Extract from 'The Delivery Guy'
by Mikel K
"I'm looking for a job that I don't want..."
1.
"Have you ever seen God on the bottom of your foot?"
I was in an anonymous place, slouched over, head in my hands, sitting in the back row hating life, hating every one and everything on the planet, hating everyone and everything in the room.
And then this twisted mother-fucker with hair to his ass and a leather jacket started to talk. "I think that God is everywhere and in all of us. I don't think that one God takes precedence over another. If there is a God, it is a kind, caring, loving God. I can't buy Christ over Krishna. I can't buy Krishna over Allah. Allah and Buddha are one and the same. There is one God and she loves me. He loves you, too."
This guy wore John Lennon specs. He had musician written all over him. He was just what I needed at the right time. Finally someone was making sense in a very sick and twisted world.
He called himself Arrogant Joe. It was his punk rock name. You usually think of punks as having little hair or a mohawk, but Arrogant Joe was a punk with long hair. He was a walking oxymoron, but he made sense to to me. "God is on the bottom of your foot. God is in your nostrils. God is up your ass, for God's sake," he said.
Joe had the room going. I could see that he was pissing some people off. But he was making sense to more people. I think a lot of us were sick of having God shoved up our buttocks. We were tired of being told that God was going to send us to hell. We were tired of feeling guilty for everything we did with the eyes of God upon us. In our hearts, we felt that God probably wasn't an asshole, but that wasn't the message we were getting from the priests and preachers. According to them, God was out to get us.
2.
Some people call me the pizza boy. I call myself the delivery guy. Really, I'm a writer, but I go door to door with food to pay the rent and make sure the kids get all the sugar they can in the form of cereal, candy and sodas. You know how kids are. They love sugar. I love my kids. If I die tonight before becoming the rich and famous writer that I think God intended me to be, I will die happy.
"Don't blow it all on the pizza boy, honey..." She comes to the door covered in dust, obviously renovating a house to cash in on some big bucks, but she still wants change from her twenty on a 15.60 pizza. Where I come from, that is called cheap or do you sense some lack of gratitude on my part this fine Saturday evening?
Saturdays are shit for pizza delivery. I will make 50 or 60 bucks tonight. Last night, I made $115. Of course, I ran my ass off to make it and tonight I will take it relatively easy, sit on my ass more, and create great works of literature. That's an advantage to this job. I'm in the car a lot. I'm not under some asshole manager's thumb. I can write whenever I feel like it. I can pick my nose whenever I feel like it. Sometimes, I pull my truck over to the side of the street, hit the flashers and write, right there in traffic. Sometimes, I write at the red light. Sometimes, I even drive and write. Like using the cellular phone, this is risky, though. Years ago, when I was leaving for college, I told my old man that I was going to be a writer. He said that writing was a tough game, that only one in a million make it, and that he didn't think that I had it. My old man thought that I should join the army or get some corporate job that had a pension. My old man was up in years when he had me. All he could think about was retiring. He died of a heart attack still thinking about retiring. All I've ever been able to think about is being a writer. A lot of things got in the way, though. Like that band said, "lately it occurs to me what a long strange trip its been."
3.
When somebody orders a medium plain pizza, I know that I am going to knock on the door of a cheap mothafucka. Sure enough, the short, fat, bald, four-eyed puke hands me a ten for the 8.85 pizza, and says, "keep the change" like he has just discovered the cure for the cancer that eats at his asshole. God Bless America. My last delivery is pregnant with her third child and though it wasn't "planned" they are going to keep it. To kill it, would have made things easy, like eating meat instead of vegetables.
My last delivery was like a year or two older than me. I would have banged her, but she barely opened the door. It's ok, I don't have to fuck her, she tipped good.
I saw five older lesbians walking towards downtown and I thought how they don't have to worry about getting pregnant or if their kid turns out to be a drug addict or a bum. My dad was sure that I was going to turn out to be a bum. Instead I turned out to be an alcoholic.
4.
