Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 18, 1993 TAG: 9304180088
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: D-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Ed Shamy
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
LOOSE LIPS ON PIZZA NOT IN GOOD TASTE
Fed a steady appetite of gossip from our workplaces and our schools, our neighborhoods, families and social circles, it all begins to sound the same after a while. The same infidelities and demotions are repeated, with different faces and into different ears over and over again.Once in a while, though, the thirst in all of us for a really good story gets a satisfying drink at the rumor mill.
Heard the latest doozy to make the rounds in the Roanoke Valley?
Goes like this: A group of nurses at the hospital calls Domino's Pizza for a delivery. The pie is brought to them and they begin to eat. Halfway through the pizza, the deliveryman calls.
Before delivering the pizza, he tells the nurses, he masturbated onto it. And he has AIDS.
There are a few slight variations on the theme. Each of the valley's three hospitals is cited as sources. Sometimes the man claims to have urinated on the pizza. Sometimes, he's already been arrested.
The basic story is not true. Nor are any of the flourishes.
But it's a great story. It's horrific. It involves local folks. It tears at a giant company - Domino's - and it proves once again that we're slowly being taken hostage by a planet full of sickos.
But what happens after it leaves your lips, when your friend tells his friends and they tell their friends?
It has to hit somewhere.
Tom Wallace takes the hit.
A year and a half ago, he and his wife, Patricia, bought 12 Domino's outlets and moved here with their three children from North Carolina.
"I'm in debt up to my gazoo," said Wallace. "My long-term goal is to provide for my kids and spend more time with them."
He wears a Domino's shirt with a nametag: Tom. He looks like a deliveryman, but his hours are worse.
"I'm sure that I have lost some sales over this from people who don't want to eat another Domino's Pizza," he said. "I've sat up nights thinking about this."
Since he first heard the rumor on March 16, Wallace has fielded dozens of phone calls at his office on Elm Avenue. One came from a woman who didn't want her son working for such a disgusting organization; another from a woman who heard the story from an unimpeachable source.
The rumor has found its way into the city Health Department and the Police Department and the commonwealth's attorney's office.
Wallace is left to wonder how to fight back against a gossipy, malicious beast he didn't create and can't find.
If he figures out how to kill the AIDS rumor, it'd be nothing short of a miracle.
It used to be told about doughnut shops, without the AIDS angle.
"That's the gruesome new twist for the '90s," says Tim McIntyre, a spokesman for Domino's at the company's headquarters in Ann Arbor, Mich.
At Domino's home office, "We first heard it about us three or four years ago, on the East Coast," McIntyre said.
Since then, it's been to Florida, North Carolina and to Texas, and popped up in California. When the rumor passed through Ann Arbor, McIntyre said, it was about Burger King.
"We thought about a competitor perhaps starting it, or a former employee, but it's too widespread for that," he says.
Wallace first believed a competitor might have started the embittered-deliveryman-with-AIDS rumor, because its onslaught coincided almost to the day with Domino's introduction of submarine sandwiches.
But this latest round is sub-unrelated. It can be traced from the Midwest to Roanoke, swirling like some great confused storm churning toward the east.
A newspaper in Indianapolis dispels the rumor in January. From there the story gains new life in Huntington, Ind., by mid-February, then on a week later to Detroit. It moves through Sandusky and Norwalk and Toledo, all in Ohio, through March.
Now it's ours, another urban legend inherited, another dark tale to confirm that innocent people just can't get a break - even on a pizza delivery.
"People who retell it may think they hurt this big, faceless company far away in Michigan, but they don't. They hurt little guys like Tom Wallace who are part of their own communities," said McIntyre.
"What happens if my sales go down?"' asks Wallace, who employs 240 people. "What if I have to start laying them off?"
He rattles a loud saber to defend his business.
He's hired Dave Paxton, an attorney with Gentry Locke Rakes & Moore in Roanoke, to try to trace the source, or at least douse the spread, of the AIDS rumor.
"There is no fact there," Paxton says of the rumor. "We intend to research every person we hear is telling the story. People have got to understand they're personally liable for repeating it."
Paxton already has called administrators at Lewis-Gale Hospital to check one angle: Is it true they're checking the pizza in their laboratory?
Of course not. There is no such pizza.
Still, Tom Wallace fields - a month after it started - about a call a day from concerned customers.
"Some of them claim they've heard it on the radio, or seen it on television," said Paxton. None has.
"It really is unbelievable," said Wallace, clearly exasperated by it all. "I'm prepared to deal with this, but - sheesh."