Who the fuck cares if it's Domino's? he told her as she scurried behind the fence in shame. It's nearing midnight. I think they were a couple; he had driven to her apartment and it was getting late and she was escorting him back to his car but their lips were just too irresistible. It's Domino's. Not a person. No one in particular, which is to say no one at all. The mask doesn't help. It's like Kurt Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron.

You see that night that couple scurried behind me, I delivered to an apartment. We're supposed to only deliver to the lobby. First: there's a pandemic and it's best to limit the amount of surfaces that I come in contact with. Second: pizza delivery is more dangerous than being a police officer. Anyways, an old black man comes down with a shopping cart from the elevator. Reminds me of Frederick Douglass almost. He tells me to put his pizza and breadsticks in the cart. Then he slowly sits in a chair and goes through his wallet, trying to find a twenty-dollar bill in a wallet that was full of them. He said something about how cold the weather is and how late the hour must be, taking a little pity on me.

On the phone he requested that the delivery guy bring change for a twenty. I pre-emptively take out my change. He hands me a twenty and two dollars. Out of politeness I ask if he wants change. He refuses. I laugh at myself I brought only ones! He laughs too. For a moment, I thought we could've been friends. Maybe he thought that too. Anyways, I close that day so I leave and he's left sitting there taking a breather from the journey.

# I arrive at a party hosted by some young desi guy. He's not wearing a mask, probably already buzzed by something, smoking a cigar as long as my forearm. Cars are lined up on his driveway. He hands me ten dollars and asks what store I belong to and when I clock out, promising me that he'd show up later to give me a fairer tip. (It was a lot of pizza.) He didn't show up, but he did compliment my 2002 Nissan Maxima. It's the sport edition. Then again, he also said I needed new rims.

# A family left an envelope outside their door. Said it was for me. I didn't want to open it in front of them, so I drove around the corner out of sight. It contained forty dollars. I felt like shit; the same day I got news that my thesis didn't pass for publication. The reviewers seemed to have dismissed it from the beginning. I don't think I deserved it either.

# It was snowing. People order lots of pizza. The largest tip I received was from a libertarian—ten dollars. (I saw his car's anti-socialist bumper stickers.) I guess if you own a mediocre home in an affluent suburb you've made it. To protect your little bit of earth, you vote for less taxes and regulations. It's not the billionaires, Bernie, it's the upper-middle class most afraid of a better society: they have the most to lose in the system where they're winning.

I bet I could beat that guy in a fist fight. Anyways, if you have any sort of class-consciousness, don't order pizza when it snows. Or if you do, ask yourself if two or three dollars would be sufficient incentive to drive down to the store and get your junk food by yourself. (How's that for self-sufficient individualism?)

# Some guy from a luxury apartment calls. Leaves a one-cent credit card tip. Cancels the order because he doesn't want to come down to the lobby.

# Another luxury apartment. Wants me to deliver pizza to his door even though he's aware that Domino's wants him to deliver to the lobby or the concierge unless he has some sort of disability or something. I ask the concierge to help me out. She does. I leave his order on a table so he can pick it up at his discretion. A doordash guy looks at me half envious, half with hatred: his customer wants him to deliver to their door. My safety only matters when there's a policy that I can use as an authority. Otherwise it's expected I comply with every whim.

# I helped an old lady with her groceries while on a delivery. She says the pizza smells so good but her doctor says she can't have any in order to regulate her "diabeetus".

# A coworker is watching girls twerk on Instagram while on his down time. Another coworker—older Nigerian guy—says to me, "Doesn't that make your dick hard?" I reply it doesn't. He looks at me with this sort of malice, a sort of suspicion that I could be homosexual. I confidently reply, Not at work. He bursts out laughing. I laugh too.

# There's this one woman who sends her child to the door so she doesn't have to pay a tip to the delivery guy. I'm sure if she can spend twenty-seven dollars and eighty-nine cents on some garbage topping combinations, she can at least afford a dollar or two more. She half-heartedly calls out How about the tip? as I'm already at my car and her door is nearly closed. Maybe she's trying to assuage her guilty conscience, maybe she's mocking me. I sigh and turn some music on. I don't think much of it, or of her.

# My coworkers complain about the tips from the low-income housing areas. But it's there where a young woman gave me a generous tip for some measly breadsticks, and a young man made sure I was ok when he ordered pizza during a cold, rainy night. He handed me five dollars on top of his credit card tip.

