Pink Dot Nation

It’s a midwinter Saturday night and i’m chugging slowly, painfully up twisty Laurel Canyon Boulevard in a 1968 Volkswagen that’s one of the few survivors of a once proud fleet. On the passenger side, on the seat and in the floor well, are four plastic bags containing what might loosely be called groceries. I’m a tall, round, middle-aged man hunched over a skinny little steering wheel, illogically making myself as small a target as possible because careening SUVs and luxury sports coupes are pulling out from behind and passing me on blind curves at 60 mph.

In the milliseconds that their halogen high beams bounce off my mirrors--blinding me, of course--these drivers see a strange, bug-shaped object painted royal blue and covered with eccentrically sized circles the color of Pepto-Bismol. On the sluggish Bug’s roof is a white plastic duck-billed beanie, itself topped by a windmilling pink-and-white propeller. Attached to the engine cover at my rear is a large pink windup key. Up front, white plastic eyelids surround two dim headlights.

After much squinting--alternately at the Thomas Guide in my lap and through the windshield--several wrong guesses and suicidal U-turns, I park on an obscure side street called McKim Court, a curly, hair-thin line on map page 593.

“Hey! Hi!” shouts a man’s voice way up there, on an upper floor of a hillside mini-mansion. He ducks inside and an electric gate slides open. I scale a long driveway and a steep stairway and face a skinny, bearded, barefoot grad-school type in his mid-20s. I place two sacks--each containing a six-pack of Michelob Light--at his feet.

“Free delivery coupon special--$12.98, plus tax,” I say, not precisely cheerfully.

Young Michelob Man looks deep into my eyes and, noting my repressed rage, fishes a twenty out of his jeans and hands it to me. “Keep the change,” he says, retreating. “Have a nice night, man.”

I descend his driveway, climb into my cutesy car, scrabble for another receipt and head for my next stop: an apartment building near the Hollywood Bowl. After two or three bum turns I finally find it, then park in a red zone. I haul out one bag containing some Twix chocolate caramel bars, the other an aluminum dish of ice-cold spaghetti with marinara sauce. The door of Apartment 205 is opened by a man with a scraggly goatee; maybe 5-foot-5 on a good day; unbuttoned Cosmo Kramer shirt; hairless chest; Twix-eating grin.

“Hey, man. Where’ve ya been? We just called to cancel the order. You’re just too late.”

The door closes in my face. I trudge out the front door of the building, tired and angry. In the midst of this rejected nourishment, I’m hungry. After several weeks of semi-aimless driving and ligament-stretching heavy lifting--interspersed by a painful and embarrassing stress-related ailment--I’m no closer to answering The Question: Why Pink Dot?

This unique, bizarrely named and logoed Southern California company--which survives by dispatching underpowered autos bearing overpriced groceries, liquor, smokes, prepared meals and sundries--has lasted 15 years in the world capital of personal cars, parking lots and convenient corner mini-malls. How has this venerable institution outlived analogous nationwide companies such as Webvan, Kozmo and HomeGrocer? What is it about Los Angeles that makes it fertile soil for such an enterprise?

Also, what personality quirks of the average Angeleno--sloth? loneliness? a need for instant (well, approximately 30-minute) gratification?--compel him or her to summon a salaried member of the service sector to deliver an item he or she could procure quite easily and much more cheaply themselves? While we’re at it, what kind of person works for such a servile company in the world capital of one-upmanship?

All good questions, agreed the editors of this magazine, and no doubt answerable via a short, snappy, George Plimptonesque essay-slash-adventure.

You bet.

“Who are our customers? I think the core group are what we would call young urban professionals,” says Dan Frahm, the business-casual-clad CEO of WhyRunOut.com, the parent company of Pink Dot. Frahm is a tall, slim 42-year-old with a thick helmet of iron-gray hair, and we are sitting in the small, spartan back office of Pink Dot’s Century City outlet on Santa Monica Boulevard near Beverly Glen. Its exterior is painted white with manhole-sized fluorescent pink dots. On one side of the office’s thin wall is a stockroom and walk-in freezer. Just south of the office door, a short Latino woman runs a small takeout deli.

