In the summer of 1998 I returned home from my freshman year of college to find that my job as first mate on my father's fishing boat had been taken by someone who was younger and fitter and had Better Work Ethic:My Brother, Kenny. To my knowledge, there were no unions for the eldest sons of fishermen, so I accepted the loss and settled in as a replacement. Never mind , I said to myself. He is the one who has to wake up at 4 a.m., and those are not hours for a dignified academic like me.
I put on my floppy bucket hat and set out to figure out the next step in my career.
At that point, our little Southern Maryland ribbon was in full swing. A McDonald's had opened about 20 minutes from my parents' house, as had a Pizza Hut, as well as a Subway sandwich shop where, not to brag, I knew a few sandwiches. As kids we could only dream of eating in chains like this. We had a Burger King during my younger years, and the only other fast food place was a local store called C&D Carry-Out, run by an old man who never met a kid he didn't accused of stealing.
I walked towards all those bright lights and turned right, heading for the brightest of them all, a new branch of the Domino's pizza chain. I had a connection there, a friend who was a delivery driver who helped me get hired there. The manager sent me home with a blue and red striped shirt and told me to come back the next day. "You should probably wash this," he said.
The uniform was too big, but in my mind I still looked like a pro when I got back in my white Ford Escort. I don't remember receiving any training, but I couldn't have been there more than three minutes before I learned the first rule of pizza delivery:when there's nothing to deliver, you fold the boxes pizza maker.
"I need batteries," the manager said. “It's going to be a busy night. I can feel it. ”
I was in no position to question his instincts, so I laid down. Assuming that most of you haven't experienced the sense of fulfillment that comes from folding a Domino box, I'll outline the steps:it was born as a flat cardboard. You turn it inside out to start, fold the top down at the crease, fold it over at the other crease, tuck the small corners into the other creases and fold the flap over until you are more in the folds.
Shortly after adding a few boxes to the stacks, you may hear the manager shouting your name. "Mike! You are in! ”
I remember running forward to meet the manager, a short but rough guy in his early twenties named PJ, who fired instructions at me like a quarterback in a group.
/>“OK! Bensville Road! I got it? »
Shrug your shoulders.
"That's one of the main roads, man. Lets go. Didn't you grow up here? "
" Well, yeah, but I went off to college.
"Did that make you stupid?"
He raised his arm to the map on the wall. I had never seen the house so big. He'd taken the book of county road maps, torn out each page, and put them together like a jigsaw puzzle. Our coverage area included western Charles County and southern Prince George's County. If you don't know where it is, you're not alone. It's about a 30-minute drive south of Washington, D.C. along the Potomac River. Roads in this part of Maryland go where land and water permit, with the road descending down the middle of the main peninsula, offshoots meandering around coves and creeks. This is the forgotten part of the D.C. metro area, a place few who live in the district can even point to.
"I've thought long and hard about why we romanticize our first jobs, and after reading countless other tales, it's clear that Americans are obsessed with creating a story arc for our lives." P>
“Here it is, man. Bensville,” P.J. said, running his finger along the wall. "And home should be here," he said with a little finger on the map.
He stuffed the two pizzas into a red hot bag, put a coke six-pack on top, and said, "Go ahead. ”
***
JOHN TOMAC
A few years ago, the hashtag #FirstSevenJobs was trending on Facebook and identified the most common first jobs. The babysitter was #1; pizza delivery was #18.
Domino's position was actually my third job. I had worked on my dad's boat occasionally since I was a young teenager, helping out at big parties or during the commercial fishing season. It was an under the table gig, though – sometimes he paid with a good lunch. My first real government job was working in a movie theatre. For $4.25 an hour I took tickets, made popcorn, and occasionally loaded a reel of film (we were still using film) during my senior year of high school.
I was there. one of 9 million young adults aged 16 to 19 at the time, according to 1996 labor statistics. We were then about 6% of the total labor force. Twenty years later, in 2016, the number of young people aged 16 to 19 in employment had dropped to 5 million, or just 3% of the total workforce. Kids today!
I've thought long and hard about why we romanticize our first jobs, and after reading countless other tales, it's clear that Americans are obsessed with creating a story arc for our lives:I came from this and became that. Beyoncé swept the floors of her mother's hair salon; Madonna worked at Dunkin' Donuts; Michael Dell was a dishwasher at a Chinese restaurant; Warren Buffett, a paperboy. And look where they are! We like to believe that we can make it from here to there, and we like to believe that where we are is better than where we've been. I hope that's true.
