I *am* a hideous triumph of form and function!

Once upon a time, I used to shag pizzas for a living. In pizza parlor vernacular, ’shagging pizzas’ means to run your ass off delivering them. When I took the job, it was with great angst and embarrassment, but it turns out that pizza delivery folk make some pretty decent scratch, all in all. Plus people want to tip you in beer and pot and free peepshows and invite you to their parties because they are already drunk and you’re sporting breasts and a jaunty ballcap.

(One time I got out of the car to hear a guy holler, “Pizza dude’s herrrre!” then amend it with, “WHOA, pizza dude has tits!” upon focusing his beer goggles)

I’m not kidding! On more than one occasion an exhibitionist or two ‘arranged’ to be ‘accidentally surprised’ at a pizza girl arriving to deliver their kitchen sink pie while they were writhing naked on the couch in front of the painfully-clean glass storm door. And then there was the laydeh who lived on Sunset Lane, who had a thing for see-through peignoirs left fetchingly open. Oh the humanity.

So as my sentence as a pizza driver wore on, I came to see that the job had a certain charm; the biggest surprise to me was that it actually was its own flavor of fun when I didn’t look down my nose at myself for being ‘only a pizza driver’. Like any job, it has its own rhythms, its own charm, its own style of communication, its own inside jokes and rituals.

New drivers, of course, got hazed. The lesser end of this was sending them on all the shit runs (waaay out there in BFE, no-tippers, the peignoir laydeh). The greater end of this was sending them on a mission to find either the Dough Patch Kit (for when you put a hole in the disc of dough that will comprise the crust, geddit?) or the Makeline Extender. This was the snipe hunt of the pizza world. Newbie got sent to the back of the store to fetch one or the other and, after either some earnest searching or mere standing around looking at the storage room peppered with some scratching of the head, came back empty-handed. They were then chided mildly and sent back. After a couple-three of these back-and-forths, a seasoned employee would accompany them back to the storage room and after a few seconds of looking in the ‘usual place it’s stored’ pronounced that a store in the neighboring city had borrowed it. Then newbie driver was sent over there to fetch it, only to be greeted with riotous laughter by the other store’s entire crew (who customarily lined up to applaud) upon asking for the nonexistent device.

All of this was running through my head randomly today when something occurred to me: To attempt a relationship with some people is to be sent after the Makeline Extender or the Dough Patch Kit relentlessly and maybe often. At some point you wise up and realize the joke’s been on you, but now you are wiser and will only undertake a fool’s errand if you’re in on the gag. In those circumstances, it’s known as an adventure.