The pizza takeaway used to
be a fire station when the town was alive and important. Since then, some sixty
seventy years it has been a bakery and a restaurant and now a takeaway with the
grease half an inch thick next to the fryer and the side walls panelled with
horizontal boards of wood. The oven burned wood straight, ash and willow
mainly, and unless the door was wide open and the fan on the room soon filled
up with smoke and it clung to your clothes and the whole building smelt of wood
smoke and sweat. Opposite was a bank and a paper shop where I bought my first
pack of cigarettes the day after my eighteenth birthday but I wasn’t ID’d. When
it rained heavily in the winter the drains would overflow and we would get
brown water sloshing up onto our doorstep which would make mopping the place at
the end of the day hell and all of the customers would be miserable and short.
It was owned by a Vietnamese man called Scott Lee who
also owned the local Chinese restaurant and the separate Chinese takeaway and
chip shop. He was short and stocky with fat fingers and small eyes and black
thin hair that pointed straight up in the widows peak. He was smarter than he
knew and knew a lot about a lot of things but man did he bullshit about a lot
of things such as knowing a whole list of celebrities. He had been in Britain
since he was eight when he, his sisters and his parents emigrated to Birmingham
but he left there in the nineties ‘cause he got sick of the triad. He was
active and loved cycling but was also a bit of a wimp and got really cold in
the winter and so would sit around doing nothing in a coat and fleece and
fingerless gloves that made him look like a Chinese scholar who should own a antiques
store. When this happened he got the deputy chef to do all the work.
The deputy chef was called Adam and he was a year
older than me. He was both a pot smoker and dealer and would often take hour
long breaks to run to his car to tend to a client. He was good with numbers and
was able to pick up tasks quite quickly but was not very bright otherwise, for
example he thought that the Queen was still the head of the government. I try
not to judge him too badly. He was my height with a very square head and thick
black stubbly hair and bad acne and constantly washed his hands. He had also
worked in the chip shop next door where, like here, he did little other than
sit around on his phone and eating what he made.
There were often very few customers so I would
usually just take a book and pass the time that way, reading roughly around
fifty to sixty pages during my five hour shift. Consequently around a third of
my books smell of smoke and many have little stains from tomato sauce of pizza
grease. My favourite times were when people recognised the book I was reading
and start a conversation about the book or the author and they would look at me
all impressed because I know such trivial facts about the book or the author
such as that Jack Kerouac was reported to have written On The Road while taking
loads of Benzedrine but actually relied mostly on coffee, the Benny thing was
just an urban myth. It impressed a lot of people.