Chapter 1
Despite his initial misgivings, Ian was not at all surprised to land this job at Pizza Good Times; after all, he already had a wealth of experience in the pizza business. Throughout the previous school year, Ian had worked at a seedy independently-owned shop a short bike ride from his home. Ian's job was to work the counter, make pizzas, and go out for deliveries, while the other employees sold marijuana and more exotic drugs in the back parking lot. Dealers got free drinks, and Ian quickly learned to identify them. He believed his knowledge of different doughs and toppings would make him a shoe-in for Pizza Good Times. A more important factor, however, was that Ian Rider was the only applicant. This was because Ian Rider's parents forbade him watching the television news, in case it might upset him, and thus Ian became the only person in the modest suburb of Raven, Michigan, who was completely unaware of the theme restaurant's most ravaging scandal.
"Here's your uniform." The mulletted manager handed seventeen-year old Ian Rider a red-and-white nylon shirt with the words "Pizza Good Times" written across the front. Ian's eyes scanned the spotty, obviously recycled jersey. Underneath the restaurant's logo, a small picture showed mascot Good Time Charley holding a steaming piece of pizza aloft. Ian thought the expression on Good Time Charley's face made him look as though he were about to rape and murder the pizza, and dump its torn and cheeseless body in the alley behind the strip mall. He came to this conclusion in ignorance of the recent tragedy at Pizza Good Times, though had Ian known then the scenario he imagined might have been even a bit more sinister.
Ian stared at Good Time Charley, tried to imagine greeting customers, talking to anybody at all, with those manic eyes staring out from a prominent position on his chest. In his mind, it seemed Charley spoke for him, that Ian no longer had a voice of his own, and he thought perhaps he was employeed at a the sort of fun house that regularly crops up in campfire stories. By the rules of such tales, he was doomed already. And it had all seemed so hopeful.
Three days prior, Ian had sweated through his interview, stumbling to explain why he wanted to work for Pizza Good Times, muttering something about "friendly, wholesome image" that both he and the gangly mullet-haired interviewer knew he was making up on the spot. Ian wanted a job, that's about as far as high school students think it out. He wanted a job where he could work with people his own age, preferably attractive people his own age. Attractive female people, actually. Ian thought that girls his age that chose to work at Pizza Good Times would probably be very attractive. He could not say why he thought this. And he could not say it in an interview.
Now, already having second thoughts, Ian took the uniform from his new boss and slid it on over his own black t-shirt, which bore the words "The Clowns Made Me Do It." The nylon uniform pulled the t-shirt closer to Ian's body, accentuating his budding paunch.
"You'll also need black workout pants," the manager, whose name was Adam, said. "Like Jen's." Here he pointed to a very pregnant but otherwise tiny young woman. She sported not the sweat pants that would seem to match the description Adam spoke, but rather shiny parachute pants that made a high whisping sound when she walked. Ian had no idea where he would find such monstrous apparel, and could not fathom that he was expected to pay for it himself. He resolved to quit right then and there.
"Um," he said. "Ok." Jen smiled at him. Ian blushed.
"This is the kitchen," Adam said, leading him behind a partition. A tall albino boy spun raw dough above his head, and Ian found himself wishing that this chef wore a puffy hat. A curly mustache would have been a nice touch, as well. But the boy was not even roly-poly like someone twirling a nascent pizza ought to be; quite the opposite, he was impossibly thin. "This is Mark," Adam said, gesturing toward the albino.
"Yo," Mark said. Mark had the worst acne Ian had ever seen.
"Hi," said Ian. Ian was madly jealous of this pale, pimply pizza maestro. Ian had never spun dough. Though Ian had experience in the pizza business, at his previous job the pies had come pre-spun into hard, flat discs that needed only to be dropped into metal tins and covered up with sauce and toppings. He wondered if maybe he wasn't in over his head. Ian decided he was not going to come in for his next scheduled shift, or any thereafter.
Continuing on the tour, Adam introduced Ian to the play structure, the arcade room, the front counter, and at least four girls Ian wanted desperately to see naked. In addition to Mark the Albino, there were two other teenage boys on the shift. Ian did not bother to remember their names. He did remember Mark, though, first because Ian was in awe of his pizza mastery and second because he did not see Mark as any real kind of competition for the girls' affections. After showing Ian around the restaurant and filling his head with fantasies of high-impact food service and frenzied sex, Adam put Ian to work scrubbing tables.
"You take a rag from here," Adam said, pulling a stiff cloth wafer from an overhead wire shelf, "and dunk it in this little chemical bath." Adam smiled at his apparent joke as he submerged the towel in water tinged with bleach. Ian noticed that the plastic container full of cleaning solution was the same type of container used to store cheese, pepperoni, and other toppings, and wondered how well the tubs were cleaned between uses. Mostly, though, Ian was furious that he was assigned to busing tables, and decided once again that he hated this job already and would quit right away.
