Okay, got your taps turned off? Domino's Delivery Gnomes
The other "creatures" that I encountered while working at the convenience store overnight didn't make such a big impression on me when I first met them, but gradually I began to suspect that something wasn't quite normal about them.
One night in early summer a guy pulls up in a battered purple Gremlin with one of those Domino's pyramid signs on the roof, puts in a couple bucks of gas and comes in to pay. I usually read when I had no customers, and didn't pay much attention to the people as they were pumping, so I was suprised when what looked like a 12 year old boy came in to pay. I kept looking for his mom or an older friend, but there was no one else, just him.
He had really greasy dirty-dishwater blonde hair, brushed forward in a kind of forelock, like the way Uriah Heep is depicted. He was wearing a Domino's hat on backwards, a Domino's uniform shirt that nearly came to his knees, jeans and tennis shoes. His clothes and his skin were slightly dusty with some sort of gritty powdered chalk. I figured it was pizza flour until I swept up some of his footprints and realized that the substance was more like crumbled plaster.
Even though he was small--I'm 5'5 and he came up to my chin--his shoulders and back were really muscular, so much so that he was hunched over. His skin had a really weird yellow-ochre complexion to it--like jaundice yellow mixed with white clay. His face was liberally sprinkled with acne, and he had a large bulbous nose, like my old German grandpa who really liked his beer. He was just plain ugly, and when he smiled it didn't get any better--he didn't have enough teeth.
He didn't have gaps like he'd lost them, his gum area was not just receded, but shrunken and wouldn't have been able to hold the normal number of teeth. His teeth were shaped weird, too--the closest thing I've seen to it before was a kid at school who hadn't gotten enough of some vitamin while he was in the womb and his teeth were spindly at the ends, almost fanglike, but more whittled down looking. This guy had that effect going on, but with less teeth all over.
His one other oddity was that his arms were so long they almost reached his knees--or maybe it was an effect given off because he had the longest hands and fingers I have ever seen in my life-- kind tree-froggish or like Nosferatu.
This was before I met the bee-guy so I just assumed he was some sort of runty, inbred, extremely ugly 18 or 19 year-old who lifted weights.
A couple nights later he comes in again, buys another $2.00 gas. I make small talk--get those pizzas delivered before they got cold? He obviously has no clue what I'm talking about. I remind him of the other night, and he tells me this is his first night, that he just started as a driver. I look out and see that it's not the purple Gremlin, but a purple Pinto. I couldn't believe it wasn't the same guy.
I would see these guys probably 3 nights a week for over three months, mostly apart but sometimes together. They claimed that they weren't related and hadn't known each other before they started driving for Domino's. I learned their names at one time but promptly forgot them because I couldn't keep them straight.
When they talked all they talked about was money, but in a weird way. Most teens talk about how they are going to spend the money--concerts, cars, clothes. These guys just talked about the money and how they preferred change to cash. They would meticulously tally their tips, each had one of those giant plastic "soda bottle" banks in their car and took great joy in filling it. They gloated over the fact that they only kept just the minimum amount of gas in their cars to do their runs and didn't spend a penny more than they had to.
Everytime I saw them I became more and more certain that there was more to them than could be accounted for by rational explanation. One time they came in when I had some of the usual teenage hangers-on were visiting and I wondered how I could have ever mistaken them for deformed teenagers. Despite their small size and acne and muscles, there was just something creepily wizened and old about them in comparison to the normal teenagers. Another time they came in and bought burritos which they heated up in the microwave and ate on the premises. One of them had the hot plastic 3"x6" package in his hand. He was having trouble opening it, so I turned to get a pair of scissors. I turned back and all that was left was the wrapper on the counter--the burrito was totally gone-he wasn't even still chewing. It was like he had managed to swallow it whole.
I spoke to their manager once when he came in to buy beer. He confirmed that they didn't seem to be related and hadn't seemed to know each other before they started working together. He said that according to their papers, one was 29 and the other was 27. Talk about your stunted growth. He had no idea where they lived, he suspected that they lived in their cars or camped out somewhere. Everyonce in a while he had to ask them to bathe, but otherwise they were good, though extremely odd employees. He had heard a rumor that when they went to cash their checks they asked to be paid in rolls of coins instead of cash.
It wasn't until after I met the guy with the bees flying out of this coat that I begin to wonder if they too might be "others" trying to pass themselves off as human. I started to wonder how much oddness we just rationalize away without examination because we don't believe it can exist. The bee guy and the pizza gnomes might have had a hard time passing as one of us in the 8-5 world, but in the 11-7 world, they could pretty much go unremarked upon, even in such a non-diverse place as Des Moines. In our "consensus reality" most people see what they expect to see and discard or disregard any dissonance. And most of us really don't look too close at what we see in the dark.
I stopped working there at the end of the summer to go back to school. The Domino's Pizza delivery gnomes may still be out there somewhere, so next time you get a pizza ask your delivery person if they'd rather be tipped in change.
