DATE: Friday, August 15, 1997               TAG: 9708150083

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY JEREMY HULATT, COLLEGE CORRESPONDENT 

                                            LENGTH:  110 lines

SLICE OF LIFE/PART 2 SOMETIMES YOU SMILE, SOMETIMES YOU ACHE

We've all seen the pizza delivery person. He or she hustles up to our homes with the hot, cheesy treat. But what do pizza delivery people see when they reach our doorsteps? Jeremy Hulatt is a pizza delivery man. Today he'll take us along for Part 2 of his peek into the lives of his customers.

Second of two parts.

I DRIVE THE same streets, through the same neighborhoods, and I often walk up the same driveways. I've come to recognize customers, some by face and others by name. At some houses, I even know when the dog is going to come running out to greet me, surely in anticipation of his long-awaited pizza crust.

Although my evenings often fall into the calm rhythm of routine, I sometimes stumble upon a delivery that frees me from that routine.

Early one spring evening, I headed out on a delivery to the Executive Inn on Military Highway. I never know what to expect when delivering to a motel. Many of the deliveries that I take are for truckers hungry after a long day of driving. Sometimes I am greeted by families who have stopped for a night of rest as they make their way to see some relative, or have come, perhaps, to visit the beach.

It's not out of the ordinary to find a group of friends who have gotten a room to party. Littering the room with beer cans the cloudy haze of cigarette smoke or the sweet musky smoke from blunts or pipes, they come to the door red-eyed and often stumbling, laughing. They take their order but don't usually tip very well.

On this occasion, I pulled into the parking lot and checked the room number. It was an upstairs room, so I locked my car. As I made my way to the stairs, I passed a man scooping ice into a small bucket. He watched me as I walked by, so I nodded my head in a silent ``hello.'' He returned the gesture.

I found the room and knocked on the door. I heard the clicking of the lock and the pulling and turning of the doorknob. Unfamiliar doors are sometimes a pain. Finally the door opened.

There, standing in the doorway, was a completely nude woman. Her eyes were turned down at first as she was fiddling with the zipper on a neon pink fanny-pack. I guess my silence drew her attention, because slowly her eyes began to work their way up toward my face. Her eyes grew bigger and bigger with the realization of her error. I was caught between embarrassment and trying to hold back a fit of laughter as she exclaimed, ``Ahhhh!'' and flung the door shut.

At that precise moment, the man I had seen getting ice walked around the corner. He gave me a perplexed look and knocked on the door. The door opened just a crack, then wider, and the man walked in.

``What's goin' on?'' I heard him ask. The woman was laughing as she told him, ``I thought that was you out there, and I opened the door naked.''

The man came back out and handed me a check. He was shaking his head, seeming somewhat annoyed. I smiled really big and said, ``Thanks.''

As I walked away, I still could hear her laughing.

Delivering pizza, I see a lot of things that make me smile and things that make me glad to be alive. There are also things that I just really don't want to see. They make me scared of what our society is and more so about what it might become.

On one occasion, I was delivering a pizza to a house in Norfolk Highlands, a neighborhood between Indian River Road and Rokeby Avenue, just across the Chesapeake city border. It's a very homey middle-class neighborhood with a warm atmosphere. Occasionally, people wave as I drive by, and in more than a few driveways, there might be folks in oil-covered overalls wrenching on a car as one or two of their kids, and maybe the dog, run around in the yard.

As I pulled up in front of the driveway, I was astonished. The front yard looked like trash. It was littered with broken things, lost things, things that had no place. An old tire, parts of an engine, a broken chair.

A few weeds stretched up between knobby tree roots and tried to hide the filth. The house looked tired, dusty and dark.

As I walked up through the yard, a young girl of maybe 12 or 13 walked out of the house. She was quite beautiful for her age but wore old and tattered clothes. She shyly said ``hi'' and picked up a cat that had been lounging on the step. She cradled it in her arms and simply walked around the yard holding it, speaking softly to it.

A tall, thin man with a bristly red mustache came to the door, opened it and stood there waiting as I made my way up to the porch. He told me to wait a minute, that ``she'' was writing the check.

I could hear her stomping through the house, and as she came closer to the door, I was introduced to the hiss of her heavy breathing and whine of her wheezing lungs.

``Whur is she, godammit?!'' a woman said, craning her neck and seeming to be trying to point her left eye out into the yard, apparently unable to see properly. ``She's right here,'' the man said, speaking softly and calmly. I turned and looked out into the yard to see the young girl beginning to cower, hugging her cat close to her and scratching its ears nervously.

``Git up heer, now! Git yur ass in the house,'' she hollered, spittle escaping from her mouth.

The girl put down her cat and walked up onto the porch, looking only at the ground, her head hung low. When she walked by me, I could see her eyes beginning to swell with tears, but she didn't argue or disobey. She simply walked into the house.

``That's it fur yew, git in yur goddam room and shut the hell up, yur not goin' out fur a week, shut up and git in there. . . .'' The woman vented her wrath.

I couldn't really concentrate on what she was saying after that, but I remember the words ringing out, ``One of these days ah aughta jus' kill yew.'' I tried to imagine the hell that the young girl was living.

The man just stood there. I could see in his eyes that he didn't like what was going on, but he uttered not a word. I heard the creak of a door shutting deep within the house. I pictured the girl lying on her bed, crying or trying to lose herself in a song on the radio. The man walked back into the house, mute.

The woman stood there in front of me, asking me how much the total was. She held the check directly up to her eyeball, making sure she had written it correctly.

I took the check, shoved the pizza at her and walked away. MEMO: Jeremy Hulatt is a senior at Old Dominion University.

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