Last night, I was delivering six fucking pizzas at a time. Tonight, I am leaving the pizza place with one at a time. I haven't cranked out any great literature yet, because I have been too fucking busy carrying these pizzas door to door, one at a time.
Some girl from the expensive all girl's school just called and flipped out because we charge a 15% gratuity to deliver to her school. Well, think about it, you well-educated, stupid bitch...why do we charge your school 15%? Because you and all your sisters are so fucking cheap. This girl is so cheap that she is going to come in and pick up her pizza instead of having it delivered. Fuck her.
5.
Woah. Woah. The usually cheap wannabe surfer boy with the dazzling white teeth just came up with a three dollar tip. He must have hit his head on a rock at the beach or is contemplating suicide and is giving all his money away. Cheap tippers usually come in packs. It's like, all the people who are heap have each others phone number and call each other when they decide to order food to the door.
I also deliver chinese food. Chinese food customers tip better, I think mainly because the food costs more. But I make more money delivering pizzas because the owner of the pizza place pays better than the chinese guy. Some of the other drivers at the chinese place say that chinese people are cheap, but I think that a better word would be frugal. Chinese people know what it is to have nothing over there in China, so when they come over to this country they count their pennies and save them.
Immigrants always seem to get ahead faster than those of us born here. They don't have the American chip on their shoulder and think that the planet or the government owes them something just because they were born here. That's what my Dad said anyway. He ought to know. He was an immigrant .I got two pies at once on the last delivery. They were both medium pies, about 12 bucks each. The first guy was real boring, though friendly, one of those non-descript people you find stuck in traffic in the morning, waiting in a long lunch line at noon and then standing in a long line at the grocery store at 5 pm. I think that the next girl was a lesbian. She wore a pro abortion t-shirt and had thick, thick glasses. I guess she was blind, but I would have taken a blow-job from her. We talked for a while and she kind of grew on me. Six months ago, she took up the mandolin, which, i thought was cool, and all, being that she wasn't as old as me, but was still not as young as most folks who pick up an instrument.
6.
When I was a kid, my parents tried to get me to learn piano. I went to a couple of lessons and decided that I would rather be out in the back yard playing Soldier or Cowboys and Indians. Every time that I hear John Lennon play the introduction to "Imagine," I could kick myself in the teeth. My kid tried for nearly two years to give up the violin, but I wouldn't let him. I said, "you may hate me now, but you'll thank me later." I don't think he hates me. When I come home from a long night of banging on peoples' doors and handing them their pizzas, my kid comes running to the front door and gives me a big hug. When my dad came home, I used to shrink and hide in my bedroom. The difference between my generation and the last one is that they raised their kids on fear and we are raising our kids on love.
7.
I'm back at the pizza joint, now. Business is pretty brisk, inside the restaurant. There are a lot of singles eating tonight, men eating alone. Do you think that men are getting sick of women? I do. I think that women are getting sick of men too. Most couples I see seem to to think that they are in Vietnam. There is a vicious battle of the sexes being fought. I don't know why men and women think that they have to hook up. I guess they are lonely. I like being alone. There is no-one to blow me shit that way. No-one to tell me how to dress. No-one to tell me how to act. No-one telling me where to be when. I have a friend who claims that most of us are halfs trying to hook up with another half to become whole. She says that that isn't healthy, that we need to work on ourselves first, become whole as individuals. Then, and only then, she claims, as a whole, should we try to pair with someone else. And that someone else should be a whole, also, she says.
8.
If I am a whole now, and I am not fully convinced of it, Arrogant Joe played a big role in my development. When I met Joe, I hated everyone and everything. I hated God. I hated Government. I hated my mother, my father and my brother. I hated me. I hated you,
© Mikel K
Reproduced with permission
THOM JONES - ‘Pugilist at Rest,’ ‘Sonny Liston Was a Friend of Mine,’ and ‘Cold Snap’
HUNTER THOMPSON - ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’
J.D. SALINGER - ‘Catcher in the Rye’
JIM CARROLL - ‘The Basketball Diaries’
CHARLES BUKOWSKI - Any word that the man ever wrote...
