Smelly Old Man

There’s this one place I hate to go. It’s a triplex on a cul-de-sac in Arlanza. Actually, it’s a trailer behind a triplex, occupied by a smelly motherfucker with a big, old-man-of-the-mountain beard and hunched posture. Know that scene from Indiana Jones when the Angel of Death comes out of the Ark of the Covenant in and melts all the Nazis? That’s what happens to you when you smell this guy’s living space.

I wish you could hear my impression of the way this guy talks. Just imagine Gollum’s hiss when he inhales, Popeye’s growl when he flexes his vocal chords, and when he’s relieving his lungs of the excess air, a horse flapping its lips. In fact, he does that every single time he exhales, often to saliva-spattering effects.

He always has his fly down and doesn’t seem to have a pair of underwear to his name. I’ve only ever seen the bare skin of his leg, and luckily not any part of him I wouldn’t want to see (but then, I really don’t wanna see him in the first place). So as not to catch a glimpse of any shriveled sex organs, I have to focus on his face, which isn’t much better with the beard and the missing teeth and the nasal secretion and the O2 tubes strung around his chin and behind his ears.

His favorite item on the menu? Sandwiches. He always orders 40 or 50 dollars worth of sandwiches, usually with an armload of sodas, and despite the fact that he always pays with a 100 dollar bill, he never fucking tips.

I understand if someone is poor. I understand this guy is old and feeble and may not be able to drive. But there are public transportation methods here. There’s “Dial a Ride.” Heck, he probably lives close enough to one of the grocery stores that offers shuttle services. 50 dollars can buy so much more food at a market than at a restaurant.

But this motherfucker orders 12 diet Pepsis. Almost cleans out our fridge. Seriously, there’s only one left. I can only bag them four 2-liter bottles at a time, using two liners so they don’t break and spill all over the place. It takes three trips to and from my car, it’s not a short walk (because triplexes are somewhat deep), and it’s fucking heavy.

Even though I may profess to the world that you do not fuck with anyone who handles your food, I’m still not the type to spit in a drink or jizz in the dough. That’s just gross. But you better believe I give each and every one of these 2-liter bottles a shake. I can just imagine them exploding in the old fucker’s face.

You know, I hate to say these things, because I don’t wanna be in this guy’s situation. I don’t wanna be old and lonely, dying in a trailer with oxygen tubes sticking out of my nose. I know I’m gonna get old, too. I want a family (or someone) to take care of me.

But if I pay the delivery driver with a 100 dollar bill every fucking time, I’m gonna at least spare a buck. Maybe two or three.

Jabberwocky

I’m at a house near the end of a cul-de-sac. If I kept going, I’d be in the parking lot of an apartment complex. I knock on the door, and suddenly get the funny feeling someone’s watching me.

Something that cracks me up about delivering pizzas: people seem to think their windows are built using two-way glass, as if they expect me to not notice them staring at me. And they also think they’re soundproof. What really gets me is that they don’t answer the door sometimes. They just stare. This window to my left, where I can clearly see several small fingers holding the blinds open, it doesn’t have a screen. In fact, the glass isn’t even there. It looks like it broke sometime in the past, and not even all that recently. It’s got dust and cobwebs attached to various corners of broken glass. Like this kid thinks I can’t see his fingers sticking between the blinds.

“Jabberwocky!” He whispers loudly, if that’s even possible. “Jabberwocky!”

What I wanna do is toss the pizza at him through the window. Or at least tell him to get his mom and dad and open the fucking door. He obviously has no idea what he’s saying. He goes out and sees a poor adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s work and thinks it’s something original simply because he’s never seen it. And it’s not that I hate Tim Burton’s version of Alice in Wonderland. It’s that kids are gonna grow up thinking this is the real story, and when they inevitably encounter the real story, they’re gonna think, “What the hell? That’s not Alice in Wonderland!”

It happened to me when I was told that whenever Ariel walked, it felt like she was walking on knives. And that her thick-headed love interest never figured out it was her all along, the one who really loved him. And she didn’t get her man. And she died and turned into sea foam. At least, that’s how the story was supposed to go, but this is, as Propagandhi once called, “a Disney-fied history.” Things have been fluffed up for today’s audiences, who apparently can’t stand a sad ending.

Even when the dad finally answers the door, even when he’s standing there handing me the money, this kid never shuts up. “Jabberwocky! Jabberwocky!” He whispers it over and over again. Dad’s acting like he doesn’t even notice. I hand him the food and go back to my car. Some day this kid will encounter the real “Jabberwocky” poem. What a shock it’ll be when he sees how drug-induced imagery actually is.

Exact change

A guy demanded exact change today day. I don’t know why some people assume pizza drivers carry coin belts. I only get ten dollars at the beginning of the day for change (what they call a “bank”), and then whatever I accumulate as I go. I don’t usually take quarters out of the drawer.

It wasn’t even the guy who told me, it was his kid. And it was only like, twelve cents. I had to go rummaging through my car to find the right coinage, listening to this guy bitch about getting cheated out of his money without even seeing the stupid idiot. It was only his kids that I interacted with. Great way to set an example, asshole.

The outskirts of Moreno Valley

I went to the outskirts of Moreno Valley, today. That’s right, it got slow enough to send me into another store’s territory just to make some scratch. That, or the MoVal location got lazy and told them to call us.

