Another night I received an invitation to "party" with a visibly coked-out man sharing a Days Inn hotel room with three women – one in nothing but a towel and another passed out on the far bed. But those are about as wild as my stories come. Delivery drivers enjoy certain advantages on Lawrence roads your average commuter may not garner. That trapezoid-shaped magnet many shops require drivers to place atop their vehicles is nearly a free pass to park wherever I damn well please, go around those annoying "Road Closed to Through Traffic" signs or speed within reasonable limits. "I can see you have somewhere to be," a kind officer tells me after I breeze through a short, yellow-to-red stoplight last winter, "but you need to keep your speed down and watch those lights a bit closer. Have a nice evening."
Joe Noel still chooses the dangers of pizza delivery even after the beating. Noel says the pay is just too good to turn down.
"I HAD KICK MARKS ON MY FACE, AND BOOT MARKS ON MY ARM AND SHOULDER. I DON'T THINK THEY PUNCHED ME AT ALL; THEY JUST KICKED ME WHILE I WAS DOWN AND UNCONSCIOUS..."
I've been lucky.
A month ago, Preston Lynch, Olathe senior and driver for Papa John's, 2233 Louisiana St., wasn't so lucky. It was nearing 2 a.m. and he had to make one last delivery at Templin Hall before going home for the night. He left his car running — because his car-topper was stolen the night before he figured it couldn't happen again — and went inside to make the exchange. The girl didn't show, and he looked out the front window to see his car slowly moving out of the parking space. "I just dropped the pizza and ran out screaming, 'My car! My car!'" Lynch says.
Lynch chased the car around the lot, getting between it and the exit. "That's when he floored it, hit me with the mirror when I jumped out of the way, hopped the curb onto Iowa and took off." Authorities eventually found Lynch's car weeks later in St. Joseph, Mo. "I got it back, but the keys were missing," he says. "I guess he planned on driving it again." Jarett Pons is going on his fourth year as a Lawrence delivery driver. He now drives for recently opened Wheat State Pizza, 711 W. $23^{rd}$ St., and says late-night drivers often come across the after-bar crowds who suddenly feel a common bond with the pizza man and invites him in for a drink. "I have to turn it down because, well, I have to drive," Pons says. Now and then lonely-looking women also offer him to come in and "share the pizza," though he suspects they want to share a bit more than just hot food. With his car in the shop one night, Pons borrowed his girlfriend's to make the nightly rounds. Bad timing. Driving along Tennessee
Street, he rear-ended another vehicle, totaling his girlfriend's car. It was hard calling his girlfriend, Pons says, to explain that he hadn't gotten off work early but that she might want to come to Tennessee Street to claim any valuables out of her now scrap metal car.
These were all rough nights, sure. But they were nothing compared to a beating.
Just two days after Noel was beaten and robbed, another delivery driver was almost mugged by the same group of men, but managed to get away without being seriously harmed. Authorities traced the delivery call to Hy-Vee, 3504 Clinton Parkway, and with the help of an employee who saw the men, two were apprehended shortly after. The next day, three more were arrested and all five are awaiting trial. Side effects from the concussion has forced Noel to relearn how to write and play the drums. It's a slow, frustrating process, and the words are still a bit small on the page, but Noel's confident he'll regain any lost abilities. Despite his experience, Noel returned to work just two weeks later. "It didn't scare me to go back to work," he says. "It could have been anyone. I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time." But the madness didn't end there. During his Friday back on the road, and once again his last delivery of the night, someone stole a pizza right out of his hands at the door of a delivery in West Lawrence. A fight between the thief and the rightful owner ensued, and a car door was ripped off the hinges, all in front of a justifiably shell-shocked Noel. But this guy can't be fazed. Noel says he still doesn't want another job. "I'll stay, yeah. It's the freedom that I like," he says. "And the money's good, too."
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Jayplay 10.28.04