From The Pizza Chronicles


Laugh at me. Point your finger mockingly, look to the sky, and let forth great gurgling spurts of dripping, foaming laughter. I am a clown, brought here for your amusement. I am a pizza delivery driver.

A lady once came to the door dressed in a full, honest to goodness bunny costume. It might have been a party, or the manifestation of a creative and unique sexual fantasy, but it was a bunny costume. She gazed out --quite abashedly-- through the mouth as she took the pizza in her paws.

With shame in her voice she said: "You must think I look really stupid."

"Lady," I said, struggling to make eye contact, "I'm a pizza delivery driver. I feel superior to no one."

And that's usually true. Exceptions include people who don't know where they live, people who come to the door naked or dressed in humiliating costumes, and that one guy who called and asked if we could put Skittles on a pizza.

Many of my coworkers, too, for a surprising amount of the labor at Marco's Pizza consists of undereducated trailer-dwelling drug users, from whom most people can leverage at least a few points of self respect. From Kevin, the 42-year-old lifetime pizza delivery driver who smoked so much pot when he was young that his brain is now the consistency of a dry sponge. And Shawn, our high school drop-out store manager and his emotionally unstable girlfriend and wife, Little Miss Catharsis --although everyone else calls her Erica. Not that I have reason to gloat --I go to community college. But as a rule, we command respect from few, and inspire awe only in those who work with feces for a living.

One day Ian the Donkey Boy and I were having a contest to see who could hurl their head against the wall the hardest. I was winning when a thought came to me: the fizzling match sticks of my coworkers were nothing to the piercing beacon of my blinding, intimidating intellect. I backed up to take one last running dive for the wall and murmured quietly, "im slarter than of all u;" I was shocked at how slurred my speech was, but closed head injuries will do that. My nogin hit the wall with a dull thud --the sound of victory!

Much of the store is protected from unscrupulous hands and good taste in music by cheap padlocks. They bind and protect most places where cash is stored, notably the driver drop box. The driver drop box is a three-by-four plywood matrix with narrow holes lovingly gouged above each of 12 cells. Drivers each get a cell (I'm lucky number 10) to store money, fruit roll ups, and other thin objects. The whole affair is sealed off with a single padlock.

After I regained consciousness, I sprang into action. There is a little office near the back for storing all the secret Marco's Pizza information, and so that managers have some place to sleep. I eased open the door and tip-toed past Shawn. Scanning a list on the wall, I quickly memorized a small string of numbers: 36, 34, 12. I slipped out and quietly latched the door. Shawn didn't wake, and I slinked off undetected.

Erica loitered near the front of the store, sullen and taciturn as usual. A pen, a piece of paper and I approached her.

"Wanna see a cool trick?" I asked.

She looked at me for too long. "Okay," she breathed.

"Okay, watch this." I reached for the padlock that usually adorns the drop box and one of the many calculators sprinkled about the store (some of my colleges are even more mathematically challenged than I.) I presented the back of the lock to Erica, and made special note of the perfectly arbitrary serial number stamped in the stainless steal. I took a deep breath and began to bull shit. "That number there?" I started, "Most people think it's just a serial number. But actually, it's the combination for the lock." I started using big words to cover my tracks. "It's encrypted with... a... prime number... algorithm that's taken from the, uh... warp field harmonics... and, um... multiplied by the recursive, uh, reciprocal of the product of... the hypothalamus... and, uh, transitive circadian rhythms." I coughed.

Erica blinked.

"So..." I paused for a moment to think of more big words. "You can decrypt the integer string by... reducing the primes and factoring the, uh, algorithmic coefficient through the... nominative fractal declination. Yes, that ought to do."

She blinked again.

I wrote out the serial number and began pressing random buttons on the calculator. "All you have to do is take that initial integer string and factor it by, uh, the prime of the function." I scribbled some Greek symbols and pseudo-math on the paper and clawed at the keypad. "And if your reduction is, um, indicative, you'll get the functional cipher." I wrote down long strings of random numbers and raked the face of the calculator. After a few minutes of these gyrations I proclaimed: "So when we, uh... terminate the function we get," drum roll, "36, 34, 12!"

Shawn woke up around this time. He sauntered up to us, stretched, yawned, scratched his head --just in time for the punch line.

"Okay," I said, grabbing the lock and resetting the bolt. "Let's see if this works." I made sure they could see the face of the lock, and with flamboyant, exaggerated gestures and gushing false drama, entered the combination. Click, click, click --the cylinder popped open. I yanked at the loop and tried my best to copy the shock that splashed across Erica's face.

"Oh my God. It worked!"

I grinned a little bit, and twirled the lock around my finger before the wide eyes of my audience.

Shawn inspected the alien symbols on my paper. "Waaaiit," he said, calling my bluff, "how did you do that? I want to learn this so I can do it too."

I sighed an indignant sigh. "The reiteration of the initial recursive fractal algorithm and the rheumatic flux capacitor cognitive numinosity meme poses a contradichotomy." I pointed to bits of alien scribbling as I spoke. "That is, one must transliterate the principality and invert the concubine so that one might eschew more nihilistic metaprogramming."

Shawn and Erica blinked in unison. He would press on, driving me to use both "nictitating" and "synchronicity" before he surrendered and conceded inferiority.

They started to call me, "decrypter boy," like I had some kind of secret CIA chip embedded in my brain. Yeah, some people see black helicopters following them all day. I get Apaches.

I savored every last drop of my counterfeit superiority. Ah, shameless ego gratification. I may not be very smart, but I could look upon the blank faces before me and know that some people were very stupid. For days they treated me like the Gray to their chimp, and kindly refrained from hurling their feces or masturbating incessantly near or around me.

After word spread, the rest of my coworkers exulted me as well. I heard, in subdued whispers, "That dude can lift a refrigerator with his MIND." And, "Don't mess with him, man. He'll go into a computer and like, the next time you're walkin' a bunch of guys in trench coats will come out of an ally and drag you away and you'll never be seen again." They approached me cautiously, and spoke humbly. For I was decrypter boy, and no one had the balls to call my bluff.