DELIVERANCE / A STORY
Sticky, Greasy, Crusty; Pick Two
From Deliverance: Tales from Behind the Wheel
There is a moment when you grab a restaurant door handle and realize you are now wearing part of the restaurant.
The realization usually arrives too late to be useful.
Your hand has already closed. The door is moving. Whatever was on the handle has accepted your invitation, and now you have to enter the building and conduct a normal business interaction while being intensely aware of your palm.
I'm here for an order.
And, ideally, a sink.
Do enough deliveries and you develop opinions about door handles that no one in your personal life has asked to hear. You begin to recognize textures. You assess surfaces before touching them. You approach a perfectly ordinary entrance with the concentration of someone choosing where to step across a creek.
Sometimes you can see the problem in advance. A darkened patch. A shine that doesn't seem to belong to the original material. A buildup where thousands of hands have all agreed that this is the best place to grab.
You look higher. You look lower.
Occasionally, the entire handle has been comprehensively seasoned.
And the door says PULL.
That is the part that gets me. You can arrive informed, observant, fully aware of what you're about to touch, and still have to touch it. The food is inside. You are outside. The handle controls the relationship.
Sticky, greasy, crusty.
Pick two.
Some locations are generous and include the third.
I had encountered this more times than I could count. Fast-food places were frequent contributors, but the experience wasn't limited to restaurants. Grocery stores and pharmacies had supplied memorable examples too.
After enough of them, I started wondering exactly where a building's cleaning responsibilities ended.
Somewhere, there was presumably a schedule. Floors. Counters. Tables. Equipment. Tasks divided among people, checked off, repeated.
Yet the object nearly everyone had to touch to get inside could remain in a condition that suggested it belonged to a different business entirely.
Perhaps the inside staff considered it outside. Perhaps whoever dealt with the outside considered it part of the door, and therefore inside. However the jurisdiction had been settled, my hand was where the unresolved issue ended up.
The weather didn't seem to improve things. In Arizona heat, the residue could feel as though it had softened in anticipation of my arrival. In Colorado cold, it could seem firmly committed to staying exactly where it was.
I washed my hands between orders whenever I could, especially after a bad one. But access to a sink wasn't guaranteed. Some places had locked bathrooms. Some had no hand sanitizer available. There were days when I touched far more handles than I had opportunities to wash my hands.
That was the exhausting part. This wasn't a strange event I could laugh about once and leave behind. It was a recurring little requirement of the job, waiting at the entrance to the next pickup.
Before Park Burger, there was the Cheesecake Factory in North Scottsdale.
That one had time to become a relationship.
Delivery drivers were required to use the side entrance to the outdoor patio. This gave us a designated route into the restaurant and, as it turned out, a designated substance to touch on the way.
I picked up orders there for something like six months. The handle was typically greasy and crusty, but somewhere around the first or second month, a large patch of food grime appeared.
And stayed.
At first, it was something I noticed on a pickup. Then it was something I recognized on the next pickup. Eventually, arriving at the door felt like checking on a long-running project.
Still there.
Same patch.
Doing well, apparently.
There is a difference between encountering a dirty handle and becoming familiar with one particular piece of dirt. I wasn't making a general judgment about cleanliness anymore. I had a reference point. I could return a few days later and recognize the same offending lump.
Sometimes I waited outside for somebody to come out so I could get through without touching it.
That was an actual decision I was making during my workday: whether to lose time standing beside a restaurant door or accept another introduction to the thing living on its handle.
I would watch for someone leaving and take the opportunity. A small victory. Inside without contact. Somewhere in the restaurant, my order might still be waiting, but I had at least completed the entrance portion without acquiring a sample.
And I kept telling people.
Every time I went in, I made a point of mentioning it. When telling one person didn't accomplish anything, I tried someone else.
Eventually, I asked to speak with a manager. A shift manager came to talk to me. I explained the problem. They said it would be dealt with.
Excellent.
A couple of days later, I returned.
The crust had not received the news.
After enough rounds, it became a game I played with myself: who could I tell next?
Not a fun game, exactly. There were no prizes. The desired outcome was a clean handle, which felt like a modest enough reward to justify continuing.
I asked for someone higher up. I explained that I'd already mentioned it. I got another assurance that someone would take care of it.
Then I came back.
Same handle. Same patch.
My complaint was moving through the organization. The substance that had prompted it was staying exactly where it was.
I began to wonder how many people needed to know about a dirty door handle before one of them could arrange for it to be wiped. There had to be a point at which I reached someone with sufficient authority over a rag.
So I called the Cheesecake Factory's corporate headquarters.
I would like to pause here and acknowledge that I am aware of how this sounds.
A man calls corporate about a door handle.
I was that man.
But by then I'd been mentioning it for months. This wasn't a single unfortunate encounter followed by a sudden desire to speak to the highest-ranking person available. I had started with the people in the building. I had spoken to managers. I had returned often enough to establish that the assurances were not affecting the crust.
Somehow, I was now spending more time trying to get the handle cleaned than cleaning the handle could conceivably have required.
On the phone, I said I wanted to lodge a formal complaint about the location. I explained that I had reported the problem repeatedly at the restaurant and that nothing had happened. I asked to speak with someone who could actually get it addressed, and eventually spoke with a corporate manager.
I gave the exact location and address.
I described the side entrance to the patio.
I specified the handle.
I described the patch.
I was supplying directions to a piece of food residue with greater precision than some customers supplied directions to their apartments.