A few weeks ago I went to the library and checked out Pizza Tiger , the biography of Domino founder Tom Monaghan. It's not a literary piece, and it plays predictable themes in its ride about how he built the world's largest pizza delivery chain. There is…
Adversity in the beginning :Before buying what would become Domino's, Monaghan says a man who claimed to be an oil investor stole $1,500 from him.
The Big Risk:Soon after, he and his brother bought a pizzeria called DomiNick's in Michigan in 1960. The cost was $500 plus a couple thousand in debt.
A little fun along the way :After the Tigers won the World Series in St. Louis in 1968, Monaghan and his team headed to the Detroit airport to greet the returning team with pizza. The traffic was so bad they never made it, so they pulled over and sold the pies to all the cars stuck on the freeway.
Errors :Once he got drunk and accidentally knocked over the Christmas tree and jumped on it down in front of his wife and newborn.
And lessons :He didn't drink after that.
And a happy and rich ending “I couldn't deliver pizza now; I no longer have a driver's license. I didn't bother to renew it because a security guard drove me everywhere,” he wrote in the last pages.
This is the man who paid me less than $3 for the hour plus tips for two summers. I don't think it bothered me then, but I know I don't now. If for no other reason the job took me on a delivery that changed the way I see the world.
***
Growing up in this rural area, my schools were 50 % white and 50% black. Nobody was rich. My mom was a freshman teacher and my dad was a fisherman, and we had a lot more than most.
My education on class disparity came after I took a scholarship and enrolled at a private college in North Carolina. Our high school parking lots were filled with battered Toyota Tercels and Ford Rangers. The college batches were different. I remember calling home during my first month at school to report the scene:“There are BMWs everywhere! " I said. And I remember my mother's answer, as clear as if she had said it this morning:"Well," she said with a breath of air, "I'm Pardon , Michael. It was a sarcastic reminder to be grateful for what we had. I'm 38 now and I still hear his words when I envy others. There's always something to envy, right?
I'm sure we had more pizza than most kids. I got it every weekend, actually.
Our house was too far in the woods for delivery services, so we always drove to pick it up. Some of my earliest memories were of driving through dark two-lane roads in my mother's black station wagon, returning from an old pizzeria near the library where I learned to read. We'd take home a pepperoni, pepper, and onion pizza and watch Daddy's Girls . I always think of those green peppers every time I see Betty White.
Sometimes we ate out. About 15 minutes from our house was Star Pizza. Her pies were thicker and they came out hot. I used a knife and fork, and I really don't care what you think. Star also had two of those arcade games where you sat across from your opponents, and Kenny and I emptied every quarter we could into Frogger or Pac-Man while we waited for dinner. I can still taste the fizz of fountain soda in the back of my mouth. Star was also where we hosted the Little League end-of-season parties. The fact that a gambling ring ran down the back of the restaurant was lost on us.
The gold standard for everything Marylander was Ledo Pizza, which serves rectangular pies because, wait, “we don't cut corners”. We had to drive an hour to the nearest Ledo; it was a special kind of place.
As restaurants opened and closed, we chased pizza all around. No matter what happened in the week, we always knew that on a weekend night together, the four of us were waiting with cheese, dough and gravy.
JOHN TOMAC
***
I never knew what was behind the next door. One minute I'd be walking around the barracks at the small naval base in town, waiting for some buzz-headed guy to shoot his head off; and the next I would be at an old lady who would shout, "Come in!" because she did not want to get up.
We received calls from dove hunters who would tell us which side of the field it was safe to enter. Or people living in extended stay motels. Or the gun manufacturing plant, where managers sometimes called in orders for 10 or 12 pies for third shift workers.
For me, the job was a natural transition from fishing. We would all come back from our deliveries and head to the back to fold the boxes and unload what we saw.
It's been years since I've spoken to these people, but I remember their names. There was Wayne, Reed, Keith, Kara, Darren and a few Billys. And of course, Big Kirk, perhaps the funniest of them all, may he rest in peace.