Another time, the app I used for work didn't work and I had to call a customer using my personal number. This is your delivery driver, I'm outside. She said my name perfectly, even sweetly when she came outside to get her pizza. It wasn't an over-pronounced Arabic or an under-pronounced English. She probably saw my caller ID. And she seemed to make a point about calling me my name. There's no way she could've been attracted to me—remember, Harrison Bergeron—and she had her child with her. I guess it was a nice reminder that my name is beautiful and I like being called by it.

# I deliver to a naval base. The guy didn't tip beforehand, so I hand him his receipt to sign. He signs it, giving me no tip—he went out of his way to make sure that the zeros were clear. He shook his head and gave me a five dollar bill. I might do that from now on.

# A man named "Don Strong" calls us. Threatens to call corporate when we inform him that our pizza store can't deliver to his address and he'd have to call another one. "I always call this store and they delivered last time," he says. We check his order history; there isn't any.

# Someone new gets hired. I take him on a delivery with me. (I was thrown to the wolves on my first delivery—I didn't think I needed my car that day because I thought all I would only watch training videos that day. Ran back one and a half miles to my car, pizzas in hand.) We went to the same middle school, so there's a good chance we met but have no recollection of one another.

# Christmas Eve. The last delivery of the night. A woman orders five two-liter bottles of Coca Cola, and nothing else. Total was twenty-eight dollars, maybe a bit more. She lives in a building that has a north wing and a south wing, so in the address the customer has to specify what wing they're in. Of course, she doesn't. Other customers from her apartment complex have used that ambiguity to claim that we never delivered their pizza. I lug those five bottles to my car. Of course, I don't catch that until I'm at the address.

I call her, but she doesn't respond. That's bad news. I call back the store, but the manager says she doesn't respond. So I go to the concierge, but I think she's on break. I drive back to store, lug the soda back in to the fridge and start sweeping.

The phone rings again: the manager picks it up, it's her. She specifies her wing. I lug the soda back in to my car. Then drive to her address. Then take it up the elevator. Of course, she lives at the end of the hallway. When she opened the door I immediately noticed she's a kind of person unable to carry all that soda herself.

She says thank you, and tips me ten dollars.

# My phone fell out of my pocket—cracking nearly beyond repair—as I threw a crumpled up receipt on to the roof of a building, just to see if I could.

# I press the wrong kind of breadstick when a customer calls on the phone, and I forgot to add coupons. When the customer heard the total, he just hung up.

# A guy comes in, said he just drove seventeen hours from Arkansas and that a hot pizza is just what he needs. I tell him he can get a free drink on us. He's so grateful and my coworkers praise how noble I am. Later that night, after doing inventory, we're missing the exact dollar amount of a single twenty-ounce soda from the register. What did I expect?

# Slow afternoon. Two coworkers fiercely argue whether one should want to die, or be ready to die. I heard echoes of Socrates and Crito in there. One calls the other a pussy.

# I deliver to the naval base where they treat wounded soldiers. I wonder why the customer is taking so long to come retrieve his pizza. He rolls down in a wheelchair. I wish he said something about it on the phone.

# There's a co-worker who's a a public school teacher. He delivers pizzas during the breaks and he's been delivering for a long time.

# There's a guy named who goes by "Zachy Poo". He plays this game with us where he makes an order using the same last name—Poo—but changes his first name. We try to catch it before making his order, otherwise he denies he ever made it once the delivery driver gets to his door.

# A coworker explains to me how another coworker won't talk to him sometimes because they're rival ethnic groups from the same country in Africa. He asks me why I'm so nice but why the other Sri Lankan guy is a jerk. (Yes, there's another Sri Lankan guy at work.) I explain that my people and his people don't get along. He laughs. We understand each other. Or so he thinks. As a side note, I didn't know how much Africans could disdain Blacks, if that makes sense.

# There's a homeless woman my age outside a luxury condominium that starts at $250,000 a unit. She can't afford her insulin. One cold night I gave her pizza, and talked to her a few times, but it isn't enough. I've seen her mental health deteriorate. Now she's ranting about government surveillance. It snowed pretty hard as I was writing this. I wish things could be different.