Either way, when I get to the house, it’s this little old lady with pinkeye, or something, because one of the lids is an unnatural shade of pepper-red.
I tell her the total.

“Wha? 34?”

“No, 38.44.”

“34?”

“Thir-tee-eight-four-tee-four.”

“Well, I have 35 here…” She hands me a 20, a 10 and a 5, then reaches into a coin purse. “And here’s 2 dollar coins for you.”

So she’s actually short a dollar and 56 cents. She’s old. I’ll take this small hit.

To be honest, though, I kinda suspect she knows exactly how much the order costs and she’s just feigning senility. Seriously, I am so gonna so that when I get old. I’ll get in a high speed chase and pretend not to know. “What? A hundred and twenty?! I though I was only going 12!”

Another thought: is it a good deed on my part to allow this woman to lie to me and steal from me and take advantage of me, just because she’s old and poor? This isn’t like that time a different old lady gave me 12 bucks, meaning to only tip 2 but there was a brand-crispy-new 10 dollar bill stuck underneath. I told her what happened and gave the 10 back.

“Thank God you’re an honest man,” she said.

Later, I would retell this story to a friend, and he would respond by asking, “Why thank God you’re an honest man? Why not thank you?” And he’s got a point. God didn’t make my decision for me.

I’m not a terribly religious person, but I don’t think God would approve of the red-lidded lady lying and stealing from me. Unless she actually is senile.

Bad smells

You know, I understand that certain animals—or more accurately, all animals, especially those with an olfactory sense far exceeding our own—like to make everything smell like them, and they don’t regard them as bad odors, but us WASPy-clean Americans living in a country settled by Puritans (and indentured servants) have very particular noses. We bathe daily, we shave, we get our panties in a wad when Janet Jackson flashes her titty (while at the same time, American civilians in Iraq were being burned alive with their barbecued corpses got strung over bridges and the media hardly gave a shit) and we don’t expect average people to have such smelly houses. I can’t believe how many houses I’ve been to that smell like every possible secretion produced by the human body combined! Now, I’ve been told Riverside is a smelly city. In fact, I’d wager the whole of Southern California is a pretty smelly place due to the pollution, but only to those not familiar with it. When I’m told by a relative who’s from out of town that this place stinks, it moves me to want to change it. (When displaced Orange County-ites complain about it, it moves me to want make it smell worse so we can be rid of displaced Orange County-ites.) Someone has to tell these people at some point that their houses and apartments smell worse than shit. They must at least be able to infer the bad smell by the way I hold my nose every time I get near them. Please, people! Clean your houses regularly! If not because you’ll be healthier, but also for the sake of pizza drivers!

What the old clerk was like

When the old clerk still worked here, there used to be this guy who’d hang out with him and his friends in front of the store. He was an older man, middle-aged, whose speech was slightly labored like he was always drunk or high, or something.

And he would tell stories. Filthy stories. Horrible, dirty stories, that I feel the need to censor because they were also pretty damn sexist.

All the stories were about sexual encounters. Very one-sided sexual encounters, where the women don’t sound like they were enjoying themselves too much. He had a thing for euphemisms for the vagina. His favorite was, “the all-seeing eye.”

Not much later, I found the ex-clerk and his friends stapling flyers to the poles that hold up the eaves outside the store, laughing as they did so. Apparently, this man and his dirty stories and euphemisms and misogynistic attitude toward women, he was a registered sex-offender. And the ex-clerk found him on the sex-offender website. His mug-shot somewhat resembled Homer Simpson’s yearbook picture, with his eyes half-closed and his mouth cracked open, stubble around the lips. “Ah, the memories!” The man had two counts of forced penetration.

I’ve never seen him since.

Bad Jewish Stereotype

So this bad Jewish stereotype walks into my store, an empty plastic pitcher in one hand and a small child (probably grandchild) being toted in the other. He looks at the soda machine, all its Pepsi branding sprayed lavishly across. “How much are your sodas?”

“2 dollars,” replies the clerk. (They’re now 2.49.)

“2 dah—2 dollars? Sheeminy!” The guy has the excess cartilage on the nose that comes with old age. I heard cartilage doesn’t stop growing, ever, but why does it seem to be worse in men? And honestly, I’m not deliberately trying to be stereotypical about Jews, but this guy really has a huge, honking nose. Almost as big as my Italian nose. “Everybody wants more than what it’s worth,” the bad Jewish stereotype remarks. “Where’s the owner so I can ring his neck?”

He goes on to order a 2-liter Pepsi, and even before he’s paid, even before he’s looked right at me and asked, “Do you work here?” apparently not noticing the company logo monogrammed to my shirt, he pops the soda top and pours it into his pitcher.

For the record, one of the reasons why he’s such a bad stereotype of the Chosen People is because of the way he talks. It’s not something that can be easily transcribed, but just to write in the vernacular for a bit, the word “here” is more like “heah” and “worth” and “work” are more like “woith” and “woik”—not quite in that Lawrence Tierney style, but close.

After he’s asked Stupid Question of the Day (the one about me working here), he pours out a Vegas-style shower of nickels and asks me to count it out. I fudge it and give the store an extra ten cents. The man and his grandkid leave the store with a storm cloud chasing them.

I’m sorry if I’ve offended any Jews out there, but remember, he was the one behaving so stereotypically.