Day 161: November 9, 2009 (the love den waits for no one, and getting reality checked by a former employee)

Position: Driver

Number of Deliveries: 7

Sales: $200.63

Tips: $38

Hours: 2.82

Total Wage: $21.48 per hour

One of the first deliveries of the night, I find myself standing on the porch of an upstairs apartment and holding a box with a pineapples, pepperoni, mushrooms, extra sauce, extra thin, well done pizza inside. No one answers the doorbell or my knocking, so I call. "Oh, are you here already?" a woman says. "I'll be right there." I wait for the door to open, but, instead, a minute later, a woman comes walking up the stairs behind me wrapped in a towel and dripping wet. "You got here so early. They said it would be about an hour, so I decided to go for a quick hot tub." To her defense, we aren't busy tonight, so I got here fast, and while I've seen people do all kinds of strange things between ordering food and my arrival, I think this is the first time someone's gone hot tubbing on me. "Good thing I had my phone. Just give me a minute," the woman says as she opens her apartment door. Nothing, except maybe the white tiger rug I'm standing on outside, could have prepared me for what's inside.

It can only be classified as a late 1970's love den, something out of a Rod Stewart video. A black baby grand piano dominates the thickly carpeted room. Red roses, sans vase, sit atop the piano next to a television set (when you have a piano in an apartment, I guess it's the only place you can put a television). Shaggy rugs cover the carpeted floor, and pillows of various deep colors, mostly purple, lounge on the throw-covered couch. A guitar sits idle against the wall. All the material and items make the room look smaller than it is, and when I try to recall the place later, I will think the far wall was mirrored, but it wasn't. The room doesn't smell like sex, but it feels like sex. Warm. Cozy. Cave-like. Nest.

The woman keeps apologizing and telling me it will be one more second. While I wait, a man emerges, dripping wet, from the darkness at the bottom of the stairs. And he looks and sounds exactly like you'd expect him to look and sound: thick, hairy chest; bald head; low, raspy voice. If there is a Corvette parked outside, I would bet my life savings it's his. He passes me, saying hello in his throaty voice, and reenters the love den. The woman finally reappears, signs the credit card slip, and closes the door. 

I can only assume they'll plop down on the rugs with the pizza box, lying face to face, allowing their towels to slide off their still wet bodies. He'll hold a pizza slice and pass it back and forth from his mouth to hers, the hot cheese stringing between their mouths as the extra sauce drips down their chins, before they begin making more sweet, sweet love. Later, they will serenade each other, him on guitar, her on the piano and . . . I drive back to the pizzeria and fold boxes while waiting around for more orders.

On my next delivery run, I end up at a house in Santa Luz. When the guy opens the door, I have that weird moment of recognition (I know this guy, but from where?), and it only lasts a second. I call him by name, and he squints in the low light to see my face. "Oh, hey Eric." He looks confused, like he didn't expect to know the delivery driver, even though he worked at the pizzeria until a handful of months ago. This is one of those moments––like a thirtieth or fortieth birthday but on a smaller scale––that you measure your life by: guy used to do what you do, but now he's moved on and you're still doing the same thing. Encounters like this are rare in Rancho, because I don't know many people out here, but they used to happen all the time in Encinitas, usually accompanied by the line, You're still at the pizzeria?

"How's your new job?" I ask.

He shrugs as he's signing the credit card slip, and says, "Ah, it's alright." His lack of enthusiasm about the new job makes me feel vindicated, as if I needed vindication. I think that no matter what work I'm doing, I'll always want to be doing something else, something more important and worthy of this life. I thank him for his generous tip and tell him it was good to see him, before driving off into the dark, dark night.