"You'll want to squeeze it out," Adam continued as if explaining the procedure for removing polyps from the small intestine, "but not too much. You don't want to be dripping this shit everywhere, but you want there to be enough water to clean the tables."
"Right," Ian said. I hate you, he thought.
"Think you can handle it?" Adam plopped the still-soaked rag into Ian's open hand, the bleach-stink staining him immediately.
"Yeah, I think so," Ian said, more bitterly than he intended. Adam patted him on the back and left Ian to his doom.
Brenda MacFarlane cursed her luck. No, not her luck so much as the totality of her life. At thirty-eight Brenda's career had peaked, and that peak had an elevation just barely above sea level. As a "Public Relations Associate" for Smoke King/PGT Inc., a position above call center operator but significantly below manager, Brenda was responsible for bandaging public perception of the Pizza Good Times brand in the Midwest. She would offer free pizza for six months to a customer when a cashier called her a "fat bitch," or settle down irate parents who found the video games in the arcade too violent for their three-year-olds. The saving grace of this job was that Brenda was able to perform her duties from her office in sunny La Jolla, California. But now, with the enormity of the Dan Knotts situation, Brenda MacFarlane was about to do the unthinkable: she was going home.
Brenda had not been back to Raven, Michigan, since she was eighteen years old. Brenda did not have a particularly horrible childhood, only one that lacked any semblance of distinction or event. She believed that this was entirely the fault of her small town upbringing, and resolved to escape once and for all. In reality, it was more a result of Brenda's not having much of an interest in anything at all, a situation that was not improved by a change of scenery. After high school, she pottered around New Mexico for eight years while working on her associate's degree. She finally took a job in the mailroom at PGT Enterprises, where she was neither liked nor disliked. When Smoke King bought Pizza Good Times, Brenda was not laid off like the rest of her department because she was making less than anyone else in the organization. Thus, she was promoted to mailroom manager and given a twenty five-cent raise. She landed her public relations position in much the way Ian Rider got his job at the restaurant.
Ian Rider felt betrayed. His second day on the job, a Monday, found him opening Pizza Good Times alone with Adam, Mark, and a moderately attractive but manifestly abrasive young woman named Darla. To make matters worse, he pieced together, through assorted gossip, that of the girls he had met the previous day, Tara was with Mark and thus off-limits, and Angie had slept with Mark on at least two occasions, which made her wholly unappealing. The thought of Mark's scabrous acne rubbing against Angie's cool white naked skin made Ian gag. The fact that one or more of their couplings took place in the walk-in freezer left Ian weak with nausea whenever he had to retrieve a box of dough. Ian hoped Mark had not ruined anyone else at Pizza Good Times. Jen was not mentioned in the gossip, though Ian assumed she had some special guy in her life. Of the other girls, their sweet voices and curvy bodies and curly hair, Ian learned some good information, and he also heard a bit about persons male and female that he'd not yet encountered. As Ian vacuumed the crusty carpeted floor, imprinted every five yards with Good Time Charley's smirking mugshot, Ian glared at Adam and damned him to hell for putting him on a shift with only one shrill sorority girl to lay his thoughts on. Didn't Adam know? Ian needed inspiration for fantasy; why else would he take this stupid job? What the hell else was he supposed to think about while vacuuming whole breadsticks and stale pizza sauce and copper tokens? Now Darla was flirting with Adam. Ian spoke the words "I quit" aloud, which were drowned out by the whirr of the Dirt Devil. Ian Rider felt a mild electric shock as the vacuum reached the end of its cord and dislodged it from the socket, and he rushed to plug it back in and finish the job.
By the time Ian had finished vacuuming, the restaurant was open. Adam unlocked the doors, but there was no one waiting to come in. Ian pottered about doing little chores, wiping off the tables, taking out the trash, and emptying what Adam called the "surprise boxes" in the women's restroom. He then sat on a ledge behind the counter with Adam, Darla, and the nacho vat.
"So Ian," Darla said, adopting a menacingly playful tone to her voice, "I hear you're Dan Knotts's replacement."
"What?" Ian said. He thought Dan Knotts played Barney Fife on The Andy Griffiths Show.
"Word of advice," she continued, "keep your trousers on."
"Um," he said. Ian became acutely aware of his baggy lycra trousers.
"She's not sexually harrassin' ya," Adam said. "Just flirting. I'm sure you already know the whole story."
