For the past six years, Jake has deferred an impending deportation with a student visa. He has no desire to leave home and live in Taiwan, where he will be immediately forced to join the national army. Moreover, he speaks neither Taiwanese nor Mandarin. After graduating with high honors from the best public university in the U.S., he has enrolled at a local junior college in order to maintain his legal status. Recently, his goal has simply been to enter into a nursing program at a local state school. With America's nursing shortage, becoming a resident nurse will put Jake on the fast track towards citizenship. Nurses are in high demand, but there are very few available programs. Subsequently, schools such as Cal State Los Angeles accept students through a lottery system. That means qualified applicants such as Jake, may wait years before even starting school. His dreams of pursuing a PhD in Psychology are on the back-burner; not being forcefully deported from his homeland is number one on the priority list.

(I think he should sign up for match.com and search for a nice U.S. citizen looking to marry a pizza delivery boy. I volunteered my younger sister, but both were lukewarm to the prospect. You're not interested are you? Jake scored 1500+ on his SATs, so your babies would be super smart.)

For undocumented workers in the U.S., there are two choices: work for a sympathetic employer from ones ethnic community who is willing to break the law, or find a very low-paying, also illegal, menial job. Many undocumented immigrants from Asian nations take the first route by overstaying their visas and relying upon family members and friends to find them jobs within their respective ethnic communities. Because they need only speak Chinese or Korean, they can stay in ethnic enclaves such as Monterey Park or Garden Grove, and work with retailers that cater towards these ethnic communities, even parlaying their skills into decent-paying positions such as travel agents or restaurant managers.

This is not an option for Jake. Legal status aside, he is American through and through. Jake only speaks English, doesn't know where the closest 99 Ranch is to his home, and his chopstick skills are best described as funky. Thus, Jake's only recourse is to save money for his future student fees (student loans are only available to permanent residents) by finding a low-paying job cleaning toilets or delivering pizzas from someone willing to illegally hire him.

I met Jake in the dorms my freshman year at college. He struck me as very intelligent and hardworking, but painfully shy. Six years later, this description still applies. He's not a "go-getter," but he always gets things done. Nevertheless, his strong work ethic and smarts weren't enough to prevent him from ending up in this legal nightmare. Thus, one of the most talented and hardworking people I know is currently delivering pizzas to the couch potatoes of Westwood. It hardly seems fair.

I offered to tag along with Jake because it figured to be an edifying experience. Millions of people across America work menial jobs that most Americans would turn their noses at. This was a unique opportunity for me to see how difficult it is to earn money. My mother would be proud. Besides, I had nothing better to do on a Saturday night.

The pizzeria is small and quaint. The proprietor mans the register while the workers, whom I assume are also undocumented workers, work the ovens. They sell by the slice, and I cough up four bucks for a thin crust. It's decent, no Zachary's or Cheeseboard, but way better than Pizza Hut. The place seems to have a strong local following. Business is good. During slow hours, Jake and the guys play HORSE on the mini-basketball hoop in the back.

Right when we walk in, after the bumper-to-bumper drive through downtown in Jake's sputtering 20-year-old Honda, the owner already has two orders ready for delivery. Jake shuffles in, grabs the boxes and we head out. Apparently, before the invention of MapQuest and Satellite Navigation, there was the Thomas Guide. Jake throws the tome in my lap and tells me to find the address. "How do I input the address without a keyboard?" I ask myself, while flipping through the pages, wondering how people once lived without computers.

We find the first apartment building, and Jake narrowly avoids being run-over by a speeding Mercedes as he scuttles across the street with Italian sandwiches in hand. He returns to the car, minutes later, with a two dollar tip. "Not bad," he says. If everyone is this generous, he could make up to 8 dollars-an-hour tonight.

We make a U-turn, and head to the next address. I'm starting to get the hang of this map thing, and the next delivery goes off without a hitch. I suddenly realize that the hardest part of being a pizza delivery boy might be the constant temptation: the pizza smells so good. With Jake's low wage, I suggest that he wait for a particularly large and tasty smelling order and make a run for it.

We head back to the pizzeria. The deliveries seem to be going well with me as first mate and official navigator. Jake cajoles me with tales of nearly getting fired the other week after getting lost for an hour and begging driving off before meter maids can give him a citation for parking in a red zone. To be honest, Jake is a horrible driver. He finally learned how to drive two years ago, and his sense of direction is piss poor. His brain was meant for Freud and Lacan, not negotiating tight turns and road rage.

During our off moments at the pizzeria, Jake and I devise a system. He writes down the address immediately as it comes in, and Thomas G. and I figure out the fastest route before the pizza leaves the oven. Two heads are better than one, and in the pizza delivery business speed counts. Before the next trip out, we run into our first mishaps of the evening. As I'm looking at the Tommy Gizzle trying to figure exactly which La Salle Ave in Los Angeles county we're headed to, Jake whispers in my ear: "I think I forgot the pizza bag at the last delivery." I quickly muffle a laugh and calculate a detour so we can swing by the previous address and grab it without the owner noticing that it's missing. Upon arriving at the address, Jake rushes out of the car but forgets to put the car into park. He turns around and stares in horror at the car rolling backwards down the hilly street with me in the passenger seat. I quickly shift the car into park and then proceed to laugh my ass off. Jake shrugs in embarrassment and runs back to the house to collect his forgotten pizza bag. As he returns with a sheepish look on his face, I quickly imagine the laughable scene if I hadn't been in the car: Jake, running down a hilly street after a runaway jalopy with recovered pizza bag in hand--pure comedy.