Up front, open to the public, is what looks like a generic convenience mart--except that the phone rings constantly. The store manager, earpiece cradled on his shoulder, writes down orders while pitching his daily specials right back. Several other employees, order slips in hand, pluck items from the shelves, place them in plastic bags, then race out to the parking lot and into their well-worn cars and pickups, each topped by a magnetic plastic Pink Dot sign, and speed away.

Frahm continues: “They are ordering for convenience. And then I think that we also have moms that need diapers or medicine on a quick turnaround. They are single moms and it is very difficult to get out of the house with their kid. I think that is a core group, and then you have a smaller group of people that are not mobile at all. They’re handicapped in some way, or can’t drive, and they rely on Pink Dot to fulfill their needs.”

I nod earnestly, filing away his quote for ironic contrast later. I ask him why Los Angeles has been fertile ground for Pink Dot.

Sloth, I think.

“Density,” Frahm says

“Huh?”

He patiently explains that urban L.A., usually caricatured as a horizontal city of ranch houses and two-car garages, is in fact very vertical, filled with office and apartment buildings stuffed with consumers in close proximity. He points to a large map on the wall showing the location of each Pink Dot. Each of the seven stores, he says, has a customer base of at least 500,000 people within a two-mile radius.

I squint at the map and suspect--for the first time but not the last--that my assumptions about my home city might be somewhat flawed. I ask Frahm how Pink Dot fits into the psyche and history of Los Angeles. I wait for the Big Definitive Quote, but Frahm merely shrugs and shakes his head. He says that they’re looking into launching Pink Dot in several other major cities.

I make it easier for him, asking: Why has the Pink Dot model succeeded in Los Angeles and not in other big American towns such as New York and Boston, which are overrun by tip-hungry doormen and concierges and runny-nosed assistant buspersons bearing cold pizza and lukewarm coffee? Frahm, a Harvard grad, lifelong Republican and former political consultant, flashes his even white teeth. Ah, I think: Here comes the insight that will reveal the city’s secrets to me once and for all.

“This pickup-and-delivery business model is not much different from what happens every day in New York, where you have these corner grocers and they all deliver,” he says. “They are just not unified under a brand.”

So much for enlightenment. To get past this thematic roadblock I withdraw to research the quirky history of Pink Dot. The company was founded in 1987, the brainchild of an audacious entrepreneur named Bill Toro. Alas, several years ago he left town without leaving a forwarding address. According to unverifiable company legend, repeated by a Pink Dot executive, the idea for Pink Dot was born fully formed one day when Toro saw Jane Jetson of the TV cartoon “The Jetsons” ordering dinner through her television. From his mind leapt the notion of combining a convenience store and deli with a pizza-type delivery service. He would charge inflated convenience-store prices plus a delivery fee, which these days is $3.50 per order.

Using the same animated thought process, he came up with the name Pink Dot and the company’s cute circular mascot, “Pinky.” He opened up his flagship store at Sunset and La Cienega boulevards and salted his fleet with a dozen or so VW “Pinky cars.” By the late 1990s Pink Dot had seven locations: The West Hollywood mother store (known affectionately as “Sunset”), Hollywood, Century City, Venice, Van Nuys, Burbank and Glendale.

In 1999 Toro sold out to a young company, PDQuick, that had great plans to build an Internet-wired nationwide network of home grocery delivery. The dot-commers set up plush headquarters in Camarillo, expanding quickly to more than 20 locations, many in thinly populated suburbs, changed the name of the business to PDQuick.com, scrapped the Bugs in favor of generic Daewoo subcompacts, and opened up branches in Baltimore and in San Francisco. By 2001 they had run through virtually all of their $70 million in start-up capital. With PDQuick on the brink of bankruptcy, the owners accepted from a group of Orange County investors headed by Frahm a fraction of what PDQuick had put into the company.

A few years earlier Frahm had formed WhyRunOut.com, based in Aliso Viejo, to handle shop-from-home deliveries for big supermarket chains, including Stater Brothers. He let go a couple hundred employees and closed all but the original seven stores. Frahm pulled the plug on Internet ordering, realizing that he had to return the company to its neighborhood approach and its low-tech tradition as a familiar voice on the other end of a copper wire.

