Memory Lane: Ghetto Pizzas

As the new year rings in, I find myself thinking back over my life and the thought occurred to me...I've lived in some shitty places in my life.

I live in a pretty decent area now, but it was a long walk to this side of town. There are some things that you just "accept" in your life growing up in the hood and when you get to a nicer part of town you just feel that something is missing.

You know you really live in a jacked up place when one of two things happens:

A) You call Domino's and they tell you point blank, "We don't deliver to that neighborhood." See, it wasn't that the neighborhood was too far away. The damn store was a block down the street. They don't deliver to this complex cuz they keep getting robbed. The messed up part about it is that they didn't even ask me for my address. They had some kind of caller ID that picked up the prefix of my number and automatically raised a red flag. That makes me think, how often are yall getting robbed that you had to take precautions to buy a system that could do that. Someone somewhere had to sit and map out the neighborhood, tally up the number of times they'd been robbed in each part and then say, "We aren't going over there anymore." Damn.

B) Domino's comes to your area but they don't send someone alone. I lived in one spot where they used the buddy system. Two people rode together and get this...they still wouldn't get out the car. They would call from the car and say, "We're outside, please come to the vehicle and pick up your pizza." I have no doubt that while I was paying the guy through the car window that he probably had a sawed off pointed at me from the other side of the door.

To this day it still feels weird going into a liquor store that only sells liquor. The one down the street from me sells wines and spirits. I'd never heard of a liquor store that didn't have potato chips, popsicles, ice cream sandwiches, now and laters, lottery tickets, hats, DVDs, cigarettes, Redskins scarves, passport photos and honey buns. And get this: They let you get your own stuff. You know how it goes in hood liquor stores. You walk in the door, stand in line and talk to the person behind the bulletproof glass. You tell them what you want and they go get it from behind the glass. They have aisles and aisles of stuff but your broke ass aint walking to get it. I even went to a beauty supply store like that. "Yo let me get a wave cap. The one over there. No, the other one. Down on the bottom. Yeah that one."

I always wondered who was the pioneer of the bulletproof glass carousel. You know, that spinning cylinder that they put your stuff in and then spin it around to you. The updated stores had the bulletproof box that has two doors but only one can open at a time, so when they are putting your food/wigs/whatever into it, you can't open it and let off a few shots. Who makes those things? Let's say I want to open a store tomorrow, who would I call and what exactly do I ask for or do they recommend these to you when you go get your small business loan from the bank? "You're opening the store where? Oh, we suggest you go with the platinum ghettotized security system. It comes with a metal gate to pull down outside the store, bulletproof everything and life size cardboard cut outs of the Schlitz Malt Liquor bull."

It's just weird how different things are.