A Short Documentary About Williamsburg’s Best Pizza Deliveryman
It can be difficult to distinguish one bearded, fixie-riding Williamsburgian from another, but Best Pizza’s deliveryman Bill Meier is a different story. No Weather Productions made a short documentary about the 52-year-old, gray-bearded and wizened with age and years on the street, and his life as a bike messenger.
The documentary, Delivery, follows Meier around on his deliveries, while he narrates with various anecdotes he’s collected over the years. In one impressive scene he balances two pizza bags filled with at least three pizzas each on the short handlebars of his fixed gear, riding one handed with a surprising amount of ease.
Meier looks older than he is, probably as a result of thirty years doing bike deliveries in San Francisco and New York, chain smoking, and his “houselessness,” as he refers to it. But despite his missing teeth and disheveled appearance, Meier has more humor and positivity than most privileged, twenty-something Brooklynites. He laughs as he retells the day a cab sheared off the top of his pinky. And even at the end of a long day when his tips are less than usual, he shrugs it off.
Despite the struggles that come with being a pizza deliveryman—gangs of kids jumping him, cars running him off the road, abysmal tips—Bill Meier says with conviction at the documentary’s end, “I enjoy this. The day I can no longer ride a bike better be the day I’m fucking dead.” So order a pie (we guarantee the short will make you hungry), watch Delivery and get to know this Brooklyn icon.
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