# I tried lava cakes. It's like warm, liquid oreos melting in your mouth.

# A coworker notices I won't eat a pepperoni pizza. He asks if I'm Muslim. I reply, Fifty/fifty and wave my hand. We both laugh hard.

# A coworker explains to me that women like strong men, but they also really skinny guys. Turns out skinny guys are packing under the hood. I ask him Is that what your wife says? He laughs hard. A few weeks later, I learned he's been separated from his wife for a number of years. There's a sadness to his eyes. That means he laughed to expel the loneliness, right?

# I can finally afford a new battery and oil change, and I know what to do to fix that squeaking exhaust pipe. I wish I had worked like this before going to college. (I never really had a chance to. Everyone beat college into me.) I would've been more confident.

# One night, a man dressed like a pimp comes in the store. Pilgrim shoes and wide-brim hat, button down exposing his chest. He's drunk. It's a fucking Tuesday. We've been done with carry-out orders for hours. Pulls out a wine bottle and drinks it in front of us, straight from the bottle. I don't know anything about wine to know if it's an expensive brand or not. He smiles coyly. He's too pretty to be straight: light-skin, chiseled jaw with 5 o'clock shadow, long lashes. Keeps looking at me all weird. Tips me five dollars when I help him decide on his veggie pizza because he says he's vegan. "You know," he says, "you remind me of my assistant, she's Pakistani."

# I see young men and women – younger than me – without legs every goddamn day. They're at the Naval Base. Wheelchairs, crutches, prosthetics. I'm so sad and angry. They'd probably just say "I'm proud to have served my country."

# Celeste – the homeless woman in front of the luxury condo – is gone. Her stuff has been cleaned off the bench. I don't know what happened to her. I get the feeling she's been put away, like a dog.

# A young girl calls the store. She asks if we could give away pizzas to homeless people. I ask her if she wants to pay for it. She replies, "Well, you're not doing your part and you're a bitch and I'm going to tell the news." She's got to learn that from somewhere, right?

# A coworker on the make-line was so fed up that the other make-line staff weren't helping him make the orders, which were coming in fast. He started doing that thing where he'd angrily slam down equipment out of frustration while making the pizzas. I was surprised how it immediately reminded me of my parents' anger when I was a kid. They'd do the same, especially my father. I felt so anxious. I offered to help making what I could; he softened his tone somewhat and declined.

# A beautiful woman answers the door one Friday night. I see her husband is watching football on the sofa. Some guys have all the luck.

# A little boy adjacent to a house I'm delivering to somewhere in the suburbs has set up an art stand. One dollar per piece. They're cartoony drawings on printer paper. Naturally, I purchased pizza slice guy piece. “Because I'm a pizza man,” I told the kid. But he was too focused on the bill in my hand. The kid's art has a good sense of form and they're very expressive. I miss teaching.

# A coworker complains to the manager that a white Kia has been parking outside the store every night in the same spot with tinted windows. She's afraid, and wants to file a police report. She asks me to get the guy's license plate while I drive by. My sperg brain instead made sustained eye contact with the guy inside the car although I couldn't make out his features. When I come back, there's a swarm of cop cars surrounding the Kia. Turns out it's just an NIH security guard taking advantage of a neighboring store's guest wifi after hours. The manager called the cops on him; I guess at 12am and two streets away the cops had nothing better to do. The next morning at the gas station the Kia guy and I made eye contact; our cars were parked next to each other.

# I can't really point to a specific incident. Sometimes I feel a certain kind of hopeless misery when I realize how much money there is, and how hard it is to earn. How I have to be a troubadour, behave a certain way, do this and that, in order to make a livable wage in tips. Once, I sat in the parking lot and cried because of how hard it is.

# I learned that one of my co-workers is actually crazy and possessive. When he was romantically interested in another coworker (please don't shit where you eat my bros), he would call her upwards of twenty-five times a day. She showed me her phone logs, holy guacamole she dodged a bullet.

# Two coworkers, driver to assistant manager, both older men:

—Can I take two orders?

—Fuck you, take one.

—But there's so many orders.

—I said take one, nigga.

—What the fuck? You can't talk to me like that. You can't see shit with your Chinese eyes.

—Shut up my son.

—Fuck you dad.

