Number of Deliveries: 12
Sales: $359.98
Tips: $65.50
Hours: 3.60
Total Wage: $26.19 per hour
"That's an automatic eight bucks," Matt, a driver, says to me while I'm running a credit card.
"Really?" I say, excited about the prospect of a good tip. Some people order so often, you can almost predict what they'll order and how much they'll tip.
"Yeah, just be sure to compliment him on his dogs. He has two Boxers," Matt says. "I've been laying it on thick around here lately, especially while serving, feeding people all the lines, and I'm getting better tips."
When I get to the house, a very attractive, dark-haired woman in her 40s answers the door. She commands the two, aging Boxers to stay on the stairs, and they obey. "How are you?" she says in a kind voice. I tell her I'm good, as she takes the food and places it on the entryway table. The two dogs stare me down and shake their bodies, wanting to charge at me for some serious lovin'. But they stay put.
She comes back to get the pen and credit card slip, then signs it on the entryway table. As she hands it back, her equally cool and handsome husband, with slightly salt and peppered hair, joins her, and says, "Did you give him a huge, huge tip?" She looks at the slip, then to me, embarrassed. She's penned in the predicted $8, so she tells him, "I think so." He winks at me. She's about to close the door, and I ask for my pen back, which she's left on the table. "Oh, details," she says as she fetches the pen. I thank them, and we say our goodbyes, but as I climb into my car, the man emerges from the house to say thank you one more time. God, they must be the coolest people in all of Rancho Santa Fe.
A little while later, I arrive at a house on Rancho Diegueno, right up the street from the Pizzeria. The woman beeps me in through her gate, and after I park and reach in the pizza bag for her food, I realize I forgot her pasta. Shit. She's standing on the porch and she knows I'm there, or else I could just return to the Pizzeria real quick and be back without anyone being the wiser. "You don't have to run," she says, as I hustle her food over to her.
"I forgot your pasta; I'll be right back." I hand her the food and she says it's okay. She pays me, and when I say I'll be back in five minutes, climbing into my car, she says, "I thought you forgot it in the car. It's at the Pizzeria?" Yes. The kindness on her face melts to disappointment.
I hurry to get her pasta, and when she beeps me in this time, I have a chance to check out the dog training course encompassing her front lawn. I assume she must have some Best In Show dog action going on in her house to commit so much of her yard to the course. I don't bother to ask her about it, though, because I'm trying to get out of here and on with my deliveries.
Halfway through the night I get an order for the house behind us, and I'm excited, because construction's been going on over there all year, and I'm curious to see inside the gates. Some days last spring, the woman ordered hundreds of dollars worth of food multiple times to feed the construction workers. We're talking some serious cash.
The order ticket says, "MAIN GATE NOT SIDE GATE." The gate facing the back of the Pizzeria turns out to be the "side gate," and when I pull around the corner, I see the main gate: an upside down U entryway with a landscaped call box island, facing two, massive, carved wooden gates, which turn out to be 4"-6" thick. On the side wall, a tile plaque reads, "The Belmont." My God, their house has a name.
As the wooden gates of heaven open, I'm staring down a long tan driveway flanked on both sides by some of the thickest palm trees I've ever seen. Way down at the other end, a marble wall fountain spurts its water at the back of a beautiful, rough marble round-about. No house is in sight. I begin the long, slow drive, and when I reach the fountain and turn right up the driveway toward the main house, I get a view of the professionally manicured grounds and matching horse stables that are nicer than most people's houses. The main house sits at the top of a hill overlooking the property. I pull my motorboat sounding, unwashed, oxidized Volvo up by the front door, and hop out with the food.
I ring the doorbell, but no one comes right away. This is an annoyance that happens often around here: people buzz you in at their gate, then aren't at the front door when you arrive. A young, doughy girl wearing horse-print pajama bottoms and an oversized T-shirt answers the door, then apathetically goes to look for her brother. The entryway looks like a Four Seasons Resort: marble floors; dual marble staircases with wrought-iron banisters; a baby grand piano at the base of the left staircase, and a full-sized harp at the base of the right; above, a massive chandelier hangs in the center.
A teenage boy with frighteningly Aryan features––piercing blue eyes, bright blond hair, and squared cheeks and jawbone––arrives at the door and asks me to wait while they find money. I assume his sister might be in her bedroom right now, peeling some hundreds off her wallpaper. Their collaboration pays off, and they give me a nice tip and thank me. A small amount of jealousy arrises in me, but is quickly extinguished by a weird feeling of sympathy: that somehow their fortune is actually a misfortune. I admire the expensive palm trees again on my long drive out.
My next delivery is in Rancho Pacifica. A man in his sixties answers the door wearing an orange Tommy Bahama shirt with a small wet mark on the front. He walks out toward me and gets really close to ask how much he owes me. I tell him $26.65, and he says, "Can you do a fifty?" leaning even closer to me. I step back, and when he begins digging through his cash, I realize the man is drunk. Really drunk. He holds out a five dollar bill.
"That's a five, not a fifty," I say.
He stares at it, as if he can pull a David Blaine and turn the bill into a fifty. "Oh." He sways, then digs the fifty out of his messy billfold. I give him change, and he holds out the ones in a crumpled fan. I assume he wants to give them to me, so I pull two from his loose grip. He sways, then pushes his hand toward me again without saying anything, and I pull another dollar from the cash wad. I look at the wet mark on his shirt, which I now realize must be from his drink, possibly Scotch. Without saying anything, he turns and stumbles inside, off to eat a pizza he won't remember.
My night ends in confusion. I arrive at an apartment complex, and find the building marked 12604, but there's no apartment #9. I call the number, but no answer. I call the Pizzeria, and the manger can't clear things up. We have some new kids working the front counter, and I don't mean to make generalizations, but some of these Rancho kids struggle with the basics. I can only hope they make good marriages someday. I drive around until I find a map to the complex. Oh, that makes since, apartment #9 is in building 12640; the girl who took the order just mixed up some numbers.
I knock on apartment #9, and a confused woman wearing a nightgown answers the door. "I didn't order pizza," she says. I explain my dilemma, but she's as confused as I am. Now I'm getting upset. It's late, I want to go home, and now I'm dealing with this crap because someone can't type in numbers correctly. I drive over and look at the map again. I call the phone number on the ticket, and a guy answers. "What? No, we're in building 12604, but the apartment number is 389." Only three hundred and eighty numbers off. Not bad. I hurry over there and find two middle-aged men in sweatpants, sitting around a messy apartment with laptops open on TV tray stands. "Hurry," one says to the other.
"I'm trying, but I want to give him a good tip."
The first one looks at me and says, "We're in an online poker tournament," then turns to his friend. "The next round's about to start." For some reason, the whole scene makes me melancholy, and I can't figure out if it's because the grown men and their situation strikes me as pathetic, or because there's something touching about two guys doing what they want, how they want.
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