Also, he set out to bring back much of Pink Dot’s former funkiness. He revived the Pink Dot name, reinstated the Pinky mascot to all catalogs, coupons and circulars, and bought an old VW Pinky car, restoring it and putting it back on the road. Hence, I reasoned, a tad desperately, the real site-specific zaniness of L.A.’s Pink Dot phenomenon would be found not in the executive suite but in the trenches, with the only-in-L.A. types I’d meet while working, with management’s blessing, as a Pink Dot deliveryperson.

I’d hoped to meet colorful L.A. characters such as Gypsy Boots or Skip E. Lowe--or at the very least Melrose Larry Green. Instead, my first encounter was with an aspiring Horatio Alger.

“This is not a bad job. It is a very good one,” says Valentin Zometa, a six-year veteran deliveryman who is my instructor on my first day working out of Century City. Like many other longtime Pink Dot employees, he is a legal immigrant from Central America. Like all the drivers (including me), he makes $6.75 per hour, plus 50 cents per delivery, plus tips. His wife works at a fast-food restaurant at Los Angeles International Airport, and they have a young daughter. He also works nights delivering paperwork for a major bank.

He grabs a white plastic Pink Dot car-topper and attaches it magnetically to his 1984 Toyota pickup. He tears off a computer-generated sales slip from the printer in the store and I haul the corresponding bundle of groceries out to the parking lot. We zoom away on the first of about a dozen trips.

From the passenger seat I try out my next cocksure assumption: that he spends most of his time catering to an anonymous parade of (hopefully) wacko impulse buyers.

“Ah, no,” he says. “I know everyone.”

In fact, he barely looks at his map as we deliver Turkey Gobbler sandwiches, heavy bottles of Arrowhead water and rolls and rolls of Bounty paper towels to an assortment of middle-aged housewives, young mothers and Wilshire Boulevard receptionists, most of whom greet him warmly and tip generously. These include the “ladies who dance” at a West L.A. “gentlemen’s club,” to whom he delivers a midmorning supply of Advil and Marlboros.

Somewhat later, however, when we’ve gotten to know each other better, he tells me about one of his favorite customers, a woman named Laura.

“Is Laura a good-looking young woman?” I ask crassly.

“Ah, no,” he says. “Low-ra is just a hand. That is all I see through the crack in the door. She is an old lady. But she is very nice. We talk very much. We are friends.”

Zometa interprets my sad expression--correctly--as disappointment, and tries to give me what he thinks I want. He admits that during his six years on the job two young women, for reasons he cannot fathom, met him at their front doors naked. And then there’s his trophy story (which, I learn, is the pride and joy of every Pink Dot driver).

“One day I am called up to a house in Bel-Air,” Zometa says, “and the lady at the door has--what you call it?--is taking her temperature in her mouth.”

“A thermometer?”

“Yes. Suddenly she looks at it and shouts, ‘Honey, it’s time!’ And rushes upstairs. And I wait in the hall and there is a big mirror on the wall halfway up the stairway in which I see them.”

With much embarrassment, he recounts waiting downstairs more than half an hour for his payment, averting his eyes from the mirror as the sounds of vigorous lovemaking sweep down the stairs. Then another woman arrives and angrily accuses him of being a Peeping Tom. Extremely nervous by then, he protests that he is only waiting to be paid. Then the woman laughs, points out the camera lens hidden in the wall and tells him he is being filmed for a television show--a raunchy cable knockoff of “Candid Camera” whose name Zometa can’t remember.

Amid much merriment by the show’s suddenly swarming staffers, he is slapped on the back and handed a release to sign. He signs, then reminds whoever will listen that he still hasn’t gotten money for his groceries. Finally, someone pays the bill. No tip.

Zometa says he never had a chance to see the show.

“Yap. Yap. Yap. Yap!”

“Who’s there?” shouts a middle-aged female voice.

“Pink Dot delivery!” I shout back.

“Yap! Yap! Yip! YAP!” screeches the Lapdog from Hell.

It’s nearly the end of my first day of solo deliveries. I’ve just driven 40 minutes through congealing traffic to a three-story apartment building in Santa Monica, pulled three heavy plastic bags of groceries (12-pack caffeine-free Diet Coke; 100-count Mr. Coffee regular-size filters; quart of Rockview Farms lowfat milk) out of my creaking 1992 Acura Integra, ridden the world’s slowest elevator to the third floor, taken several wrong turns down a narrow and dimly lit corridor (Frahm was right about the density) and wound up facing a door to which is attached a gaily colored kachina doll and a hand-carved wooden plaque that reads, “Welcome!”