"Ah, sure. Yeah," Ian laughed. Was Darla flirting with him? Ian decided he would sleep with her if he had the chance. Why not? He still had no idea what she was talking about. He looked back through the pizza racks at Mark preparing the toppings. Mark was making an obscene gesture at Darla, one that Ian had never seen before but immediately recognized.
An hour went by without customers. Ian retired to the break room, where he browsed his email on a portable video game system. He also checked to make sure no one had interfered with his Wikipedia entry on Mogo, a seldom-seen comic book character from a third-tier comic book series. Mogo was a living planet that fought evil. Ian had made a catalogue of every time Mogo appeared in a comic, and summarized exactly what happened, making special notes of episodes that “can not be considered canon” for one reason or another. He was very careful to make sure no other Wikipedia writers introduced errors. Ian's was an eternal vigilance. He also maintened a farm in an online video game, and used his downtime at Pizza Good Times to make sure his carrots were growing properly. They were.
At quarter to eleven Adam showed Ian how to set up tables for a birthday party. Ian set placemats, paper plates, plastic cups, and party hats that nobody ever wore at close intervals, six to a table. He also blew up balloons, including a long skinny one that Adam said was "ribbed for her pleasure." Darla would take care of the actual party, with Ian clearing off refuse as needed. He would also watch the play structure, and tell kids to knock it off when they broke one of the numerous rules. Ian eyed the exit door, but did not want to leave Darla in the lurch now that he knew she might sleep with him.
At 11:30 guests began arriving for the eleven o'clock party. Adam whispered that they would almost certainly be pissed off when their allotted two hours were up, but since it was a slow day they would probably just not say anything, let it go. Ian found himself furious that people could be so rude, show up late and then expect special accommodation. He wanted to chuck them out right now, just on principle, and also to save himself an hour and a half of babysitting on the big plastic tubes. He then had to remind himself that he was making just over five dollars an hour, and didn't plan to work for Pizza Good Times past the end of week. So who cares? Darla was very polite, smiling a lot, and took everybody's pizza order. Ian helped her pour the sodas. He was certain the seven-year-old birthday boy was trying to look down her shirt, and Ian nearly reached across the table to throttle the kid before he again heard Darla's loud, grating voice, and remembered he didn't really care about her breasts. Unless she did indeed want to sleep with him, which would change everything. Ian decided he would find some way to stick it to the little bastard on the play structure, just in case.
Brenda MacFarlane got thoroughly drunk on her flight from LAX to Detroit Metropolitan Airport. The ninety-year old man sitting next to her had never seen a person so intoxicated in all his long life and two tours of service in the U.S. Navy. Nor had he ever heard so much profanity. As Brenda spoke with the old man, whom she called Steven for reasons mysterious to both of them, he began by joking with her and matching curse to curse (greatly dismaying his great-grandson in the window seat), but was soon left in the dust by Brenda's nonsensical strings of vulgarity. Finally, she hit herself on the head reaching for the overhead compartment and knocked herself out. Brenda had to be dragged from the aircraft after landing, and would have to appear in court to pay a sizable fine.
While Brenda MacFarlane was getting hoisted by the elbows by two male flight attendants, Ian Rider found himself in a locked closet with Darla, dreaming of the possibilities. She put the dread visage of Good Time Charley over Ian's head, and fastened snaps on the tuxedo to keep it in place.
"There you go, big guy. Now remember, Good Time Charley doesn't talk. So just do like a general mime thing."
"What do I mime?" Ian said, the sounds resonating in the giant hollow head. He pictured Charley in white face paint, with black around the eyes and bright red lips. It was not something he ever wanted to think of again. "Give me an example."
"Ok. Like, if a kid tells a joke, go like this." Darla put her hands over her mouth, leaned back, and shook her shoulders a bit.
"That's stupid," Ian said.
"It is what it is," Darla said. "I mean, look at this fucking thing. Did you expect it not to be stupid?"
"I guess I never thought about it."
"Well, at least you gave it more thought than Dan Knotts." Darla opened the closet door and Good Time Charley emerged as if from the smoky depths of hell. Ian saw himself as a giant lumbering monster knocking over buildings in Tokyo or New York, and with the limited visibility permitted by the costume this was not a wholly inapt comparison. Mothers snatched up screaming children from beneath his feet as Ian shifted his torso left and right, waving to no one in particular. Darla led him around by the hand, which was nice. Ian felt the warmth of her palm through his three-fingered cloth grip. Ian and Darla performed the Hokey-Pokey for two five-year-old outcasts, a boy with headgear and a girl who'd messed her pants, children obviously invited by parental mandate. The girl with heavy shorts loved Ian, and gave him a big hug at the end of the dance. Ian was glad to be protected by the Good Time Charley costume, and began to wonder if he should forgo wearing his work clothes underneath next time, to keep them from getting dirty.