Tales From the Road

The adventures of guy doing food delivery at middle age

This is Ruby, my trusty steed.

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I’m up at 5:30AM, ready to tackle the day. Tired, but enthusiastic. Let’s do this thing!

But a conversation with my wife unexpectedly turns into an argument, which turns into a fight. It leaves me feeling ornery and miserable. I waste most of the time I should be working the breakfast rush arguing, and when I finally throw my hands up and leave, I’m too late for the good part. I’d been crazy busy the day before, but now, very few orders are coming in, and the ones that are aren’t great. My last assignment is to deliver a single, solitary side order of edamame from a sushi place. I navigate the labyrinth of apartment buildings, find the unit on foot, and climb the stairs. The instructions say to meet the customer at the door, but when I knock, and tell her I have the food she ordered, she sounds too terrified to answer. Instead, she tells me through the closed door to leave it on the welcome mat.

I cringe inwardly, but do as requested. You wondered what kind of person pays to have a single side order of soy delivered, I thought. Now you know.

Sometimes, customers like this wait until they see me leave the vicinity of their door, only to peek out like the Onceler and snatch the package back inside. It’s a maneuver not entirely unlike a frog catching an unsuspecting fly with its tongue.

I give up on making any money. I’m hungry, because I’ve eaten nothing all day. I come home for lunch, and despite my wife’s conciliatory tone, I wind up arguing more. I’m in a mood. The things that are bothering me are of the kind I just can’t figure out how to let go of. Old wounds, constantly renewed. She says things that trigger my defenses and insecurities. I say ill-considered things that make her angry. It’s a pattern I don’t know how to break.

Finally, feeling like garbage, I leave again. Maybe I can distract myself with more work, I think. Being busy drives out excessive introspection, and it also keeps me from hanging around, being obnoxious because I’m upset. I figure I can maybe catch some early dinner orders from the Pizza Hut on Greenway and 64th, where the talkative manager likes me and the orders are usually decent.

On my way there, I find myself thinking about popping in to a nearby Catholic parish. It’s a block away. I can go sling pizzas after.

Other than for a funeral last year, I haven’t darkened the doorstep of a Catholic Church since I shook the dust from my metaphorical sandals a few years back. So I’m a bit surprised by the impulse. But I’m really down in the dumps and don’t know who to turn to, and I figure that at the very least it can’t hurt to try.

Well, at least as long as nobody sees me crying like a chump. I’ve gotten more emotional in my old age, and getting easily verklempt has always been one of my least favorite traits.

Maybe I’ll feel something, I think. Maybe God has finally decided to reach out to me after all.

The thought makes me nervous. I’m not sure I’m ready for that jelly.

Heaven knows I still ask him to chat often enough. It’s just that he never accepts the invitation. I don’t know if he’s there at all, but if he is, I’ve come to a certain level of comfort with our silent détente.

I pull into the parking lot just as the attached parochial school is letting out, but despite the hustle and bustle I find a spot. Kitty-corner to my spot, a young blonde trophy wife in something that looks a little too much like a black catsuit is loading her 2.1 kids into her high-end BMW. It’s an odd outfit choice for picking up from a Catholic school. But then again, this is Scottsdale, which is rapidly becoming Beverly Hills East. A place where athleisure, lip fillers, and plastic surgery never go out of style.

I’ve been to this parish before. It’s a newer building, done in a neo-Romanesque style that used to be plain white like an unused coloring book. I haven’t been inside in a few years, though, and the internet tells me it has been given a rather nice coat of paint. Certainly far better than the 60s monstrosities one often finds around this city.

As I approach the building, however, feeling less trepidation than expected, I discover that all the doors are locked.

Every. Single. One.

I start to walk back to my car when I notice a side door. I turn back and check it.

Also locked.

Message received, I think. Every time I reach out to the big guy to see if he’s there, I get nada.

Or in this case, less than nothing. Something even worse.

A locked door in my face. No way to even have a personal sit down with The God Who May Or May Not Be. If you’re going to mine coincidence for symbolism, that one’s hard to miss.

So I let it go. The moment has passed. Once again, I’ve tested the waters, and found them unsuitable for use.