After the latest debacle, things run pretty smoothly. The sun sets as we drive with the windows down, his air conditioning doesn't work, and the salty air reminds us that the ocean is only a few miles away. Jake turns up the radio on his favorite easy-listening station. A crooner sings, "It's too late to turn back now...," right as Jake makes a seven-point U-turn. The irony is killing me.

As we turn down a street, I tell Jake that the address is on the left hand side. Jake then tells me, "You're gonna have to point. 'Left' and 'right' mean nothing to me." In between laughs, I open my laptop to type up his latest comical antics. "You're not gonna write that down are you?" he says, as it slowly dawns on him that I am documenting every silly remark and bad driving maneuver.

"I've hit cars too," he says. I decide that it's best not to ask him for details. We don't need Jim Gilchrist and the LAPD after Jake.

At 14270 La Salle, a starving customer stands outside his house, hanging out with his cat while rubbing his stomach. As we pull into the driveway, he falls down on his knees wildly gesticulating in the air with cash in his hand, begging us to hurry with his pizza. I decide that he's my favorite customer ever, of all time, and begin applauding his performance.

While arguing with Jake about the difference between a "speed hump" and a "speed bump", I discover a strange button in his car that does nothing! When I press the button, a clicking sound, similar to the scary sound the engine makes when climbing a hill, emanates from somewhere but nothing happens. Intrigued, I continue pressing the button that does nothing until Jake screams: "Stop it! You're gonna break my car!" To further annoy him, I click the button whenever he isn't looking. If it's already broken, can it be really become more broken?

What turns out to be the funniest, and potentially most tragic, gaffe of the night is perpetrated by yours truly. As we're exiting the car, I place a soda can on top of the car roof as I'm exiting. Unbeknownst to me, the sun roof is open and the can falls straight on to my head and then spills on the Holy Thomas. We stare in disbelief as brown lakes and rivers begin forming amongst the streets of Culver City and Santa Monica. In emergency mode, we run into the pizzeria and grab a handful of napkins. I let the liquid on my laptop sit as I frenetically and deliberately blot the pages hoping to save Jake's livelihood. I begin to blow on the page hoping to dry it out before it becomes permanently see through, while the owner laughs at me. After a few minutes, the crisis is averted and the map is a little worse for wear but still legible. Luckily, I haven't ruined Jake's cash cow. Unfortunately, it seems that the other delivery boy isn't nearly so lucky. He's got the hood of his even older car propped up and looks mighty pissed.

After we experience few more near crashes, the sun sets and our evening begins winding down. It's 9:30, and I figure out the directions to what will probably be our last delivery while Jake wipes down the tables and mops up. When night falls, street signs and address numbers become significantly harder to spot, making one of America's most dangerous jobs, even more difficult. I'm already tired of it. For me this is a one time comedic adventure, but for Jake, it's an occupation. Surely, the job isn't always so entertaining, constant threats of vehicular homicide aside. Undoubtedly, after getting his third one-dollar-tip for the night, Jake must wonder why he's delivering pizzas instead of a dissertation. But just like the surly looking Chinese cooks at the takeout place next door, Jake continues working this dead end job. People don't like doing this work; they just don't have options.

In all likelihood, this little journalistic jaunt is the closest I'll ever come to doing service sector work in my adult life. I am quite lucky. The amount of money I make is not dependent upon the capricious whims of the evening's tippers. Couples on dates come into the pizzeria, discussing their after-dinner plans. Only two weeks ago, I was also in a restaurant with my date trying to figure out which L.A. hotspot we would hit next. I never paused to think that this was a luxury that Jake, and millions like him, cannot afford. They prepared my food while I busily tried to impress a girl with my cursory knowledge of the local nightlife.

Oddly, the only thing that really separates Jake and me is our legal status. He is in every way my equal, and in some ways my superior, but I was lucky enough to be born on U.S. soil instead of my parents' homeland. Is this not the very definition of caprice? Instead of finding a job equal to his level of erudition and expertise, Jake has been relegated to work often reserved for the unskilled, uneducated and underachieving, only because he lacks a little green card. It seems cosmically unfair.

Undoubtedly, Jake will make it in America. Soon enough he will be accepted into a nursing program. Or, some lucky American girl will take his hand in marriage. Nonetheless, for now he must waste away the weekend nights of his youth. It's too bad. But he is luckier than most of America's underground workers. Most are without hope of improvement, can barely speak English, and dream only of their next reunion with their families. That being said, I'm sure we could all afford to tip a little better.

*name changed for obvious reasons