# There's this one weird dude who always orders the same pizza nearly every night. Mushrooms, black olives, onions – Brooklyn style. He does his exercise at night, I've seen him jogging around during deliveries. He will inspect the pizza before taking it every time. Today he asked why the cheese was more orange than usual. I made up some story about the oven needing constant readjustment; really it's because whoever made the pizza just added a little bit more tomato sauce. He might be a moron, but then again it could be some kind of OCD. Maybe the former accusation is insulting to the latter accusation.

# There's this Indian (her name is super Tamil or Telugu) nurse (she comes in wearing her scrubs) who will eat the same crap for lunch every single day. One medium sausage pizza. $11.57 each time (including tax). Hasn't tipped once. God, for some reason, I just hate her.

# I deliver to this house surrounded by large hedges. A group of kids are bouncing on a trampoline, you can tell it's a birthday party. A beautiful woman collects the pizza. A Garden of Eden, and I could not enter.

# There's this one guy who consistently orders a pan pizza with an icing cup. What does he do with the icing cup? Does he just slurp it like a yogurt cup? Worse: does he fucken dip his pizza in to the icing?

# We got a new system at work. Now we don't pre-fold boxes. Everyone was supposed to watch a video about how these creative types supposedly made our old system obsolete. I don't have anywhere else to express this, so I'll write it here. Can you imagine telling one of them, "Hey this new system you've created doesn't account for the realities of a pizzeria that can't meet the demands of the system 100% of the time." Imagine that disgusted, I know more than you glare–you know which one I'm talking about.

# I'm in an awkward position in traffic. A woman is in the car behind me. A man in another car goes out of his way to get my attention to tell me I'm blocking the woman. Fuck you, white knight.

# Turns out the public school teacher guy is a Trumper. You could tell by his hand-wave appeals to "strength" and "common sense". The Tragedy of The Commons.

# Don Strong sends an Ethiopian cab driver to retrieve his pizza for him. Turns out the guy used to call our Domino's when the store's delivery boundaries would reach his place...ten years ago. In those times, he asked a coworker to drive him to DC. Man, what the hell.

# My brother reports that Celeste was last seen at Pike and Rose, down Rockville Pike.

# There's a psychic on Connecticut Avenue. Wants to pay in $100 cash. I tell him it's against policy to take large bills; he'd have to pay another way. He hangs up, then calls again demanding the manager. I give the phone to the manager on duty. Frustrated, the psychic tells us he owns a Lambo. I wish it was me on the phone–I'd tell him to use it as collateral for his pizza.

# An older woman came into the store. She looked despondent, something heavy was on her mind. Her order is taking a little longer to prepare. I ask her, "Do you want to join our team?" She lit up. "Thank you, I needed that. Thank you for saying the word "team"". "Of course," I replied. "You're even wearing our colors."

# A young coworker, let's call him "Noah", comes from a wealthy family. Looks weird, like a lanky bird. He asked me why I couldn't just fix my ruined exhaust system. Or, after getting his receipt and checking his tip, he'll say, "Yes!" after shifting his eyes to check to see if people can hear him. Once he was talking to a coworker and I wasn't sure if "My father is a lawyer" was a joke or not....

# It's nearing midnight. I am at a stoplight. I am in a thoughtful mood. I turn my head. The young woman driving the car next to me has been studying me. She has a very pale face and dark curly hair. I wonder what she was thinking.

# It's near midnight. I'm listening to the heaviest of heavy metal. At a stoplight I pull up next to some Pakistani men in their van. They're bearded and wearing thobes. Serious expressions on their faces.

# A coworker becomes devoutly religious so God will grant him a car dealership.

# I've worked a very difficult eight hour shift. I made exactly $50 in tips. I am leaving for the day when another coworker clocks in. His first order nets him a $50 tip. I wanted to cry.

# There is an upscale apartment on the road behind us. I could either walk around the block, or I could jump the parking lot fence. So I hung the hot bag on the fence post, vaulted over the fence, and retrieved the hot bag from the other side.

# Don't tip? Sound nasty over the phone? I roll down my windows and keep the hot bag open as I get to your residence.

# Sometimes it can take forty minutes to get in and out of the NIH. Once I served a very large order to one of the building, but they gave me a dirty look when I forgot their plastic forks.

# I'm at the naval base. A woman about my age is wearing tight fitting cow-print jeans that shows off her butt. She's walking into one of the dorms, a guy from inside the dorms hollers at her, catcalling/complimenting her jeans, she slaps her butt.