“I am a soldier of the algorithm,” I drone as I pull back onto the road, between bouts of the standard, autonomous, negative self-talk mantra I fall into when I get in moods like this. It repeats, ad nauseam: Nothing matters. I don’t matter. Nothing matters.

“I go where the algorithm tells me,” I continue. “I deliver what the algorithm wants me to deliver.”

I don’t deserve good offers, I think. I don’t need to be discriminating. I just need to work.

And then an offer comes in. Low pay, high miles. And it’s going to take me to a part of town I don’t want to get stuck in. Sketchville…

“Oh hell no.” I say. “That’s not worth it.” So much for being a soldier of the algorithm. I decline it and continue on my way.

Finally, a decent enough pair of orders comes in. Grocery delivery. Not my favorite, but they’re worth more money. It will move me towards downtown, but that’s fine. In Scottsdale, where there’s usually no shortage of disposable income to pay for conveniences like food delivery, things have been dead all day. I’m up for trying a different area. I deliver the groceries. The first drop is clockwork. The second takes me dead into rush hour traffic, with a turn lane that is used to expand the northbound bandwidth from 4-6PM.

It’s a little after 4, and my GPS is urging me to turn left. It’s simply impossible.

I keep going, looking for a traffic light, or a break in the endless stream of cars. I’m now a mile or two past my turn, and I’m going to be late. I’m cursing. I’m yelling. My bandwidth for irritation was already overflowing before I hit traffic. I finally find a light. I make a U-turn.

And find that I’m facing the same problem heading East as I was heading South.

More creative cursing. At long last, I find a break in the traffic and gun it into a residential side-street, then shove my way back into the line. The GPS is telling me to turn right now, but I can’t get to the turn lane. I’m driving an off road vehicle, so I think screw it, I’m jumping the curb.

I ride the sidewalk with two wheels, the other two on the road, until I get past the jam. I’m supposed to be at this delivery already. This is absurd. I finally make my way into the complex, find my way to the back, and locate the apartment.

An elderly woman answers the door, and immediately begins to hit on me. My beard may be nearly white, but she must have been in her 70s. Nevertheless, she can’t stop gushing about how tall I am.

The first thing she says when she opens the door is, “I think you took all my tall.”

I take the groceries and follow her inside. I don’t usually enter a customer’s residence, but the notes on the delivery say she’s disabled and needs help. I can see a deep ridge of scars running up the back of her neck, running along her spinal column, as she turns her back to me to lead me inside.

“I used to be 5’6”, but after my surgeries, I’m two inches shorter.” She says.

“I used to be 6’4”, but I don’t want to know what I am now. I’m probably shrinking,” I say, trying to be polite and topical.

“Oh, I don’t think so. My son is six foot two, but you make him look little.” She replies. The way she says it, she sounds almost elated.

I ask her where she wants the groceries, then place them on the counter as directed.

I apologize for my tardiness. When I off-handedly mention my sidewalk maneuver as a show of good faith for trying to get there on time, she lights up.

“You’re my kind of guy!”

It’s so awkward. I’m happy to help her, but I need to get out of there. She tells me which gate to leave to avoid traffic, but her directions don’t make any sense. I thank her anyway and head back to my vehicle. A new order has come in. I have to keep moving. But the app won’t let me close out the old order because I didn’t take a photo of the drop-off. And for some reason, it won’t let me skip that part like it usually does and just include a note that I handed the items to the customer. I fire up a support chat and dive back into traffic. Ten minutes later, when I’m almost to my next stop, the issue gets resolved.

Before long, the rhythm of the game takes over: Offer. Accept. Pickup. Drive. Drop off. Repeat. Each new delivery moves me further across the map, in a motion that is unplanned and organic. Pei Wei. The Beach House Taco Stand. Ono’s Hawaiian Barbecue. The Cheesecake Factory. Cold Stone Creamery. Corleone’s Philly Cheesesteaks. Ike’s Love and Sandwiches.

I deliver to a chic hotel that looks like a re-modeled 1960s motor lodge. The doors are painted black, with the unit numbers stenciled on in yellow, in size 2000 font. The entire building is covered in creeping vines. Young professional women seem to be the primary guests. They make their way to their cars for evening engagements, or smoke their cigarettes in the lot, or answer the door when I drop off food.

