Backed Out

My white-knuckled hands give the steering wheel a snakebite, and the vinyl mutters protests at the unnecessary stress.  I want to scream, so I do, and the pedestrians in the crosswalk leap in surprise and one woman spins about so suddenly she drops her designer purse (which upsets her, as her husband who has no job had yelled at her for ten minutes for buying it, and that stoked enough resentment in her that they hadn’t had sex since, and that was five weeks ago), and two wobbly children hide behind the sturdy legs of their mothers.  At least four people give me looks of anger, and another two glances of concern.  The rest ignore it.
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There’s a rumor going about that you’re looking to sell.
I am always willing to listen (laugh).
Well, if you’re "willing" to listen, maybe you’d be willing to talk, as well.  How much is it worth to you?
I bought it for 250,000, and I figure it’s worth more than that now.
Fair enough.
So, all in, with the expectation of carrying a land contract, maybe 325,000?
Deal.
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Ataturk Boulevard hums a busy tune.  Against a soft, torn-denim-blue sky, the grandiose silhouette of the Valens Aqueduct casts a long, graceful shadow, a bit of performance art spinning and stretching amidst the aging day.  The boxy European cars and buses driving down the Boulevard pass under the gray stone arches, their strange shapes complimented by their seemingly lawless interweaving.  Emperor Valens built the engineering marvel in the fourth century CE to bring vital water down from the Thracian hills into Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire.  Now it’s an inconvenience to city planners, an ignored oddity to commuters, a mild curiosity to tourists.

It’s only early afternoon on a Monday, and yet the simmering park near the Aqueduct is filled with sweat-browed Turks, the top buttons of their billowy linen dress shirts unbuttoned.  They’re mostly blue collar: pill sorters, leather curers, trinket hawkers, and it included one man who barely escaped from the fireworks factory explosion in 2008 when said factory collapsed, crushing many.  They sit atop Byzantine columns that are buried to some impossible to discern height, only the detailed Corinthian capital and a few feet of stone bursting forth from the ground below.  This is peculiar to me, a little bit jarring–like when your stomach stands on one leg.  The fruits of an eleventh-century stonemason’s labors now a twenty-first century stool?  A bedraggled, one-eyed cat sleeps in a Jesus Christ-monogram (a popular symbol in the Christian east) adorned stone sarcophagus, its patchy tail’s tip resting in the bottom drainage hole–predicated by the messiness of human decomposition, I remind myself.  "Sarcophagus" is the shortened form of "lithos sarcophagus," Greek for "flesh-eating stone."  Why the name, I can’t remember.  Something to do with limestone, I think, and then just as quickly forget the question.

Not that it’s cool, but I thought it’d be hotter in Istanbul.  I think it may be a misconception borne of other misconceptions–that Turkey is Islamic (well, technically the state is secular, but you know), that Islam means the desert, and that the desert must be and always is unbearably hot.  That’s a lot of misconceptions.  Because while I’m not comfortable, and there’s a light sheen of sweat on my forehead and a droplet or two meandering down my back, at least a breeze off of the Marmara/Bosphorus cools it down and I can concentrate on other things, like the sheer mass of the Hagia Sophia towering before me, truly one of the wonders of the world.  In some things, it’s simply impossible for America to compete.  Sixth century religious architectural masterpieces is one of those things.
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Slate gray dormitories and drab taupe buildings full of efficiencies hunched their shoulders above me against the languid drizzle.  It was 3:30 in the morning and the energy drinks had replaced my heart with a peacock feather in a swirling wind.  Just workin’ on that next kidney stone.  I’m muttering to myself, random things, and now I’m saying Baton Rouge means "Red Stick," over and over again, slightly altering the intonation with each iteration.  It’s a curious habit born of driving too much, I think, of being on autopilot, half in the car and half in my head.  Fallen leaves tapered like teardrops stuck to the periphery of my windshield outside the reach of the wipers, little yellow things with green veins like road maps, like the green ropes in my forearms, the red spiderwebs in my eyes.  I put up two wheels on the curb and flick on the hazard lights; click-click, click-click, click-click;  I felt a bit ridiculous, like I was putting on a false pretense of importance, but it’s a time saver, and I was in a hurry.  I flicked on the phone; the new one, not the stolen one that some anonymous man lifted from me in an east-side mall and made about fifty phone calls with, only later to have his friend contact me on my new phone that you’d better bow down because I’m not one of your little white friends and I will fuck you up.  "Did you order pizza?" I asked the female voice on the line.  "Yes," she slurred, and across the dew-soaked lawn, I saw the door open, and a pant-less young woman stumbled out into the yard.  No time for pants when it’s pizza, I guess.