Looking back, I don't know which stories are true and which aren't, the years mixing them. Big Kirk had a flying problem, which didn't make sense to me because Big Kirk was tall. We've been attacked by dogs, hissed at by cats, and scared off a few of our former teachers who were light-eyed in the daytime but came to the door with pink eyes at pizza time. Wayne told a story of being greeted by a woman wrapped in a towel. Naturally, in Wayne's version, she placed the pizzas on the table and opened the napkin just for him. Whether full of it or not, he got the reaction he most wanted. "No way. »
Sometimes I would meet my best friend, Joey. Don't tell anyone, but he delivered for Pizza Hut. Sometimes we raced, he in his purple Ranger and I in my white Escort, making the most of the eight cylinders we shared between them. Other times we'd just sit around the quarters and talk, or grab a beer from the back of his truck.
(Side note:Other pizza deliverers turned out to be from better citizens than we are. Some are heroes. At least twice in the past seven years – once in Oregon and again in Tennessee – drivers have voluntarily driven to the homes of regular customers who were elderly and had stopped calling, only to find that these people had fallen and couldn't reach their phones to call for help.)
Some of my favorite times were just being alone, behind the wheel. We had no GPS or cell phone, just maps and music. I've traveled these dark roads with Bruce Springsteen's greatest hits and Biggie Smalls' latest CD, Sublime and the Barenaked Ladies, and Tom Petty, of course.
I go back and forth across the county , around corners that suddenly I knew better than anyone – the big curves on Billingsley Road, for example, where so many other kids have wrecked their cars. I knew the maximum speed you could go without ending up in a tree.
The most dreaded word was closure . That meant you had the last shift, and the last shift meant the dishes.
The Semisonic track “Closing Time” came out in the spring before I took the job, and the old station radio DC101 loved this song. I remember spending long nights in my back, pulling the trigger on the sink faucet nozzle, the sound of clean water spraying the dishes, the smell of dirty water from the pan that was coming up, and this song, "Closing Time," all around.
One Friday night, I was closing up when a call came in to deliver pizza to the Navy base. These people were our age or just a little older, and often they ordered one pizza at a time and barely tipped. The gate was 7 miles away, and after going through that the speed limit on the base was 25 mph. Each trip was at least 30 minutes, round trip, and often you came away with little more than a dollar in your pocket.
That night around 10 p.m., the base was one of my last descents. I passed guard with a wave, which was all the permission we needed before 9/11, and headed for a section of townhouses. Near a park, a tiny beagle escaped on the left side of the road. I remember his eyes glowing green when he looked at me, and I remember the thud. I stopped. My hands were shaking and tears were streaming from my eyes. And then, for reasons I still don't understand as anything other than panic, I went ahead and delivered the pizza. By the time I got back there, a military police officer had blocked the road. A woman was kneeling in the grass with two young children, crying and pointing at me. The officer approached my window. He checked my license and registration and said, “It's okay. It happens. Keep on going. “I did what the man said, but I still wonder about this family. The children would now be in their late twenties, possibly with children and a dog.
I mention the story now not because it was the delivery that changed the way I see the world. It's coming. But I wanted to mention it in case any of them read this. If so, I'm still sorry.
***
Today — and I mean literally the day you're reading this — one in eight Americans will eat pizza, according to a recent study by the department American Agriculture.
My wife and I live in a nice neighborhood in Charlotte, NC where she grew up. Her first job was as a babysitter, followed closely by a position in a nursery and greenhouse. She now has a successful career in public relations but she is still a witch in the ground. For all the energy we expend getting from here to here in our stories, it seems like we never venture too far from the opening scene.
"The delivery I'll never forget started like any other. »
Like my family when I was a kid, Laura and I eat pizza once a week. From our first steps, we can walk to three places with “pizza” in the name, and half a dozen more that have pizza or flatbread on the menu. We are so spoiled that we have a different pizzeria for different moods. A restaurant, run by Serbian brothers, has brick walls and warm air and is ideal for cold nights. Another has solid pizza and long tables and an outdoor area where our friends' kids can run around on summer evenings. Another has fancy organic fillings. A short drive away are two new Neapolitan-style spots with super ovens that bake pies in 90 seconds. About 2 miles away is a restaurant down a flight of stairs, tucked away, with grilled Italian sausage pie which is our favorite pizza in town. Of course, it helps that our tax man is also the bartender. But when we want to eat our way back in time, we go to a place called Luisa's. It's only a few blocks from where Laura grew up. When her mom came home on Fridays after a week of work, she would take Laura and her older brother to Luisa's.
