“Keep the change”, vol. 1

So I delivered pizza for a lot of years, and delivering pizza brings you into contact with some people you would never otherwise meet- coworkers, customers, employers, food distributors, etc etc. In this series of posts, I will document interesting (to me!) stories that have come up over my time driving you your food. And for the record, I will say that I truly miss the delivery business. But I cannot justify it with gas prices being so out of control. There was a time where you could make GOOD money by driving around listening to Slayer cds.

OK, so first up is this guy Richard who I worked with at Mama Mia’s Pizzeria and Seafood. The establishment’s name will be addressed later, as it is sort of absurd, no doubt. But yeah, Richard is difficult to sum up in printed word- he was pretty much constantly high, stole motorcycles as a side job, had enough speakers, gauges, and dials in his car that it looked like a power plant’s control tower, fathered two children, robbed a gas station, and once punched a guy in his head and put him in a coma (which reportedly, he never came out of). He also had a knack for randomly choosing popular catchphrases and repeating them incessantly for weeks at a time. I can still vividly picture him exclaiming “Yo quiero Taco Bell!” and laughing with this weird monotone “aaaaaaahahaaaaaaaahh” that sort of sounded like a muscle car idling at a stop light. He had also been fired and rehired at Mama Mia’s easily ten times over the years. And it’s no joke, something about the guy was so likable, our boss couldn’t stand to see him gone for more than a couple months at a time.

I will tell you two particular stories about Richard for now. One night, a real slow night for deliveries, I returned to see Richard cleaning the inside of one of the coolers, where we kept all the dough and sauces we made every day. Except that he had climbed into the cooler and was cleaning the inside with the doors shut. At first I chalked it up to him being his usual self, stoned out of his mind, as I saw him kind of look up with a woozy, expressionless face. Didn’t look high, more sick. Then I realized he was scrubbing the insides of the cooler with open bottles of both bleach and that purple degreaser stuff that has all kinds of weird chemicals in it. Before allowing the poison to fully render him unconscious, I opened one of the sliding glass doors on the cooler to tell him that maybe this wasn’t a good idea and to let the fumes out a little, at which point he stated “I think I need to take some Tylenol…or get some of that white bitch, aaaaaaaaahaaahaha”. See, “white bitch” in this context was his slang word of choice for cocaine. Dude always had a contingency plan, I’ll grant him that much.

This other time, Richard and a bunch of other coworkers and friends were helping our boss move this gigantic hot tub that he bought from some old lady’s house to his own home. After spending a good 2 hours blowing it on miscalculating how to fit it in the back of a moving truck, we settled on piling it in the back of a pickup truck. I don’t even recall how we fit it on there, but that isn’t the point. So as we’re driving back to the house in my car, it starts to rain. Richard found a pack of gummy worms that I had on the passenger side floor, at which point he decides it will be funny to stick them to my car…bewilderingly, he had some rudimentary concept of chemistry that these gummy worms would in fact bond to my car with the rain water. And they did. So we’re driving around an old station wagon with gummy worms stuck to the windshield, rendering the wipers virtually useless in torrential rains. Whatever, that’s not really “crazy” or anything, but a funny little aside. So we get back to our boss’s house to unload the hot tub, which goes off now without much of a hitch. But before we leave, Richard finds one of those shock collars for dogs that are used with an electric fence…which of course our boss has around his yard for his dog, which for the purposes of the task at hand had been moved inside. For some reason, Richard decides to strap that bad boy around his bicep, and upon seeing this our boss immediately shoves him straight into the woods, where, you guessed it, the electric fence line had been placed. The noise omitted by the guy might best be described as faint hints of pain intertwined with the aforementioned laugh…textually represented by “AHaaaaaaahhhhAHHHaaaaaaahAHHHH”. And since it was mildly shocking him the entire time, he couldn’t get it together enough to take off the shock collar…and he didn’t have the wits about himself to stand up. So he just got shocked for the 20 seconds or so that those things last. To this day, that memory still makes me laugh out loud.
More to come, I’m sure…let me know if this is worth reading. There were a lot of funny observations, stories, and characters in my life over the last decade.

Tags: mazda rx7, reeeeeal good, selling drugs on deliveries, wanna buy a stereo?