Me and my wife split up, and I basically, instead of sitting in a bar drinking all the time, thought I’d get a part-time job and make some money, do something productive. I went there and talked to the Indian guys that owned it and they said, “Come to work, let’s deliver some pizza.”

I figured I’d get some free food out of it.

You have a license.

You have a car.

You’re a pizza man.

The license might be up in the air.

I delivered from Cedonia and Sinclair in the east and all the way over to the Alameda in the west. On the south end, 25th and Sinclair Lane over to Sinclair and Belair Road.

On the north end, I’d go to Putty Hill, out to Joppa Road, a good area.

About seven by seven miles, all of Northeast Baltimore into the County and North Baltimore.

The owners were brothers: Hardeep and Tony—two Hindu guys. They had a lot of experience running pizza places in New York and Jersey, moved down here and bought Zorbas from the Greek people. They were two really good guys. In the kitchen, you had Spanish guys.

On the front desk, you basically had white trash girls. The girls at the register, they paid six an hour under the table. The Spanish guys got $10─12 an hour under the table. It’s hard to find people who can make pizza from scratch—can’t exactly take a crackhead off the street and teach him to spin dough.

They had me, two Nigerian delivery drivers, a Pakistani driver and a regular African American guy who also delivered newspapers in the morning, an alright guy. [The author used to wait for an early morning bus in the area where this fellow delivers papers by throwing them out of his SUV door. Once, when he missed a porch, the older black man standing at the stop with me said, ‘Hey, you need to get that one on the porch. That lady don’t play, she will call on you,” and the fellow ran from his car and placed the paper on the porch.]

Nobody there I had was a problem either. I liked working there.

You got paid six an hour, cash under the table, a buck-fifty a delivery and whatever tips you make. There was a couple times I walked out of there with 200 hundred a night. When the checks come out, all the dindu neighborhoods were jumping with pizzas, Dutch Village all the way down to 23rd. A couple times, I had so much food in the car that the windows were steamed up and I’d have to wipe the windows and windshield down with a rag.

I don’t know if you want to put this in here—but, ah, fuck, put it in—I used to drink beer, a six-pack of beer, driving around drinking beer, delivering food. Sometimes that would lead into a second six-pack.

The only problem with the pizza delivery job is its hard on your car.

I don’t give a fuck how bad a neighborhood was, my job was to take the food to the door. The Nigerian, Pakistani and African American guys would call from the car and make them come out and get it, make them come out in the street and get it. The black customers couldn’t believe I was bringing food to their door. The funny thing was, it was always a surprise with the blacks. You knock on the door, and the person that answers is never the one who ordered the food. They never pitch in and order something together. It’s always every dindu for himself. So the call goes out that there is food at the door, and people are running all over the house, and eventually the person who ordered it comes to the door with the money.

The owners and employees got mad at me one time when I was handing menus out to people on the street. They thought these were shady people—well, they were drug dealers—I drank some sips from a forty ounce with them and was handing menus out, and they started ordering pizzas to drug corners. The owners wanted to expand north into white areas. I had a lot of fun doing it. Take the food to the door. These are the type of guys that scare off most people. But all they was worried about was ordering some hot food—dindus gotta eat too.

With dangerous groups of people, if you play it off right and approach them first, you offer the olive branch—it’s always worked good for me. That probably kept me out of a lot of trouble. Instead of covering up when there’s no cover around, when everybody knows you’re delivering pizza with money in your pocket, you approach them. You have to be believable and honest and talk the talk. If you look scared, and you deliver pizza in the ghetto, it’s not gonna turn out good for you. I’m not triggering the predatory instinct.

If you ever heard about these idiots riding bikes in California and getting snatched off their bikes by mountain lions, well, sometimes you have to stand there and talk to the mountain lion.