JOHN TOMAC
It's a good 15 minutes from our condo, but it's there that we went the other night. We called a large with pepperoni, mushrooms, onions, and green peppers, all topping a crust that turns a little chewy after baking in a brick oven. Above the oven is a sign that counts the number of pizzas baked here since the restaurant opened in the early 1990s. That night the count was 1,335,072.
"You just add to that,” a waitress said as she exited. We dropped the box in the back seat and drove away, the smell of cheese and gravy filling the car as we drove past 11 pizzerias between there and home.
***
The delivery I'll never forget started like the others, PJ called me to the front and handed me a ticket with the order and address. I recognized the street right away:Bertha Circle.
It was in Woodland Village, the only neighborhood in the delivery area that had a reputation for being dangerous. The summer before he started working at Domino's, a driver was robbed at gunpoint. He made the paper. Most of my colleagues have reported being robbed or nearly robbed. Looking back, I'm sure that wasn't true.
In our humble area, this was one of the poorest neighborhoods, and it was my first time there. I took the pizzas from the rack and ran to the car, not wanting to risk being late. About 6 miles into the ride I was at a traffic light when I looked at the ticket and realized the order called for a coke six pack. I remember my head getting hot as the blood flowed. I did not know what to do. Go back and be late to what is surely a house full of people who will probably rob me anyway? Or go ahead in this house without the Coke? I came up with another plan:I stopped at the Dash-In convenience store and bought six 20-ounce bottles of Coca-Cola.
I had already begun to form a theory that people with less gives more. The only gated community we delivered to was at the northernmost point of our delivery area, as close as we got to Washington, DC. It opened in the mid-1990s, and one of the first residents to buy a home was a new Washington Redskins receiver, who had just signed a big contract with the team as a free agent. . The first summer I delivered, he lived in a 5,500 square foot house in a corner of this gated community, and he taught me that even millionaires are bad dumpsters.
I left to left in Woodland Village, that famous neighborhood of short, square brick houses, and I passed people sitting on porches and clotheslines full of bright colors. I found the house and awkwardly gathered the Coca-Colas and the bottled pizzas. A man answered. I will never forget what he looked like; he looked like all the other dads I knew. He was thin and had a pair of glasses perched on a nose that hung over a mustache. Two young children played in the living room.
When I handed him the order, he said, “What? Have you changed bottles? I told him the faint story of how I forgot the cans and bought the bottles. He thanked me, closed the door and I left.
Back at the store, the manager handed me a piece of paper with a phone number on it.
JOHN TOMAC
"The one you delivered just called and wants you to call him back," he said.
I dialed the number and the man from Bertha Circle answered.
"If you come back here later, come," he said. "I want to pay you for those sodas you bought. ”
Later that night it was dark and I had another delivery in that area. On the way back, I arrived at Woodland Village and passed people under porches and clotheslines full of bright colors. The man in this bad neighborhood gave me cash to cover the sodas, then an extra $5. Then he thanked me .
“Most of my colleagues have reported being robbed or nearly robbed. Looking back, I'm sure that wasn't true. »
“I hope to see you again,” he said.
I never delivered another pizza to this house, but I thought of him every time another ticket popped up with a Woodland address Town. And I still think of him, 20 years later, in my work in the Charlotte community. A few months ago, I joined a group of about 30 others — politicians, lawyers, business leaders — of all races and walks of life for an implied panel discussion. We were each asked to list the words we had heard about the culture of other children and to do so honestly. As we walked around the room, it was obvious that we had all learned some things that we had to unlearn. At one point, the image of this man from Bertha Circle came to mind.
When he called me home that night, he wasn't just giving me money additional; he was teaching me a few lessons:first, it is foolish to sort people into groups before knowing them individually. Second, show people how much you think they're worth.
To this day, no matter what, I've never tipped another delivery driver less than a $5 tip.
I left the neighborhood that night and turned the headlights on the freeway towards the store. I opened the door, hung the heat bag on the rack and went to the back to fold the boxes.
The manager came by to grab a pile. "Hey, Graff, what did that Woodland Village guy want?" »
The other drivers turned their eyes to me.
Nothing. He just wanted to give me a bigger tip.
"In no way. »
This article originally appeared in the March 2018 issue of SUCCESS magazine.