Mildly piqued–not sexually, of course, but I get a lot more fat, middle-aged men in their underwear than women–I took the steps up through the open gate and walked briskly toward her.  She wasn’t wearing what I would call "walking around panties," but instead a baby blue, lacy thong, and judging from the wild shake and roll to her eyes, she had no fucking inkling regarding the world around her.  Even her shirt, a lime green decollete number that seemed to be an altered version of what I presumed to have been her high school cross country team’s regular t-shirt, left little to the imagination.  "I’m not…" she began, and one ballistic leg suddenly shot across the other, nearly tumbling the rest of her to the ground.  Instead she staggered up against the damp wall, her hands working across the brick and mortar as if looking for the on switch to her brain.

"…wearing any pants?" I finished for her, as I herded her back into the door.  Turning around, her attire demanded that I direct my attention elsewhere.  She nodded, appreciative that I’d seen to the heart of her quandary so quickly.  "Don’t worry, it’s barely noticeable.  Why don’t you just stand there," I suggested, "and I’ll block the view of you from the road."  I checked the order time on the bill as I opened the heat bag, and I felt a warm billow of steam envelop my hand.  3:10.  Twenty Minutes.  "I just need you to sign here," I told her, pointing at a dotted line on a credit card receipt.  She did so, leaving no tip.  I didn’t necessarily expect one.  The very drunk either tip very well or not at all, and I know from thousands of deliveries that the amount of time a person waits–except in cases of extreme tardiness–has little to do with how much they’ll give you on top.  They’ve decided already, they have a routine.  You’re either appreciative or a dick.

As I emerged from the doorway and before my car became visible, I heard a strange rattling sound and giddy laughter.  I jogged through the gate and turned, unsurprised to find one drunken lout trying to pry the pizzeria sign off my car and another going after the GPS in the lower-left corner of my windshield.  "Hi, guys!" I called out in a singsong, startling them.  "Can I help you?"  I find that situations in which I’m being wronged are best confronted in singsong.  They scattered, but not before one turned around, directed a clumsy kick at the rear passenger door, and taunted me, "Fuck you!"  As he again spun around and started to run, he tripped over the low curb and went headlong into a threadbare shrub.  I heard an assortment of small snips and one impressive thwack, and then a pathetic groan.

This, then, is how I went from traipsing around Europe, to finding myself trapped in a familiar job in a familiar town with familiar frustrations.  Fuck me.
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Jimmy is Albanian.  Jimmy is not really Jimmy, but in America, it’s easier to be Jimmy with an accent than Shkelqim from Albania.  His salt-and-pepper grizzle poorly conceals a second chin, and his collection of monochromatic polo shirts strain at the seams to cover his not-unreasonably-big paunch.  When talked to, he may smile, he may respond, but his eyes dart about in a sort of shiftiness, not so much out of slyness, I think, but a perpetual uncertainty that he’s completely understanding what you’ve said.  His backyard brims with an eager garden, and tucked against a fence are two pits surrounding two metal posts.

The horseshoe is rubbing against the blister on my right index finger as I casually flip it around in my hand, from heel to toe to other heel.  Jimmy’s horseshoe in flight spins slowly, end-over-end, and in a precise and instantaneous position catches the light and then fleetingly flings it across the cut grass and scraggly remnants of summer’s flowers.  Autumn is a flamboyant party, a riot of color between the dog days of summer and the quiet chrysalis of winter.  Clang!  "Ringer?" Jimmy calls out inquisitively, cheerfully.  He senses his freedom, his impending emancipation, and it’s showing in everything he says and does.  I shrug.  Micah nods, and then incongruous–"Maybe?"  Well, which one is it?

Is Moscow that far away?  Sixteen hours of restless travel, my head pressed against a small round window, the frost looking like small bullet holes.  They’re not really holes, are they?  It can’t break and "whoosh" me out into the thin and frigid atmosphere for a few minutes of terror and then a few minutes of acceptance and finally a few minutes of terror.  It’s amazing to me that a plane can find such distant places; like a horseshoe flung a thousand miles, ears straining for a faint clang!  It is my turn, and my right arm swings like a clumsy pendulum; my horseshoe barely clear the oak branches overhead; it’s too high, and thud! pathetically short of the pit.  Dammit, I mutter, but I manage a smile.  I throw the other, and I know its a better attempt, but it swings around the post and is thrown back at me, as if the pit itself was rejecting it.

