The Olden Times #3

In the olden times ...

There were only two kinds of food that could be delivered: pizza and Chinese food. The Chinese food places that delivered were as unreliable as the consistency of the food they delivered. One week, the Pho Han Palace would deliver, the next week they would deny ever having delivered food in the entire history of human existence. The only guarantee you got was that your Dim Sum would be delivered by a guy on a motor scooter. And that motor scooter sounded like an atomic bomb detonating in the atmosphere as it pulled up out front. The guy didn't even have to ring the doorbell. You would be alerted by his bombastic engine and the fumes he was venting.

Your order would maybe be right, or you would get the fish head soup with a single set of chopsticks and ten thousand poorly written fortune cookies. "The penny you save can also be considered the penny you have now earned. Your lucky numbers are 4, 4, 4, 4, apple." So, your best option for good delivery was pizza. Your options there were limited, though. You couldn't get pineapple or spinach. Your options were two kinds of smoked meat, extra cheese, and for some reason completely inconceivable to most of mankind, tiny little salted fish.

Your pizza was delivered by a stoned kid in a 1978 Gremlin that rivaled the motor scooter for sheer sound output. He would drive eight thousand miles per hour to fill that 30-45 minute delivery window, just leaving mayhem in his wake. Nothing behind him but mailboxes and weeping widows. When your pizza arrived, the gross of the cheese was on the lid of the box, another victim of his wheel-spinning death parade.

When there were five boys to feed, your mom ordered enough pizza to topple the economy of a large European nation. When she gave the call that the pizza had come, her five boys appeared like an army of Huns on the Russian steppe. She insisted that you say grace, which you did, but at least one of you did it around a mouthful of pizza. The biggest of you could get ten slices in before tapping out, only to appear a few minutes later for one more piece, to fill that square micron of empty space. He then washed all that down with half a liter of Coke, and all your mom said about this goon's devastating appetite was that he was a growing boy. He could, in fact, eat that large European country back into the Stone Age. And, of course, pizza night was usually on a Friday, and that came with other perks, like the weekend movie rental.

So, your mom put on Tarzan, which she knew nothing about because there was no internet, no Common Sense Media. She just thought Tarzan, what could be so bad? And hey, it had Richard Harris, and she loved him in Camelot. Twenty minutes in, after seeing a few naked natives and Tarzan in a loincloth, she got the inkling that it could be a mistake. Then when her middle son said of Bo Derek - complete with a speech impediment - "She's making me hworny," she shut down the whole operation, and you ended up playing Monopoly, which the goon won, of course, because nobody wanted him flipping over the game board. Then the Huns toddled off to bed, where they listened to the oldest brother tell them how he could totally hook up with Bo Derek if he wanted to.