Extra Sausage

I didn't realize until he was getting ready to close the door that the guy I just delivered a pizza to wasn't wearing pants.

It was last summer, and I was delivering on the city's west side. This particular deliver was later in the evening--about 10 or so--and I was looking forward to going home. The way I usually deliver a pizza is like this: I walk up to the door, greet the person, then pull their order out of the bag and set it on top of the bag so I don't burn my hand. I remind them of the total, take their cash, then hold the order out and let them lift if off the top of the hot bag. This was exactly what happened here.

He came to the door, I pulled his pizza out of the bag and told him the price. I took the cash and held the pizza out until he took it off the top of the bag. Because of the way I hold the oder out to the customer, I couldn't see him from about mid-chest down until I lowered the bag. That was when I noticed his penis was flapping at me.

But the whole time before that, he had been completely nonchalant about the fact that his pork and beans were in the apartment hallway. Nothing. When he answered the door, there was no looking from my eyes down to his waist and back up; no "lookit what I've got" eyebrow raise; he didn't answer the door with a hearty "How's your evening? Look at my penis!" So the whole time that I'm holding his pizza out to him and he's counting out ones and handing me the cash and taking the pizza, I had absolutely no inkling what was down there. Then I lowered the bag and went to put the cash in my pocket...and there's this guys lil spittin' cobra looking at me with its one good eye. I took a half jump back and think I even squeaked a little.

Even THEN, things didn't turn weird(er). He didn't wink and invite me in. There was no cheap innuendo about offering me a better tip. Nothing. In fact, he was so blasé about it that for a moment, I wondered if I was the weirdo because I was wearing pants. He told me to have a good night, and closed the door.

What. The. Hell.

I've had chicks answer the door in underwear before. I've gone to houses where people were sitting around looking at porn. Corey Taylor of the band Slipknot lives in our delivery area and he's fond of ordering pizzas for parties he throws and having naked ladies answer the door. So it's not like you don't get used to seeing strange stuff when you deliver things to people's homes late at night. But the thing of it is, when people DO shit like that, they usually do it for the effect. Chicks will answer the door in their bras to watch the guys eyes bug out at the gift of free boobies. People do shocking stuff for the shock. At least, people do things they THINK are shocking for the CHANCE to shock people. Most delivery drivers, we see a guy or a chick in their underwear, we just shrug and assume that means we're not getting tipped.

But this guy did absolutely nothing to call attention to it. And once I finally noticed, he STILL didn't do anything out of the ordinary. He didn't even laugh at my--admittedly--funny reaction. That made the experience even more strange.

Whenever someone tries to make the argument that delivery drivers don't deserved to be tipped, I think of that guys penisokyousee, now, that didn't come out right. (that's what she said) Let me try again: Whenever someone says delivery drivers don't deserve our tips, I think of that evening. People say "I tip waitresses because they bring my food, refill my drinks, and do other things that drivers don't do!" And I think "AND THEY NEVER SEE YOUR DICK!"

Zen and the Art of Pizza Delivery

My dad's a cop. He's been with the police force for 19 years or so now, but he got a late start in his police career, not going through the Academy until he was 42. But the thing of it is, my dad was a cop before he was a cop, if you know what I mean. He's always been the authoritarian, good with keeping tabs on things, willing to bust his ass for what he thought was right. So when he actually became a cop, it was like "oh yeah, this fits."

So, for better or worse, it's save to say that I've pretty much always been a pizza delivery guy.

It's easy to see how people could look at that statement and pull a negative connotation from it, or assume that I'm being self deprecating. After all, you think of pizza guys, you think of stoned slackers who want to work as little as possible and spend their free time riding their fixies and listening to Zepplin in their parents basement. I'm not going to say that any of that is false for a lot of drivers.

But I think that--whether they realize it or not--many drivers have a far more zen-like approach to life than the average person. We all do the job for the tips and the ability to have a decent amount of walking around cash in our pockets, but no one ever became a pizza driver under the auspices of becoming rich from it. And most of us are fine with that. Myself, for example: I only deliver three to four days a week, averaging right around 20-25 hours. My paychecks are juuuuuust enough to pay my rent and bills, and the tip money keeps me in food and DVD's. It's not very Rand-ian of me, but it certainly fits the "pursuit of happiness" portion of the American Dream.

