I deliver pizzas. For 8 hours, sometimes 9, at a time, I drive around and get as many pizzas to as many people as possible. When you think about how much pizza that is, and how much pizza people are eating, it's kind of disgusting. But if you let the poetry of it be the shining quality, it can be nice. I get to see a small window, opened briefly and slightly hidden from me, of people's lives. A tall girl with a short boyfriend who acts like I'm trying to interview him for his court case. A fat man alone. A bunch of teenagers laughing and showing off their beers. People who apologise for ordering pizza, as if I'm taking note or casting judgment. Gruff people who grab the box and stare at me like I should leave. Overly nice people who put the money on the box, so I can't even get it without putting it down. People who are trying to be funny, with me as an uninvited audience of one, people who look like they pity me, and people who look right through me out into the street. I take my tips as a measure of how much my charms are working. On average, they're not working very well, but cold calls were never my strong suit. The wet streets sing a song between houses, and the red lights, reflected, like chorus singers, triple-lunged baaabyyy...
Tarheel Slim & Little Ann - "You're Gonna Reap"
In the realm of the first slowdance, sweat is an international power. It casts its name firmly in the iron of history, written a signature of closeness and smell that will last eternally. I remember the smell left on the shoulder of my long-sleeve shirt, a smell I left there for as long as I could. In the May heat of the darkened afternoon gymnasium, her chin hooked over my shoulder and her neck, perspiring quickening on my shoulder, it was indelible, permanent. I succumbed to its firm policy of maintenance, upkeep and heed. I'm left scarred, proudly, as if each mark on my character were an initial, a signature in the guestbook of my existence. An "i was here" where someone thought my body worthy of such vandalism.
[from a compilation called A Little Bit of Hurt to which I can't find a buy link]
[Mississippi Records]
