Fun With Pizza (Part 9: Dumpster Diving)

I had a secondary money-making scheme which also involved UCB students.  In my normal pattern, I vacuumed money out of the students by delivering them pizza, for which they would pay me plus a tip.  We were paid by the tag:  at the time, $2 per tag, or order carried.  Thirty orders in a night, sixty dollars, plus the tips, which fluctuated wildly.  Anywhere from a dollar (cheap-ass fuck-hole!) to thirty or forty, if you picked up a big party order to an event.  The sort of order where the pizzas don't get bagged, but simply loaded in the trunk and back seat: they'll keep each other warm when there's that many.

Peanuts

Peanut allergies. "Yes, our little Braden has a peanut allergy. He could DIE if exposed to peanuts!"

So anyone who walked past a Planter's display in the last thirty days or reminisced about their sack lunches as a child --- think "______ butter and jelly," for those of you who move your lips when other people read --- or has figurines of Linus and Snoopy in their den, it's up to you to remain a minimum of three hundred feet from Braden at all times, lest you be accused of attempted child murder. God fucking forbid the parents teach little Braden to not jam his face in jars of Skippy at the supermarket, or --- this is so crazy it just might work --- not trade lunches at school with a kid who got a PB&J that day.

It's called personal responsibility. Your kid's problems are not my problems. Try to make them my problems, and I'll tie your earlobes to your scrotum and carry you around like a bowling bag. If your result of a condom failure is so sensitive to a basic common food that he could snuff it just from walking past someone who had a snack on an airplane recently, maybe you should LEAVE HIM HOME. Home, where it's safe. Where the medications always are. (The medications are never with the child, for some reason.) If he needs to leave the house for some reason --- and I'm not it --- put him in a full body chemical suit and a gas mask. Yeah, I'm gonna stare at him, and possibly make jokes at his expense, but apparently those are the least of his problems. His main problem is that he's allergic to a common snack.

And as a last resort, well.... Remember the ending of "Ol' Yeller"?

And before I forget, fuck you for naming the kid 'Braden' in the first place. Even my spell-checker hates the name.

There Is Life After Youth

The first time I ever considered seriously abusing a child (well, he was fourteen) was at 924 Gilman at the end of a show.  Little bastard walked up to me while I was having a smoke outside and said three words, one I'd never expected to hear applied to me.  He walked up and said, "Excuse me, sir?"

Briefly, At Denny's

I guess this is propf that at the age of twenty, one's Asshole Gland is functioning at its peak.You're still at the age where being a cruel, vicious bastard comes quite naturally, and without a second thought.  Would I behave in such a manner these days?  Well.... Probably not.  I've gotten it out of my system, I think.

I was at the Denny's near La Jolla Shores sometime in early 1989. It was about one in the morning, and the only people in the place were me, Bekka, and a jive-ass white-bread couple --- you could tell just by looking they drove either a SAAB or a Volvo --- and the couple's infant. A very unhappy infant. One that did not stop screaming.

Fun With Pizza (Part 8 - Invasion of the Woo People.)

Obviously, the most common drug was alcohol.  I was offered so many beers there's no point in trying to count.  I first started driving for Lefty's a little over a year after my last drink ever, and there was a bit of irony in constantly delivering to drunken college kids: they helped encourage my sobriety.  It was a situation where I'd be around a gaggle of drunk students, and my thought process was not envy, but vicarious embarrassment.  The horrible realization that I used to act like as big of a putz as they were, and that hurt deep inside.  It would strike me, "Oh holy Christ, I was just as big of an asshole as these twerps."  So yeah, they helped me stay steadfast in keeping off the bottle.