There could be no confusion about which Cheesecake Factory, which entrance, or what needed cleaning. I had narrowed the matter from a national restaurant chain to a particular area of one door.
All that remained was for somebody to touch it with something other than their bare hand.
I went back.
It was still there.
I don't remember ever seeing that patch removed before I moved away from Arizona. By then, it felt less like something awaiting cleanup than something the restaurant had decided to retain.
I have no idea what the handle looks like now. But part of me pictures that same patch still there, collecting another thin layer with each passing hand, quietly outlasting everyone who promised to deal with it.
That was the history I brought to later conversations about door handles.
I knew how little “we'll take care of it” could accomplish. I knew you could describe a problem to people in the building, then people responsible for those people, then somebody at corporate headquarters, and still find yourself outside waiting for a stranger to open the door.
So when I eventually went to Park Burger, my expectations were well established.
It was a nice restaurant in a nice suburban neighborhood. An upscale burger place. The kind of setting in which a person might reasonably arrive with some confidence in the front door.
The handle had topography.
I mean that almost literally. There was a layer of grime thick enough to have visible edges. In places, the crust had flaked away, revealing the material underneath, and the contrast was so stark that the clean patches looked like discoveries.
You could see what the handle had originally been trying to look like.
The remaining buildup had an elevation profile. If somebody had asked where the worst section was, I felt I could have given directions using terrain.
I had just filled my gas tank, so my hands were already feeling greasy before I arrived. This pickup had become an opportunity to compare industries.
I asked to use the bathroom so I could wash my hands.
Thankfully, I could.
Afterward, I collected the order and decided to say something to the woman handing it over.
“I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but your door handle's getting pretty crusty out there.”
“Wait, the what?”
“The door handle. There's, like, a layer of grime on it. Just wanted to let you know, because as a delivery driver, I have to touch a lot of door handles.”
It was an unusual credential to present, but I had earned it.
I wasn't arriving with a clipboard or conducting an inspection. I was a man collecting food who had become, through sheer repetition, professionally familiar with the city's exterior hardware.
“Okay, thanks for telling me.”
I took the order and left.
That was as far as I expected the matter to go.
When you mention something like that in the middle of someone's workday, you don't necessarily imagine it becoming the next thing they do. There are customers, orders, other tasks. A polite acknowledgment can be the entire life cycle of your observation.
I had said my piece. Someone was waiting for their burger.
My car was parked around the block. After I got in, my route took me back past the front of the restaurant.
And there she was.
The same woman.
Cleaning the handle.
Actually cleaning it. Already.
I was impressed. In the time it had taken me to walk to the car and drive around, she had gone out there with a rag and acted on the information.
Then I saw the rag.
It was white, except for the part that had met the door handle.
That part had returned black and brown.
One small section of handle had contributed a frankly ambitious amount of material. Even driving past, I could see the stain. I could also see her expression as she looked at what she'd wiped off.
Disgust. Horror. Bewilderment.
I couldn't hear her thoughts, but her face seemed to be asking a very reasonable question:
Oh my God, what the fuck is this?
Yes.
Exactly.
That was what I had been trying to communicate, though I'd gone with “getting pretty crusty” because I was standing inside her workplace holding an order.
There was something deeply satisfying about witnessing the discovery. The handle had been visibly filthy, I'd mentioned it, and now someone else was looking directly at the evidence with the same disbelief.
It wasn't just me being precious about a door.
The rag had corroborated my account.
I gave her full credit. She had listened, gone outside, and dealt with it immediately. That deserved appreciation, especially given what her cloth had apparently brought back from the expedition.
But I still couldn't understand how the handle had gone unnoticed long enough to acquire layers.
It wasn't an obscure service entrance. The restaurant had outdoor seating. Staff used that door to move between the dining room and the patio. On my way in, I had watched a waitress open it and hold it with her foot while she maneuvered inside.
So they were touching it.
That ruled out my theory of a secret, immaculate staff entrance through which everyone employed there had been bypassing the problem.
Maybe that was how it happened. You opened the same door so often that eventually you stopped experiencing it as an object. It became a motion you made on the way to something else.
A delivery driver, on the other hand, got a fresh introduction.
And sometimes the introduction stayed on his fingers.
I continued on to drop off the food, pleased that for once I had seen the whole sequence: notice a problem, mention it, watch someone do something about it.
At the Cheesecake Factory, I had worked my way from restaurant staff to corporate management without seeing the patch budge. Here, one conversation had put a woman outside with a rag before I had even made it around the block.
I didn't have to call anyone. I didn't have to repeat myself at the next pickup. She had simply listened and acted.
Behind me, one restaurant entrance was improving.
For that moment, I was satisfied.
I'd picked up a burger order and helped restore a door handle to its original altitude.
A couple of weeks later, another order brought me back.
Naturally, I checked.
Once you've become involved in the rehabilitation of a door handle, you want to see how it's getting on.
The topography had changed. The raised areas had been flattened. It looked as though the scrubbing had taken down the hills, but a layer remained.
I couldn't tell whether it had resisted further cleaning or whether some of it had built up again. All I could see was that the handle looked improved, without looking completely free of the stuff.
Apparently, restoring the original altitude was not the same as restoring the original surface.
I still gave that waitress full credit. I had seen the work. I had seen the rag. More importantly, I had seen the exact moment another person discovered what I'd been touching.
Months of complaints in Scottsdale hadn't given me that.
But there I was again, outside a restaurant with an order to collect, inspecting the residue on a door handle.
The mountains were gone.
The crust remains.