Excerpt from an Autobiography

BBD's "Poison" used to play incessantly in the Pizza Hut delivery/take-out store on Monticello Avenue in 1990.

Rob and Doug Malone and I would make pizzas and fold boxes and clean the store. Orders would come in and we would rush out to get it to them within 30 minutes or . . . you know. Rob drove his Escort, when the steering wheel worked. I drove my Accord. Doug drove an old Audi with New York plates, evincing his Long Island heritage and Yankee demeanor.

It's driving me out of my mind
That's why it's hard for me to find

Upon our return to the store, we'd rejoin the motley cast of characters. Big Bruce, the elephantitic young fellow. The married couple working together, which was kind of an amusing novelty until we later learned they'd once been jailed for pedophilia. Such can be an impediment to gainful employment, so fold a box and take the next call for a Meat Lover's at the Rodeway Inn, you two.

Can't get it outta my head 
Miss her, kiss her, love her

Rob kept me from getting fired one time when I ducked out to go to Harborfest in Norfolk. I never properly punched him in the face for doing that. We all three were nearly terminated when we skipped out in favor of Buffett at Cary Field. That weekend we delivered nothing, nothing but stupid jokes and drunken attempts at romance with our then-and-not-future girlfriends. It was a soundtrack reprieve. Somewhat.

You got fins to the left, fins to the right 
And you're the only bait in town

Soon, though, it was back to the Hut, and not some Buffettian bungalow . . . though that word shares a syllable with what Pizza Hut represented to us. I kept drawing snake eyes on deliveries: a trailer here, Bruce Hornsby's dad there. The latter notorious for issuing an Andrew Jackson on his repeated, identical $19.70 order and telling drivers to keep the change. That's just the way it was, and some things would never change. Or qualify as "change."

Ah, but don't you believe them

To look back and think of the torment of that summer . . . the three classes I "took" in the Department Soon To Be Known As My Former Major . . . the marathon 1985 season of Strat-o-matic baseball sprawled out across a misnomer of a dining room table . . . MTV . . . the incessant mockery 'twixt the finest collection of my college era's comic comrades ever assembled, a clown-car residence of 6 adult males in a 2 BR/1 BA . . . the 40 ounces per vessel and the 4 dollars per hour . . . and the Bell . . . and the Biv . . . and the DeVoe . . .

That girl is poisonnnnnnnn
Never trust a big butt and smile

Years later. Decades later. I'm re-enrolled in the College. As a free treat on the evening of the last class of the summer 2019 session, there's a stack of large, 16" circular gestures topped variably for the students. From the Hut. That food is poison.

Poisonnnnnnnn

Folks around my world are always stunned when I inform them that this episode, this small chapter of magnets on car doors and punch-clocks and embossed name plates and differing definitions of "supreme" and taking pies home to housemates and gas bills (but $1.15/gal) and three bad brothers two of whom you know so well and the endless box making and the really, really endless playing of BBD, I mean endless nonstop ceaseless and any other way you and Roget could label it, it . . . well, it created this devastatingly amusing and despondently sad cry for help, the kind of help like you need if you ingested

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