Read Online Losing in Gainesville (9781940430331) by Brian Costello - Free Book Online Page A

more clear-cut, than it is now that we’re in college. Graduate, one last summer in town as Sandwich Artists, then we’re off. For good.
    â€œ ‘We’re not going to be like them, right?’ Beth would say on those breaks, pointing out our regular customers, screaming overweight families voiding packed minivans . . . ”
    There is no name on this page, only a handwritten “Page 3” in the top right corner. For once, Andy cannot guess who wrote this. And he wants to know who wrote it, he wants to know what happens next. His head is a stabbing post-vodka skullache, the jungle a stultifying mix of insects and sweat, roadkill and exhaustion. Andy gathers as many pages as he can find—almost optimistic, nearly hopeful—walks to his car, straightens the pages into as close an approximation to a stack as he can make these dirty torn crumpled pages, climbs in, drives home.
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    THE MODERN DAY WARRIOR’S JOB INTERVIEW
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    Jeremy Moreland, seventeen years old, wunderkind Assistant Director of Partytyme Pizzatyme Anytyme Affairs for Grandfather’s Olde Tyme Goode Tyme Pizza Parlor (the 34th Street location, between Larry’s Reasonably Priced Furniture Rental and Le Chandelier Hut, in Patton Plaza) holds in his freckled hands a grease-smudged application where the only information given is the first name: Stevie. No address, no phone, no social security number, no employment history, no references.
    â€œHe must figure we already know him so he don’t gotta put nuthin’ else down,” Brooks Brody, the unwunderkind Table Removal and Replenishment Coordinator says to Jeremy when handing him the application. “He just told me to hand this to you when I walked by his booth.” Brody stood in front of the counter, holding the gray bus tray filled with yellow plates and clear red plastic cups, in a sweat-soaked, sauce-stained yellow apron covering a uniform middle-scale and lower department stores would call “husky.” Brody plays right tackle on the Junior Varsity squad at Buchholz, where Jeremy would soon graduate with a 4.96 GPA. Not that their paths crossed much at school—Brooks Brody being good for little besides plowing open spaces for running backs to sprint through, or parting the overcrowds in the hallways between classes, or lifting heavy objects like free weights or bus tubs. Besides this, he tended to stand there in his short-cropped blond jock mohawk (funny how it was always perfectly acceptable when the o-line or d-line of the football team got mohawks for superstitious reasons or whatever in the middle of the season, but God help anybody else who did it) awaiting his next orders with that blank look of his.
    â€œYou did the right thing, Brooks,” Jeremy says. “Go finish the rest of the tables.”
    Brooks grunts an affirmation, swivels a 180 to the unbussed tables. “So, Stevie wants a dishwashing job?” Dale Doar, Director of Partytyme Pizzatyme Anytyme Affairs for Grandfather’s Olde Tyme Good Tyme Pizza Parlour, says, removing the yellow, red-lettered regulation work cap (the Employee Manual calls it a “party chapeau”) and running a hand through receding brown hair he used to comb back into a pony tail. He steps away from the counter, laughs his just-had-his-first-post-work-hit-off-the-one-hitter heh heh heh . “I’ll let you handle this one,” he says to Jeremy while walking to the kitchen, to the back door. “Just give him an interview while he’s eating. Make up whatever excuse you need to.”
    Jeremy stands behind the counter holding the application, in this all-too-familiar perspective of the gold peppermint candy dish and the red plastic “take a penny/leave a penny” tray next to the register, the Elton John/Kiki Dee duet “Don’t Go Breakin’ My Heart” that the adult contemporary station feels necessary to share with North-Central