Serving it forth

A look at the hard work behind Tulsa's exploding food scene

(page 4 of 4)

Alex*, Pizza-delivery driver
A 10-year veteran of the restaurant industry, Alex delivers pizza along Tulsa’s Peoria Avenue, dropping pies to customers living between the well-to-do neighborhoods around Cherry Street and the high-crime area near I-44.

I usually work nights. I get to work at 5 p.m. Friday and Saturday, and deliver until midnight. I work about five days a week, 40 hours. I don’t ask for days off. There are lots of people I work with who have kids. I’m the float-around guy who will take whatever shift. I’m not married. I don’t have any kids. No serious, prior obligations.

I’m paid by the hour, plus tips. I get paid per delivery; I average 20-25 deliveries a shift. My boss, the general manager, he works really hard. I like him a lot. I’ve had other bosses, not so much.

I live off of Brookside; I share an apartment with two roommates. I spend most of my money on PS4, a bunch of stuff like that I don’t need, but it’s fun. I like heavy metal, video games, cartoons, pizza, and beer. I’m like any other younger guy.

With tips, it just depends. It varies from night to night. I can have a good night where I have lots of deliveries to houses in the nice neighborhoods around Cherry Street. Usually I make $100 per night in tips. If you walk out with $50, that’d be a bad night. I’ve been known to order pizza delivery.

I have a lot of friends who do the same job. Since I live on tips, I’m pretty nice with them.

There are places we don’t deliver after 5 p.m. There are some places we just don’t go to at all. Sometimes it’s because something has happened, or it’s not lit very well, if there are too many complaints. They won’t make us go there. It’s just kind of scary, and they know it. The apartment complex where the quadruple murder happened last year? We don’t go there. But we didn’t go there even before.

There’s a screen the orders come in on, it shows when and where stuff is going. Whoever is there first, they take the oldest order. You don’t get to pick and choose. If it was like that, no one would want to take the orders that go to certain places.

You smell a lot of weed. People aren’t embarrassed by it. Then you get your families, your old ladies.

Where I was robbed, it wasn’t in a scary place. I think the two guys had just decided to rob the next person who walked by. They took my wallet and a cell phone I’d borrowed because mine broke. They took an empty pizza bag and my car keys. The cops found the pizza bag in the middle of the street. They threw my keys behind another location of the pizza chain where I work. That was kind of nice. At least I don’t have to worry about them breaking into my house anymore.

One of the guys tackled me. I think it was because he panicked. They never hit me. They pulled a gun on me, but I don’t know if it was real. I wasn’t going to take that risk.

We don’t carry guns. You can have a knife on your belt, pepper spray. But I’m not going to try to pepper spray a guy with a gun. Having a gun, that’s a giant liability for the company.

Anything could happen. We’re not the police.

My parents are kind of mad at me for going back. I think it would’ve affected me more if I was robbed in a rough neighborhood and not in a good neighborhood. That was a curve ball. No one saw that coming. The rougher neighborhoods are as scary as they were. I am more aware of my surroundings. I make sure that, when I park, I can get in and out of there as fast as I want to. I’ll park in fire zones, handicapped spots — as long as I can get in and out. I didn’t do that as much before.

This happens more often than you hear about it. It happened the day before it happened to me at another pizza place, but for some reason, I made the news. Two news stations came to my store. There are guys I work with who have been doing this for 20, 25 years, they’ve been robbed four and five times. I couldn’t do that.

I would say that 80 percent of the time, it’s a really fun job. The other times, it’s like, dammit, I don’t want to go to this place because it’s scary kinda, and they’re not going to give me a tip. It’s a very interesting job. I meet and see so many different people.