Even in a Pizza Shop Life Can Get Complicated

by Paul Stapleton (June 2026)

 

Stanley did not give two shits about the rumors. Who was not without his foibles?

Stanley was still ordering his pizza pie every Friday night from Nico.

Afterall, Stanley was a practicing humanist, certified by the state flagship university as a Doctor of Philosophy, and if someone like him were to desist from buying pizza pies because of rumor, no matter how credible or convincing, what was the next step? Casting stones at the entire human race? The corporations were the problem, not the moms and the pops in their brick-and-mortar shops, the disappearing local proprietors with whom Stanley cast his lot, the individual business owners like Nico, locally flawed and sinful, stuck in the muck and mire of propinquity.

At Nico’s, the dough was fresh but never doughy, the crust was crispy but never crunchy, the cheese was creamy but never bubbly or burned, and all the ingredients, including a catalog of extra toppings—the usual suspects, but also delicacies like grilled asparagus, marinated artichokes, sun dried tomatoes, roasted figs, and sauteed rapini—were prepared in the back kitchen and applied up front in generous circular patterns that made every pie a unique creation, a phenomenon tantamount to a work of art. Ever since he discovered Nico’s, Stanley took great pride in their relationship, and he professed to himself that he would never again patronize any of the national corporate pizza chains as he did when he first moved down South, peddling their low-grade mozzarella, mass-produced sauce, and machine-cut toppings.

For Stanley, it was the conglomerates and corporations that were the problem, not Nico, what with their categorical imperatives, their addictions to uniformity, their bowdlerizing professionalism, their paralyzing propriety, their proscribing prescriptions, their elitist paranoia about a human condition that their CEOs, CFOs, COOs, VPs, management teams, and HR pinheads were filtering out of existence from behind the sleek puritanical windows of their Modernist national headquarters, quarantined behind palisades of arborvitae and moats of run-off ponds.

Corporate America was the target of Stanley’s righteous indignation, not Nico.

Or was it self-righteous indignation? Stanley thought.

Could indignation be anything but self-righteous? Who could become indignant about something unless they were already feeling more righteous than somebody else about one thing or another, and thus, necessarily feeling self-righteous? Did indignation necessarily connote self-righteousness?

No matter, Stanley thought, because his indignation was justified, and everything he ever said in the classroom was justified because corporate America was turning the quirky nooks and crannies of Americana into a soulless strip mall.

Although if Stanley really wanted to be accurate, the state flagship university, to which he was deeply devoted, was a kind of corporation, as his wife Marie liked to remind him—ex-wife—albeit a non-profit corporation, a designation that she pointed out, was bullshit, and although he was so very far down the corporate-vis-à-vis-university ladder that he arguably made no direct contributions to its profit line besides turning up each morning to teach the red-eye classes the tenured professors only scoffed at, there was a glitch in his line of thinking because his students were undoubtedly sustaining the profits of that very corporation/slash/university with their tuition payments and students loans, not to mention all the other monies they generated with their purchases of t-shirts, hats, caps, sweaters, sweatshirts, sweatpants, socks, slippers, tumblers, sunglasses, binders, pens, pencils, notebooks, bookbags, underpants, panties, sports bras, jock straps, condoms, and oversized water bottles, all of which appeared in Stanley’s classroom daily, albeit sometimes surreptitiously, but always bearing the copyrighted state flagship university logo.

If you followed Marie’s line of thinking, the state flagship university was just as worthy, perhaps more than any other corporation, of Stanley’s indignation, maybe not his self-righteous indignation, but definitely his goddamned indignation, because for one thing—and it was no small thing, a point she drove home before she drove away after he refused to take the high-school job with the full slate of benefits—his independent-contractor status did not warrant any benefits at all, not even health insurance, just like all the other uninsured adjunct instructors (who by the way, comprised the vast majority of the professoriate), a circumstance no doubt related in a very direct way to the very healthy finances of the corporation/slash/university, its thriving market investments, and its muscular endowment, the staggering growth of which was somehow insufficient to underwrite—at all!—the health of people like him, human beings, whose 1099 contracts failed to cover the cost of getting sick and dying.

As for the rumors about Nico, to hell with them. They were scuttlebutt, mudslinging, mere susurrations, at best the bathos of a self-righteous clientele incapable of accepting the fact that even in a pizza shop, life can get complicated.

And so to prove his allegiance, Stanley gifted Nico with one of the autographed photos of the state flagship university’s national champion basketball team, which Stanley had procured courtesy of the shooting guard he had tutored for several months off campus, as he was instructed, in the archives room at the nearby county library, a kid who sort of owed him several favors.

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Paul Stapleton won a Pushcart Prize for a story that first appeared in J Journal. He currently teaches English at North Carolina Central University.

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