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A Clown in the Drive-Thru
We used to be carried in the arms of cheerleaders.
That summer I was working at one of those Taco Bell / Pizza Hut hybrids and I’d tell people (many would of course ask) that I just simply liked to Líve Mas and one way of doing so were continuous attempts to truly Outpizza The Hut — that I liked to be within hands’ reach of a Crunchwrap Supreme and/or personal pan pizza for 40 hours a week, give or take.
They’d generally look at me quizzically with maybe a little bit of worry and then neglect to take the conversation any further, which was kind of why I’d engineered that as my canned answer — though I can also honestly say that the sentiment was true and I had the blood pressure and cholesterol figures to prove it.
Not a knock on that kind of establishment at all, but I did understand why people would wonder about my working there. I don’t think anyone would earnestly argue that very few people aspire from childhood to work the drive-thru of a Taco Bell / Pizza Hut in a small town in the middle of a midwestern state, especially not at 33. (Or at least not after childhood; as a kid it sounds like a pretty dope job, especially if you know the food is free or discounted.)
But I also think almost everyone out there has some sort of understanding of what it’s like for things to happen in life that get in the way of or completely crush whatever aspirations you have or once had.
Sometimes you have to pivot, right? And that’s where my series of pivots had landed me at that point in time.
One day I had just decided it was time to move back home. (Well, maybe not home, exactly, but the place I had grown up. I’d say it never really felt like home, but nowhere had, so how did I know what home felt like, really? Maybe I was home everywhere. Or nowhere.) I didn’t have anyone or anything holding me back, which was partially why I had made the move in the first place. I needed to shake things up. It didn’t have to be permanent if I didn’t want it to be. My only real hesitance was just the thought of how it might be perceived, my returning to the place I was from. For a second I worried that people might think of it as me having given up, which I kind of had, actually, but then I reminded myself that I didn’t (or at the very least…
