Cosa Nostra Pizza / CNPIZZA

Pizza delivery a major industry. A managed industry.
People went to CosaNostra Pizza University four years just to learn it.
Came in its doors unable to write an English sentence, from Abkhazia, Rwanda, Guanajuato, South Jersey,
and came out knowing more about pizza than a Bedouin knows about sand. And they had studied this problem.
Graphed the frequency of doorway delivery-time disputes. Wired the early Deliverators to record, then analyze, the debating tactics, the voice-stress histograms, the distinctive grammatical structures employed by white middle-class Type A Burbclave occupants who against all logic had decided that this was the place to take their personal Custerian stand against all that was stale and deadening in their lives: they were going to lie, or delude themselves, about the time of their phone call and get themselves a free pizza; no, they deserved a free pizza along with their life, liberty, and pursuit of whatever, it was fucking inalienable. Sent psychologists out to these people ‘s houses, gave them a free TV set to submit to an anonymous interview, hooked them to polygraphs, studied their brain waves as they showed them choppy, inexplicable movies of porn queens and late-night car crashes and Sammy Davis Jr., put them in sweet-smelling, mauve-walled rooms and asked them questions about Ethics so perplexing that even a Jesuit couldn’t respond without committing a venial sin.

The analysts at CosaNostra Pizza University concluded that it was just human nature and you couldn’t fix it, and so they went for a quick cheap technical fix: smart boxes. The pizza box is a plastic carapace now, corrugated for stiffness, a little LED readout glowing on the side, telling the Deliverator how many trade imbalance-producing minutes have ticked away since the fateful phonecall. There are chips and stuff in there.
The pizzas rest, a short stack of them, in slots behind the Deliverator ‘ s head. Each pizza glides into a slot like a circuit board into a computer, clicks into place as the smart box interfaces with the onboard system of the Deliverator ‘ s ship. The beacon of the caller has already been inferred from his citizen ID and poured into the smart box’s built-in RAM. From there it is communicated to the ship, which computes and projects the optimal route on a heads-up display, a glowing colored map traced out against the viewport so that the Deliverator does not even have to glance down.
If the thirty-minute deadline expires, news of the disaster is flashed to CosaNostra Pizza Headquarters and relayed from there to Uncie Enzo himself — the Sicilian Colonel Sanders, the Andy Griffith of Bensonhurst, the straight razor-swinging figment of many a Deliverator ‘ s nightmares, the Capo and prime figurehead of CosaNostra Pizza, Incorporated — who will be on the line to the customer within five minutes, apologizing profusely.
The next day, Uncle Enzo will land on the customer ‘s yard in a jet helicopter and apologize some more and give him a free trip to Area18 — all he has to do is sign a bunch of releases that make him a public figure and spokesperson for CosaNostra Pizza and basically end his private life as he knows it. He will come away from the whole thing feeling that, somehow, be owes the Mafia a favor.
The Deliverator does not know for sure what happens to the driver in such cases, but he has heard some rumors. Most pizza deliveries happen in the evening hours, which Uncie Enzo considers to be his private time. And how would you feel if you bad to interrupt dinner with your family in order to call some obstreperous dork in a Burbclave and grovel for a late fucking pizza? Uncle Enzo has not put in fifty years serving his family and his country so that, at the age when most are playing golf and bobbling their granddaughters , he can get out of the bathtub dripping wet and lie down and kiss the feet of some sixteen-year-old skate punk whose pepperoni was thirty-one minutes in coming.
Oh, God. It makes the Deliverator breathe a little shallower just to think of the idea.
But he wouldn’t drive for CosaNostra Pizza any other way.

You know why? Because there’s something about having your life on the line. It’s like being a kamikaze pilot.
Your mind is clear.
Other people — store clerks, burger flippers, software engineers, the whole vocabulary of meaningless jobs that make up Life in America — other people just rely on plain old competition .

Better flip your burgers or debug your subroutines faster and better than your high school classmate two blocks down the strip is flipping or debugging, because we ‘ re in competition with those guys, and people notice these things. What a fucking rat race that is. CosaNostra Pizza doesn’t have any competition. Competition goes against the Mafia ethic. You don ‘ t work harder because you’re competing against some identical operation down the street. You work harder because everything is on the line. Your name, your honor, your family, your life. Those burger flippers might have a better life expectancy — but what kind of life is it anyway, you have to ask yourself.
That’s why nobody, not even the Nipponese, can move pizzas faster than CosaNostra.
The Deliverator is proud to wear the uniform, proud to operate the ship, proud to march up the front walks of innumerable Burbclave homes,
a grim vision in ninja black, a pizza on his shoulder,
red LED digits blazing proud numbers into the night: 12:32 or 15:15 or the occasional 20:43.