Another thing that attracts many of us to the job, is the impermanence of the whole thing. I'm personal friends with the owners of my shop. I first started working for them when I was 18 and they had one store in town. Now I'm 34 and they've expanded to 11 locations in two states. I haven't worked for them the entire time, but rather I've come and gone pretty much as I've pleased. If I decide tomorrow that I've got to get out of dodge for a while, I can say the word and walk away from the job without causing any real disruption for them. And, when I finally arrived at my chosen destination, there's a pretty solid chance that I could get a job the same day delivering pizza somewhere. As I mentioned in my first post, there's not a huge screening process for drivers at most places; there are usually not a lot of questions asked beyond "do you have a car?" "can you find your way around?" and "can you keep your pants on for six consecutive hours?" As a general rule, as long as you can show up when asked, get food from one place to another without it going cold, and don't steal your bank at the end of the day, you can deliver pizzas whenever and wherever you want. It opens up a lot of options for a person who's looking for a more languid approach to life. Which is why it tends to attract stoned slackers. That and the pizza, of course.

I guess what I like most about all of the above, or the thing that most defines the majority of the drivers I know is that we don't tend to define ourselves by our jobs (says the guy with a pizza blog). I happen to deliver pizzas to pay my bills at the moment. I didn't always, and I might choose to stop tomorrow. But in the meantime, the method by which I get my cash isn't a reflection of who I am or what I want out of life; it's a means to end. Granted, not being defined by my job also means I'm not particularly fulfilled by it, either. But I've got other things to do that. My friends. My kittens. A ton of old generation video games. I don't come home at night worrying about the next day or sweating something that happened at work. I come home at night with breadsticks. And for now, that's a pretty sweet way to go.

Let's see how long this lasts

So this is my blog. Ostensibly, it's a blog about delivering pizzas and related mental flotsam and jetsam, but I very highly doubt it'll all be about pizzas. Because, frankly, making pizza delivery interesting--in any meaningful day-in-day-out kind of way--is difficult.

Pizza guys are in kind of a weird karmic spot. We technically work in the food industry, but we don't have the years of training and artistic sensibilities of trained chefs; we spend the bulk of our days in our vehicles, but there's no exhaustive training process, ala long haul truckers or NASCAR drivers; we're delivery people, but don't even get the hipster romanticism of bike couriers.

No my friends, the person who brings you your pizza rarely has any special qualifications or skills that he brings to the task of not dropping your food. Delivery drivers aren't even that strenuously vetted in most cases: as long as you have access to a semi-reliable vehicle and can prove yourself reasonably willing and able to refrain from masturbating onto a customers front step, you've got a job waiting for you.

Which isn't to say that I'm completely cynical about my job. Just that I'm self aware enough to know where it puts me on the food chain of "things people will reliably want to check out when they should be working instead."* So, from time to time, I'll write about other things that strike me. Maybe I'll review a movie from my DVD collection. Perhaps I'll turn extra-meta and blog about how I'm avoiding doing my dishes by blogging about avoiding doing my dishes. I can't promise you that you'll laugh all the time. Or, at least, I can't promise that the laughter won't be directed at me, rather than with me. Though, I guess as long as YOU'RE laughing, what do you care where it's going?

Anyway, this is entry number one. If you're reading this, you can feel free to tell all of your friends that you were there from the beginning. Though if you're going to do that you might want to do it soon since (with my propensity for following through on things), the end might be three or four days hence. In the mean time, feel free to check back for new posts. I don't promise daily content, though I'll certainly try. If there are things you want to know or would like to read about, drop me a line and I'll take it under advisement. If you wind up liking something, tell your friends; like everyone else on the internet, my sense of self worth is tied almost entirely to hit counts and friend totals.

Mahalo.

*The answer, depending upon how much you can get away with looking at from your workplace server, is somewhere between 8th and 119,990th. I know I place under things like: sports, politics, reddit.com, facebook, twitter, email forwards from your grandmother and LOLcats. Then, for that magic few of you who work for places too stupid or trusting to install a content filter, there's always porn.