# On warm weekends I see people enjoying their afternoons with each other. I see beautiful women, and happy families, and friends going out on the town. I see the outfits they're wearing, compare them to my dirty work uniform, how I hide my face with a mask, and my beat-up car, and my poverty; the shame not that I have to work for a living, but I have to work so hard for a living. I feel miserable and lonely.

# You're not supposed to share your really favorite songs with anyone: the pleasure of the song will be mixed in with memories, or even worse, names. I was playing my really favorite song with my windows rolled down one night — Frodus's "The Earth Isn't Humming" (it doesn't matter now, it's already mixed in with memories). A group of girls in an SUV roll next to me at a traffic light. Their windows are down too. I can hear them laughing and chatting, but as my song progresses (It wasn't THAT loud), all their chatter dies down until there is complete silence and I figure all they hear is a pizza guy (Domino's) listening to his favorite music at a traffic light.

# I get to a house. The instructions tell me to call first, and not to knock the door. I call. I see someone barely pull open the curtains and check the window. It goes to voicemail instantly. CHOO CHOO! ALL ABOARD THE TRUMP TRAIN! TRUMP, MELANIA, IVANKA ... it goes on for two minutes. I disassociate. Finally, I hear the beep. Please come outside, it's your Domino's delivery driver, I have your pizza. A big long nose pokes out the door. Like a rat checking to see if the coast is clear, a sniveling little man comes out bit by bit. When he gave himself the OK, he scurries out into the sunlight, towards my car, and asks "Were you the one who called?".

# Speaking of Trumpers, when Trump caught COVID (forgoing his recommended prescription of bleach, which, if ingested, would have stopped the virus in two weeks), he was recuperating at Walter Reed. His fans cheered him on from behind the fence, waving signs, yelling and screaming, and, when they got tired of that, prowled around the neighborhoods in cowboy hats, boots, and leather chaps. One guy wore an American flag coat. My mother and siblings told me they were scared of these people.

# On January 6th, I was delivering pizza in DC. A cop - not just a cop, a police chief - pulled me over because I rolled through a stop sign. I feigned ignorance and he let me go. He was making sure those hooligans stayed where they belong, at the Capitol.

# You can tell when the navy cadets get paid: you get a nice tip. You can also tell when they've run out of money.

# I arrive at the naval base, delivering to a regular. He looks at me and says Where's my calzone?

—Sir, we don't make calzones. They're not even on our menu.

—The guy on the phone said you had calzones.

—I'm sorry, that's not even possible, there's no way to input calzones on our ordering system... I don't even know how that happened.

—Well, make sure it doesn't happen next time. I know it isn't your fault.

I knew exactly who the dumbass on the phone was.

# It's 1 or 2 in the morning, I can't remember. I knock on the door. Two really weird looking people open the door, a man and a woman, real oblong. You can just tell they're having the freakiest, raunchiest sex. You can just tell. The skinny little man chuckles "Ha! Sorry for ordering pizza so late, hehe." The woman behind him grins. I reply without affect, "No, it's just my job."

# It's late at night on a Friday night. A young couple answers the door. After I gave them the pizza and counted the cash, I sat in my car and thought before driving off. I am missing out, I have missed out.

# The customer is writing down my tip, but fumbles adding up the totals. He confides "Is it OK if I don't get the total right? I don't want anyone to judge me." I nod and reassure him that it's alright. He insists he wants to get the sum right, but there's some sense of urgency, and I tell him that as long as the tip is clear, he'll be fine. Later that night, when my managers were counting up my receipts, they laughed. Look at this dumbass! Can't do basic math!

# I deliver to a beautiful, small house nearby. It's hidden by thick trees. Looks magical. The total for the pizza is $20.53. I knock on the door, an older man opens it. He gives the pizza to his excited little granddaughter. He hands me a $20 bill, smirks, and says "Keep the change". Shuts the door. I was too stunned to do anything. I just went back to the store.

# A coworker is telling another coworker about a woman he's taking on a date. The second coworker dispirits him by telling him only hookups are worth any effort. The first coworker responds, almost thinking on his feet (almost): Hey, but if you date her, then you can have sex all the time. The other coworker laughs and says Right, right and turns away. The first coworker's face: tired, sad. No, more than that. Exhausted. You could tell that he put on a macho front for the other guy. He's lonely.