Delivery Job
by Douglas Cole
[this is the fourth in a six part series–
read Evening of Earth from the beginning]
Delivery Job
I liked delivering flowers. This was when we were first in San Diego, around ’86 or ’87. There was no GPS at the time. I didn’t know the city at all. But I learned fast, and I liked looking up the addresses in the Thomas Guide map book. I liked driving around, on my own, checking out the neighborhoods—Normal Heights, Pacific Beach, Ocean Beach, downtown, National City Chula Vista, San Ysidro on the Mexican border, dust yards, yucca, wide streets going into the desert east or the big ocean west. I loved swimming in the ocean off Sunset Cliffs, the red sandstone trails down to the beach and pelicans cruising in armadas over the waves.
The owners of the shop were two men: Olaf, short and large-bellied, red receding hair and red beard. He was mostly the numbers. Then Walter, very tall maybe 6’6’ or 6’8’, with big square head and black hair dyed; he looked like Lurch from the Adam’s Family. Sweet energy, artsy, the arranger—something was wrong with his neck, so his head leaned to the side past looking like he was thinking about something and into oh that looks uncomfortable. I’d rate the angle of neck to shoulder at maybe 35 degrees, acute it’s called.
What a job, I thought. It was perfect: one of those throw-away ones you know isn’t forever. But it’s a fun adventure. Something strange. And what fun to bring flowers to people. I felt like a magic elf bringing pixie-dust happiness to the world. I felt like that. Most deliveries were to offices, weddings and of course funerals. The first time I ever went into a funeral home was to deliver flowers. There was no one there, literally, except a dead body. In an open casket. I rang the bell and no one appeared, so I arranged the flowers at the head of the casket. That was the first dead body I ever saw. I wasn’t afraid. I was curious. The difference between a body with a life in it and a body without a life in it is obvious. The spirit of this old guy was pretty much long gone. Maybe he had a few feelers still tethered in there. He mostly looked like gray modeling clay.
I was learning the city well. I knew my way around better than most natives within a couple of weeks. And I really liked that city. The main highway east and west was the 8, and it ended at the ocean. North and south were the 5 and 805 and, well, I don’t remember them all now, but then, you could tell me an address, and I could picture the path to it in my mind, gauge the best route by the time of day and the flow of traffic. I acquired my best spider sense city driving skills doing that job, which is saying something because I had become pretty skilled at driving San Francisco before I went to England and then LA fairly well when I moved there. I liked having that ability to read the city traffically.
But one day I was in a hurry. I had a lot of deliveries to get out before the evening rush hour, and I was heading out of the flower shop parking lot, made a right turn into the street, and caught the corner of a flatbed truck, gouging a deep groove into the passenger side of that delivery van from stem to stern. It made an excruciating sound, that steel ripping other steel. I backed into the parking lot, and Walter came running out, his head bouncing sideways, his hands pressed against his face. He shrieked. Oh, the horror of that expression as I climbed out and came around to see the ugly cut-open, bent-in metal on the side of the van. The flatbed truck was fine, not a scratch. The van was half-totaled. You couldn’t open the passenger door or the sliding door.
I finished my deliveries, getting the flowers out through the back of the van. The owners were pretty cool about it. They didn’t dock my pay or anything. No report to the police, which was a big deal for me, then. I quit soon after for a better paying job at the high school as a TA. There, I spent the majority of my time at a little study cubicle in the library, bent over a stack of essays, under a bunker-style window about a foot high and two feet wide through which I saw nothing but the solid blue sky.
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