“Hold on a second, will ya? I’ve gotta shut this [colorful expletive] animal up,” says my customer.

I wait for five minutes while yells and yaps drift into the hallway. A door slams, followed by five minutes of silence. Then renewed sounds of struggle and, finally, a shouted request from inside to leave the groceries in the hall. The door opens a crack, the dog reaches new heights of ferocity, and a hand bearing a Visa card snakes out. I run it through my portable imprinter and hand back the slip. She shuts the door, writes me a $3 tip, signs, tears off her copy, hands the rest of the slip back and slams everything shut again.

“What kind of dog is that?” I ask through the door in what I feel is a friendly tone.

“Seven pounds of [colorful expletive] big mouth!” she snarls.

I retreat and drive to my next and presumably last stop, a gray frame house with an overgrown front yard and a partially disassembled Corvette in the driveway. The door is opened by a Cheech Marin look-alike. I peer inside to see an elaborate stereo system squatting on the floor--and no other furniture.

“Thanks, man,” says my customer, grabbing hold of his two 12-packs of Budweiser ($23.98, plus $5 tip, not including tax). He then looks quizzically into a second bag.

“Hey, man. This isn’t mine,” he says.

I stare into the bag at a Southwest Tortilla Salad, check my sales receipts and realize that I should have left it with the dog woman. I sigh, clamber back into my car, drive back to the apartment building, ride the world’s slowest elevator and notice that the other bags are gone. I knock on the welcome sign.

“YAP! YAP! YAP! YAP!”

There are no signs of human life. I leave the salad on the doorstep and never talk to or hear from the woman again.

Both are interesting encounters, if contemplated calmly after a couple of extra-strength Tylenols, but no help in confirming any preconceived--or even ill-conceived--anthropological notions about L.A. In fact, after a full week on the job, about all my gridlocked brain can handle is to bundle my conclusions about the citizenry of the Pink Dot Nation into two loose, essentially useless categories.

Category One: Customers for whom a credible imaginary back story can be concocted from one brief interaction. This category includes Cheech the Bud Man, of course, and the high-tech consulting firm in Westwood (two Gobblers; two Evians; see receptionist for credit card), about 80% of whose cubicles are bare. It also includes:

* Richie the Rich Young Adult in his Wilshire Boulevard penthouse (two packs of Camel Lights and one shrink-wrapped cup of coffee; $11.77, plus $5 tip, not including tax).

* The Hollywood Operator, who doesn’t even pause from his wireless-headphone dealings as he signs for a carton of American Spirit cigarettes and a six-pack of Diet Coke ($50.98, plus tax).

* The pajama-top-and sweatpants-clad young woman (Home Pride bread; Brawny paper towels; Scotch brand mailing tape), whose glowing computer screen and slightly out-of-focus eyes--I’ve seen them often enough in the mirror--fairly scream “I’m a burnt-out freelancer!”

* The awesomely beautiful young woman who hauls in a couple of bottles of wine at 10:30 a.m., and whom, when asked for proof of age, displays her birth certificate, which she keeps on a table next to her front door.

* The elderly Brentwood woman in a loose flannel shirt, whose voice sounds strong and sharp but whose shrunken body barely allows her to make it to the front door, who gives me a $3 tip for delivering a pair of 100-watt lightbulbs and a container of Coffee-mate nondairy creamer.

Category Two: Customers whose appearance, surroundings and desires are so unfathomable as to lead a compulsive storyteller toward madness. These include:

* The mouthy dog’s lady.

* The young woman who not only cheerfully accepts her order of root beer, Kleenex and Hershey’s chocolate syrup, but who for some reason has the contents of what looks like a half dozen file cabinets and scrapbooks spread out over her breakfast nook, hallway and living room floors.

* The husky guy in leather pants, cigarette-scented black sweatshirt and ZZ Top beard who sleepily buzzes me into his West L.A. security building for an early-afternoon eye-opener of one ham sandwich on croissant and a half-gallon of milk.

* The aforementioned birth certificate wielder who, three days after we first meet, calls Pink Dot to send over a $6.99 home pregnancy test and smiles warmly in recognition when I hand it to her.

