Teacher/Pizza Guy

Jeff Kass

• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780814347164
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

Explores the emotional and physical labor necessary to work nights as a pizza delivery driver and days as a high school English teacher.

Teacher/Pizza Guy is a collection of autobiographical poems from the 2016–17 school year in which Jeff Kass worked as a full-time English teacher and a part-time director for a literary arts organization and still had to supplement his income by delivering pizzas a few nights a week. In the collection, Kass is unapologetically political without distracting from the poems themselves but rather adds layers and nuances to the fight for the middle class and for educators as a profession.

The timing of this book is beyond relevant. As a public high school teacher in America, Kass's situation is not uncommon. In September 2018, Time published an article detailing how many public school teachers across the country and in a variety of environments work multiple jobs to help make ends meet. Teacher/Pizza Guy chronicles Kass's experience of teaching, directing, feeding people, and treading the delicate balance of holding himself accountable to his wife and kids, his students, his customers, and his own mental and physical health while working three jobs in contemporary America. The journey of that year was draining, at times daunting, at times satisfying, but always surprising. Many of the ideas for these poems were initially scribbled onto the backs of pizza receipts or scratched out during precious free moments amidst the chaos of the school day. A driving force behind the book is Philip Levine's poem "What Work Is, " which Kass believes attempts to examine not only the dignity and complexity of what we think physical, tangible work is but also the exhausting, albeit sometimes fulfilling nature of emotional work.

Teacher/Pizza Guy is a funny and relatable collection for readers, thinkers, educators, and pizza lovers everywhere.

IV

Young man, take your headphones out

is the refrain of Ian’s poem, and the refrain

he hears each morning when he pushes

into the building at 7:30, sleet stinging

his face.

Young man, take your headphones out,

Ian hears, and obeys long enough to move

past the line of sight of the assistant principal

yelling at him through a megaphone, before

he puts them back in.

Young man, take your headphones out,

Ian hears in his sleep, when he eats a foil-pack

of Pop-Tarts for breakfast, as he clambers

onto his bicycle, and, whatever the weather,

rides it to school.

Young man, take your headphones out,

I hear as I pull into traffic, seeing Ian’s

anguished face as he sits atop the classroom

radiator, hearing his throaty voice when he

reads his poem, as I half-listen to the radio,

late already, on my way to deliver

my twentieth pizza of the night.

Young man, take your headphones out,

I hear as the first few notes from Whitney

Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” play

through the car’s speakers and despite

my tardiness, I pull over into a 7–Eleven

parking lot.

Young man, take your headphones out,

Ian repeats as the anchor of his poem,

a custody-sharing tale of three days

a week with his father, and four

with his mother.

Young man, take your headphones out,

as he rides his bike back and forth

between parents, and the only thing he takes

with him everywhere is his music. The only

stability in his life, on his bike, in the hallways,

in his head—his music.

Young man, take your headphones out

disappears as I sit in the parking lot,

engine running, for three minutes,

so I can hear Whitney drag out that

long ayyyyyyyyyyyyyyayyyyyayyyyyy,

about 5/6ths of the way through

the song and how just that single stretched-

out vowel, that one sparkling sound,

will buoy me through the rest of this shift,

maybe the rest of the week, the school year,

who knows, maybe even my whole damn

career.

Territories

I.

Evan says Robert’s bullying him, threatening to slug him with his backpack

full of textbooks and, let’s be honest, Robert’s a big kid. His shoulders could

be mini fridges, his fists padlocks. Evan’s jumpy. The kind of kid who won’t

slaughter a spider, or even a mosquito, but will capture either in a paper cup

and cart it outside.

In the hallway, where I’ve summoned him during class so he can’t perform

before an audience of peers while I scold him, Robert tells me, he stole

my seat. You know I have anger issues. That’s why I separate myself,

so I can stay calm. I go back there in the corner and make my own space.

He can’t just sneak in and steal that from me.

True, but, you still can’t threaten to smack him with your backpack.

Well, I wouldn’t do it if he just let me sit where I always sit.

Other teachers gaze at me now, poke their heads from their rooms

at the hint of heat in the corridor. Can the Assistant Principal down the hall

hear us from his office? I lower my voice, try to sound like the kind of background

music that plays in a high-end supermarket. All right, I say, how

about, just for today, you sit somewhere else? I’ll talk to Evan

after class about how important that seat is to you, but you

need to promise if you’re feeling angry, for whatever reason,

you’ll come talk to me instead of threatening anyone, deal?

Robert says nothing. Yanks the hood of his sweatshirt up, his eyes floorward.

A kid in the Robotics Club wearing an 8.5 x 11-inch

laminated hall pass around his neck that says, I surrendered

to defeat because I don’t care enough about missing valuable

instructional minutes so I chose not to be patient enough

to use the bathroom after the bell walks by, his eyes radar-

locked on the battlefield pixelated on his phone.

Deal?

Nothing.

A guidance counselor in a purple T-shirt that proclaims in white text across her back, Lead, Care, Aspire, scurries past and tosses me a question with her eyebrows.

Deal?

Nothing.

Deal?

Nothing.

I can’t allow you back into the classroom if you can’t promise me.

His eyes don’t move from the floor, but the sweatshirt hood nods.

Or, maybe, I just

want to believe

it does.

II.

Tonight, electricity abandons the Cottage Inn store in the north...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• I
• II
• III
• IV
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author