As I head back to my Jeep, something catches my eye. Behind a dense screen of cultivated foliage, a hotel-attached open-air bar and “swim club” done up in an island motif is warming up to receive its evening crowd. It looks like a movie on pause, right before the characters enter the scene. I lift my phone over the hedge of green plants and snap a photo.

A young man in flip flops and swim trunks, wearing a hipster tank top with wide horizontal bands of pink and blue stretched over his comically round belly, gives me a surreptitious side eye from behind aviator sunglasses. His brown hair is tousled, and long enough to curl on his forehead. He has a ridiculous mustache and is carrying a towel. He looks like a character Jack Black might play in a comedy, only his vibe is all wrong.

“That’s a really cool place,” I say of the bar, in an effort to break down his suspicion. He seems to think my photo-taking is weird.

“It is,” he agrees, his face brightening. Then he turns and waddles towards the pool.

I make my way to the next stop, which is further West. As streets turn to avenues, the surrounding scenery becomes more and more run down. I’m not in the bougie part of downtown anymore. I turn up a side street and hear a siren chirp. I look in my rear view and realize the police cruiser behind me isn’t trying to get by, he’s pulling me over.

Son of a bitch. Can this day get any worse?

I fumble for my wallet and place my hands in clear view on the wheel. He comes to my window.

“Do you have any idea why I pulled you over?” He asks. Aviator sunglasses again. A mustache. Did I time travel to the 70s? Was I supposed to get that memo?

“I don’t,” I say.

“Your registration is expired.” He tells me. I recall my wife telling me the day before that she needed $200 dollars to renew. I transferred $500 yesterday for that and other bills, but the transfer was still in progress.

I tell him I didn’t know because I’ve been busy.

“Since October?” he asks, incredulous.

“I don’t go back there and look,” I say. It’s a sticker on the rear license plate. Maybe some people pay attention to that kind of thing, but I’m not one of them.

He goes back to his Tahoe and starts writing me up. Local troublemakers are curiously eyeing the white guy in the wrong part of town who got busted by the law. They look almost superstitious about the police presence. Perhaps I’m like a sacrificial scapegoat that keeps the bad juju away from them for a little while longer.

The cop comes back to my window.

“This is the easiest citation in the world to take care of,” he says gently, handing me a curled printout and a stapled handout. “You just have to submit proof that you’ve renewed the registration.”

I apologize. I tell him I’m DoorDashing to make the money to pay bills, because I’ve got a house full of kids and everything’s so damned expensive. I tell him I appreciate him, which sounds weird, but he wasn’t a dick, and that’s not nothing. I don’t tell him that last part. He smiles and tells me to drive safely.

I finish up my orders in the hood and turn off the apps as I make my way back to the upscale districts. I find myself waiting outside The Cheesecake Factory for 25 minutes for two orders I’m supposed to deliver to two different houses for a grand total of $14. Delays like this kill my hourly rate. But I don’t want to cancel two short-distance orders, so I talk to another dasher who is also stuck waiting. We commiserate about how slow things have been. I offer him little tips I’ve learned along the way.

I finally get my orders just as it starts to get dark. I continue on with my deliveries, feeling annoyed that the day has taken so many wrong turns. But perspective starts to slide into view.

A kindly older woman in a housecoat with a cane is my first drop off from the overdue Cheesecake Factory order, and she hands me an extra $5.

The grandma who took a liking to me was harmless.

The orders on the bad side of town came were done before the night-lurkers came out.

The cop who pulled me over was surprisingly cool.

The orders have been light, but I picked up enough at the end of the day to salvage my daily minimum.

Push comes to shove, most of the day really could have been worse. Except the stuff on the Homefront. That went really poorly.

I get a text from my wife, asking if I’m coming home for dinner. I tell her I’m still working.

She says that sounds like a no.

Then I ask if she really wants me around.

She says she loves me and misses me despite it all. She wants me to come home and hang out. I feel some of the tension inside me release, and my eyes tear up a bit. I tell her I’ll finish up and do exactly that.

I get home and eat with my 8 year old daughter, who is enjoying a bowl of ice cream. Everyone else is finished. I head upstairs to take a shower. We lie down on our bed to watch something when my wife arrives. My 18 year old comes in to talk to her mother, and without feeling myself go, I slide into sleep, exhausted from the day.