Shortly afterward I reach a debilitating existential cul-de-sac. I realize that the “journalism” I’m practicing is actually a mirror image of my regular routine. In my other life as an out-in-the-open reporter, I get to visit people’s homes and ask just about any intrusive question I feel like, provided I make an appointment and let my interviewees set their houses and stories in order. As undercover Pink Dot Man I get to glimpse the lives of total strangers, totally unguarded--but can ask them nothing more probing than “Where do you want me to leave this carton of Red Bull?”

From there it’s a short misstep to two other dreary thoughts: (1) neither brand of reporting is producing any useful conclusions; and (2) during my week at Pink Dot I’ve knocked on more doors and met more of my “neighbors” than during the last 15 years of my life in Los Angeles.

The anxiety is simply too much. I develop a case of shingles, a painful disorder that cuts short any possibility of my hauling around 2 1/2-gallon jugs of spring water, or even a couple loaves of bread.

Several weeks later, fully recovered, I call into work to learn that my job is waiting, as is the old Pinky car, now roadworthy. Hoping to finally discover the ultimate Pink Dot experience, I ask for and am granted permission to drive it. After a day or two delivering on the Westside, I am presented the opportunity to work the Sunset Strip on a Saturday night. “Maybe you’ll be invited to a hot tub party!” suggests the manager of the Sunset store.

Turns out, I do get my trophy story.

“Pink Dot delivery!” I shout into the intercom of an apartment building on Beverly Glen, holding a midmorning snack of Smirnoff vodka and Marlboros.

“Come on (garble),” says a deeply accented male voice, buzzing me up.

Three floors above, the door is opened by a slightly younger version of Pregnancy Test girl. She hands me a Visa card.

“I’ll need to see some proof of age,” I say.

“Sure,” she replies. “I’m 23.”

“I mean ID.”

“Really?” she giggles.

“Yep. Really.”

Another giggle. She steps inside for a few seconds and returns with her driver’s license in her right hand and a purple balloon--inflated but not tied--in her left. I thrust the credit card slip toward her.

“Could you hold this?” she says.

Ever the helpful service-industry professional, I grab the balloon securely by its neck.

She takes my pen, prepares to sign, looks up--her eyes are, well, we’ll call them twinkling--cocks her head flirtatiously and says: “You like nitrous?”

Two seconds of silence.

“Uh, yeah,” I stammer. “At the dentist’s office.”

“Whatever,” she croons, then writes in a $3 tip. She gently relieves me of my balloon, grabs her provisions and floats back inside.

And that, perversely, is that. My night on Sunset consists primarily of delivering random munchies to a number of dateless individuals in a series of increasingly depressing apartments. Then comes my motoring adventure on Laurel Canyon; my feckless encounter with the impatient Cosmo Kramer; and a snap decision to stop the madness.

I realize that I’ve been hurtling, badly disoriented, though a funhouse of Los Angeles cliches and anti-cliches, with no more penetrating insights than could be found in your average local-news radio editorial. I’ve learned a few fuzzy facts about myself, granted. But what’s that worth in the Marketplace of Ideas?

I head back to the store. Traffic is jammed on Sunset Boulevard. Idling a few blocks from home base, I glance into the rearview and see a drunken man--a dead ringer for the late comedian Sam Kinison--rush out of a bar and head toward me. He’s yelling something incomprehensible and holding his arms aloft in such a way that I realize if he reaches me he’s going to wind up the big key on the back of my car, for sure.

A car-length space opens up ahead, and I let out the clutch. The Bug leaps forward; Sam lurches past my rear end and disappears. Whoever he is, whatever he wanted, he is gone. I give thanks that I can quit this research project, stop my spirit-sapping soul-searching and go back to my life of letters. After all, I tell myself, I’m only a faux Pink Dot Man. I can quit at any time.

Then, for some reason, I flash back to an earlier delivery. A guy my age in Santa Monica, in the midst of checking his order (large fruit salad, Kendall-Jackson Chardonnay), looked up and asked me if working for Pink Dot is my only job.

“No,” I said smugly. “I’m a writer.”

“Uh-huh.” He nodded knowingly.

I replay this enigmatic exchange in my head a few times, then shiver. What exactly did he mean by that? I would have loved to have asked him. But, of course, I couldn’t.