(6/28/25)

Yesterday Chris, one of my coworkers, told me that he's had a gun pulled on him three times while working this job. He said this while making the sign of three with his thumb, pointer finger, and middle finger then wiggling them about in the air. This is the glamours of delivering pizza in De Kalb. "Two were at crack houses, well I guess meth houses, technically..." He carried out a delivery before he said where the last place was. He didn't resume the topic after he returned. I was left guessing for the rest of the day. It could have been in a hotel, after a woman asked where her marinara sauce was and he replied that it's probably in the box, so she opened the box right there in the hall while a man waited impatiently behind her in the door frame.

It could have been in a trailer park on the south side of town (which refers to itself as a "chateau park") after he forgot a man's 2 Ltr of mountain dew and had to drive all the way back to the store to get it and then drive all the way back to the chateau and when he got back a dirty man was eyeballing him from across the street as he knocked on the chateau's door and the sound rummaged through the night air and intermingled with the sound of stray cats and TV sets. The 2 Ltr dampened his pantleg as he moved its weight from hand-to-hand.

Or—and this was the most likely of all—he was parked outside what he was sure was a crack house (or a meth house, if we are being technical) because it had two rusted cars parked on the front lawn instead of the driveway and the windows were all dark and covered with fabric insulator and the house was in the "bad part of town." So he got scared and called the store and he was told that the address was a frequent customer so he approached the door cautiously but before he knocked the door was answered by a small girl and her mother right behind her. She spoke a few words of Spanish and handed him a crumpled five as a tip. He returned to the car feeling stupid and the night air, the same air that blew coldly onto wet hands clutching a slippery 2 Ltr, pronounced me a fool. I drove back to the store and felt the world staring back at me, innumerable faces.

~clancy