By David Sapp

At sixteen, in 1976, the same year as the bicentennial and the same year Dad lost the house and dry cleaners and Mom’s psychosis demolished our family – a year before Star Wars – I got my first job at Ron’s Pizza. I needed spending money and more importantly sought to escape my mother’s mania in the evenings. The shop was a tiny unremarkable cube on Coshocton Avenue. I remembered it in better days as The Milkhouse where in the 1960s we picked up milk and the Sunday Columbus Dispatch after mass. As a pizzeria it was filled with ovens, coolers, bags of onions, blocks of mozzarella, three-foot phallic lengths of pepperoni, cases of tomato sauce and mushrooms, and the warm aroma of fresh pies – truly the best in town. The local radio station droned six hours every night, filling our heads with pop music and blather. For $1.25 an hour (No, this was not a lot of money in 1976. It was a horrific wage, not a quaint sum.) I learned to answer the phone, roll dough, weigh cheese, cut onions without tears, wash countless dishes, and sweep and mop floors. I learned to get along, ignore the unbearable ignorance of my boss, and fain deference to rude customers. Having to work every Friday and Saturday night, I missed many dates, dances and football games. My wages from Ron’s Pizza paid for my new Pentax camera, but I couldn’t risk a Paris trip with the French Club to take pictures at the Louvre for fear of losing my job. When I moved in with my grandparents, after living with Mom became dangerous, I occasionally brought a pizza home from work. The smell woke up their dogs, they would get out of bed, and we all ate pepperoni, sausage and black olive at midnight. How their stomachs survived this late-night meal was astonishing.

After getting my driver’s license, I was given the previous family car, a maroon 1970 four-door Galaxy 500 with black vinyl seats to get to work. I wired in an 8-track tape deck and played Eagles and Chicago for my girlfriend. A mattress or eight-foot two-by-fours could fit in this monster land yacht. I became an expert at popping the lock with a coat hanger when I locked my keys inside. In the winter the door latch froze, and I doused the space between the door and window with a sauce container full of hot water. That did the trick until it froze again. I used a tie-down strap to keep the door from swinging open around corners. Mom still retained a key, and to keep her from stealing my car while I was at work, I disconnected the distributor cord.

Ron, the owner, a petty, miserly, insufferable lout, who attended an obscure and highly evangelical church where people spoke in tongues and all the women wore uniformly long hideous skirts, waddled around the shop. Periodically, when no customers were present, he pulled up his apron and rubbed his immense and oddly symmetrical pot belly, saying, “Look, I’m pregnant.” We wanted a definite due date and would host a baby shower. We winced at his many lame quips such as “If you go to kiss your honey and her nose is kinda runny, you may think it’s funny, but it’s snot.” Ron could eat an entire large, multiple topping pizza in one sitting. He would take a gander at a diet, which meant whining about the misery of the task, and then binge on an entire package of doughnuts two days in. Because it was a family recipe, only Ron mixed the dough and looked up from time to time to see if anyone was watching. We couldn’t care less but enjoyed messing with his paranoia, pretending to take surreptitious notes or rubbernecking from across the room. He gave us sharp, suspicious glances and stood so as to block our view of the mixer.

I replaced Bob White, about three years older than me, who worked at Ron’s through high school until he found a lucrative union welding job at Marion Power Shovel where they manufactured heavy earthmoving equipment. I thought it was funny that his parents named him after a bird. Maybe they intended to call him Robert rather than Bob or maybe they never heard a bobwhite. I remembered listening for the familiar quail-like bobwhites in the fields where I played as a child: “bahb-WHIITE, bahb-WHIITE.” Bob still stopped by after his shift for a pizza in his new black Pontiac Trans Am T-top. I planned to go to art school, and he commissioned me to draw his car for thirty dollars. I also drew a cartoon for the shop which hung by the cash register for many years. Ron is depicted announcing a customer’s pizza will be ready soon but drops the pizza on the floor when it is ready. This happened more frequently than we liked. Bob often ordered a sub with extra Hot Timmys. He called banana peppers “Hot Timmys” because a classmate’s name was Tim Peppers, and Tim was hot because he was the fastest on the tack team. Tim Pepper’s sister, Connie, was in my class, her family also attended St. Vincent de Paul church, and she was the mascot for the Mount Vernon Yellow Jackets. I asked her out once, but she wasn’t permitted to date white boys and her brothers were fanatically protective. Will Farley, a farm boy also in my class but whom I had no recollection of ever seeing in the halls at school, had a glass eye. He lost it from a loose fence wire. I was constantly required to re-evaluate which eye was which when communicating pertinent pizza business. Years later, I thought of Will and remembered to always wear safety glasses whenever bending wire. His personality was that of a dour old lady. Never smiled. Never cracked a joke. I vaguely recollect that we nearly came to blows one evening over what I don’t know. There was shoving and Ron thrust his bulk between us like an NFL referee. Will left for better pay at the new Ponderosa Steak House, but they cut his hours a month after his arrival.

