I do my best to eavesdrop, hearing things that could be innuendos but could also be about a thousand other things in the world.
    As I bring out the pizza, I fear the fingers on my broken arm are too weak to hold the tray. Beth will end up with eighth- degree burns and years of skin grafts. I sweat in fear from this unreality, making an accident more likely.
    In reality, I get the pizza down fine and even get a thank-you from nameless girl number two when I drop off a stack of extra napkins.
    “Here you are, ladies. Pizza is messy no matter how proper the people eating it.” I smile.
    Beth laughs and the other girls laugh a nanosecond later, suggesting that they are laughing at her and maybe me, but definitely her.
    I offer to get refills and then flee.
    Back by the oven, Flip, the owner, asks me to read a receipt to him.
    “It says, ‘Philly steak onions peppers provolone.’”
    He nods as if I confirmed what he already knew, but I suspect he can’t read words he’s seen a hundred times. Who can’t