All Jim Anderson wanted was a pizza. What he got was a lesson in perceptions, East Dallas-style.
When he called the Pizza Hut at Skillman and Live Oak one Sunday night this summer, he thought he was asking them to deliver one of their heavily promoted Bigfoot pizzas.
Instead, he was discovering that his house on Swiss Avenue, which is about eight blocks and four minutes from the Pizza Hut, is not part of the store’s delivery area.
Several employees, Anderson says, hinted that his part of Swiss wasn’t safe, and that if he wanted a pizza, he was going to have to come and get it himself.
Jim Anderson tells this story with a bewildered expression. He has lived in East Dallas long enough to know that crime is part of living in East Dallas. He does not want some poor delivery guy to get waylaid so he can munch on mozzarella.
But he also knows that he lives on Swiss Avenue in East Dallas, not at the intersection of Franklin and Normandy in South Central Los Angeles – even if everyone else wants to believe otherwise.
What happened to Anderson far too often to our neighborhood – and from people who should know better. It would be all too easy to write a cheap, vicious and snotty piece about the Pizza Hut suits in Bedford who have red-lined our neighborhood. But it wouldn’t be true.
In fact, Barry Barron, the marketing manager for Pizza Hut in the Dallas-Forth Worth area, says the store should have delivered Anderson’s pizza.
Pizza Hut, he says, delivers pizzas in far worse neighborhoods than Anderson’s, including South Central.
The decision not to deliver Anderson’s pizza was made by the people at the store, in our neighborhood, who were too willing to believe what they wanted to believe, and not what was true.
I called last month to check Jim’s story, and discovered that they wouldn’t even deliver a pizza to my house at Swiss and Fitzhugh at noon on a sunny day – even though the Pizza Hut corporate policy says that its stores will deliver pizzas within an eight-minute radius. When I asked the assistant manager what the Skillman store’s delivery area was, she told me it depends.
What it depends on is their perception of the crime-ridden and drug-ravaged streets of East Dallas. Well, believe this: Jim Anderson’s section of town is no more dangerous than the Pizza Hut’s section of town. Anyone who doubts it can look at the crime stats in this month’s Advocate.
It’s one thing when the outside perception of East Dallas – from City Hall, the suburbs and the like – bears little resemblance to the truth. I like to zing those people, because they are such deserving targets.
It’s a worse thing when the inside perception of East Dallas is equally as wrong. Life is hard enough without having your neighbor act like he can hardly wait to move to the Park Cities.
A couple of years ago, I opened a checking account at a neighborhood bank. The woman who handed me the forms – and who had presumably opened hundreds of checking accounts for white, middle-class people just like me – leaned over and asked, “How can you live in this area?”
I shrugged and mumbled something. What I should have said was this:
“I can live here a lot more easily than I can live somewhere else with someone like you.”
That’s something Jim Anderson would understand.