John Blubaugh, a distant cousin, was a gangly goofy kid. My great-grandmother Maude was a Blubaugh originating from our families in Danville. Between pizzas, he would sneak out to the back stoop on warm summer nights to escape the heat and his turn at washing dishes and to pull a few tokes from a joint. Like Bill Clinton, I puffed but didn’t inhale. His pot smelled stale and its efficacy was questionable. He told me a hilarious story about how he once inadvertently sneezed on his girlfriend and his booger landed on her cheek. Jim Teeter lived down the street and spent whole afternoons on his front porch with stereo speakers on the sill of his living room window just behind his ears while pounding away at his drum kit. I harbored a slight crush for his mom after she passed the window in a black bra, but she was always a mother getting ready for her shift. After work we drove the wrong direction up one-way streets just for the hell of it. When Dan Smith cut his finger on the meat slicer and fainted, I caught him from falling and cradled his head in my hands. For a moment, in his complete helplessness, I understood what it might mean to fall in love with another boy. Clare, short for Clarence, was a shy, amiable, pudgy man of about thirty or forty who lived with his mother somewhere in the neighborhood. When business was slow, he stopped by to talk about painting his bike (every other month red or blue enamel) or getting new batteries for its lights. Clare was intellectually disabled, and Ron thought Clare was always good for a laugh to pass the time by taking advantage of his many OCD tics and eccentricities. Clare found body hair repulsive and regularly shaved head to toe. Ron would stroke his bear-like arm for Clare. Clare recoiled, distressed, almost nauseous in disgust. In the summer, Clare mowed a narrow strip of grass around two sides of the shop. Ron paid Clare with one can of soda. Just one. No pizza.

Ron gave me a key to the shop and pressed me into turning on the ovens after school.  In between school and work, rather than driving all the way home, I grabbed food at Burger Chef, ate it in my car, and finished homework. One afternoon I brought my sweet silly girlfriend Brenda with me, and we made out on the massive prep table where employees assembled pizza boxes and folded dough into tidy loaves ready for rolling. Brenda, a mediocre clarinet player who persistently slathered vivid cerulean blue eye shadow, sewed and embroidered matching shirts for us to wear while walking around the mall. We got to know each other in marching band, and I discovered, much to my delight, that I could make her laugh. Our first date was a drive-in rendition of Jaws, and she introduced me to the novelty of Taco Bell and the tostada. I read in my grandmother’s Cosmopolitan about couples having sex in adventurous places and thought this would be exciting, but the formica surface was hard and the height of the table awkward.  And the prospect of Ron walking in on us was far from romantic. And the condom broke after having been ensconced in my wallet for far too long out of wishful thinking. Not fun.

Ron tired of slinging pizzas and took up used car sales. He failed miserably at his new venture and would occasionally swing by the shop to express his regret. Coincidentally and unexpectedly, my uncle Wayne, a kind and quiet man, bought the business from him, but never changed the name and never corrected anyone when they called him Ron. Wisely, the menu did not change, but he probably should have reconsidered the name of the specialty pizza with everything on it. It was called and to this day remains “All the Way,” which exuded a rather 70s sexual connotation. Wayne enjoyed baking when he was in the Ohio National Guard, and after working for other people for many years including running the dry-cleaning equipment at Dad’s Jet Quality Cleaners, found his calling in pizza. Not surprisingly, when he took over, the business soon doubled. After I dropped out of art school, dejected and directionless, Uncle Wayne generously offered my old job back, but one night while running the dough roller I simply said I wouldn’t be back – couldn’t come back – and he understood, thanking me for my help in getting his business up and running. Despite the arrival of Dominos, Pizza Hut, and Little Ceasar’s, the business has thrived for over forty years. Ron’s Pizza is still there, though it moved to a better building on Coshocton Avenue, another former carry-out where I used to pick up milk. It is run by my cousin Annette and her husband Jim after Uncle Wayne died of cancer. It remains the best pizza in town. And after eventual trips to New York, Chicago, Florence and Rome, I can confidently say the crust rivals any pizza anywhere.

By David Sapp          

Litro Magazine

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