Jimmy has won, and we get down to the business at hand.  He walks to his BMW, one of those weird SUV-did-it-with-a-minivan crossovers that inexplicably reminds me of a giant dinosaur egg in poorly-rendered 3-D.  He returns with a pizza box, the lid down but not folded in.  What’s this?  He brandishes the contents towards me, and I barely keep in the thunderclap guffaw that springs up in me.  I wasn’t expecting him to keep all of his financial documentation in a goddamn pizza box.  "If you are serious about buying it from me," he tells us, his tongue slipping on the more foreign sounds, "this is all you need to know.  If you need job during process, Mitchy, you can deliver for me until all this is settled."

Turns out we could’ve known a little bit more.
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This is Mitch, how can I help?
I’d like to place an order for delivery.
Okay, great.  Can I have your phone number, please?
484-283-2848.
And your name?
Audrey.
And your address, please.
It’s Barnard Hall.
Okay, what’s the street address.
It’s a dormitory.
I figured something like that.  I still need the street address.
It’s a DORMITORY.
Oh, it’s a dormitory?  Why didn’t you say?
I di-
I’m still going to need an address.
How would I know?
Well, I’m guessing you live there.
It’s on campus.  You’re a delivery driver.  Shouldn’t you know where it is?
Maybe, but I don’t.  I don’t know the name and location of every building on campus.
Aren’t you a student, or something?
No, I didn’t go to school here.
You "didn’t?"  So you went somewhere else?
That would be the implication, yes.
And you graduated?  You have a degree?
Yes.
So why are you delivering pizza?
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It’s the Imperial City, Saint Petersburg, the gleaming city of the Tsars.  The city wears finery like a Czarina might, with the downtown populated by famous landmarks like the Winter Palace, the Hermitage, St. Peter and Paul Cathedral, and the Church of the Savior on the Spilled Blood, the last being a name I find especially…something?  Ominous, daunting, evocative.

It’s a month out, now, before my adopted home is home no more–a return to home home awaits.  A re-immersion into baseball, driving a car, political attack ads, college-age girls who make everything sound like a question.  More urgently, frighteningly–unemployment.  What am I going to do?  Where are we going to live?  Trading in a decent job for what?
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There’s something especially humiliating, emasculating, about what this job reduces you to.  The elevator is broken, I have three mammoth pizzas, and I’m trudging up twelve flights of stairs.  I’ve been clenching my butt cheeks for two hours and kegeling for one because I desperately need the bathroom, but the one at the store is fucking gross and the birthplace of the UTI and I’m about ten minutes behind, anyway.  Being behind doesn’t really cost, you’ll remember, but it does make it more likely that some privileged pre-med kid or some receptionist who had a bad day will shit all over me, and I’d really rather forgo the aggravation.  I’ve got the emailed order in my hand, and the tip has already been added to the total, so I know what this is worth to me.  It’s worth a dollar.  I’m a grown-ass man, busting my ass for a single, solitary dollar, which more or less pays for gas.  It’s a push, assuming I don’t hit a bicyclist, puncture a tire, or accidentally run a red light, all while willfully ignoring the 445 dollars I just spent to repair my car.

[People ask me what is a good tip.  The most common rule people seem to operate by is either ten percent or two-bucks-no-matter-what, both of which are bullshit.

What have you asked the driver to do?  How far did he go?  Is traffic bad?  Is weather bad?  Don’t get hung up on how much you ordered–when you think about it, there’s almost no difference between bringing you one pizza or three pizzas.  If you ordered eight, though, consider a little bonus.  Anything less than two dollars, and the driver resents you.  Less than one, and he hates you.

Most importantly, if you order from the same place regularly, tip.  The delivery driver has your food outside of your view–if he knows beforehand that he’s paying out of his own pocket to bring you your food as if it were some privilege being afforded him, who knows what he might do to it.  Most drivers grin and bear the regular stiffers, but most is not all.]

It’s Saturday night, so the entire stairwell smells of stale Busch Light and fresh vomit.  Fucking college town bullshit.  I can’t say for certain what type of beer it actually smelled like, honestly, but I always make the assumption that truly horrid reeking beer, the type you associate with your dissolute uncle whom your aunt divorced because he wouldn’t stop fucking strange and the way he smelled is, indeed, Busch Light.  I reach the sixth floor, the number "6" outlined white with two screw holes against a dirty white background; whatever plastic ornament that once hung there had only recently been torn off.  The Asian man in Apartment 624 opens the door, and his arm emerges suddenly, quickly, demanding, and snatches the food from my arms.  Wordlessly–not a single word was spoken, by either party–he shuts the door in my face.

One solitary dollar.
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The fucker backed out.
He backed out?
He backed out.