WORKING IN L.A. / PIZZA DELIVERY : He Grabs a Slice of the American Dream

According to Aziz Kahakwan, the secret of delivering pizza is “to stay cool.”

“One time, I take six of them to a house in Venice,” he said a few days ago. “They’re having a big party, outdoors, very nice. Everybody is laughing, having fun. They have a big bulldog. . . .

“They say if I walk past the bulldog, they give me a $50 tip. They say if I don’t, no tip. I think, It’s the money or my life. Which one?

“So I kept walking, right past the dog,” Kahakwan said. “The dog growls, but it doesn’t attack. Everybody claps. The pizzas cost $49. They give me $100. So I actually got $51.”

It’s successes like this that have made Kahakwan the Pakistani pizza prince--a mentor to his countrymen, one of the top salesmen at the Domino’s pizza joint in Marina del Rey, owner of a grocery store in Culver City and an example of how an impoverished immigrant can make good in a hurry.

Kahakwan, a 29-year-old native of Karachi, said he arrived in this country in July, 1985, and promptly went to work for some relatives in Los Angeles.

“The trouble is, they all speak Pakistani,” he said. “I learn no English.”

In an effort to broaden his horizons, Kahakwan applied for a job with Domino’s.

“They hire me,” he said. “They give me two T-shirts, a belt, a hat, a jacket and a little Domino’s flag for my car. They don’t know I don’t speak English.”

They also gave him a name tag, which reads “Massus.”

“That’s because of one of the assistant managers,” Kahakwan said. “She can’t pronounce my name, but she says I give great back rubs. I’m the Domino’s masseuse.” Kahakwan said the manager went out of his way to teach his new employee English, listening in as Kahakwan took orders on the phone and unscrambling whatever mix-ups resulted.

“Within six months, I am training other Pakistanis to work here,” Kahakwan said. “There are 13 stores around here owned by one guy. By now, there are six or seven Pakistanis working at each of them. And I was the first one.”

Three fellow Pakistanis--one of them his 30-year-old brother, Muntaz--were among the dozen people working a night shift earlier this month at the plain little store on Lincoln Boulevard in the Venice area.

Domino’s shtick is its promise to deliver its pizza within 30 minutes, or give you $3 off. To accomplish this, there’s an assembly line of sorts.

It starts at the phone bank, where most of the orders come in. One minute is allowed for that.

Then comes the “make” counter, where circular blobs of dough are pounded flat, smeared with tomato sauce and sprinkled with cheese and whichever of the 11 other toppings the customer has ordered. Three minutes there.

“Pepperoni, sausage and mushrooms are by far the most popular,” said Rodney Nash, one of the assistant managers overseeing the store’s monthly production of between 850 and 2,500 pizzas. “We only sell four or five anchovy pizzas a week.”

The pizzas are then placed on a slow-moving metal conveyor belt that carries them through a gas-fired oven in exactly six minutes.

That leaves 20 minutes for Kahakwan and his cohorts to plop each pizza into a box, toss the boxes into insulated pouches and drive their fragrant cargo to the apartments, condos, houses and yachts in their 12-square-mile delivery area.

“Delivery is very cool,” he said. “I turn on my stereo. I have no pressures, no headaches. I can choose my own schedule. I like this job.”

Eleven minutes after Doris Herrera’s onion-mushroom-and-pepperoni pizzas left the oven, Kahakwan handed them to her on the doorstep of her home on Alla Road. The pizzas cost $21.55. Kahakwan’s tip was $2.45.

While Kahakwan was heading back to the store in his tiny Japanese coupe, a pineapple pizza ran amok and bubbled over in the oven. That slowed things down a bit, and by the time he started his second run, there were only 12 minutes left on the clock.

“Everything’s cool,” he said as he cut across Lincoln and headed for a condo on Lighthouse Street. “When people see the Domino’s flag, they let us pass in front of them. If we have to park in the red, the cops see the flag and give us three minutes before we get a ticket.”

Kahakwan completed the second run with two minutes to spare. The pizza cost $14.15. His tip was $5.85.

During the next hour, he completed four more runs--three of them to apartments and one of them to a 65-foot yacht, the Splendour, from which actress Natalie Wood fell 11 years ago on the night she drowned off Santa Catalina Island. The pizzas totaled $62.30, the tips added up to $7.45.

“It’s good money,” Kahakwan said as he headed back up Lincoln Boulevard toward the end of his shift. “I don’t get a commission on the pizzas, but I make $5.75 an hour, plus mileage, and the tips average $5 to $6 an hour. . . .

“When I started out, I sometimes worked 16 hours a day,” he said. “I needed money to help my family when they came over here--my brother, my four sisters, my mother and my father.

“Now one sister has a hair salon, another is a nurse, another is an office clerk and the fourth is in school. My brother works here, and my father and my wife work at my grocery store. When I’m not doing this, I manage the store, and I think pretty soon I get another store.”

That might mean an end to delivering pizza, a job that has afforded him some happy memories.

“There was the old woman who insisted that I leave her pizza in the mailbox,” Kahakwan said. “That was pretty funny.”

And there was another woman, back before Kahakwan was married.

“It was about 2 a.m., just about the end of the day,” he said softly. “I took a pizza to a wonderful condo in the marina.

“The lady came to the door. She was young. She was beautiful. . . .

“I said, ‘Here’s your pizza.’

“She said, ‘I didn’t call for pizza, I called for fun.’

“I said I had to get back to work.

“She said to come back after work.

“I could not, because I am a very religious man. Every morning at 3:30, I go to the mosque. . . . But the next day, I came back.”

Kahakwan said that as things worked out, he and the woman--a 26-year-old from Italy on a six-month vacation in Southern California--dated frequently during the weeks remaining before her return to Europe.

“It was cool,” he said.