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The next morning, I’m up again at 5:30AM. As I deliver coffees and bagels and breakfast burritos to the good people of Arizona, the top open on my Jeep, my farmer’s tan deepening, I find myself daydreaming about coming home to write about my experiences. I want to regale my readers with tales from the dusty, heat-weathered roads of the Valley of the Sun. About some of the interesting things I see, and the observations I’ve made.

And to think that I saw it on Mulberry Street!

But there is work to do, so it has to wait. People can’t be expected to shop for their own Little Debby Honey Buns, toilet paper, and dog food from the local pharmacy while dodging homeless addicts smoking lot-scavenged cigarette butts.

That’s my job.

Yesterday was hellish. I know today will be better, but I’m still thinking about it as I drive. Still, I focus on the job. The work is medicine. It keeps me putting one foot in front of the other, small successes adding up to a day I can be proud of, with something to actually show for. A direct connection between work and reward.

Downtown jobs in this city are a mixed bag. Upscale plazas have signs informing patrons that it’s “OK to say no to panhandlers” as meth heads and fentanyl zombies lurk in bus stops and street corners nearby. A Starbucks pickup is thwarted by a no-longer-accessible front entrance near where my Jeep is parked. The door is locked behind a beige painted steel gate. I take an accidental shortcut through the side door of a Mediterranean fast-casual place and back out again through their large glass front door, finally finding the Starbucks entrance. Once inside, I see that the door I parked near — the one locked behind the gate — is roped off with signs saying the exit is closed. A shopping trip through a CVS leaves me thwarted by a long vertical PVC pipe attached to the mini-cart, stopping it from quite fitting out the door. The woman working there is apologetic. “If we don’t do that, the carts all disappear.”

My wife has business to attend to and needs me at home with the kids so she can leave, so this afternoon, around lunchtime, I make a final drop off — a protein bowl and shake for a pleasant young woman with dotted tribal tattoos extending from the corners of each eye who works at the Indian Reservation — and then I drive the 25 minutes home while listening to Carolyn McCormick’s excellent narration of Jeff VanderMeer’s novel Annihilation. This turns out to be a mistake. I feel drowsy, but I fight it, and then suddenly I realize I just dozed off for a second at 70 miles an hour just a click from my exit.

I wake up exclaiming, “Jesus!”, but it isn’t a curse. I’m exhausted, but I don’t know how to stop. As long as the money keeps going out, I have to keep it coming in. And unlike with my writing, which might pay off at some point in the future, there is a direct correlation between effort in and dollars out at this job, with the only limiting factor being my own endurance and willingness to hustle. It feels good to hustle. I’m dropping weight again, and going to bed tired. It’s not the kind of work I bring home with me, though I dreamed the other day about being too tired to take an offer with a $109 tip. For a couple hours after I woke up that morning, I thought I’d really declined an offer from my bed, then rolled over and went back to sleep.

I looked it up today, and I’ve driven nearly 2,200 miles for Door Dash and Uber Eats for 118 hours since April 25th. That’s 15 days straight, some with longer hours, some with only a handful, but I’m bad at taking days off when I know I don’t have to and there are more bills to pay.

I enjoy the work, even if it pays less than I really need, but enough that it keeps me coming back. It gets me out of my head, gives me structure and purpose, and connects effort to income. It gives me less time to think than I had hoped, since I’m always looking for the next turn, the next restaurant, or the next offer, but when I do get ideas I dictate them to my notes app and save them for later.

I came home early one day last week to play a little Valheim with my wife, who also needed to de-stress. It’s our favorite game to play together, but I found myself distracted by the idea of going back out to deliver more orders. This real-life game I’ve been playing has an appeal at times that makes the games I buy for fun seem less inviting.

At the end of the day, after all, they don’t pay me to play.

It ain’t exactly a living, but it’s something. It’s often frustrating, I’m spending an arm and a leg on gas, but I’m staying one step ahead of expenses, for now. I love seeing the city, meeting interesting people, and finding all the cool spots to eat. And when I do get a chance to come home and write, it feels good again. Not forced. Almost like catharsis. Maybe this was exactly what the doctor ordered.

If I could figure out how to make a real living at it, I might do this for quite a while.

There’s a part of it I just can’t help but love.