You don't know Tim Fitzgerald, but chances are he knows you.
He has seen your 18 cats, your stash of cocaine on the table and your wife half-naked. He knows your name and your phone number and maybe even your dog's name. Above all, he knows what you like on your pizza.
Fitzgerald is your pizza delivery driver.
"Every person's door tells a story," he tells me as we zoom around neighborhood streets delivering hot pies to St. Petersburg's hungry masses. "You can tell a lot just by standing in their door."
And after peeking into the lives of hundreds of strangers every month, Fitzgerald has gotten pretty good at figuring you out.
"You know what category to place them: housewife, family guy, old hippie, blue collar, white collar," he says.
But the pizza guy himself still remains a bit of a mysterious figure. In the popular imagination, he's the stoned slacker, the pimple-faced college kid, the porn movie star.
But what's a night of pizza delivery really like? I met up with "Fitz" — a delivery driver for Joey Brooklyn's Famous Pizza — to find out.
It's after 5 p.m., and Fitz is late for work. I'm standing in front of Joey Brooklyn's downtown shop when he arrives in a green Isuzu pick-up truck. He tells me he overslept.
Fitzgerald, 40, is wearing a black Rev. Horton Heat T-shirt and camo shorts. He has curly, shoulder-length hair and a soul patch.
Fitzgerald has worked at Joey Brooklyn's for five years, ever since leaving a waiter position at an upscale Italian restaurant. Before that, he lived in Ohio and delivered pizzas for another mom-and-pop pizza shop.
Fitz's first order is waiting — a large pepperoni to Old Northeast. We hop in his 15-year-old jalopy, which jerks and jolts over the brick streets. Fitz has no radio, so he whistles and smokes cigarettes to pass the time.
In less than five minutes we're at a large Victorian home. An older woman opens the door and a child's voice calls out: "Oh, here comes the pizza guy!"
Kids are always happy to see the pizza guy.
"When I was waiting tables, a big family like that would be a pain in the ass," he says after delivering the pie. But now, he says, it usually guarantees a generous tip.
To Fitz, customers fall into one of three categories: "average," "douchebag" and "nice!" The next woman we deliver tips $3. She's average. The Snell Isle resident in a $2 million house who tips $2? Douchebag.
Next stop: the Marriott Hotel on Fourth Street. Fitz knocks on the door of a fifth-floor room. No answer. He knocks again.
"You can tell when guys are whacking off," he says. "You knock and they're like 'just a minute.' And they come to the door all flustered."
He points to the door and whispers: "Definitely whacking."
A shirtless man in flannel pajamas opens the door, flustered, and takes the pizza. Fitz gets a $4 tip.
Halfway through his shift, Fitz has amassed nearly $50. It's a good night, he says, tips averaging $4. But his mood turns sour after our next delivery at the Vinoy. What looks to be a businessman answers the door in khakis and striped shirt. He tips $2.
"Douchebag," Fitz mutters, irritated. "It makes sense the guy staying in the four-star hotel will tip the lousiest of the night."
Our next delivery is in Southside St. Pete off of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. It's in a neighborhood where many pizza shops refuse to make deliveries. I ask Fitz if he's ever been robbed.
"No," he says. "But I fear it like nobody's business."
He's had one close call. Four years ago, he was approached by three men as he was returning from a delivery.
"They surrounded me and said, 'Let's beat up this white boy and take his money,'" he recalls. "I'm like, 'Come on, guys. I'm not The Man. Look at my car.' I was sweating bullets. Then they just laughed and [left]."
Fitz rarely encounters dangerous criminals; usually, people just have the munchies.
"People love to try and get the pizza guy stoned," Fitz says. People offer him beer all the time, too, but he refuses both for obvious reasons.
So what about all those Penthouse letters about the horny housewife seducing the pizza guy?
"It's never the hot chicks doing it," he says. "And it's never quite so flagrant."
But one time, he admits, a lady in Shore Acres came to her door in a towel and "dropped her money," revealing herself.
"She didn't say anything, and I didn't say anything," he recalls. "I got the hell out of there."
But for the most part, Fitz's evenings are spent in relative normalcy interspersed with the occasional Jannus Landing post-concert delivery to performers like the lead singer of Molly Hatchet or Henry Rollins.
"This is a job to hold me over until I do something with my life," he says (his ultimate goal is to become an interior designer). "I'm still waiting to do something with my life. I'm such a slacker, you know what I mean?"
We reach our destination off MLK, and a woman answers the door. She's attractive and gives Fitz a wide smile. She's already paid for her pie, but she doesn't have cash for a tip. She thinks for a moment and offers Fitz a substitute: a 6-inch glass dildo. Fitz looks at it, looks at her and then takes it.
"They make great stocking stuffers," he says and heads back toward the shop for another run.
This article appears in Oct 31 – Nov 6, 2007.